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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    If you think about it, that's kind of... everywhere. Post-war culture is a hodgepodge of whatever cultural artifacts and traditions survived the First Space War and whatever they've come up with since to fill in the gaps. There are whole fleets that devote their living spaces to enthusiastic recreations of pre-war Earth like Macross-11 or Macross Frontier. Macross Frontier goes so hard on it that they made recreations of multiple cities worth of historic districts complete with superficially appropriate vehicles and other aesthetics. The ultimate fate of the Asuka II is not stated, but she was likely destroyed in the bombardment. Her sister ship, Graf Zeppelin II, was assigned to protect South Ataria island and may now be floating out near Pluto. At the very least, we know of one crew member on the Asuka II who has living descendants after the war. The movie Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure establishes that Walkure member Makina Nakajima is the great-granddaughter of the VF-0 program's chief mechanic aboard the Asuka II: Raizo Nakajima. That's the Battle Astraea, yeah... from the NUNS's 7th Fleet, prior to it being stolen by its commander and crew and becoming the flagship of Heimdall. Available information suggests planetary defense forces vary in size depending on the emigrant fleet that ultimately colonized the planet. The New UN Spacy escort fleet that the emigrant ship was protected by becomes the planet's New UN Spacy defense force after colonization begins. So some planets have a Battle-class to rely on because they had the good fortune to be colonized by a 3rd Gen or later emigrant fleet. Fleets that didn't leave with one (or lost theirs) would have to build one or buy one. Presumably the reason we see no Battle-class ships in the Brisingr cluster is that it was colonized by 1st and 2nd generation fleets like Megaroad-04. Macross Frontier is just as blatant, with the uppermost level of Island-1 being a loving recreation of several parts of San Francisco... right down to the infestation of Toyota Priuses and Ozma's replica of an early 90's Lancia Delta HF Integrale. Though I think no example better suits the post-war fervor for recreating pre-war history than Culture Park in Macross II: Lovers Again. Lovingly crafted recreations of many world famous pre-war monuments with Disneyland-like abandon. The whole scene is a massive homage to Roman Holiday, so we see a lot of Roman landmarks like the Trinita dei Monti church and the famous Spanish Steps, the Mouth of Truth in the Piazza della Bocca della Verita, and the Flavian Amphitheatre. We also see several other monuments from other places and cultures like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Louvre in Paris (we see Ishtar pose in front of Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People), the Moai from Easter Island, the Great Wall of China, and Petra's Khazneh el-Far'oun... all lovingly recreated for the sake of an enormous historical theme park. Or that Marines are simply carried as infantry aboard naval vessels... the Marines we see postwar have been the Spacy Marines.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    We got another month before this one comes out, right? I've been to the theaters like half a dozen times in the last two weeks and I've seen NOTHING about Kraven there. If there was any advertising at all, it seems like it's been buried under the advertising blitz for Red One.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Is there a petition we can sign to get the showerunners of Andor put in charge of Star Wars as a whole? Seriously. This is ten thousand times more interesting than anything about the glowstick society.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Just got back from a showing of Overlord: the Sacred Kingdom. Not gonna lie, I can see why IGN gave the movie a bad review. It's a very compressed adaptation of the light novel that is absolutely no ambassador to anyone who hasn't seen the anime up through the middle of its fourth season. It cuts out several major scenes, and merges a few others. Unfortunately one of the scenes it left out was a really important one that explains why the demons absolutely ham it up about Neia's bow being a "rune" weapon, so there are several scenes where demons just engage in dreadful acting about it with zero direct explanation. It's not a bad speedrun of the story, but it's definitely not for the non-fan.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    As narratively unnecessary and painfully dull as the movie was, I can honestly say I feel no inclination whatsoever to watch its equally dull and unnecessary prequel. On the scale of "better things to do with my time", watching Freedom Zero is going to fall somewhere below teaching myself to play the bluegrass banjo with my feet, catching the flu for purely recreational purposes, or rewriting the entirety of the European Union's tax code in dactylic hexameter pig Latin and publishing it as an epic poem. A hard pass even then.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That alone was enough to get my attention. So much of Star Wars is focused on military affairs or the life of ne'er-do-wells on the fringes of society that there's little indication of what life is like for the billions upon billions of normal workaday folks who aren't living and working in the almost-literal ivory towers of the rich and powerful, the wretched hives of the crime lords, or the little farming villages in the middle of nowhere. Skeleton Crew'll be doing some interesting worldbuilding.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing is too weird for the Star Wars setting as a whole. Disney's in this to make money, though... so I expect the writers of this kid's show will keep the weirdness to a kid-friendly and marketably controversy-free level. (Elective cybernetics might veer too closely to a politically-polarizing real world topic for Disney's comfort.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Star Wars's Galaxy Far Far Away is an absolutely gargantuan setting that's allegedly home to over 20 million sentient species. I'd assume the only practical limits on "weird" are the imagination of the writers and the size of the budget for practical and digital effects. In a way, isn't that kind of the theme here? Skeleton Crew is a story about some bored kids from a nice, safe, middle class neighborhood where nothing interesting ever happens digging up a buried spaceship and finding out how weird, wild, and dangerous the rest of the Galaxy Far Far Away really is.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    In a way, it is oddly impressive that Disney LucasFilm's writers managed to make "Lesbian Space Witches" unappealing to Star Wars's predominantly male audience. (Even more so given that pre-Disney LucasFilm managed to sell fans on the idea twice. Once in the EU novels and once in The Clone Wars.) That said, pre-Disney Star Wars had its fair share of "Holy my beer" bad narrative decisionmaking too. Phantom Menace introducing three different alien species that read like racist political cartoons, absolutely every bit of dialog between Anakin and Padme, so very much of the Expanded Universe. It is not a new development by any means. It's gotta be there for a reason. AFAIK, Star Wars cybernetics are mostly organ/limb replacements for people with life-altering injuries. The few exceptions are low level clerks and functionaries who get elective surgery to boost their brains with computer hardware. That's why I hypothesized she might be blind. The casting does seem to be aiming to make the group of kids as diverse and representational as you'd expect for a kids show (which is not a bad thing, to be clear). Social media does absolutely feed the toxic fandom... but on the other hand, Star Wars has also served up enough disappointments in its rapid-fire release schedule since Disney took the helm that general audiences are greeting new titles with less enthusiasm and more skepticism/suspicion too. For every Rebels, The Mandalorian, or Andor there's a The Acolyte, The Book of Boba Fett, or The Rise of Skywalker serving up a bland and disappointing viewing experience or irritatingly bad writing.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, she's probably meant to be an inclusive character for viewers with disabilities. Like Geordi LaForge was in Star Trek: the Next Generation. It'd be a bit too weird for Disney to make a kid into a cybernetics fetishist like that ridiculous moped gang from The Book of Boba Fett. As memorable as he is, I'm sure I'll forget him again soon enough. And if not, there's bourbon.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I completely forgot that he exists. I think my brain glossed over his existence entirely, since he looks like an especially ugly Chia Pet and he and his crew managed to be slightly less intimidating than stormtroopers.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it'd just feel wrong to have a space pirate story in Star Wars without Hondo... seemingly Star Wars's only space pirate.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, that sounds like a recipe for hilarity to me. I would watch that. The undead Emperor just... getting completely casually disrespected by a bunch of exciteable kids who have no idea who he is, trying to keep his flesh from falling off his bones at the same time he's trying to keep their grubby mitts off his Sith artifacts until he can find someone to dump them on so he can have a moment's peace. The most dangerous and deadly villain in the galaxy treated like a Scooby-Doo villain for a few episodes. (And you can't tell me Star Wars has never done that kind of thing before. I've seen the episodes of The Clone Wars where Dooku is taken hostage by that magnificent ham Hondo and ends up chained to Anakin and Obi-wan.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I ordered mine from Crunchyroll and it arrived with no issues to speak of despite spending several additional days in the care of the USPS. They're definitely not going overboard with the padding the way I've seen HLJ and CDJapan do, but mine came wrapped in several layers of paper padding. It looks like yours got mangled in a sort facility though...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Distance from the Skywalker saga has proven to be a pretty good idea... at least as far as good ideas go under the stewardship of Disney. There are just too many sacred cows on Skywalker Ranch for telling more stories there to be a good idea.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Oh boy... more lifeless and unnecessary garbage from Gundam's most overrated, least capable director. 🤮
  17. Seto Kaiba
    My copy arrived today. I was surprised by how hefty the box is. Definitely not thrilled with the decision to put the discs inside of the book instead of in a separate case. The print quality of the art seems nice though.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's likely, given that Isamu is from Eden and never signed on with an emigrant fleet's escort detail as far as we know. (Personally, I suspect the reassignment to New Edwards was Isamu's CO trying not just to make him someone else's problem but to put him in a position where he might remove himself from being anyone's problem. By that point, the YF-19 had put two test pilots in the ICU and two more in the ground.) Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix takes that view. The Restored Phoenix story section mentions, in passing, a government-led cultural and technological restoration project that spent the twenty years after the First Space War combing through the ruins of pre-war Earth for any surviving cultural artifacts and technology. It was one of that project's expeditions to Edwards AFB that discovered a cargo container with two wrecked VF-0s from the Asuka II's air group and led to the reverse-engineering and restoration of the VF-0. While Battleships of the Galaxy is a doujinshi, we do at least know that the Battle-class was not limited to use by emigrant fleets. There was, of course, the second Macross 13 that was the flagship of Earth's defense forces under Gen. Kim Kabirov in the Macross Frontier novelization and more recently Battle Astraea from the NUNS's 7th Fleet that became the flagship of Heimdall in Absolute Live!!!!!!. Master File, while also not strictly official setting, does seem to suggest there weren't initially that many of them since Battle 7 was borrowed for the mission to suppress the main fleet that destroyed Spica III. Oh, absolutely. Traveling by space fold has always been a "speed of plot" way to get around. It's easier to leave the distances between places vague or undefined and have people get there when it's dramatic/necessary to do so rather than set up a bunch of detailed rules and stats that they'd then have to worry about following or breaking later on. This bit of intentional vagueness and the increasing casualness of interstellar travel is justified in-story in several ways. The introduction of fold faults as a navigational obstacle that can prevent ships from taking the shortest possible route and/or greatly increase the error in time measurement is practically a get out of jail free card for inconsistencies in presentation. Humanity's ever-advancing technology has allowed them to manufacture more precise and reliable fold systems and advances in fold carbon synthesis have made those systems more capable and efficient. They've also simply gotten better at using them through experience. Those are pretty extreme examples, though. Humanity in Macross isn't quite a monoculture, but most of the galaxy hasn't been separated for long enough to really develop their own ingrained independent cultures and traditions. The closest we can reliably get is emigrant planets that already had a native alien species living on them, like Windermere IV or Ragna. Though Macross being Macross, "not so different" is almost always in play and even these alien cultures end up being more like Human culture than they are different. Supplemental material like Macross the Ride and Master File suggest that the Macross Frontier fleet isn't quite as isolated as the series makes out and that there are several other fleets (incl. Galaxy) and some inhabited planets within semi-easy fold distance of the fleet. (~500ly, according to Master File.) The exact details are left to Macross's usual "broad strokes" continuity, but it's worth noting that both Macross Frontier and Macross Delta materials effectively treat the game's Vindirance route as the Good/True Ending of its story. Vindirance and the pro-autonomy faction triumph, the government and military are reorganized, the pro-centrists end up punished for their crimes and some become terrorists (like Naresuan) or mercenaries (like Ernest Johnson).
  19. Seto Kaiba
    This got me thinking... how many worlds within that bubble do we actually know about? As noted before, Macross doesn't often mention how far apart various planets/systems are so it's hard to know if we've actually seen any systems within that 100 light year radius bubble explored by the short-distance emigrant fleet besides Eden. Legible backwards text in the first episode of Macross Plus (during Isamu's dressing-down by his CO) describe several emigrant planets including "Planet Barnard", which apparently orbits Barnard's Star 5.978 light years from Earth. That may imply that the other planets Isamu is threatened with a dead-end assignment to (incl. Micross Minus and Banipal) are within that same zone. It's also possible that many of the planets visited in the course of Macross M3 are in that same zone. (Honestly, in astronomy terms, the idea of someone finding a planet at Barnard's star is quietly hilarious... considering how many real-world refuted arguments for a planet there have been made over the years. Sadly, it seems whatever fleet found it didn't have the sense of humor to name is Vandekamp or something like that after the late Peter van de Kamp, who argued for many years that there was a planet there.) Any space big enough to hold Battroids should be plenty capable of accommodating Zentran. You'd just have to be willing to put up with the drain on resources, which from what the Macross Frontier series implies, was a rare case indeed. Either. Quite possibly both. The Uraga-class is certainly not the only example... the Battle-class and the later Saratoga II-type are also designed for blue water operation. Probably not, considering how fundamentally wrongheaded the Earth UN Forces beliefs about an alien invasion and the strategies involved turned out to be. The Daedalus-class, Prometheus-class, and Destroids were all products of the assumption that Earth would one day face a classic alien invasion scenario with ground troops and efforts to capture terrain for resources or prisoners. That turned out to be lamentably wide of the mark. There is still some kind of blue water Navy in play though, as Isamu's service record mentions him serving about the Navy's Enterprise. Considering the disparity in munitions capabilities... probably. Largest ________ metrics are a bit muddy in real world terms thanks to several countries that play fast and loose with what counts as a military ship or aircraft. Based on officially published numbers, if you parked the Macross 7 fleet on Earth today it'd technically be the 4th largest air force in the world in terms of the total number of military aircraft, behind only China, Russia, and the United States. As of the 2050s, that's a solidly medium-sized fleet. Nothing specific... it's known that they can be artificially created by the Protoculture's technology and the Vajra's biotechnology, so presumably they understand how these things work. They're not really explained to the audience beyond essentially just being a higher-dimension navigational hazard that ranges in severity from "speedbump" to "pothole bad enough to mess up your tires/suspension/alignment", "sinkhole big enough to swallow your car whole", and finally "that's not a sinkhole that's a **** damn canyon". If we were to extrapolate from official materials, Macross Chronicle's Technology Sheet for barrier system suggests that a barrier is essentially a deliberately created fold fault: a region where the geometry of space-time is twisted into an impassible obstacle. So a fold fault is presumably a region of higher dimension space that's been warped by some (gravitational?) force (stellar gravity, black holes, stray pockets of heavy quanta?). They're one of those things that Humanity is still studying, having cheated their way to having interstellar flight via very lucky/unlucky first contact events.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    We've kinda had that three times already... in Macross II, Macross Zero, and Macross Delta. As above, we've kind of already had that too... Macross II's creators hint in-story and in interviews that the Mardook are the descendants of Protoculture refugees like the ones mentioned in DYRL?, who fled their civilization's fall to start over and lived a semi-nomadic life in space.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Crunchyroll's store has it listed at MSRP ($189.99) for non-members. The member discount takes 10% off the top automatically ($170.99) and it's eligible for a lot of their coupon code discounts too... which is how they handled the preorder discount pricing in the US, to the discontent of some. Since the coupon codes are pretty ubiquitous, the real pricing is more like $151 w/ free shipping.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Not to mention the impact of Macross Frontier and Macross Delta's favorite two-word problem and pet project of SMS parent company founder Richard Bilra: "fold faults".
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Started watching the Initial D spinoff/sequel MF Ghost... and it is so much better than the last racing anime I watched (HIGHSPEED ETOILE) that it crosses the line four times from not funny to funny to embarrassing (for HIGHSPEED ETOILE) to absolutely goddamn hilarious. This is what racing anime should be... even if it is basically another love letter to the Toyota Motor Co. So much more exciting and energetic than HIGHSPEED ETOILE's static choreography and obsession with getting the maximum number of sponsor logos into all shots. EDIT: This is the second show this season where I've picked it up figuring "Oh I'll just watch one or two" and realized hours later I'd binged the best part of an entire season in one unbroken sitting. MF Ghost is just THAT good.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Just got my shipping notice too. I'm looking forward to giving this release a thorough look.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how most distances to/from emigrant planets are left intentionally vague, I'm not sure it would be all that helpful in that regard. Perhaps doubly so given that Humanity didn't expand into deep space in a uniform manner. Humanity didn't expand into space in a slowly growing sphere of influence. They sent emigrant ships out across the galaxy on a bunch of different courses hoping to find habitable planets through sheer dumb luck and determination. Megaroad-01 launched in 2012 and within four years she was out by the galactic core. Megaroad-04 launched somewhere around 2016 and by the time she found a habitable planet in 2027 she was way out on the edge of the far side of the galaxy from Earth ~60k-75k light years from Earth. (This even carries over into Master File, where "nearby" planets like Spica III can be hundreds of light years away and in no particular direction.) From the descriptions we have, it sounds like most Human-built ships have a degree of that modularity... but it's modularity of internal systems rather than bolting stuff to the ship exterior, for stealth reasons. The exception being the Macross-type ships where the individual limbs are typically separate ships in their own right. Master File's concept of improving the ARMD/ARMD II-class's capabilities by installing modules in the open space underneath the center hull could be said to be taking advantage of the fact that the ARMD-class was originally designed as a space station not a space warship. I don't think it's been stated definitively, but given that the ARMD-class design is a floating drydock turned upside down that space between the pontoons was probably meant to be a dock for a smaller space warship like an Oberth-class destroyer or some large supply ship resupplying what was designed as a sort of "space airbase". After the design was repurposed as a space carrier through the additions of engines and a bridge, it was probably only a matter of time before someone in-universe decided to fill in the gap with something. Macross 7 Trash shows a version of the original ARMD-class where that gap was filled in with what appears to be a large additional hangar. The description is quite short, noting only that the new ventral pontoons are able to be lowered into the water to let the ship float while emigrant fleets are surveying planets. There shouldn't, theoretically, be anything preventing an ARMD-class from doing atmospheric operations simply by hovering anywhere in the atmosphere using gravity control. The float module likely is intended to let it operate as an ad hoc navy ship. The original series did the same with the Unification Wars... with the exception of the opening crawl in episode 1 and the flashback in #33 (IIRC) we never really see the Unification Wars, only the generalities that matter directly to the plot are covered and any additional info is confined to supplemental materials like the short stories in Perfect Memory.
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