Seto Kaiba

Assuming they get that far, probably. If ~100 chapters = 1 season or 1 Saga = 1 season, we're looking at the possibility of Brook in season 5 or thereabouts? Season one is a cut-down version of the East Blue Saga, so presumably next season will be the Alabasta Saga with Baroque Works as the Big Bad (which they teased in this season), then Sky Island, then Water 7, then Thriller Bark, the Summit War, Fishman Island and the timeskip, Dressrosa, Whole Cake Island, Wano, and the Final Saga/Laugh Tale assuming they go all the way. I'd assume Brook will probably be changed quite a bit if they get far enough to adapt Thriller Bark since his signature line (besides singing Binks's Sake) is just sexual harassment... which probably won't go over well.

Yeah, I saw a lot about that when the news dropped that Games Workshop was discontinuing a whole bunch of legacy Firstborn kits.

I covered this one a while back based on the trailers. It looks like season one is a pretty condensed adaptation of the East Blue Saga, the first six story arcs and approximately the first 100 chapters of the manga. The first four story arcs (Romance Dawn, Orange Town, Syrup Village, and Baratie) are where Luffy acquires Zoro, Nami, Usopp, and Sanji respectively. The fifth, Arlong Park, is the fight against the fishman pirates, and the sixth (Loguetown) is the windup to Luffy and his crew actually entering the Grand Line where the main story kicks off. (Basically, this entire season is prologue.)

Gettin' caught up on a few titles... Jujutsu Kaisen has started running again, and I have to say that I enjoy this series so much more when it forgets about the supernatural action and is just the main trio messing about as ordinary teenagers. It's just so relentlessly grim otherwise that I have a hard time caring what happens to the joyless, unlikeable characters infesting the story. Undead Girl Murder Farce is speeding into its first season's final story arc, with the team now going after werewolves who appear to be behind a string of murders in an isolated village. Still interesting, still entertaining, I'm hopeful it'll end on a high note because I've enjoyed the hell out of it so far. Classroom for Heroes... isn't worth anyone's time. It is a form letter exercise in the standard "the ultimate hero is reincarnated, tries to lead a normal life, fails to be even slightly inconspicuous, and gets a harem" storyline that has been garbage every time it's been done. My Tiny Senpai is devolving into similarly form letter ecchi fanservice with little semblance of an actual story and less of character development. I feel like I've insulted the writer of My Senpai is Annoying after initially thinking it was a copycat of that series with the genders flipped. Probably gonna start The Legendary Hero is Dead!, season two of the gun-eatingly insane sports anime Birdie Wing, Yuri is My Job, or go back a bit and watch Ai Tenchi Muyo! or Tenchi Muyo GXP: Paradise Starting.

So... continuing from where I left off... The VF-22 Master File skims over the actual creation of General Galaxy and talks instead about how the newly founded General Galaxy made a habit of scouring the population of Zentradi left on Earth to find individuals with particularly high aptitude for the sciences and engineering. It's noted that while the Zentradi are little different to humans in terms of intelligence, that most first-generation Zentradi immigrants to Earth were of the combatant types who were more inclined towards/interested in physical activity. Those who had been assigned to headquarters and logistics type roles were apparently had an easier time transitioning to research and development work. General Galaxy's dev team ultimately ended up with less than twenty engineers initially, many being individually-tutored Zentradi recruited personally by Kurakin. Argus Selzer, formerly known as Toran 825, is said to have been Alexei Kurakin's top student and inherited leadership of the company and the position of the company's chief engineer after Kurakin's untimely passing in a flight test accident in 2026. That section wraps up with the mention that, as "peace children" born after the First Space War began entering the workforce one particularly noteworthy half-Zentradi by the name of Guld Goa Bowman was considered the most promising new recruit to General Galaxy's VF Development Division. The next section goines into Guld's own history a bit. It's noted that, while he was enrolled in the Aeronautical College of Engineering on Eden, he obtained a Valkyrie pilot license through the New UN Forces internship system. On graduation, he moved to Earth to take a position at the General Galaxy head office in the VF Development Division as a flight control systems researcher, where he caught the eye of Argus Selzer. When Project Super Nova was initiated, General Galaxy held an internal review of independent research to select systems best able to meet the military's need and Bowman's proposal for a radical new man-machine interface (the Brain Direct Interface) was adopted. It's noted that it wasn't entirely accurate to refer to Guld as the YF-21's chief engineer, but General Galaxy made a concerted internal effort to credit him with more involvement in the project out of respect for him after his unfortunate passing in the Sharon Apple Incident. They also note that, out of respect for him and his contributions, the development base "Guld Works" was named in his honor. There's mention of a large number of experimental aircraft including a number of modified VF-9s and VF-14s that were used to evaluate various aspects of the YF-21's proposed design including the deformable wings and the adoption of the Inertia Vector Control System. Two are described in some detail... a unit codenamed GG-103 that was used as a test platform for the YF-21's deformable wing and a unit GG-106 that was used to evaluate the YF-21's battroid mode body plan after testing revealed significant issues with the introduction of the inertia vector control system to older models on an experimental basis. There are some mentions of how the New UN Forces mandated that various parts be used, occasionally from third-party or rival corporations, and that there were some attempts at sabotage by supplying defective parts to the parts pool the New UN Forces assembled that were then randomly sent to either Super Nova developer. It's mentioned that there was apparently some dispute among the design team working on the YF-21 whether to adopt a three-hulled/trimaran design similar to the VF-4 and VF-14 and accommodate the military's armament requirements by increasing the space between the engine nacelles or to adopt a more radical design that focused on internal storage to focus on better stealth performance combining passive and active stealth. Bowman was a champion of the latter proposal that ultimately won out. Guld supposedly missed the completion of the YF-21-1 because he was busy at Eden Aeronautical Institute of Technology completing the prototype of the BDI for Unit 2. There's mention of Dr. Ludmilla Blackwood, a frequently recurring character in Master File, having been one of the lead developers of both the next-generation airframe control AI ARIEL used on the VF-19 and production VF-22 and the self-learning AI used on the Ghost X-9 and Sharon Apple system having been potentially in communication with both Guld Goa Bowman and Jan Neumann of the YF-21 and YF-19 teams respectively and helping resolve the issues of making the airframe control AI play nicely with Guld's BDI system.

Never been a Space Marine player myself, but I've always liked the Mk.VI helmet. It's iconic of the older editions of WH40K, and now particularly of the Horus Heresy since the Mk.VI was introduced by the loyalists during the Heresy. I'd like to see JOYTOY do some Heresy-era stuff so I can maybe get a Garviel Loken, a Sigismund, or maybe someone like Aeonid Theil... the Ultramarines had way more character in the Heresy than the boring pack of starcharses they are in modern 40K, even if the entire galaxy was actively taking the piss out of them in 30K.

As it's a holiday, and for once I'm not being dragged into the office anyway, I decided to spend some quality time with Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II. This is definitely one of the less-good Master File books and it takes a lot of weird liberties with the VF-22 design... but there are still some interesting tidbits here and there, esp. as it's written from a point around 13 years after the in-universe publication of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur. Like the VF-19 book, the VF-22 book spends a fair amount of the introduction praising the VF-11 as an extremely capable multirole VF that was overwhelmingly superior to Zentradi battle pods one-on-one to the extent that the New UN Forces considered it unthinkable that they would lose in an even fight. This VF-22 book goes a bit farther and asserts that the VF-11 had no noteworthy drawbacks and that as a result development stagnated somewhat because the only perceived needs for other/newer models were to cover roles that the VF-11 wasn't designed for. Unlike the VF-19 book, the VF-22 book walks back the idea that the "Spica Shock" - the incident in which a Zentradi main fleet appeared and destroyed the colony on Alpha Virginis III in 2037 - was the prime motivation for Project Super Nova. Instead, it paints a picture of both Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy lobbying the New UN Government to approve development of new model VFs on two points: Preventing the stagnation of technological development. The existence of "unknown threats" in the galaxy. In the former case, there's an interesting take on the subject of an unmanned (all-Ghost) air force in which it's presented as being proposed by Shinsei and General Galaxy as a far future ideal that was fundamentally unworkable at present. The reason? Employment. Due to the size and nature of emigrant fleets, the military was one of the largest employers of young adults who'd grown up in the aftermath of the First Space War and they couldn't feasibly switch to an all-Ghost airforce without tanking the economy. Nevertheless, that idea was carried forward by a faction in the military headed up by General Higgins while an opposing faction championed the continued development of manned fighters through the Super Nova project. The latter point carries an interesting implication on its own. Namely, it suggests that the New UN Forces may have been aware of at least two specific threats before they were officially encountered. The first mentioned is the Protodeviln. The VF-22 Master File suggests that the New UN Forces were at least partly aware of a possible energy lifeform on the Varauta system's ice world for years before they were accidentally released by the Blue Rhinoceros Corps. The other unknown-at-the-time threat mentioned is the Vajra, who the book asserts have (at the time of the book's writing in 2063) come to be regarded as potentially responsible for a number of unexplained incidents in which survey fleets had lost ships and carrier-based aircraft without explanation. The Spica Shock was apparently the coup de grace that convinced the New UN Government and New UN Forces that, in all likelihood, the two defense corporations had a pretty good point. After dinner, I'm gonna dig into the next section, that seems to be about Alexei Kurakin's founding of General Galaxy and his training of handpicked Zentradi students to become General Galaxy's core development team.

The MEP prototype that was sold at auction on eBay would have been, had it been completed and green-lit for production and sale. I'm not sure how selling the .stl files would be classified... esp. if the licensee they were made for is getting out of the franchise. 🤷‍♂️ It was one-of-a-kind... but now that the .stl files used to prototype it are in the wild, well, I wouldn't be surprised if the person who paid over two grand for the poor-quality physical prototype that anyone can now recreate for about $40 between the cost of the .stl and printer filament feels a bit scammed. That's the great advantage of model kits... they can be a lot more screen accurate since they don't have to make most of the concessions that come with transforming.

I would. That's kind of the pattern we've been following for the last 23 years and counting. The toy licensee in question will do all of the VF-1 variants, then they either give up or move on to the MOSPEADA mecha. Then they give up. They never ever move on to Southern Cross. It has been thus ever since Toynami had the license and refused to even consider doing the Southern Cross designs because the expected return on investment was much too low. With no Japanese toys to copy, anyone doing Southern Cross mecha toys is going to have to invest a lot more time, money, and effort into designing the toys from scratch. That will naturally have implications for quality and cost, but it's also going to make it significantly harder to turn a profit. Southern Cross is the basis for Robotech's least popular saga, and with sales already falling precipitously when they transition from Macross to MOSPEADA the expectation would be the sales will slip even further when they switch to Southern Cross. Selling a large number of toys will almost certainly be impossible, so they can do one of two things: raise the price or reduce the quality. The problem is that doing either to the extent that it makes the toy profitable effectively precludes production. And if the licensees Harmony Gold had 23 years ago couldn't find a way to make the toy profitable when interest in Robotech was peaking, they're sure as hell not going to find it now a good decade after the franchise curled up and died for the second time. This toy prototype that ended up being sold at auction is a product of failing to look before one leaps.

Not surprised. I guess the folks who were bidding on it have a proper understanding that there will probably never be an official commercially available transforming Spartas toy. It really is a one of a kind collectible. And with the amounts some of the robotech fans have pledged to things like kickstarters, this isn't even that much.

You're building your argument on the basis of a nonscale 3D model from a video game and a fanmade doujinshi. Those aren't exactly reliable sources. Especially given how many liberties the doujinshi takes and how it ignores a number of design choices that we know were made in-series. I'm not going to get into this with you again... I just do not believe your argument has a sound evidentiary basis. This, however, is potentially food for thought and fodder for productive discussion. If you think about it, there is actually a pretty good reason for this disparity to exist... though it probably wouldn't occur to people who haven't spent an indecent amount of time in and around old warship museums. Indeed, a fair amount of this would not have occurred to me at all without spending a rather lengthy day rummaging around in the guts of an old Forrest Sherman-class destroyer in parts that tourists would not normally be allowed to visit. Quite a lot of the weight of a traditional ocean-going warship is tied up in design features that are necessary for an ocean-going warship but not really needed in a dedicated space warship like the Northampton-class. The keel, the armored conning tower, the waterline armor belt, the heavily armored magazines for gunpowder and other explosives... and so on and so forth. These are, for the most part, substantially thick chunks of extremely heavy armor-grade steel scattered throughout the ship's structure. A space warship has no need of a weighted keel for stability or as a primary structural member. The armor belt and armored conning tower are not particularly useful since attack can come from any direction and quite frankly no amount of armor protects from some of the weapons being used. There's no need for heavily defended magazines because the main armaments are energy weapons and reaction warheads that contain no explosives and cannot be set off by enemy fire. So with the benefit of not needing all of that heavy defensive equipment and the benefit of being able to build the ship out of fictional supermaterials that far exceed the structural strength and damage resistance of humble armor-grade steel, the ship can be a lot lighter and a lot roomier without compromising on defense. It's particularly important that the ships can (and do) cheat up their armor strength using the same energy conversion armor technology used on VFs making the thinner but much tougher layered laminated armor more resilient by pumping it with electromagnetic pulses produced using electrical power from the thermonuclear reactor(s). Unlike a modern fission reactor, the reactors in Macross's ships can be made very small thanks to the advanced alien technology that allows for practical aneutronic fusion via gravity control and power generation using high efficiency thermoelectrics, so a huge chunk of the mass of a modern nuclear warship made up of shielding and steam systems is simply unnecessary. Then, of course, there's the question of the size of some of this equipment thanks to alien futuretech. The compact thermonuclear reactor in the VF-1's engines is about the size of a beach ball and it can still generate 650MW+. If you can get a gigawatt out of a power system roughly the size of a large suitcase, the actual reactors for these ships are probably not much bigger than a minivan. Not to mention a lot of space can be saved by colocating the reactors with the engine nozzles, since the main propulsion system uses plasma from the reactor as the primary propellant. So... yeah, you aren't exactly wrong when you accuse these ships of being big empty boxes. That's what they canonically are. It's even in the name of an entire category of ships, the ARMDs. They're a box full of fighters with some crew quarters, fuel tanks, guns, and engines grafted on. They can be light because the structural requirements to build them aren't the same as oceangoing ships, the materials are lighter and stronger, and the systems needed to support them are extremely compact thanks to alien technology and some savvy design. These ships are acknowledged to be made structurally simple in order to be highly versatile and easy to mass produce, after all. Macross Chronicle is a compilation of previously existing materials, for the most part. Reconsidering the official stats was not a normal part of its objective.

They're doing one for the Grey Knights baby carrier?

TBH, kinda disappointed that all the Space Marine JOYTOYs have been Primaris marines. Kinda wanna get a Beakie for old times sake. I ended up getting their (Primaris) Marneus Calgar and an Ultramarines standard bearer to go on the shelves where I keep the WH40K books. Dark Eldar line when? (I know we always get the short shrift but c'mon...)

Let's be honest, if someone developed an actual usable transforming robot for the military we would all absolutely be clamoring for models of it. Even though the Northampton-class is ostensibly a dedicated space warship it can probably make a water landing the way many other ships in Macross can. There are likely quite a few exterior hatches for taking on supplies and munitions that could be used to embark and disembark crew under those circumstances. I suppose that, since the ship's missile launchers are large enough to launch a VF though, they could also use those as a hatch for loading/unloading. Of course, the official answer would have to be that the Northampton-class has an internal hangar with an odd sort of ramp on the underside that's only seen in Macross 7 PLUS's episode "SPIRITIA DREAMING". They apparently have enough space to hold a few VFs (they're shown launching VF-14s) so presumably there's space up there for a small launch or two to transfer personnel and supplies. Strictly speaking, only one of those is an actual shuttle... the one Walkure uses as an orbit-to-surface transport in Macross Delta. Sheryl Nome doesn't have a private transport. She gets around using Galaxy Starliners: the fold-capable spacefuture equivalent of commercial passenger jets. She arrives in the Macross Frontier fleet as one of many passengers aboard a regular commercial flight from wherever her previous tour stop was, and the Frontier gov't later charters a flight on a Galaxy Starliner to take her to Gallia IV in order to suppress the discontent among the Zentradi troops stationed there. (It let them reuse the same starliner CG model.) The Konig Monster has a mode called shuttle but it isn't really one. It can't carry passengers in its stock state. The reason it can in Macross Frontier is because SMS upgraded its Konig Monster in various ways including the installation of a modern EX-Gear flight control system. Thanks to those upgrades, operations that previously required a pilot and two gunners can now all be managed by a single pilot, leaving the two gunner seats free in the cockpit. Presumably the modern New UN Forces have some kind of compact launch used for casual transport of personnel and supplies between ships that we just haven't seen. There were quite a number of specialist auxiliary craft shown in Macross 7 including police patrol vehicles, transports large enough to move Valkyries and bulk cargo, etc.

That's not just true, and an astonishingly low bar to clear, it was also essentially my point. 99% of the time, the answer to "Why is it like that?" in Southern Cross is "because nobody thought this through." "Why do the almost exclusively Western European space colonists wear impractical samurai-inspired body armor?" Because the armor was designed for another series concept that didn't get green-lit and the show's staff were pressed for time and couldn't be arsed to design something that actually fit with the final product's design aesthetic. "Why is the Spartas's crew compartment exposed in two of its three modes?" Because the studio massively underestimated the difficulty of designing a believable transforming robot. etc.

Golly, those goalposts moved quick once I demonstrated there were actual explicit artistic and symbolic reasons rather than just "Rule of Cool". I'd point out that the pilots aren't Stormtroopers, they're Navy personnel not Army. The other examples are from films made over thirty years later by a completely different set of filmmakers so it's not exactly surprising that the new team may have their own artistic vision separate from that of the original creators. Stormtroopers of other colors might be running on "rule of cool" rather than an intentional artistic statement, potentially because the stormtrooper armor itself has become symbolic of fictional fascism. The aforementioned fascist symbolism is specific to Star Wars's Stormtroopers. There doesn't seem to be any real artistic statement behind the Arming Doublet in Southern Cross. It's a holdover from an earlier series concept that Tatsunoko recycled to save time as they rushed Southern Cross into production to meet the network and licensee deadlines. It was originally sci-fi ou-yoroi armor for a Sengoku period drama IN SPACE but due to that concept being dropped in favor of chasing the trend set by Gundam and Macross it was imported into a setting that doesn't have a strong Japanese cultural bias the way a space fantasy version of Japan's warring states period did. It'd make sense in context of Glorie had a large Japanese population or something along those lines, but the series has only one minor asian character and the rest of its design aesthetic lacks any overtly Japanese stylistic touches. The Arming Doublet and its samurai-inspired design aspects don't make sense in context, it's obviously impractical, there's no in-universe explanation to justify it. This is potentially a political topic, so I want to avoid making it political by keeping it in abstract terms. Research costs money, which is why researchers look for corporate backing, for investors, for grant money, and so on. The more you fund research in a field the more that field will advance and produce usable results. Military technology produces the most, and most visible, results because that's the field developed nations throw the most money at by literal orders of magnitude.

When it comes to One Piece, it's basically the equivalent of "a wizard did it"... he's the wizard scientist who did it. Normally, yeah... One Piece has avoided a lot of that in two ways: The first is a historical period called the Void Century... The second is the enigmatic genius Dr. Vegapunk... Pretty much all anachronistic tech in the series can be attributed to one of those two origins... and backwards places are simply isolated by problematic geography. (The world of One Piece is INCREDIBLY messed up.)

... yeah... so... about that... there is no explanation. Those are just a thing that exists. This is a world where they had two-way radio in the Age of Sail thanks to telepathic snails. Why do they change to look like whoever's calling? We don't know, it runs on cartoon logic. Normally the explanation for any anachronistic technology would be "blame Dr. Vegapunk" but there's no evidence he's even involved.

As someone who does translations on the side... it's not that suspicious, especially if they've acquired the various extra features from the Japanese home video releases and are translating those too. Not to mention however much additional material is being made for things like liner notes and extras. Not to mention it's all probably got to go through two layers of legal approvals now... one at HG and one at Big West.

All right! It's the weekend and I'm going to sit down and see just how bad One Piece really is. Over lunch I saw a news piece attempting to claim that One Piece broke the curse of bad anime adaptations, and my gut reaction was naturally "Bullsh*t", but we'll give this a fair shake and see... OK, not gonna lie... I am weirdly disappointed that the opening narration isn't using the one from the One Piece anime that gives the gist of the story's premise. The narrator in the anime is always rather overdramatic too, but the narration about how the new age of pirates began with the valediction of Gold Roger in which he told the crowd assembled to see his execution that he's left his treasure, which has everything the world has to offer, in one piece and that it was up for grabs. This new opening narration is so much more generic and uninspiring. Luffy's quirky so he has to break the fourth wall? Go **** yourselves Netflix. OK, I have to give them points again for something... That said, it's ****ing weird seeing Alvida with actual human proportions. I guess they backed down to avoid causing a stir, but in the original work Alvida was grotesquely obese, hideously ugly, and quite sensitive about both... whereas this version is merely a bit chubby. She's also missing most of her bad boss tendencies. The set design is absolutely amazing though. Just absolutely amazing. You can really tell where the money went. I love that they faithfully reproduced Alvida's club from the anime for the actual fight though. But I was right when I assumed at the outset that Luffy's devil fruit powers were going to look like absolute crap. Really, there was no chance that they were going to actually look good/impressive because it is a REALLY cartoony power set that kind of calls for late 90's The Mask-grade CG. ... and it's back to the flashback... Nice easter egg though... the music in the tavern is "Binks's sake", a song that becomes very important MUCH later in the story. Can't say I care for this version of Luffy getting his powers though. They also kinda bungled the bandit's confrontation with Shanks... especially since it's one of the story's most hilarious-in-hindsight "Bullying a dragon" moments. So, I knew this was a compressed adaptation... but we're not even thirty minutes into the first episode and they've already got rid of Alvida and are introducing Buggy, Nami, and Axe-Hand Morgan? I hate to say it feels like we're rushing but we're RUSHING. Wow... Helmeppo looks even worse than I expected. The bob cut he had in the original was bad, this is just... instead of looking like a spoiled brat with questionable fashion sense he's a ridiculous hat away from looking like a pimp. It's like they spent all the money on the set design, CG ships, and fight choreography and forgot to hire anyone who knew how to write or act. The over-the-top acting is probably meant to be that way... and it's absolutely faithful to the original work where everyone is so hammy the production can't be called kosher... but combined with the loving rendered ships and sets it combines with Luffy's sh*tty CG to make the whole thing feel like a paradoxically bad FMV video game. One Piece can't be called a serious story by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels like two separate teams are working at cross purposes here. The set design and prop teams were clearly told they were doing a pirate story and were going to play it laser straight and realistic, while the writers and actors were clearly told to be as cartoony as possible. The end result is downright surreal. ... and again, Luffy is way too coherent and articulate. Inaki Godoy at least seems to realize what kind of show he's in and is 100% not taking this seriously. The sheer amount of "I forgot I had superpowers" going on here for Luffy is kind of impressive. I guess the CG is just too expensive to use on a regular basis. I'm also unaccountably disappointed that Morgan wasn't crushed under his own statue like in the original. They also left out some rather important character development in a few places... ... and then the episode ends with one of Buggy's men explaining the theft of the map to Buggy, who vows to steal it himself. All in all... as of the end of the first episode, it's not terrible it's just all over the place. "Indecisive", in a word. It feels like the creative team working on Netflix's One Piece were really struggling to reconcile the original One Piece's heavy emphasis on comedy with its nature as an adventure series about pirates. The original work is unapologetically comedic 99% of the time with attack names full of puns and overreactions and idiot behavior. Here, it sort of flip-flops frequently between pure comedy and pure seriousness in a way that doesn't feel quite natural. Like channel surfing back and forth between James Bond and Johnny English. It's kind of the opposite problem Cowboy Bebop had, where they kept trying to inject comedy into a serious noir story... in One Piece they don't know how to make the comedy that is supposed to be there work with the parts of the story that aren't inherently comedic in nature. It's not So Bad It's Good, So Bad It's Awful, or So Bad It's Exiting The Critical Spectrum at Velocities Exceeding C yet... but it's not good either. It's... mediocre? Unremarkable? Inoffensive? Like, it's very pretty but it doesn't leave much of an impression. EDIT: Next episode is presumably going to cover the fight with Buggy the Clown... and as he's my favorite One Piece character I really am somewhat anxious about that. Partly because Buggy in the original is an ineffectual comic relief villain until Impel Down when he becomes the poster child for Imposter Syndrome, and partly because this version of Buggy seems to be going for a "scary clown" angle ala Heath Ledger's overhyped Joker.

In my experience, people who default to "rule of cool" tend to paint with far too broad a brush and miss that it's far more often being done for practical and/or symbolic reasons by the art staff. Why are the Stormtroopers bright white? It's partly because "gloss white is futuristic" was in full force at the time the first film was made and their helmets are meant to be stylized skulls, which is Rule of Cool in part, but it's also symbolic. Their sterile white armor and stylized skull-faced helms were meant to be evocative of their role as fascist enforcers (the armor is literally referred to as "fascist white armored suits" in the script for A New Hope*), and as the Stormtrooper name implies they're both shock troops and political enforcers. Their armor is not meant to be camouflaged... it's meant to be high visibility so that it can be feared. Their presence is meant to intimidate like their namesake. For the same reason, Char's custom Mobile Suits in the original Gundam are painted not just red but their own unique shade of red not just because's a "Red Baron"-type ace, but to make his Mobile Suit recognizable among the otherwise identical-looking Mobile Suits of the same type and so that the red of his Mobile Suit wouldn't blur into the red portions of the Gundam or other designs in the animation. Zeon's whole aesthetic is modeled on WW2 Germany's, and designs introduced after the Zaku were given other colors besides the Wehrmact officer green in order to make them easier to tell apart, especially since the first one Tomino was forced to introduce when they switched to a borderline "monster of the week" format was the very similar looking Gouf. Where Southern Cross is concerned, however, it's really more like... "Rule of Lazy Reuse". Even toned down, the Arming Doublet's samurai armor aesthetic doesn't really fit with the design aesthetic of the rest of the series. They spent a lot of time on it when they were developing the series as Science Fiction Sengoku Saga and either couldn't bear to toss the designs and/or didn't have enough time to make a new design that would actually mesh with the show's style. The color schemes aren't really "rule of cool", it's just what they've ripped off. The Bioroids are different colors because they're styled after the Principality of Zeon's main Mobile Suits from Mobile Suit Gundam like the Zaku II, Gouf, and Dom, and that shows though not just in their concept, sound effects, and color scheme, but even in things like the external energy conduits and the late period Bioroid Type I "inheriting" the Dom's cruciform visor. Similarly, the Spartas is red, white, and blue because it's modeled on the Gundam and GM, and they tried to go the Macross route in making it easy to tell which model was the hero's with head variants... and then did such a crap job animating the series that most people don't know there are three different heads for the Spartas because the differences are too subtle to make out and indistinguishable from the show's frequently off-model animation. The only one who really got subjected to "Rule of Cool" was Marie Angel, who got an orange Logan despite frequently being the only Logan pilot onscreen, just to make her stand out that much more. "Rule of Cool" is a thing... but it's easy to mistake deliberate practical or artistic choices for it if you're not paying attention. *As provided in The Art of Star Wars, edited by Carol W. Titelman, Ballentine Books, 1979, on page 18.

A bad adaptation of a classic is somehow worse/more offensive to the eye than a bad adaptation of a regular series or something new. That's why Netflix's Cowboy Bebop got absolutely CRUCIFIED by the reviewers and audiences alike. If Cowboy Bebop had not been so beloved and timeless, the Netflix adaptation would just have been a bad TV show instead of downright criminal.

Come on fan editors... I'm waiting. Oh god, I kinda wanna play hooky and just binge this beautiful mess while it's fresh... Not surprised they dumped it all at once. That's kind of been Netflix's particular thing. Instead of drip feeding it like Disney+ they just toss it out all at once because they KNOW their service is for binge-watching... bless their hearts.

Which is also ironically not painted... the glossy appearance is actually a clear laminate vehicle wrap protecting the dull yellow ablative armor emulsion coating the bare composite armor and frame. It's purely functional. That it happens to look like a tacky gold spray job is purely coincidental. Though, as I said, there's really no reason to try to camouflage a giant robot. There are few things in the world more conspicuous (or more noisy) than a chunk of metal the size of a house that's decided to go for a walk. Anime's preoccupation with giving them fancy paintjobs can be, to an extent, forgiven because low observable stealth just doesn't apply in this case. It seems unlikely that Southern Cross's creators actually understood this point, though... as the paintjobs in the series are a bit too Gundam-inspired to be the work of an original thinker.

TBH, I don't think the argument that the Southern Cross Army is a useless chocolate box regiment tracks with anything in the series... They're way too heavily armed to be just a peacekeeping force and a way to keep bored teenagers out of trouble. They have a purely military space fleet, three or four separate Army air services, a half-dozen terrain-specific specialist teams, an armored cavalry corps, and even reserve formations. That isn't a for-show army, these people are armed like they're wishing a mother****er would. Which makes no sense, because there's literally nobody for them to be beefing with. Yeah... as I said, there's not a lot of point in trying to camouflage an 18m tall 80t robot. You might as well paint it in bright colors to scare the enemy and make it easier for units to coordinate when radar is off the table, or just because that's the color of paint you had. Of course, Southern Cross did it because they were ripping off Gundam and there's no actual rhyme or reason to it there.