Seto Kaiba

Oh, I'm sure that as technology continues to advance, it'll eventually be possible to do something like that... but I doubt it will ever be practical enough for anyone to want to.

Oh, really? Another Macekre? If that's true, we certainly don't need to worry about that being something that will actually lend Robotech a little much-needed credibility. That particular brand of disrespectful dubbing went out of style nearly twenty years ago, and is generally looked down on as bad practice. That's why companies like 4Kids are scorned even by the voice actors who work for them. I guess at least that way if the animation sucks, it's not Harmony Gold's fault. I wonder whose work they're pillaging this time, if that's the case. Drat... I was hoping for Robotech III: the Sentinels II (Ohio State: 0) or something ridiculous like that...

Y'know, I asked myself that question initially too... Macross Zero is a bit strange, but it's also fantastic eye candy where the mecha are concerned. The story's a bit on the confusing side, but it really does help if you watch the shows in rough production order, since they gradually build up the concept of the Protoculture in each individual series. Azrael put it best, that the whole birdhuman shenanigans is more an of application of Clarke's 3rd Law than actual magic. You'll find Macross Frontier adds a little bit to the understanding of that once you get around to it. Speaking as someone who enjoys pretty much all of Macross (though admittedly it took me a while and some improved subs to gain an appreciation of Macross 7), I think it's safe to say that if you avidly dislike it when a series like Macross does things less-than-seriously, you'll probably find Macross 7 slightly offensive. If you're someone who really enjoyed the occasionally insane, over-the-top blend of silly/awesome in G Gundam, you'll probably love Macross 7. Either way, give it a chance... and if you don't like what you see in the first couple of episodes, skip right to #22 or thereabouts and you should be in good shape.

Yes, I'm aware of that... but as I've already said several times (and you've studiously ignored), we only get to see a tiny slice of Macross's vast universe. You're trying to draw conclusions about the universe as a whole on the basis of an extremely small sample population and the (misguided) assumption that women are equally as numerous as men in the UN Forces, or any military for that matter. This is, again, not indicative of sexism at all, but rather that more men than women find the military an attractive long-term career option. More and more, I think that instead of examining the facts and then coming to a conclusion based on them, you started with the conclusion you wanted to be outraged about and tried to find only those facts that superficially fit what you're trying to say. I also can't shake the hunch that your beliefs about proper gender roles in a military environment are drawn more from Star Trek than actual knowledge of military affairs. Yet again, you conveniently omitted a significant number of women in positions of power and/or authority. Even if we discount the fact that most of the influential musicians in the Macross universe are women, we still have an interesting combination of characters to work with... such as: Myung Fang Lone: Sharon Apple's producer Akiko Hojo: Record label executive producer Sazapi (sp?): Television producer (helped Mylene launch her solo career) Sara Nome: Tribal religious leader Mao Nome: Leading xenobiologist, head of the 117th Research fleet's study of the Vajra Aries Turner: UN Forces (OTEC?) researcher, genius, pioneer of Protoculture research Ranshi Mei: Xenobiologist, Dr. Nome's research partner in the 117th Research Fleet Grace O'Connor: Xenobiologist, Dr. Nome's research partner, Sheryl Nome's manager/producer, presumed to be inventor of the galaxy-wide zero-time fold network concept, nearly conquered the galaxy. Canaria Berstein: Licensed doctor, combat pilot Milia Jenius: Mayor, City-7 Maria Fokina Barnrose: Leader of the Vindirance anti-government organization. Mahara Fabrio: UN Spacy pilot (retired), Coach of the Black Skull T-Crash team. Pasha: Manager, Black Skull T-Crash team. Luxor Jebiru: Top T-Crash solo competitor. I'm not denying that Ishtar and Sylvie are main characters too... but Hibiki is the focus of the story, like him or not. Yeah, there's no evidence of that... except in the misconceptions and (hopefully unintentional) omissions you've made in this thread. There's just no evidence of this chauvinistic agenda you're trying to tell us is secretly at work here.

I didn't exactly pay a lot of attention to the production process of Shadow Chronicles, but if I recall correctly it got pushed back at least three times for various reasons. If we use that to calibrate our expectations for whatever they're calling this latest project, then we can expect to see it in early 2013... assuming they actually manage to find a distributor who wants to carry that turd. I'm not sure, but I vaguely recall someone mentioning that Harmony Gold had burned some bridges with RTSC's distributor (FUNimation), and that they were unlikely to carry future Robotech projects.

If we were using the actual definition of officer status, then virtually every woman we see in the UN Forces is an officer. You seem to be confusing your impression of what an officer is (someone in command) with what actually constitutes an officer (holding a commissioned officer rank). Still, the majority of the female officers we see hold command positions anyway. And let's ask ourselves... how many ship captains figure prominently in the story of the various Macross shows? Five. The women have a 20% share there right off the bat. Still, you have to remember that Macross has a big universe, and we're only seeing a tiny slice of it. Just because we're not seeing them doesn't mean they're not there. It just means they haven't been given center stage yet. Women are, generally speaking, a minority in a modern military... I can't imagine any reason that would change significantly in a short period of time, especially after Earth's population was decimated. As I've pointed out once already, the bigwigs in the UN Forces Command at Alaska base were likely holdovers from the various national military forces after the formation of the UN Forces. The antecedent militaries would have been predominantly male, and as such it makes sense for the officers drawn from them to fill out the UN Forces top brass would have also been predominantly male. If Macross Plus's General Gomez is any indication, many of the top brass at the UN Spacy circa 2040 are veterans of Space War 1, where the military was (like in real life) predominantly male. In theory, if large numbers of women are enlisting too then we ought to see the genders start to balance out in the top brass circa 2059, but since everything's decentralized under the NUNS banner we never saw them contact Earth for help. No, quite the opposite. I'm trying to point out that in your increasingly desperate and nonsensical attempts to conclude that Macross's creators are sexist and/or chauvinistic, you're overlooking a lot of female characters in positions of power and authority. They're not military, true... but it's still relevant to your accusations that the franchise is somehow biased against women. Oh, there's no need to take my word for it... I can cite sources. I can even provide pictures if you'd like. It's not exactly a 50-50 split in terms of genders, but female pilots (incl. human female pilots) are a fair bit more visible in the DYRL-II parallel world continuity. Unfortunately, the only appearance the UN Spacy's general staff makes is in the Macross II OVA. Likewise, starship captains make very few appearances, since the UN Spacy largely uses captured Zentradi ships and builds very few ships of its own prior to 2055. The closest we get is a female flight controller from a Daedalus II-class carrier. The only captains who figure prominently in things are our good pals Vrlitwhai 7018 and Captain Balzae. Just nitpicking here... but if they have the option to wear trousers instead of a skirt and they make a conscious choice not to then that isn't sexism, that's choice. We've seen several examples of unisex uniforms available in the UN Spacy, and we've seen several female characters wearing them. They obviously exist, so saying that a female character wearing a skirt with her uniform has to be the result of sexism is illogical to the point of being downright nonsensical. You're drawing an absurd conclusion here in an attempt to justify jumping to the main misinformed conclusion you made back in your first post. Gender equality does not mean that everyone has to dress the same regardless of gender. But the main character whom the story centers on is Hibiki, which was my point. Yes, Sylvie is there and she's a famous female fighter pilot and a babe to boot (for added alliterative appeal), but Hibiki is the character who the action centers around.

But that's inherently misleading... as being the captain or executive officer of a starship isn't the only command position an officer can hold. The other bridge operators are line officers too, and they have command authority over various aspects of the ship's operation... the most obvious of these being the flight controller. In point of fact, there are far more command positions beyond simply commanding a ship or fleet. Restricting it to merely female starship captains (or the absence thereof) based on an EXTREMELY limited sample population drawn in large measure from shows that don't prominently feature the military cast smacks of an attempt to distort the facts to support the conclusion you want. But that's also extremely unfair to the female cast of Macross, since there are plenty of women in positions of civilian authority. You're arguing that Macross is sexist, and making a conscious effort to shift aside a sizable body of evidence to the contrary. Gee... if that's the case, kindly explain the presence of Macross M3 and Macross Digital Mission VF-X in the Macross Compendium's timeline. For that matter, both VF-X games and Macross M3 got covered in Macross Chronicle too. I think you might want to check your facts thoroughly before you start complaining again. Additionally, since you saw fit to include Macross II, you might want to take note that both Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song are part of its timeline too. They're canon, and the female pilots and officers who appear therein are quite applicable to this topic. And yet, that doesn't rule out the presence of women in fleet command roles or anything else... of course, in the modern day you don't exactly see 50% or more of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made up of women either. News flash... everyone had a pretty harsh military career during the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series, and you yourself said that we have to sort of waive that one due to attitudes at the time. Obviously subsequent Macross shows are not at all averse to letting women kick ass and take names... e.g. Sylvie Geena, Canaria, Nora Polyansky. As I've said once already in this thread, you might want to check your facts before you post. In many nations (including the US!), the female variant of the standard service uniform includes a skirt with the option to wear trousers instead. This holds true for all five branches of the United States armed forces... and we're far from being the only ones who do that. Real-life female combat pilots wear skirts in many modern navies and air forces. It's not unusual or in any way sexist... they have the option to wear trousers and they choose not to. It's a safe bet that Kawamori and co. modeled the UN Spacy on the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and other real-world militaries, which makes their decision to make a skirt part of the standard female uniform perfectly logical and not at all indicative of the chauvinism you're trying to read into it. In all fairness, there's really no accounting for Klan Klang's high heeled spacesuit... but then again, anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that male sexual fantasy is pretty much the entire purpose for Klan Klang's character. Of course not... but let's also remember that the main character of Macross II was Hibiki, not Sylvie. Oh, don't worry... you could insult me until you were blue in the face with very little risk of actually offending me. The thing that's irritating is that a lot of your complaints largely stem from faulty assumptions and misconceptions on your part. You've gone off half-cocked and arrived at a misleading conclusion because you didn't thoroughly check your facts beforehand.

Is that so? Just my take on it, but to me it looks like you're complaining that Macross is sexist and that women are severely underrepresented among the line officers and pilots of the UN Forces based on incomplete information, several faulty conclusions, lack of context, and an apparent misunderstanding about what constitutes an "officer". I've already pointed out a number of women you overlooked who were officers, pilots, or both. In fact, I've already pointed out that virtually every female soldier we've seen in Macross has been an officer. Likewise, you missed several examples of a unisex uniform in Macross in your haste to complain about the uniform designs that have skirts. The real kicker is that you've somehow overlooked the simple fact that the only Macross series since the Macross Plus OVA to make UN Forces soldiers the focus of the story was Macross Zero. The stories of Macross 7, Macross Frontier, and their follow-ups all focus on the civilian population... with minimal representation from the UN Forces. You're drawing conclusions about gender representation in the UN Forces based, in large part, on shows where the military was not the focus of the story (or even prominently featured). Of course, I could also be lazy and point out the obvious... that Macross is a show about giant fighting robots. It's going to be primarily targeted toward a male audience, so it makes sense for them to make many of the characters who are the focus of the show's action the same gender as the target audience so they'll be easier for the viewers to identify with...

Part 2. Um... just pointing out the obvious, but that might have something to do with them having no knowledge of traditional gender roles or, for that matter, anything that doesn't involve shooting people and blowing things up... Considering they had literally zero experience with culture beforehand... I think you're judging them way out of context and far too harshly. Remember, we're talking about people who quite literally had no knowledge of any life outside of war, so when they got introduced to culture it would have come as quite a shock and been quite legitimately the biggest thing since sliced bread in their eyes. You also seem to have overlooked many ponts in Milia's career where she held positions of great authority... after her marriage, she joined the UN Spacy as an officer (2nd Lt.) and served as an ordinary fighter pilot, special forces fighter pilot, test pilot, flight instructor, the executive officer of a starship, and eventually rose to the rank of Major before becoming the mayor of City-7... and she did all that while raising EIGHT kids. As I've just illustrated, there's rather a lot less of one than you think... since your definition of "officer" seems to be a bit off, and you've missed a fair few canon titles that prominently feature female pilots and officers. Almost every military woman in Macross to date has been an officer, and there have been more than a few women who were also pilots. This would be a viable complaint if we weren't limited to a tiny slice of Macross's universe... we can't claim to have a complete picture of the UN Forces since most of Macross is set on colony ships out in the galactic boonies or in relatively small, self-contained events that don't involve a lot of people directly. To be blunt, there's no evidence that there aren't lots of women in the service and holding high-ranking positions. We obviously have at least one major exception in the most recent Macross title... you are, of course, also glossing over women in civilian positions of authority, like various concert promoters and managers, the Mayor of City-7, etc. The problem is you're drawing a false conclusion based on a VERY limited sample population, much of which is drawn from Macross shows where soldiers don't take center stage... Or could it be that not every sci-fi series set in the future has to establish gender equality by the way people dress? It's not like the species is going to abandon conventional notions of gender roles and human sexuality overnight just because Earth got shot up. There are plenty of women in positions of authority in Macross, and plenty willing to go out and get shot at... a disproportionate percentage of whom are held up as being much better at it than their male colleagues. Furthermore, you seem to have also overlooked that not all of the old variants of the UN Spacy uniform had the women wearing skirts... most prominent was the Macross M3 uniform, which was unisex and sported trousers instead. IIRC, Lucy Macmillan's uniform in Macross Plus was basically identical to Isamu's. I think it's more than a little bit chauvinist to suggest that women can't be credible authority figures without forfeiting their sexuality in the bargain.

Actually... there's not nearly as absent as you think. Also, not to split hairs or anything, but almost every female character who's in the military has held an officer rank. They might not be in command, but they're definitely officers by rank. Depending on how things pan out with Macross: the First, this may or may not remain the case... in any event, you have the bridge bunnies who all rank 2nd Lt. or better. The Macross's chief engineer presumably holds an officer rank since she's serving on a military ship. In all fairness, we only ever see the bridge crew of one UN Spacy ship in Macross II: Lovers Again, unless you're counting the time Sylvie's squadron borrowed that rescue ship. Given the character design art, all of the bridge bunnies on the Gloria were officers too. Of course, we've also overlooked the canon prequels to Macross II, and the female pilots they contain. Macross 2036 had Komilia Maria Jenius as a VF pilot, squadron leader, and main character to boot. Likewise, Macross: Eternal Love Song had two female pilots in the main character's squadron, plus the female flight controller on the Prometheus. Because we only really saw two pilots up close... Uh... what about Mahara Fabrio in Macross 7 Trash? She was a pilot and a commissioned officer, and she was one of the pilots trained by Milia (like Gamlin). IIRC, she was also a squadron leader or held some other kind of leadership position in her formation. Not sure about that Zentradi girl who worked for Colonel Bacelon though. Sound Force is technically a UN Spacy unit as well, since even if its leader is an uncooperative berk their gear is still developed and issued by the UN Spacy. Considering the UN Forces stay pretty much uninvolved in this one, that's not surprising... Unclear, actually... officially, that female marine (Katie) was assigned to the VF-0 team, so she may could have been a pilot. After all, the Marine Corps do have their own pilots too. Considering we only actually get three NUNS pilots who have names, and only two of whom get faces to go with it, that's not that surprising either. Cathy Glass was a commissioned officer though... holding the rank of 1st Lt. and working in the Joint Chiefs of Staff office. There's actually been a recent development on this front, since Grace's co-conspirators refer to her by not only her name, but the military rank of Colonel as well. IIRC, there were female pilots in VF-X as well... and Macross M3 too. More to come.. had too many quote tags.

Just throwing this out there... but this wouldn't exactly be the first time we've seen a New Macross-class's battle section discharge its Macross cannon at less than full power. In Macross 7, it's explicitly stated that the Battle-7 needed at least 150 seconds of prep time before it could be fired at 80% of its maximum capacity if the Macross cannon's auto-limiter was disabled. If we work backward from earlier dialogue in that same episode, it appears that under normal circumstances it takes 320 seconds to prepare the gun to fire at full power. (Macross 7 ep16) Based on the above and the observation that we never see the Battle Frontier charging its Macross cannon for more than a few seconds before firing, it seems logical enough to assume that they're being hasty about it and firing at very low power for various reasons. The canon stats would lend some support to this, since the movie has the Battle Frontier firing twice in a matter of minutes, and the spec says it needs 60+ minutes of downtime between firings (presumably meaning full-power firings). So... it's not necessarily an inconsistency. Okay, that I can't answer... the shield certainly isn't visible the way it was in the Macross Frontier series, so it's possible it was in a low power state or something in the absence of incoming fire.

They don't... and there's no room for ambiguity on that note, thanks to the various court documents from the flurry of lawsuits triggered (in part) by Harmony Gold's jackass behavior. Even if we didn't know that, it's not exactly easy to overlook the paranoid way they've avoided anything to do with Macross in the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles movie. None that I'm aware of, no... but it wouldn't exactly be the first time Tommy failed to check his facts before he commented on it. IIRC, that was one of the assertions that started the whole legal tiff between Big West and Tatsunoko. There has been ample proof that Tatsunoko doesn't have any rights to subsequent Macross works produced without their involvement, which should put paid to that little thought in pretty short order. Of course... the most likely reason they registered that trademark when they did is that they wanted to use it specifically to impose a virtual embargo on Macross licensing. It's nominally legal... but it's unethical as all hell, which could describe a lot of Harmony Gold's behavior. Robotech would never be able to compete with Macross on any kind of level footing... that's why they have that trademark keeping things biased strongly in their favor.

'kay... I just finished watching Macross Frontier: Itsuwari no Utahime for the first time. I'll probably watch it again later just to pick up on any details I might have missed.

Just got started watching the movie myself. I'm only about five minutes in, but so far the animation quality is pretty damn impressive. The only thing that punctured the impressiveness for me was a few seconds of reused footage so far, which stood out fairly strongly for me since I only just finished rewatching the Macross Frontier series. So far, so good... EDIT ~08:20: Huh... there's a little bit of gratuitous english just for kicks... EDIT ~14:28: It's nice to see the Frontier NUNS garrison doing a little bit better than they did in the series, but I still hate how they're depicted as totally out of their depth and generally cowardly compared to SMS.

Isn't it an interesting choice of words? Just from the way they keep banging on about it like it's breaking news, you'd think they're either hoping that the entire Robotech fandom is suffering from anterograde amnesia or that they're hoping the original announcement completely flew under the radar so they can announce it like it's new again for the 25th anniversary. It's a given they'll spend most of their time banging on about writers who likely haven't had anything to do with the project in three years, and then duck questions about the side story thing and Shadow Rising for the rest of the Q&A session.

For one... as far as I've seen, all but the most devoted Robotech fans sincerely doubt that Tommy will actually have something ready to deliver next year. Even if they do manage to deliver it on time, it's not like it'll be all that relevant to the ongoing story, and it definitely won't change the fact that the only people interest in the project are the die-hard Robotech fans. The rest are asking "why aren't you finishing Shadow Rising?". On the subject of the live action movie, I doubt they'll announce it if it gets canceled. Past performance would seem to indicate that they'll sit on the news until someone else leaks it, then they'll grudgingly own up to it or claim that it's not really dead and say they're shopping around for another studio. Either way, they're going to do whatever they can to give the illusion that it isn't a lost cause for as long as they can

To be precise... the thing that's slowly killing the Robotech franchise is Harmony Gold's entirely-justifiable lack of confidence in the brand. If we can say one positive thing about senior management at Harmony Gold, it would be that they're not so far gone that they've started to believe their own hype. Despite all the noise from Kevin and Tommy about how Robotech is a big hit, their superiors haven't forgotten Robotech's long and proud history of f*cking up royally. So, unsurprisingly, they're unwilling to spend much of anything on keeping their Robotech franchise afloat. Unless it turns a profit, it's not even on their radar. That's why the discussion boards over on robotech.com are such a mess... senior management doesn't care how they're run because they don't turn any kind of a profit, and the luckless employees tasked with its maintenance have long since ceased to care. Steve got sick of fanboy drama and doesn't want to deal with it anymore, Tommy only visits it to make sure nobody is saying anything bad about him and to sustain his undeserved feeling of accomplishment, and Kevin uses it as a venue to live out his "big name fan" power fantasies. Nah... step 1 is "Don't make anything, but tell everyone how awesome the stuff you're not making is." That is the very essence of the Harmony Gold convention tour.

True! In point of fact, that key difference between Macross and Robotech is one of the things Carl Macek claimed (after the fact) was an intentional change he'd made to "improve" Macross... specifically, by trivializing the music aspect of the series and by making Minmay a horrible person. Of course, in that same interview he also claimed that Macross had hastened to imitate Robotech's elimination of music as an important part of the story in various sequels. (Bear ye in mind that at the time, the most recent Macross sequel was Macross Dynamite 7) Nope, the initial Robotech series was aimed squarely at young children. Later titles, like the Waltrip bros. comic adaptation/continuation of Robotech II: the Sentinels and Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles clearly were aimed at older demographics. The dramatic swing towards PG-13 sex scenes and the like in Sentinels and the hilariously awful character designs in Shadow Chronicles leave no doubt about that...

IIRC, wasn't it given to him by his mother?

No kidding... and it doesn't help that both Kevin and Tommy appear to be quietly encouraging the asinine behavior of certain moderators by playing on their desire for "big name fan" status and/or employment at Harmony Gold. In one case, we know for a fact that that's exactly what's going on. Eh... in my experience, the core of the problem isn't really the terminal idiocy of Harmony Gold's so-called "creative team". What's really killing the Robotech fandom is Harmony Gold's crippling fear of risk and the poor choices they've made in volunteer forum moderators. Exactly... if you still care about Robotech, then robotech.com is the last place you should be going for news about Robotech. In a case of breathtaking idiocy, the official website of the Robotech franchise is often the last site to have news about Robotech. On the few times that Harmony Gold's staff have talked about why it's like that, they point the finger at a ridiculously slow and restrictive approvals process that leaves them waiting weeks or months to announce things they've already said at conventions on the front page of the website. Between the absence of news about new Robotech productions and the general lack of content thanks to past failures, the Robotech fandom has nothing to do but endlessly rehash those what-ifs until Harmony Gold (possibly) gets their act together. It doesn't just sound like that... that's exactly what it is.

Heh... but as a Macross 7 fan, doesn't that mean you'll only know that one song for at least your next ten posts? Really? All this time I've been thinking it's because he's the only halfway-likable main character in Robotech and they keep dangling him in front of the fans like a donut in front of a fat kid on a treadmill. Okay, I give up... was misspelling "crowd" an unintentional gaffe or deliberate homage to Tom's illiterate "fanclub"?

Yeah, the subject of the Supervision Army gets dragged up in the Macross 7 TV series during Exsedol's discussion about the history of the Protoculture and the Protodeviln on Rax/Lux. Also, isn't "Inspection Forces" just a bad translation of "Supervision Army"? Obviously not, since the creation of the Supervision Army is touched on in a show that came out ten years after DYRL?, and the timelines in Macross Chronicle and on the Macross Compendium still use them. The Zentradi vs Meltrandi thing is, IIRC, part of the propaganda aspect of the in-universe DYRL. Either way, it sounds rather anticlimactic and it takes all the mystery out of them...

Uh-huh... of course, if you take the implications Kenichi Yatagai was dropping in his B-Club interview at face value, they might have already done that. Mind you, I think it's still a bad idea given our more recent picture of what the Protoculture stand for... it'd take away all their mystique by making them a known quantity.

Interesting observation... here are my thoughts on it. It's been a while since I last watched those episodes, but I can think of two possible explanations. Alto's VF-25 lost engine power as a result of the d-pulse burst. This might mean that the loss of the other controls was just collateral damage as their powerplant went offline. If the d-pulse burst is targeted to disable a thermonuclear reaction powerplant, then that would explain why Brera's cybernetics and Alto's EX-Gear weren't affected. One would assume Brera isn't carrying a tiny fusion powerplant in his gut, which means his cybernetics are probably battery operated. We know for certain that Alto's EX-Gear is powered by fuel cells and uses chemical rockets to achieve flight, which would explain why he wasn't affected. It's doubtful that the burst was intermittent enough for them to do what they did without realizing their fighters still worked, but it is reasonably likely that the VF-27 was hardened against such things as part of its design process since they knew they were going to be encountering Vajra.

Had to think there for a second, didn'tcha? lol... if you actually watch them once in a while, then you're made of sterner stuff than I am. I don't even keep the DVDs on my DVD rack with all my other movies. They're buried in a box in my basement along with all of my other Robotech stuff.