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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Not to mention the impact of Macross Frontier and Macross Delta's favorite two-word problem and pet project of SMS parent company founder Richard Bilra: "fold faults".
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Started watching the Initial D spinoff/sequel MF Ghost... and it is so much better than the last racing anime I watched (HIGHSPEED ETOILE) that it crosses the line four times from not funny to funny to embarrassing (for HIGHSPEED ETOILE) to absolutely goddamn hilarious. This is what racing anime should be... even if it is basically another love letter to the Toyota Motor Co. So much more exciting and energetic than HIGHSPEED ETOILE's static choreography and obsession with getting the maximum number of sponsor logos into all shots. EDIT: This is the second show this season where I've picked it up figuring "Oh I'll just watch one or two" and realized hours later I'd binged the best part of an entire season in one unbroken sitting. MF Ghost is just THAT good.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Just got my shipping notice too. I'm looking forward to giving this release a thorough look.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how most distances to/from emigrant planets are left intentionally vague, I'm not sure it would be all that helpful in that regard. Perhaps doubly so given that Humanity didn't expand into deep space in a uniform manner. Humanity didn't expand into space in a slowly growing sphere of influence. They sent emigrant ships out across the galaxy on a bunch of different courses hoping to find habitable planets through sheer dumb luck and determination. Megaroad-01 launched in 2012 and within four years she was out by the galactic core. Megaroad-04 launched somewhere around 2016 and by the time she found a habitable planet in 2027 she was way out on the edge of the far side of the galaxy from Earth ~60k-75k light years from Earth. (This even carries over into Master File, where "nearby" planets like Spica III can be hundreds of light years away and in no particular direction.) From the descriptions we have, it sounds like most Human-built ships have a degree of that modularity... but it's modularity of internal systems rather than bolting stuff to the ship exterior, for stealth reasons. The exception being the Macross-type ships where the individual limbs are typically separate ships in their own right. Master File's concept of improving the ARMD/ARMD II-class's capabilities by installing modules in the open space underneath the center hull could be said to be taking advantage of the fact that the ARMD-class was originally designed as a space station not a space warship. I don't think it's been stated definitively, but given that the ARMD-class design is a floating drydock turned upside down that space between the pontoons was probably meant to be a dock for a smaller space warship like an Oberth-class destroyer or some large supply ship resupplying what was designed as a sort of "space airbase". After the design was repurposed as a space carrier through the additions of engines and a bridge, it was probably only a matter of time before someone in-universe decided to fill in the gap with something. Macross 7 Trash shows a version of the original ARMD-class where that gap was filled in with what appears to be a large additional hangar. The description is quite short, noting only that the new ventral pontoons are able to be lowered into the water to let the ship float while emigrant fleets are surveying planets. There shouldn't, theoretically, be anything preventing an ARMD-class from doing atmospheric operations simply by hovering anywhere in the atmosphere using gravity control. The float module likely is intended to let it operate as an ad hoc navy ship. The original series did the same with the Unification Wars... with the exception of the opening crawl in episode 1 and the flashback in #33 (IIRC) we never really see the Unification Wars, only the generalities that matter directly to the plot are covered and any additional info is confined to supplemental materials like the short stories in Perfect Memory.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yakuza Fiance turned out to be a highly entertaining and unconventional series. It's about a girl named Yoshino, the granddaughter of a major Kansai yakuza boss, who tries to lead a normal life until her grandfather returns from a big meet-up of the country's yakuza family heads and announces he's trying to set her up with Kirishima, the heir to a powerful Kanto yakuza boss. So she's off to Tokyo to spend a year with the family of her possible future husband. It reminds me a bit of The Way of the House Husband, in the sense that it's got a lot of over-the-top Japanese mafiosi wandering through its story alongside a Very Normal Girl(TM) and her ridiculously threatening love interest who just can't act normal for five minutes straight..
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It seems safe to assume that not every local defense force operating under the auspices of the New UN Forces was affected to the same extent, given the broad authority that the local governments have in equipping and training their forces. That said, it's also fairly safe to assume the decline in the military's morale and training is widespread to the point of affecting every regional force. The causes given for the New UN Forces' declining morale and training are events which affected the whole of the armed forces, like the reorganization of the government and military in the aftermath of the Second Unification War(s) and the military's expanding use of unmanned fighters to minimize the risk to Human life. There is also the non-trivial possibility that this trend will begin to reverse itself as 5th Generation VFs see increasing rates of adoption. They have performance that exceeds that of the current generation of unmanned fighters, and EX-Gear is designed to make operating a VF more intuitive and as a result make training faster and more productive. With the events of Macross Delta, it's also possible that PMCs will have suffered some reputational damage as a result of Xaos's fumbling the defense of the Brisingr cluster twice and the related exposure of the company's criminal activities. Volunteer Knights of Arkarelia, while not official setting, seems to be preemptively leaning that way too with its depiction of PMCs like the General Galaxy Corporate Forces as more realistically amoral war profiteers willing to participate in an unprovoked invasion if paid enough. From what's been described, there are some fleets that have gone to all-Ghost air forces... but most simply treat the Ghost like a second Main Fighter and use them in roles where the risk of loss of life is extremely high like scouting out enemy forces before sending in manned fighters. I wouldn't say they're reserve forces... more just that they're not using manned fighters for everything and there's just not a need to send human pilots for a lot of simple tasks or especially dangerous roles. Yeah, it's pretty unfair... Though the New UN Forces in Macross Delta can at least say that they're disadvantaged not because a megacorporation put its finger on the scales, but because they live in a bit of a backwater where the governments of the Brisingr Alliance simply can't afford to provide their troops with the latest weapons and the best training. Their main problem is the way Xaos only grudgingly cooperates with them and undermines them at several critical junctures in order to play hero. One would assume there are miclone systems around for the Zentradi pilots. Otherwise, it would not work out very well... or they'd need to have a supplemental module for their accommodations like what's shown in Master File decades later. EDIT: To expand on the above, because I realized I failed to explain properly, Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III has a section on the ARMD-class ("revised") which shows three alternate configurations of the class that have filled in the underside of the ship in various ways. One is a "float" version which is just a conversion that permits water landings by having a series of pontoons on the underside, one is a Zentradi use version which includes a large living space module for Zentradi troops, and one is an expanded hull type which just puts more hangar space and more cargo space which facilitates longer duration independent operations. I'm not sure it needs to be animated, since Macross runs on broad strokes continuity. It can still function as The Great Offscreen War, because only the most general details of it really matter to the story. It'd be great to have it, though, since it'd be pretty damned cool to watch. (Or, hell, just remaster the games for modern consoles.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, there's little to distinguish a good actress working with a rubbish script and lacking direction from a bad one in the same conditions. Whether we think she's a good actress or a bad one (I'd call her "middling" based on her inability to spot a bad script), it's not a great look for a production that's already self-sabotaging on so many other fronts to hire an actress best known for two things: 1. starring in one of the industry's all-time biggest flops and 2. blaming "sexist fans" for said flop instead of more deserving figures like either the writers or director. They couldn't find someone with a less sh*tty reputation for a major recurring guest spot? Is this just an attempt to get out ahead of the failure with their own fan-blaming expert, or are they going to claim she brought the toxic fans with her?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's... troubling. Paramount, who are in a bad way financially, are preemptively doubling down on an unasked-for spinoff of the Star Trek franchise's all-time least successful, worst reviewed TV series. A spinoff based on a recycled series concept that almost every producer to touch the franchise in its golden age rejected as fundamentally unsellable. And to maximize their chances of success, they cast an actress best known for her starring role in one of the most expensive and embarrassing flops in streaming history? They do know The Producers was a comedy, not a documentary, right?
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I was thinking more the intended outcome... flying it into the ground deliberately in order to run off with the investors money. 🤣
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Based on what official publications have said, I wouldn't attribute it to the fleet's politics. It's more readily attributable to two factors: the prevailing strategic thinking of the New UN Forces at the time, and the ridiculously deep pockets of SMS and its parent megacorp Bilra Transport. Macross Chronicle and other official publications explain the "morale and training" matter in two contexts: First, that the New UN Forces have seen a decline in morale and the level of training due to organizational issues. The New UN Forces were reorganized in the wake of the Second Unification War to diminish the considerable power they wielded (and abused to their own benefit), and that both hurt morale and impacted the organization's flexibility. The use of unmanned fighters to automate certain risky operational roles also led to diminished readiness as pilots were simply less experienced. Many of the troops in the Frontier fleet are simply green, having had little chance to gain practical experience in the generally peaceful fleet. Second, that the higher morale and better training of SMS's troops owes quite a lot to the deep pockets of SMS and the megacorporation that is its parent company. Richard Bilra wields enormous political, economic, and financial power in the Macross Frontier fleet becuase his interstellar shipping company sponsored the fleet's mission towards the Vajra's territory in search of fold quartz. He's also a major backer of President Glass's administration, which allowed him to steer government and military resources to his own company. His considerable influence over the government enabled him to get SMS designated as a special unit under the direct authority of the Frontier President and exempt from the New UN Forces chain of command, as well as to secure exclusive contracts for SMS to carry out final field testing of the latest cutting-edge weapons developed for the military. SMS's financial resources are also leveraged to secure cooperation with other large companies like LAI and to headhunt top talent away from the military. SMS Frontier has several key officers like Jeffrey Wilder, Ozma Lee, and Henry Gilliam who were elite, combat-hardened NUNS troops before joining SMS. It's only natural that SMS's morale and training are in better shape when they have the latest cutting-edge weapons designed to fight the foe they're fighting and are being trained by people who were once the military's most elite. The Vajra's ECM interfering with the command guidance of Ghosts from their motherships did force the New UN Spacy to use its manned fighters, yeah. That said, the New UN Spacy pilots get an unfairly bad rap from the SMS characters. They were relatively green troops who were sent into battle against a vastly superior foe. The VF-171 was not equipped to fight the Vajra. It didn't have the acceleration performance or the maneuverability to match them in a dogfight and its weapons were just not powerful enough to reliably score kills. This isn't because the VF-171 is a bad fighter. It's actually described as something of a masterpiece machine that even average pilots can perform in and the defensive and offensive power to dominate against Zentradi and other VFs. The Vajra just demand a whole other level of power, which is why the 5th Generation VFs were developed specifically to fight them on an even footing. SMS are looking down their noses at the NUNS early in Macross Frontier, but it's really hypocritical of them because the main reason SMS is doing better is because they're using weapons designed to fight the Vajra while the NUNS aren't. Once the NUNS is able to equip its forces with more powerful ammunition and improve countermeasures against the Vajra's powerful ECM, they're immediately doing MUCH better.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Still not thrilled with the Gorn designs, but looks like the next season promises to be exciting.😁
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Apt! Especially considering that film was so bad that Gene Roddenberry and the showrunners essentially declared "We shall never speak of this again." and that commandment held true until Strange New Worlds "The Serene Squall" 33 years later. Really wish season 5 wasn't the last one for Star Trek: Lower Decks. Along with Strange New Worlds, it's one of the only Star Trek titles doing Star Trek right.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    This is going to bomb so hard that it's going to cross the line twice from funny to not funny to actually pretty hilarious. It really is nice of Paramount+ to continue setting millions of dollars on fire for no gain other than helping Michelle Yeoh join that select community of actors and actresses who have both an Academy Award and a Golden Raspberry. Nicer still of them to give it a 2025 release date so it won't contest Lionsgate's Borderlands for the title of worst sci-fi film for 2024. Section 31 is the unasked-for spinoff to Star Trek's all-time lowest-rated and least succesful series starring one of its most loathed characters in-story and out. Nothing about that is a recipe for success. You'd almost suspect Paramount+ is Springtime for Hitler-ing this.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Those are definitely some interesting choices for a first wave. With Captain Jellico, Tuvix, and Weyoun in there I almost feel like they're doing it for the memes. They definitely took the time to put jokes into the slides for their presentation. Captain Garrett's special feature is "poorly placed debris"? 🤔
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Venturing into Rom Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions season two... and it's just as good as season one. This one's rapidly becoming a favorite.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Indictments of the show's terrible writing don't come much more damning than that. Hideo "Nanomachines" Kojima likes the writing... that's like a pat on the back from Uwe Boll and Ed Wood at the gates of filmmaker hell. I know exactly what you mean. Being a subs-over-dubs guy, my first instinct was "Gundam is anime" and so I changed the audio to Japanese and the subs to English. Then I was politely baffled when the lip flap didn't match at all and the voice casting was full of dubious choices and dodgy performances. Turns out, this one was written in English so when Netflix says "English (Original)" for the audio choice they are NOT kidding. This series was written to be watched in English, so it doesn't flow right in Japanese. Then I switchd it back to English and found that, while the voice acting flows more naturally and the casting choices are far more appropriate, the writing is still dreadful. That's because, as is typical for Gundam UC side stories, they're not the same designs we're used to seeing. They're implied or outright stated to be yet another batch of one-off custom jobs for prototyping something or other. In this case, the Gundam is a bridge design between the original RX-78 and the RX-79[G] Gundam Ground Type from 08th MS Team. Weirdly, it seems to be drawing inspiration from the Ez8 custom for the head (which is why it has that weird chinstrap). Its official designation is given as RX-78[G]E Gundam EX.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    First, the section of my post you quoted was talking about the other characters of both genders in Requiem for Vengeance... not all female characters in Gundam. That's not the counterargument you think it is because everyone else in this series is in proper uniform, which just makes Hot Topic Trooper stand out more. Second, I'd like to point out that Helena from Code Fairy there is still wearing the actual uniform... something our Hot Topic Trooper can't claim. Her tattoos aren't visible when she has her uniform jacket done up properly and I don't believe her hair color is described as a dyejob like Chara Soon's is. Third and lastly, Helena's part of a special forces unit under Kycilia Zabi's direct authority kind of like Char and thus exempt from a lot of the usual regulations. Not something our Hot Topic Trooper can claim... and even then, she's only lightly skirting the uniform regs instead of outright ignoring them. Yeah... it's actually hard to take her seriously because she looks so incredibly unprofessional and out of place compared to all of the other Zeon soldiers. The writers can try to make her badass all they want, but she's never not going to look like Zeon was so hard up for cannon fodder that they pressganged some random carnie. Interestingly, the official website for the series actually mentions that Hot Topic Trooper's appearance is a violation of regulations and that she is routinely written up for failing to comply with dress code by her superiors. That, and her otherwise being highly capable, are her only character traits.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Everyone has their own experiences, certainly. My friends and family in the Army and Marines have had almost universally negative experiences with PMC troops on the ground. They almost without exception described the PMC troops they'd met as dangerously undisciplined military cosplayers. Civilians power-tripping on being allowed to carry firearms and play soldier, who are too panicky or too trigger-happy to be relied upon to de-escalate or conduct themselves properly in combat and too eager to feel powerful to be trusted not to intimidate or harass the locals. Just massively problematic people in general. This view extends well up into the military's top brass, with many generals commenting publicly that PMC troops are stupid, reckless, poorly-trained, and generally a liability because the military has to clean up the aftermath of their gung-ho idiocy. Brigadier General Horst made some delightfully trenchant remarks about that in '05, and he was far from the only one. The handful of current- and former-PMC personnel I've met and worked with when I was doing government work weren't much different from what I'd been told. Even the ones I met who'd already retired were very toxic people who constantly sought to intimidate others in order to feel in control and who were frequently openly racist. Mind you, there's also quite a lot of documented evidence of PMC troops - yes, even US ones - being involved in both petty criminal activity and actual war crimes over many years in various combat zones. Everything from little stuff like harassment, assault, and armed robbery up to the scale to rape, torture, and murder. PMCs on average are pretty well entrenched in villainous territory in the real world... which makes the heroic PMCs in Macross feel a bit silly in hindsight. Esp. with such high-profile villainy on the part of PMCs in recent years. Xaos, at least, is authentically inept when it comes to actual military endeavors. Their crew of military washouts fumbled the bag so hard that a fourth-rate power like Windermere whose troops had never even seen live combat before was able to push them out of the entire star cluster and bankrupt them with minimal effort in the space of just a few months despite being massively outnumbered by far more experienced personnel. It's a nice touch that the series actually acknowledges the illegal nature of their participation in the war, and the other criminal misconduct of the company like its illegal cloning operation.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    No, they were not. It's unknown if they were among the crew who perished when the ship was transported into deep space by the Macross's fold jump or if they were simply off screen for the duration. To the best of my knowledge, the only time either commanding officer has appeared is in the manga Macross the First. The captain of the Daedalus is briefly seen and named in the flashback chapters. His name is John Morton.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Gundam, and especally UC Gundam, gives that treatment to female civilians... not female soldiers. Those female civilians are typically The Load, The Chick, or The Love Interest and aren't directly involved in the fighting. They're "waifus". Women in the military in Gundam tend to be depicted as consummate professionals. There is some mild sexism mixed in based on when certain titles were made and the concept of professional women at the time, but almost all of them are shown to follow the uniform code as strictly as any other soldier (and often more than some of the men). Paramilitary factions in Gundam like the AEUG and Karaba, or mercenary outfits like the PMC Trust in 00 or Tekkadan in IBO are pretty loose on dress code... but they're not the real military. The EFF and Zeon/Neo Zeon/Cosmo Babylonia/Zanscare/etc. tend to all put their characters in uniform, neat and professional looking at all times. That one girl from the infantry in Requiem for Vengeance looks hilariously out of place compared to even the other characters doing her same job. They're all in proper uniform, no visible tattoos, no kind of piercings or hair dye. So she looks like she wandered onto the wrong set or something and was too embarrassed to admit she didn't belong..
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Second episode start, though... back to the weak s***. It's weirdly annoying that the cows are far better animated than the people. I wonder if the old joke about Egyptian tanks is true for Zaku tanks too... about the campaign to equip them with backup lights. Whoever is piloting that RX-78[G]E is just sadistic. It is even more apparent in this episode that the Gundam is toying with the Zeon mobile suits and stalking the protagonist. If nothing else, Requiem for Vengeance can say with pride that it has done more to make it clear why the Gundam invoked such fear from the Principality of Zeon's forces than almost any other title in the franchise and certainly any title in the UC. This is giving T-800 from the original Terminator movie energy. It's unstoppable. It's learning. And it's coming for you. RUN. I am at the end of episode two and I am almost ready to be disappointed this series is only six episodes long. It's interesting that there's so much emphasis on the Red Wolf Zaku II leader model, when it's only in one episode of the six so far. I'm gonna catch the remaining three episodes tomorrow... but at the halfway point what I can say for it is that this (mini)series stands on its action. The story is unremarkable at best, with some incredibly stilted dialog. The characters are almost totally undeveloped thus far and are really only here to react to the Gundam tearing sh*t up. The actual mobile suit fights are quite impressive. This series does a great job of one key point and that's making the Gundam scary. It isn't just unstoppable, it's predatory. It's sadistic in how it toys with the Zeon mobile suits before tearing the apart. This is the Gundam as a horror movie monster.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Okie-dokie... starting Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance... Still don't like that title. Requiem for Vengeance sounds edgy AF but it's nonsensical. A requiem is a mass for the dead, or a musical composition meant to be played at same. Did the concept of vengeance itself die? Once I got to the OP, it became apparent that this is leaning on MS IGLOO so hard that it's actually a bit sad... it's just reminding me of what will surely turn out to have been a much better show. Talk about borrowed street cred, though... yeesh. I will say this in Requiem for Vengeance's favor. That first beam rifle hit is ****ING GORGEOUS. Ooh. That's just... [a noise of distinct satisfaction]. It is as abrupt and horrifying in its power as you could ever hope to see a beam rifle from Gundam depicted. After so many shows where there's just a pink beam and the enemy mobile suit explodes into a pretty pink explosion, this is something that makes a beam weapon scary again. NGL, the writing in the first episode dialog-wise... pretty bad. That first mobile suit fight, though. Had me like:
  23. Seto Kaiba
    NGL, if you'd stopped at that third sentence I'd be sold. That's more or less exactly how I think a story told from the perspective of the Principality of Zeon's occupation forces should go. The jackbooted goons of one of the most evil regimes in human history getting a taste of the fear they've infliced on the entire Earth sphere. I'm gonna give it a whirl in a minute.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That's been done a few times before... even MS IGLOO dabbled in it, showing Oliver May footage of the Federation's "white devil" recovered from the cameras of a Zaku. It's sensible enough. From Zeon's perspective, any engagement with a Gundam during the One Year War is basically Friday the 13th with giant robots as a single impacable killer with a chalk-white face embarks on an unstoppable killing spree. (Ironically, the best take on this one wasn't done by Sunrise. It was Aldnoah.Zero.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    We're almost never given more than the vaguest approximation of where planets exist in relation to each other... the Brisingr globular cluster and Eden are the only real exceptions, since we know approximately how far they are from Earth and each other. Yeah, I look forward to the day that Macross's writers decide to research what PMCs are actually like in the real world and rapidly course-correct towards depicting them as what they typically are: ammosexual civilians playing dress-up because they're convinced they're starring in their own personal action movie and ex-privates who lacked the discipline needed for a military career. In hindsight, I suppose Macross Delta did try to meet me halfway there. SMS was a hypercompetent PMC contracted to field-test the military's latest and greatest tech in live combat and staffed with the brightest and best soldiers that could be lured away from the NUNS with massive salaries. Xaos, by contrast, is a barely competent private outfit under the regional command of a guy who was kicked out of the military for sedition and is staffed mainly by folks who washed out of the underfunded local NUNS for various reasons. Their most promising recruit is a former forklift driver with a passion for dancing, and the all-important idol group they support and weaponize is made up of (in rough order of severity) a failed solo idol, a cyber-criminal working under duress, an illegal immigrant who also emigrated illegally, an illegal clone, and most heinous of all... Makina. 😝 (The above is a joke, folks.) If you think about it, we can acknowledge Macross Delta for what it really is... a truly spectacular ad for forklift certification. Hayate Immelmann got forklift certified, and it almost directly led to him saving the galaxy. Truly, the forklift certified are the real heroes among us. We did kind of get a scenario like that in Master File's Volunteer Knights of Arkarelia... with General Galaxy's own in-house private military company, the General Galaxy Corporate Forces, serving as antagonists and assisting one emigrant planet's invasion of a neighboring peaceful planet. I used that exact reasoning to explain why certain characters looked far younger than their chronological ages in more than one Macross RPG. (One of whom was a Jenius, yes.) Considering what we've seen malfunctioning fold systems do to ships, like warping space-time into an impassable wall or carving it up like a roast by teleporting chunks of it into higher dimensions, setting it to maximum range, throwing it at someone, and telling it to be anywhere but here is already pretty darn nasty.
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