Seto Kaiba

Eh, I really can't imagine there being any benefits to contributing to such a small site on that scale... unless you count sitting at the RobotechX booth at conventions... which I don't (Sorry MEMO). I can't say I have any real interest in contributing to the Robotech Codex either, since I've already got one time-consuming fan project on my plate... building my Macross II reference guide. Honestly, I'm not sure if I should show MEMO and Seifrietti a bit more respect because they're trying so hard to do something good for the fanbase with their respective fan magazines, or feel pity because they're working with the certain knowledge that they'll get screwed over by Harmony Gold just short of the finish line. I couldn't work under conditions like that. Sorry, brain's running on autopilot... I meant RDF HQ, which is, like RobotechX, a ghost town. In fact, the only real activity there in the past few days has been this post made by manofsan (aka sanman) about how to deal with "Macross purist trolls" (or rather, anyone who doesn't agree with his belief that RT is flawless). This guy's a hoot... it's like one of those murder mysteries where the murderer gets amnesia and starts investigating the crime himself, except with trolling. EDIT: Hmmm... it looks like Maverick_LSC's been here to see what I've been saying... I wonder if I'll be receiving a snide e-mail from him soon.

I'd bank on it being a bad year for Harmony Gold and Robotech just based on their pitiful offerings at the panel discussions they've done. With the live-action movie still a distant POSSIBILITY on the horizon and Shadow Rising going nowhere fast and gathering essentially no fan interest at all (seriously, NOBODY, even on Robotech.com, seems to care about it), they're back to where they were in '01, coasting solely on toy sales and the pitiful re-releases of their DVDs. Well, that presents its own particular set of problems... In its current state, Robotech's continuity is a horrible, fractal cluster-fart of contradictory stories. If you thought the confusion about whether DYRL or the TV series was the right version of Space War 1 is bad, Robotech is a billion times worse. Because Harmony Gold got into the habit of giving licenses to anyone who could spell their own name in three tries or less, half of the stuff they produced back then reads like it was written by someone whose total knowledge of Robotech is a single, vague recollection of the back of a VHS box from some five years previous. Despite Harmony Gold's declaration that all that garbage was non-canon, the fandom has taken it upon itself to mirror the fractured, confused, often nonsensical state of the continuity. You have the purists, who hold the TV series above all else, the McKinneyists, who think the novels are the be-all end-all of Robotech, the fans of the comics, who really don't have a fancy name and think the now non-canon comics are the bee's knees, and the Universalists, who want to smash all the contradictory stories of the TV series, novels, comics, non-canon side-stories, etc. into one big messy whole and call it official. Because the fandom is so heavily divided, it's almost impossible to get them to give a poo about any one thing or any one fan site. This, of course, makes it impossible for them to congregate at any one fan-site. The two big fansites are RobotechX and RDF Underground, but both of those are essentially ghost towns, where most of the members seem to have given up and moved on, leaving only a few devoted contributors keeping the place moving. I avoid going to RDF Underground, because I see the population of that site as a bunch of Bizarro-world beings with completely alien concepts of fun and entertainment, but I do visit RobotechX from time to time. RobotechX is the only site with any real concessions to a fan-made Robotech encyclopedia, but it seems to be done from a Universalist approach, and with the active population of the site numbering some six people, those of us who actually know the source materials and the few authoritative Robotech books well simply cannot be arsed to do anything with it. We have better, less tedious things to do, like counting the number of atoms in our monitors, calculating the growth rate of our front lawns, or reciting the complete text of War and Peace backwards in Hindi.

You're half-right. FASA sold the rights to the Mechwarrior line ages ago... Wizkids had it for a while, and I think the current owner is Catalyst Game Labs, who made an announcement June 24th of this year that they had acquired the rights to the "unseen" (aka Lost Mechs) artwork from the early Battletech/MechWarrior games. The announcement can be found here: http://catalystgamelabs.com/2009/06/24/cat...gs-back-unseen/

No source that I'm aware of specifically defines it as any one of the three. Given its size (never more than 3) and its equipment (VF-17 Nightmares) I would say that it's probably just a special forces team.

Wow... just wow... anything I say will just detract from the fact that this just goes to show how right I was. Robotech will always be remembered as a penny-ante crapfest because it never produced anything worth watching after the first series... it'll never escape association with Macross (specifically, as something riding Macross's coattails) either at this rate. Nah, the current Robotech fandom in general is going to hell. There are very few decent people left among the fans... because the few decent people (like you, me, Wanzerfan, Jasonc, etc.) get hounded off the site for our lack of blind faith in the franchise. They've been whittling the fanbase down so that only the blindly faithful remain, the idiots who will buy the same Beta fighter four times just because it's painted a different color... the idiots who bought the original series on DVD every time a new version came out... the idiots who still hope that Harmony Gold will revisit and finish Robotech II: the Sentinels and Robotech 3000... there are, sadly, enough to them (for now) to keep the feeble mess that is Robotech chugging well into the foreseeable future. Whether McKeever will ever get his comeuppance? Well, it won't happen on RT.com... not so long as he has admin privileges there. Maybe he'll get too big for his britches and get axed like Tom Bateman did, or he'll become head of RT and run it into the ground for us. It might take a while, but I'm a patient man. I can wait. I do... every time he posts. Frankly, it's a mystery to me why Harmony Gold even hired him. After seeing how he handles panel discussions at conventions, how he behaves on message boards, and reading his blog, I wouldn't give him the time of day even if his resume was printed on solid gold ingots. He's an ideal example of the very worst aspects of Robotech fandom... a frothy-mouthed fanatic who does his damnedest to discredit or drive off anyone who doesn't think Robotech is a flawless masterpiece beyond the critique of mortal men. I'm not privy to internal Harmony Gold affairs at all, but just based on what I've seen I don't think much of his abilities as a marketing director either. As any cynical businessman will tell you, marketing is the use of fraud and deception to sell trash to idiots. A key part of being a good marketer is knowing just enough to come up with a believable lie. Not only is McKeever's hype virtually transparent, but he actually seems to believe his own absurd claims that Robotech is successful, popular, and a big seller. He actually thinks that getting it into a nosebleed timeslot (7am saturday) on a Canada-only Sci-Fi network ripoff and getting the movie onto Hulu are huge achievements. It's never a good sign when a marketing department starts to buy into its own hype... that's what got GM where it is now. In the interest of not ruining my expensive new monitor and keyboard with projectile vomit, I think I'll pass on re-reading that thread. It gets better... that group's stated intent is to "correct" people who think that Leonard (orig. name Claude Leon on SDC: SC) is a big, evil tosser or a bad commander. They pop up in droves when someone badmouths him. They'd probably poo out their kidneys if they saw that the Wildstorm comics depict both Leonard and RTSC villain Edwards as Anti-UN agents working to bring the United Earth Gov't down from within.

It gets better... just like the last time he sent me a bullshit threat, I sent a scathing e-mail to Maverick_LSC, illustrating exactly why his accusations that I was baiting, trolling, etc. were completely and utterly unjustified, and then told him flat-out that the only rational explanation I can see for his behavior is that he's abusing his mod position to pursue a personal beef against me, and that I would be appealing to Steve for a review of the situation and the revocation of his moderator status. I sent a carbon copy of the message to Steve, and told him as much in the e-mail. What I got back from Maverick_LSC was: He forwarded them the letter they already got when I sent them a carbon copy, and is filing a harassment complaint against me because I called him out on his obvious bullshit threat. I actually busted out laughing when I read that... it's just SOOOOOO illustrative of why the whole Robotech franchise is going to hell. Yeah, it's complete and utter bull... at some point or another ALL of the site's authorities on the various sagas and their Japanese origins have offered to update the Infopedia for free... myself included... but they always ignored the offers. Now we're getting some snide line about how they'd pay more attention to the site if only we paid them to do so. McKeever's their marketing director... and the worst thing to happen to the Robotech franchise since its creation (its creation probably being the worst thing). SAVED FOR GREAT JUSTICE. Sir, I wish I could shake your hand... that was epic. (Show it to McKeever, it proves you're a better writer than any of the asshats who wrote Shadow Chronicles) Isn't it? I've gotten all kinds of e-mails of support and agreement about that thread, though many of the people are afraid to publically post their support for me and my position because they don't want to be banned out of spite by Kevin McKeever or Maverick_LSC. This is truly a franchise that abuses its fans to no end. They're like an abused spouse that's too afraid to leave. Why has Robotech survived this long if they're dead-set on treating their fans so poorly? Those days are gone, I'm afraid... never to return. With McKeever at the helm, there is no such thing as freedom of speech on those boards. Discourse on politics, religion, or anything that isn't PG-13 safe is banned. Criticism of Robotech for any reason, even constructive criticism, is apparently also banned. I look at McKeever and Maverick_LSC's behavior over there, and they consistently remind me of two people... Stalin, and Senator McCarthy respectively. We've got one joker who makes people who disagree with him disappear, and another who's content to invent enemies where none can be found... triumphantly marching off to battle against the fans, and returning with the scalp of a "Macross purist", a fan who dared to criticize the Shadow Chronicles.

Nah, they'll leave it intentionally vague, just like they did last time... I'm looking forward to the first (probably of two) Flashback 2012 character sheets... and hopefully soon we'll get a VF-4 Lightning III sheet.

"Brera's wardrobe provided by The Village People."

Total non sequitur here for a moment... I got drawn into a discussion about the current state of the Robotech franchise and how it's remembered on Robotech.com. The OP quickly turned out to be one of those dyed-in-the-wool fanatics who thinks that Robotech is a flawless classic beyond the criticism of mortal men that must be regarded as a megahit. He took it very poorly when I explained to him that 9/10ths of the world doesn't know what the hell Robotech is, and that the remaining tenth is split into fans, people who hate the show, and people straddling the fence between the other two groups and started attacking me for it. The dolt was basically labeling anyone who disagreed with his deluded belief that Robotech is a pillar of the American sci-fi genre as a troll and trying to hound them off the site. When a bunch of people reported him... it was ME who got threatened with a ban by the moderators (specifically, Maverick_LSC, a particularly loathsome little toady who interprets any criticism of Robotech, no matter how well-intentioned, as flame-bait). Then, of course, McKeever comes along, while professing to actually listen to fan opinions, quotes my criticism, and says "this is why I don't listen to Robotech critics". And these people wonder why the Robotech franchise is circling the drain? It's run by people who only listen to positive feedback, and do their best to quash criticism of any kind. I wrote to Steve Yun about Maverick_LSC's behavior... I expect a VERY interesting and informative response... if he does what I think he'll do, I'll be posting a copy of his e-mail telling me that fans aren't allowed to criticize Robotech under any circumstances...

Hey, if you take the tribute shows and convention tour away from him, he won't have anything to do at all. Since Harmony Gold isn't calling the shots on the live-action movie, he doesn't have anything to do on that front, and it's highly doubtful that they're actually doing anything about Shadow Rising. Maybe he's cooking up another plot-critical limited-edition comic book to tie Shadow Chronicles and Shadow Rising together, so they can keep the same level of storytelling quality... y'know, overlong intro cutscenes that explain nothing and go nowhere. No doubt the fans will try to make something major of it.

Somehow, that seems neither wise nor efficient... is there actually precedent for that thing having Zentradi pilots? That just doesn't sound right to me for some reason... Yeah, I did a bit of a double-take when my copy first arrived, and then Mr. March, Talos, and let loose a collective "WTF!" while discussing Chronicle in a group chat. Still, Chronicle makes mistakes and omissions every now and again, like their sudden change in labeling of the VF-22's gunpod, and their misidentifying the armaments of the VF-2SS. So a typo here and there does not surprise me much anymore. They're rushing to meet a very tight production schedule, so one can hardly blame them for a few mistakes. I'm actually amazed there haven't been MORE problems.

Honestly, Harmony Gold's creative and marketing staff has perfected the art of talking a lot without actually saying anything. I understand they also devote something like half the panel time to Q&A and other associated malarkey. "Be patient" seems to be the default response of the die-hards these days. They're so utterly convinced that Robotech will finally deliver on the promise it supposedly had back in the 80's and will wow the world when the live-action movie comes out... we just (supposedly) have to give them enough time to make the live-action movie a flawless masterpiece... so our great great great great grandchildren will probably be watching it while they tool around the galaxy at Warp 6. We shouldn't take this as a sign that the LAM is a go... it's out of Harmony Gold's hands at this point. They sold the rights to Maguire Entertainment and Maguire partnered with Warner Bros. Whether or not the movie makes it into production is not going to be Harmony Gold's call. As it still HASN'T entered production, it would appear that it will not be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. If it falls apart, and I believe it probably will, Tommy and Kevin will only retreat to their fortresses of crapulence once Warner and Maguire tell them it's been axed... odds are they won't bother telling Harmony Gold for a while anyway. One has to wonder how they think they're going to succeed with this live-action movie when the trend they're depending on is dying fast, and they're still dicking around in the earliest phases of pre-production. It looks to me like when the bubble bursts, we're looking at another twenty-year silence from Harmony Gold. Maybe a few more Macross shows can slip through once they're back to having nobody "minding the store". Well, yes, but that much was essentially a given. They couldn't pass up the opportunity to sell another Beta repaint to the masses at $200 a pop. I wonder if it'll sell bugger-all like the Jack Archer YF-1R did. So they're ditching Vicious Cycle Software as a developer? Maybe they've hired the cheesy French pricks at Ubisoft to handle it this time. If Robotech: Invasion was anything to go by, they don't have a goddamn clue what the fans want. I can't believe they think there's actually enough content in RTSC to make a game. Why, WHY am I thinking that this'll be a Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena-style repackage of Invasion billed as a new game because of the addition of an expansion pack that was too short and too poo to be a stand-alone title was tacked on to the end?

Well, they DO have the outside-Japan merchandising rights to DYRL. Nah, they're just stealing ideas from other toy manufacturers now... I'm kind of amused that this black and gold repaint is a Strike Valkyrie from DYRL, rather than something from Robotech. It isn't the Stealth Valkyrie from Battlecry though... that was just Hikaru's color scheme with the white replaced by black

I can't remember if they actually CONFIRM that. I remember Luca saying something to Leon about suspecting that Bilrer wanted to use the advantageous properties of fold quartz-based fold drives to monopolize interstellar commerce. I know his involvement in that whole cybernetic conspiracy was supposedly to find Minmay and the Megaroad-01. Well, it's Macross: Flashback 2012's related publications that say that Hikaru was assigned to the SDF-2 Megaroad-01, which was captained by his wife Misa. It's the Megaroad-01 that got missing (with the entire original love triangle aboard).

There really hasn't been a lot of motion from Harmony Gold this year. The only major development in Robotech since Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles failed to set the world on fire was their December 2008 announcement that Robotech's original series would be sold on iTunes on a per-episode basis. There's been precious little from the Robotech front this year, with the only noteworthy things being the hype about the live-action movie (which even die-hard fans are starting to get sick of) and a few more shoddily-built additions to the Masterpiece Collection... namely, more color-matching Betas and another Cyclone. Can they sustain business without the gullible fans who've buy every repainted toy and re-released DVD box set? Probably not. Of course, they do have the backing of the main corporate office, which does something with real-estate. If the fans do finally get tired of it all and stop buying, the main office'll probably shut the Robotech franchise down and go do something else.

Oh yes, they profit from that practice. The way they made Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and trumpeted it as a huge success ought to be a clear indication of exactly HOW they do it too. They put very little money into the development and production of new products, then price them as though they were made by a much more competent company. That way, even if sales are mediocre (and they often are) the initial investment will still be covered, and the rest is all profit. Exactly what they're doing with it is anybody's guess... since they don't seem to be investing it in more or better products (given the recent decline in the quality of the Masterpiece Collection and the phenomenally low budget of the RTSC movie). They probably spend a lot of it keeping their staff paid, and the rest on constantly renewing their trademarks.

And in one sentence, you have completely redefined my vision of hell. Well, Harmony Gold may not have the creativity to redesign the VFs, but then again the final say on mechanical design belongs to Maguire Entertainment and Warner Bros, who DO know how to do that. I get the feeling what we'll be seeing are transforming F-22s and F-35s, just like Bayformers did. Yeah, they're much better than what HG/WB/ME could do, but they're still Macross IP, and thankfully off-limits to all three parties of idiots. As much as I'd love to see a high-quality CG VF-2SS Valkyrie II, the last place I'd want to see it is a Robotech movie.

and that, my friends, is the secret to Harmony Gold's "success". Harmony Gold gives the illusion that Robotech is popular by producing merchandise in very limited quantities, and then bragging about it when it sells out. The cornerstone of their toy sales, the Masterpiece Collection, are all limited to production runs of 10,000 units. Considering that the Robotech fanbase, while small, is still an international one, the limited 10,000 unit run isn't going to go very far, especially not with fans buying 2 or 3 at a time, and comic shops buying them in even larger numbers. The comics books are on the same model... extremely limited print runs that are totally inadequate to satisfy the small, but devoted fanbase.

Nah, Macross II was an official production done by Big West, it's just that Studio Nue wasn't involved with the project (though some other Macross creators were, like Haruhiko Mikimoto), the studios who did the animation were AIC and ONRIO. Kawamori's never really said he wants nothing to do with Macross II, just that it's an alternate universe story because it doesn't line up with his vision for the ongoing story (which was, at the time, Macross Plus). It was made back when he was still loudly professing that he didn't want to do another Macross show. Because Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles had an extremely limited print run, and sold out fairly quickly, so right around the time Robotech fans thought that this was the start of a new, major story arc, they were fighting to snap up copies of the magazine, which supposedly contained key details about the plot. After scans were leaked to the net, most people realized that the magazine was just a rehash of several old Sentinels books with some redesigned ships and characters, and that was the end of their interest in it.

Speaking of running into Macross in the weirdest places... On a whim, I was watching Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka just a few minutes ago when the sudden appearance of Macross Frontier's Captain Wilder caught me by surprise. Attached is the screen capture from episode 8 of the show (about 4:17 in).

I know what it is now... it's the pirate ship from Macross Dynamite 7.

I know the plot of the movie... it came to me in a flash, and now the hiring of Tom Rob Smith makes sense. The movie's going to be a murder mystery! It'll star Tobey Maguire as a Detective Rick Hunter, a rookie trying to figure out who murdered Minmei after the Earth forces and the Zentradi got sick of her stupidity, and the fact that listening to her singing is the auditory equivalent of unanesthetized dental surgery. It'll be a tough case, with lots of twists and turns (from over 50,000 suspects, all with motive!), and at the movie's climax, Rick finds out that HE is the murderer, and turns himself in, only to be given an official pardon, a medal, and a three-rank promotion by a grateful Captain Gloval.

Considering the age of consent is lower over there, I think that was probably more to facilitate the changed backstory, where Hikaru was already a soldier and Minmay already famous when the two met, rather than a way to dodge accusations of them being too young. Yep, that's what Minmei looks like in the Sentinels comics. Ugly, isn't it? Unfortunately, she's not alone in having been turned from a slender woman into some buxom bodybuilder... pretty much all the women in the Sentinels comics looked like that.

Eh, I'd say Robotech fans live in a sealed-off bubble away from the rest of humanity... Robotech RPG players doubly so.

My eyes! THEY BURN! Honestly, it's hard to say exactly what the Robotech fanbase thinks of characters of mixed ancestry. The problem is that, aside from the Sterlings, there really aren't any mixed-species couples who have produced children. The Zentradi are nearly wiped out, the survivors pack up and leave with the Expeditionary Forces and suffer heavy losses, leaving the species all but extinct by 2044. The Tirolans who attacked Earth are apparently wiped out at the end of the war, so they never mate with humans, and all but two of the human-form Invid are dead by the end of their war with humanity, and they haven't been around long enough to mate with anyone. Unless Scott and Ariel or Lancer and Sera pop out a kid in the near future, the only mixed-ancestry characters around are Dana Sterling, who is almost universally loathed, and Maia Sterling, who is too new and unestablished for the fans to give a hoot about. For now, it doesn't look like the Robotech fanbase gives a toss about mixed-ancestry characters. The show and expanded universe material have always been kind of anthropocentric, pitting the all-human forces against the evil, cardboard cutout alien villains. The subject of "good aliens" in Robotech is a particularly odious one, because there's no way to approach it without bringing up the monumental stupidity that is Robotech II: the Sentinels. Really, there are no "good" aliens in the original Robotech series. There are always one or two "good" characters among the evil alien hordes, but other than them, the aliens are essentially all malevolent, and bent on humanity's destruction. Robotech II: the Sentinels tried to introduce the subject of friendly alien races by having the Expeditionary Forces of the Pioneer Mission liberating worlds that had been invaded and occupied by the Invid Regent's forces. Unfortunately, the friendly aliens who appear in Robotech II: the Sentinels are a pack of sci-fi cliches... anthropomorphic animals, sentient robots, coneheads, rock people, and space amazons. Even hardcore Robotech fans have a hard time taking the Sentinels aliens seriously, and the general consensus is that the whole lot of them were a stupid idea to begin with. Robotech fans don't do friendly aliens... it's always humanity versus the alien menace.