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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Andor was a good first step in that regard. That said, creating more series and movies on a similar level of quality to Tony Gilroy's work on Rogue One and Andor is a tall order. So tall that I'd bet against LucasFilm's regulars being able to pull it off. The main stumbling block is likely going to be LucasFilm CCO Dave Filoni and the sort of people that he tends to hire. Star Wars superfans don't seem to be able to write Star Wars stories with broad general audience appeal. They're too close to the subject matter. So much so, in Filoni's case, that it's allegedly hurting his prospects as a candidate to replace Kathleen Kennedy when she steps down. IIRC, the next series in the release schedule is Ahsoka season two... which seems unlikely to stick the landing, leaning as heavily as it is on fanservice, even without Andor being an impossible act to follow. Then again, the future is unwritten and so are these pending films. They could surprise us all, for good or for ill.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I stand corrected. Just one recalibration, not two. Whatever their greatest sin was, it seems like the real test of whether the sequel trilogy era can be made long-term marketable after The Rise of Skywalker is going to be whether Starfighter and New Jedi Order do well.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Some people will, sure... that doesn't mean the argument is sound. Most people - fans and casual viewers alike - simply accept the easily verifiable reality that these occasional inconsistencies are mistakes that were made in production and not anything meant to have significance to the setting or the narrative. For example, you don't see Star Trek fans arguing that the USS Enterprise-A is three times her stated size in Star Trek V because the deck numbers in the turboshaft scene show numbers as high as 78 (and in reverse order) on a ship that only has 23 decks. It's just a mistake in set dressing and nothing more. Same as when, in Star Trek: Nemesis, Riker somehow kicks the Viceroy down into an inexplicable bottomless pit on the lowest deck of the ship (29)... somehow five decks below the previous lowest deck of the ship (24). Just a dumb mistake. To give another, you don't see Star Wars fans claiming the Millennium Falcon doesn't actually have a radar dish based on the fact that it's MIA when the ship is first seen in A New Hope. Or that Anakin obviously visited our galaxy to buy lightsaber parts given that the bottom of his lightsaber in Empire clearly bears the stamped words "MANUFACTURED BY GRAFLEX" and "ROCHESTER NY USA". Or that the Republic has only actually been around for 1,000 years based on Palpatine's dialog in the prequels. Sometimes... a lot of the time... an error is just an error. No hidden messages, no secret authorial intent. Just an honest-to-goodness screwup that didn't get caught.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Box office take isn't everything. Disney and LucasFilm were barraged by social media toxicity the whole time the sequel trilogy was in the works, and they did radically recalibrate the direction of the story twice after negative responses to films... leading to the absolute cluster**** that was The Rise of Skywalker's plot. One could say one of the cardinal sins of the sequel trilogy was that it self-sabotaged as a result of trying to please everyone... especally the unpleasable die-hard fans.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    No, I mean most Macross fans understand that animation errors are a thing and don't assume that a single moment of off-model animation overrules decades of official material from the people who make the show. That kind of questionable reasoning is more in line with another fandom that we don't talk about here. Your particular preferences don't mean the official information is wrong, though. You know that Macross 30's game engine is not representing the Valkyries, ships, etc. at true scale. You didn't need me or anyone else to tell you that. Your struggle seems to be because you chose to change the size of the ship rather than acknowledge that the game employs some acceptable breaks with realism to allow the characters to operate a lot more VFs than is realistic or accept that the animation is not perfect. What you do with your own fanworks is nobody's business but yours. People are going to raise eyebrows or argue if you go around telling people you know better than the show's actual creators, though.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody else seems to struggle with the premise that the two or three scenes in that episode that depict the Northampton-class as unusually roomy or launching fighters from ports that shouldn't be able to fit them are anything but animation errors. The creators of Macross 7 have had 30 years to correct the size of the Northampton-class based on that scene if it really is not an animation error. They haven't changed its size. Cutting straight to the point, you asserted that the Northampton-class was not big enough to be an aircraft carrier and I pointed out that it's actually about the same size as many modern aircraft carriers. You yourself then provided a visual aid that shows that, yes, the Northampton-class (Frontier version) is comparable in size to an aircraft carrier. We both agree that it's absolutely not set up to BE one, but that's beside that particular point. It's still large enough to hold a nontrivial number of Valkyries internally, as you agree later on. That's why Macross 30 introduced a carrier conversion of one in the form of the Gefion... to specifically address the point of egress. It's a model from a video game so it's not in perfect scale in-game, but it suffices. I was looking at it when I wrote my post, and I'm looking at it again now... it is the same size as the stock Northampton-class in terms of length and width of the hull. It's very very slightly taller, but all they really did was slap a carrier deck on the bottom of the ship and call it a day. That deck only protrudes slightly from the ship's diamond profile. Yes, they use most of the ship's interior as hangar space, but that was already true for the Gefion as well (at least in the novel). They actually only use two decks as hangar space, the third (uppermost) is equipment storage according to their diagram. Even if you omit the largest and lowermost deck, the only one that changed the Northampton's profile, they still show you can theoretically fit a dozen or so VF-11s into a single Northampton-class in a plausible manner. Standing by a conclusion that doesn't tally with the facts isn't a particularly useful stance to take. Anyway, the official size of the Northampton-class is 252.5 meters long. We know the episode of Macross 7 contains animation errors that mistakenly represent the Stargazer as larger than it actually is. We accept that these are errors and move on with life. Pobody's nerfect. By your own admission, the Northampton-class is actually big enough to hold a dozen or so Valkyries. The Gefion-type solves the problem of "how do they get out" with the two modest gates and hangar decks added to the sides of the design. Yeah, the game model doesn't make the gates quite big enough to allow the very largest craft available in the game to work that way, but it's a game and that's just acceptable breaks with reality in action the same as the ship's hammerspace arsenal of every VF you unlock in-game. For rational purposes, we can assume they're not actually present or not actually canonically used. Ukyo Kodachi's novelization of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy does confirm the Gefion is a modified Northampton-class stealth frigate, so we can safely assume that she really is 252.5 meters in length.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's an animation error if it's off-model without an in-story or production explanation. If it's off model and it has an in-story or explicit production explanation, then it's not an animation error. (For instance, Max's vertical stabilizer missiles in the original series are an attempt to address an animation error after animators noticed mid-production they drew more missiles being fired than the VF-1 actually carried.) Whether it affects the plot or not is irrelevant. Mistakes happen. My good fellow, there are real world aircraft carriers in service right now that are the same size or smaller than the Northampton-class. The Northampton-class stealth frigate is 252.5m long according to its Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet. France's Clemenceau-class aircraft carrier, including the French navy flagship Charles de Gaulle, clocks in at just 9 meters longer than the Northampton-class at 261.5m, they're both around 60m across at the maximum cross-section. The Charles de Gaulle carries 30-40 aircraft on average. The Italian navy's flagship, the aircraft carrier Cavour, is smaller than a typical Northampton-class at 244m long and 39m wide at maximum cross-section, and still carries 10 F-35B's and 12 helicopters as standard. Spain's Juan Carlos I-class is 231m long and 32m wide and typically carries about 23 fighter/attack aircraft. That's not by any means an exhaustive list. The Northampton-class is plenty big enough to function as a light aircraft carrier at 252.5m long. Most aircraft carriers are around 250m long. 300m+ is pretty much just a US, China, and Russia thing. Well, maybe just a US and China thing since Russia's only carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is drydocked and rotting. Even Circle FANKY, who came up with their own light carrier version of it for their doujinshi, found enough internal space to fit a round dozen or more VF-11s into the Northampton-class's unmodified hull. Their own fanmade carrier variant, which is the same size as the official version, just slaps a carrier deck on the underside and holds 25. Or... and hear me out... you are operating under more than a few misconceptions in a variety of areas. As we've demonstrated above, key areas of your argument do not stand up to fact-checking.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Based on the remarks I've found by J.J. Abrams and Colin Trevorrow, Disney LucasFilm absolutely did have a plan for the sequel trilogy. It wasn't laid out in exhaustive detail, but they did have a framework laid out for how the story was supposed to progress from episode to episode. I think the actual problem is more along the lines of Disney LucasFilm losing confidence in the plan they'd put together after The Force Awakens and overcorrecting with The Last Jedi, before throwing up their hands in despair and trying to write The Rise of Skywalker by committee in an attempt to please everyone that ended up pleasing nobody. The bat-faced space masochists? Yeah, I can't see them trying to Disney-fy that.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Can I be candid with you for a moment here? Nobody is arguing that the animation of any Macross series, whether it be hand-drawn or computer aided, is going to be free from issues. There are going to be moments of off-model animation in hand-drawn work and 3D models meant for close-ups vs. distance shots are naturally going to have some discrepancies to save on rendering resources and because the small details will get lost at a distance anyway. Scale issues are going to happen either to make a scene more dramatic (like when Klan is arguing with Michel in his Battroid) or just because properly representing the size of something enormous is actually really hard to do accurately. These are just animation errors. That's all they're ever going to be. If it helps, you can excuse them as errors in the in-universe fictional production that Kawamori has occasionally claimed each series is. It's guaranteed to be that last one. The mechanical designers decide the sizes of the ships and robots and whatnot during the design process as part of the animation model reference that's provided to the show's key animators (and/or 3D modelers). It's meant to help the animators keep the sizes consistent. In the case of the Stargazer, the production staff had a cool idea and didn't realize the ship wasn't big enough for that to actually work in scale terms. The animators made what'd been storyboarded, and the whole thing made it out without anyone realizing the Stargazer just wasn't that big. Most people can't really picture an object 250m long in their head with any accuracy. It's just too big, and most people don't see a moving object THAT large in everyday life. It just registers as "enormous". For Macross 30, I guarantee you the developers did not care about rendering anything in true scale. The goal was to make things fit on the world map comfortably and look good doing it. They had in-story reasons for choosing a Northhampton-class as the basis for the Gefion, and yes it really is supposed to be small and harmless looking.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    To be frank, I doubt that's it. Ukyo Kodachi seems to have wanted to make the Gefion the smallest possible ship he could while developing the scenario for Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. Not only to justify why Leon, who had only come to Uroboros to make a delivery, needed to be pressed into service as the Gefion's only regular fighter pilot and replacement test pilot for the YF-30 Chronos but also why Havamal and the Bandits don't see SMS as a real threat. He also seems to have wanted it to be a commonplace ship class so that it wouldn't stand out as home to something unconventional the way a Mother Raven-type or Valhalla III-type special forces warship might. The Northampton-class seems to have fit the bill for the story because of its sheer ubiquity, its status as a cannon fodder ship, and it being known to carry a single platoon of VFs under normal circumstances since that's all that ever launches from it for most of the game. It IS large enough relative to many modern STOVL carriers in service today that even an entire squadron being aboard would not be implausible. (Though when the game finally does show large numbers of fighters being launched for the final offensive, SMS is not using the Gefion anymore... they're operating from the Macross Quarter.) Please do remember this is a game and there are some Acceptable Breaks from Reality in place esp. in terms of where all the VFs you unlock are (or whether they exist at all in the context of the story). The only thing wrong with the size of the Gefion is that the hangar gates need to be bigger to accommodate the full wingspan of something like a VF-25. That's not exactly a deal-breaker for gameplay though, so it's not surprising they went with something that looked nice. The whole point of having the Gefion be a modified Northampton-class is making her small and unthreatening. The larger Guantanamo-class stealth carrier is a fair bit bigger and projects more power because it's typically home to 2-3 entire squadrons rather than a single platoon or two in a pinch. It's not about the beam gun turrets, it's about the size of a ship's airwing. As I said, there's nothing eyebrow-raising about Leon waking up after being shot down in the prologue to find he's the only pilot aboard a tiny escort ship that isn't normally home to more than 2-3 pilots at most. It's immediately eyebrow-raising to be the only pilot on a dedicated carrier that's normally home to almost fifty pilots.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe... but, then again, we're talking about a clash of flavors there. Andor's brand of grounded, realistic, and mature storytelling with its focus on moral ambiguity and the struggles of regular people won't mesh well with the more fantastical style and larger-than-life characters and caricatures used in more conventional Star Wars media. Consider, if you will, that LucasFilm intended The Force Awakens to be a literal and maximally accessible fresh start for Star Wars rather than a simple sequel. The film being a de facto soft reboot of Star Wars was in aid of that goal. It was meant to be appealing and accessible to a new generation of viewers who may not have seen any of Star Wars before or at least may not have found their parents and grandparents old movies all that interesting. Hiring J.J. Abrams to helm it surely sounded like good business in the abstract since he was a rising star who had recently done a soft reboot of another major sci-fi franchise... even if they apparently missed that his attempt at a soft reboot of the Star Trek franchise was widely panned by fans and underperformed at the box office. The mess that ensued after the first movie's lukewarm reception was partly down to J.J. Abrams's tendency to save all the reveals and explanations for the third act (acceptable in a single film, but a terrible idea in a trilogy) and partly because the studio saw all of the social media hot takes and generally mediocre audience response, panicked, and overcorrected in the next movie instead of sticking to what they'd planned out. Disaster ensued. Yeah, that's not happening. Disney LucasFilm's not going to broom the sequel trilogy they spent so much money and tried to rebuild the brand around. I can see two probable outcomes from Disney LucasFilm in the event that the New Jedi Order movie underperforms, depending on how badly it underperforms. If it does so-so but not great, LucasFilm will probably have Rey succumb to the usual Jedi mentor occupational hazard and whoever's the most popular secondary character with fans replaces her as the protagonist for the rest of the New Jedi Order storyline. If the film is a bomb, LucasFilm will can the rest of their plans for New Jedi Order, retire the rest of Rey's storyline to the EU, and try to move on from the sequel trilogy era. We'll see... they've got some far-past sequel in development called Dawn of the Jedi, which is allegedly set 25,000 years in the past.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's a video game, bro... I guarantee you the dev team literally did not care about making anything in true scale. 🤣 What Artdink's dev team did care about was picking a design for the Gefion that plausibly fit with the premise of the game's story. The SMS branch on Uroboros is not there to provide PMC services to Uroboros's government. They're not even really meant to be a combat unit at all. They're a well-funded, but minimally staffed, R&D unit led by an eccentric senior researcher. Their mission is to study the intense and widespread fold fault activity around the planet and work on ways for fold faults to be traversed safely. The minimal staffing and remote location make secrecy easier to maintain. In practical terms, that meant the Gefion needed to be: An escort warship large enough to plausibly hold 3-4 Variable Fighters for the main cast. Small enough to not dominate the area map in any of the game's zones and plausibly be operated by a handful of people. Lacking in offensive power to the point that SMS cannot plausibly overpower the other factions in the game using it. Visually communicate that SMS Uroboros is a small operation lacking the resources of a dedicated combat unit. The Northampton-class was a pretty ideal choice there, since it was a design used in Macross Frontier and its movies, it's a very small and lightly armed stealth warship, and it has been shown to carry ~3 Variable Fighters in normal operating conditions (in Macross 7). They just slapped some catapult decks on the side because that linear catapult launch in the Macross Frontier series is so dang satisfying. The scale's off a bit, sure, and once you've got a dozen or so support characters you start to wonder where they're putting everyone... but that was a lower priority than finding something that fit the bill, looked nice doing it, and worked naturally with the game. The only other pre-existing design that would have fit the bill would be the Valhalla III-type from Macross Digital Mission VF-X... which would've been kind of badass in its own right but the catapult launch on that one would've been much more complex and possibly induce motion sickness. Using one of the larger carrier classes was right out. They're too big, they imply too much power at SMS's disposal, and the player is naturally going to wonder why a ship that was designed to hold multiple squadrons of Variable Fighters only has one other pilot - who is also the ship's captain - aboard at the start of the game.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Naturally. Even the very finest actors cannot save a production with a garbage script and lackluster direction. Ms. Ridley herself is not the problem. She can only do her best with what she's given. The problem facing New Jedi Order is that they're trying to sell another movie based on a character whose audience reception hovers somewhere between total ambivalence and general antipathy. The writers of the sequel trilogy did a very poor job with Rey as a character and it's going to be very difficult, potentially impossible, for her to win over the crowd now. The kind of writing that works for stories like Andor doesn't really work for something like a Jedi-centric story. The Jedi and the Sith exist in a simpler, more child-friendly context where morality is reduced to a simple matter of Good vs. Evil, where the villains are melodramatic evil sorcerers and blood knights, and where the Chosen Hero of Destiny saves the day every time. You can't have that AND do grounded, morally complex, realistic writing like Andor's... they're antithecal premises. A lot of classic fantasy stories started out as folk tales... little bits of oral mytho-history, fairy tales, and folkloric explanations for the weirdness of the natural world. They're short and to the point because they exist to teach a simple moral lesson, to teach children what not to do, or just explain weird sh*t that happens naturally. Sequels, prequels, all that hot nonsense has existed for a long time too. One could argue that Homer's Odyssey was a sequel to his Iliad. Those existed more in the realms of complex, bawdy, and bloody mytho-history meant for the theatergoing adult. Commercial sequels... it's hard to say how old those truly are. Shakespeare did at least one, that being Henry IV Part II, but even that wasn't really making stuff up off the cuff to keep a story going past its end. They do imply that the war we see in the OT is only one that's happened, so it's justified even without showing another. I think moving far enough down the timeline that everyone from the originals is long dead would be a good move. They don't want to because they want to lean on all that residual goodwill audiences have for the existing cast. Developing new factions, a new main cast, and new designs all from scratch is a hard and a big investment... something they were burned by in the sequel trilogy. They can try to maintain stasis, much like how The Acolyte looks essentially no different to the "modern day" despite being 100+ years apart, but that's unsatifying in its own way. Kind of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation IMO... but at this point they have little to lose now that Andor's over and the best they have in the pipe is more unintentionally sexist displays of girl power putting the entire galaxy in danger in Ahsoka season two.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, absolutely... and that was a cycle LucasFilm and its licensees had already gone through several times over more than twenty years before LucasFilm was acquired by Disney. That was the Star Wars Expanded Universe, where the fighting just never bloody stopped and which was on its seventh galactic government (and the fifth post-Empire one) in 21 years of realtime and about 130 years of in-story time when Disney and LucasFilm decided to pull the plug in the runup to the sequel trilogy. As I understand it, the official Happy Ending Override was Heir to the Empire in '91. Disney LucasFilm is just doing exactly what pre-Disney LucasFilm was already doing... milking the franchise until everything that made it likeable or interesting has run dry.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Thank you for the heads up. I got one as a gift for my nephew, and will pass along word to my brother so he doesn't get caught by that rather odd issue. 👍
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The real question is even more direct than that... "Does warfare change after the sequels?" With Dave Filoni still firmly in charge of Star Wars, the obvious and extremely safe answer is "No". Part of it is that LucasFilm CCO Dave Filoni clearly does not like to leave his creative "safe space" (Star Wars: the Clone Wars), but to a large extent the lack of any real change will be easily attributable to the fact that the two confirmed post-sequel projects in development are only set a few years after the Rise of Skywalker. It's unlikely that war will change, both because it hasn't meaningfully done so in the 68 or so years of time encompassing the Skywalker Saga despite three major wars and because technological improvements are a main driver of change in how wars are fought and technology in Star Wars seems to be almost entirely stagnant across at least the 168 years of onscreen time we've seen thus far. Given that both of the announced post-sequel movie projects are supposedly set only about 5-15 years after the events of the Rise of Skywalker, I think it's safe to say that we'll be seeing the scattered remnants of the First Order harassing the reconstituted New Republic or whatever successor state replaces it in the same way we see the scattered Imperial forces harassing the New Republic in the time between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. Like what we see in The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. A very cynical part of me is inclined to suspect they'll try to go for an EU-esque approach to the period similar to what the previous work titled New Jedi Order did. That situation likely suits Dave Filoni's creative process just fine. He won't have to develop a new antagonist faction for either project. He can just rebrand the Empire again, and if he wants a dark sider for Rey's crew to fight he can just have some forgotten Sith apprentice come out of the woodwork the same way Order 66 Jedi survivors have been doing for decades. Starfighter's so close to the previous film he doesn't even have to come up with new designs, he can plausibly continue to lean on the existing designs from the previous film which were themselves just the classic designs from the OT with minimal facelifts. It's a near-perfect setup to play it extremely safe with future projects. The one risk I feel like they're taking is basing another movie (New Jedi Order) around Daisy Ridley's character Rey. Even excluding culture war nonsense - and a directoral choice seemingly intended to provoke culture war nonsense - Rey is a polarizing character to the target audience. She wasn't handled well in the sequel trilogy, so a lot of the audience is seemly rather ambivalent about her return.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, the direction I feel like they're going with Nyan is that she's the person who's been swept along by events her entire life without any real means of control. What little exposition we've gotten about her paints the picture of someone who's been on her own and at the mercy of others from a very young age. She's from Side 2, and she lost her home and her entire family in the One Year War... likely in the One Week Battle, where Zeon's unprovoked attack on Sides 1, 2, and 4 with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons wiped out approximately 1/2 of the Human population at the time. She was 10 or 11 at most when she was orphaned and made a refugee. She lived on her own in an illegal tenament in Izuma colony's illegal refugee district and worked as a black market courier to make ends meet, always fearing arrest by the Side 6 military police. When she meets Machu, she basically ends up under Machu's thumb and dependent on Machu's earnings in Clan Battle. Then she's dependent on Shuji for escape, and finally on Xavier's kindness and Kycilia's use for her to make any kind of life for herself. One has to wonder what will happen when she finally gets a measure of control... like her own Gundam. She unflinchingly killed two elite veteran soldiers in her only prior combat outing and she didn't hesitate to vaporize Miguel either. One has to wonder what she might do if unrestrained for the first time.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Does she? This is just my read of it, but she doesn't seem to do anything voluntarily. She gets involved with Machu because Machu tracks her down. She gets involved with Shuji because Machu attaches herself to him. She hangs around Shuji because he's Machu's partner. She pilots the GQuuuuuuX only because Machu isn't available. She supports the plan to rob the Pomeranians and flee to Earth because it's what Machu and Shuji want. When that goes to pot thanks to the Titans and Shuji ghosts her by rapturing himself and the Red Gundam away to parts unknown, she accepts Xavier's invitation to go to Zeon only because she's a wanted criminal with nowhere else to go. She becomes the pilot for Kycilia's GFreD not because she wants to, but because that's the assignment Kycilia gives her and it's currently the only way she can earn any kind of a living for herself. She's a passenger in her own story, for the most part. The first thing I think she really does for herself is activate the GFreD's Omega Psycommu from outside and vaporize Miguel with a bit's beam cannon... though even that is only because he's actively trying to murder her. To each their own, I suppose... it's clear you have some very strong feelings on the matter. I quite enjoyed IBO, but I'm in no denial that it was a very polarizing title. A lot like G-Reco, which I know a LOT of Gundam fans didn't like but which I enjoyed. (Kinda suspect that my liking that one borders on a "hear me out".)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Probably fighting the remnants of the First Order, the same way the New Republic spent years fighting the remnants of the Empire. X-Wings, TIE fighters, things blowing up... should be a decent popcorn action flick at the very least.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Call me a huge literary nerd if you want, but the actual literary definition of a main character/protagonist is the character whose actions are central to the plot and move the story forward through their interaction with the antagonist(s) via the story's central conflict. What you're describing there is a POV character. You can have multiple of those, and they need not be the story's main character, but in general at least one of them spends their time in the story observing the main character whose actions move the plot forward. To give a Gundam example, Reconguista in G shows events through the perspective of Bellri Zenam, Luin Lee, Noredo Nug, and others... but it's principally the actions and views of Bellri that move the story forward making him the Main Character. Framing Machu, Shuji, and Nyan as the show's main characters definitely looks like a mistake at the present time. Shuji, I agree, he's a walking plot device not a character. He has no personality. He's had no real character development. What little we've seen of him suggests that he's basically a sockpuppet for the disembodied consciousness inhabiting the Alpha Psycommu of the Red Gundam and getting raptured out of the frigging story two episodes ago didn't really change anything about the story. Nyan, no... if any character is totally lacking in agency it's her. She is just kind of involuntarily caught in Machu's orbit from the get-go because Machu was sharp enough to notice Nyan had slipped the black market installer device into her bag and spot the tracker on it. The only time she ever really takes action is when Machu can't... when Machu's stuck in that locker with Xavier and will miss their Clan Battle while Shuji's sick, or when Machu needs to rob the Pomeranians to fund their escape to Earth. She only goes to Zeon when things go pear-shaped because Xavier insists on it and she only becomes a test pilot for the GFreD because Kycilia insists on it. She only ever reacts to what other characters do around her, never moving on her own. Machu... well... Machu's problem is just a lack of character development that leaves her actions feeling knee-jerk or motivationless a lot of the time. She's making decisions, but because the writers are much more interested with the background drama surrounding the Zabi family power struggle, the choices she makes don't really influence the story in any meaningful way. Not that Komori or Xavier are any better off than Nyan, really. I'd have to disagree with you there. I don't think good Gundam writing is dead. Gundam: Reconguista in G had an unusual story that went in a very different direction from usual Gundam stories, but in many ways it was a refreshing change of pace and it brought some engaging and likeable characters like Bellri. Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin was a retread of old ground, sure, but it had its fair share of extremely powerful moments especially surrounding its depiction of Operation British. I remember watching the episode where Iffish is prepared for the drop over a lunch break at work and being disturbed by it the entire rest of the day because it was such an unflinching display of Zeon's willful malice. Iron-Blooded Orphans was so heavy I completely understand why people dropped it because of its unrelenting grimness, but it had a lot of powerful moments in its writing that I think make it more than worthy to be counted among the great Gundam shows. Hathaway's Flash Part 1 was pretty solid too, just like the novel. The only thing wrong with Cucuruz Doan's Island was that they took a story meant for a 23 minute TV episode and stretched it 5x longer than it was meant to be so it feels thin as a result. I think we've had a couple of lazy titles in the last few years... but nothing that was unfixable with a little polish. The Witch from Mercury's had solid, if unremarkable design works and an interesting premise. Its main flaw was just that its protagonists were so wealthy and so privileged that the writers struggled to come up with believable conflicts for them, ending up repeatingly creating and then breaking arbitrary rules in the setting to inject tension. SEED Freedom was a lazy rehash of Destiny, but even that could've worked if they'd picked a new direction to go in with the characters. Requiem for Vengeance may have been a glorified tech demo, but the only thing really holding its story back was the way that the writers inexplicably decided to awkwardly dance around the fact that Zeon were 100% the Bad Guys in the One Year War. Making Iria Solari a villain protagonist or having her struggle with the demands of country vs. her morals would've made her a much more interesting character. Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans: Urdr Hunt has the same writing team as the main series, so I have a pretty good feeling about that one.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    If only the technology were that advanced... instead it's just autotuned algorithmic slop. Potentially uncopyrightable slop, depending on how several pending court cases go, which may make this a poor business decision in the long run.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    There are no official specs for the Gefion-type, so while we can reasonably assume she's a derivative of the Northampton-class everything else is purely an assumption. It's also a video game, where things are not necessarily represented at true scale. It's doubtful Artdink's developers even considered the relative sizes of the ship vs. the VFs. (Hell, given the relative size of Vrlitwhai City, we can be pretty damn sure they didn't.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    For me, that's exactly the part that makes the series so disappointing. GQuuuuuuX seems to be painfully uninterested in its own main characters and, at times, its own main story. Machu, Nyan, and Shuji are supposed to be the main characters, right? Not only has the story generally avoided any kind of character development for Shuji or Nyan, the actions of the main trio are never more than peripheral to the course of the show's story. The role of a main character is to be the perspective the audience views the story through as well as the driving force behind the story's progression as they navigate the conflict central to the plot. None of that is really happening with Machu, Shuji, or Nyan. It's really clear that the story of those three is not the story the writers care about telling. Nothing the main trio do has done has meaningfully affected the course of events in the story and the writers of the series keep having other characters like Challia and Kycilia remind us that the real story is something else entirely that's going on behind the metaphorical curtain where we're not allowed to look. It's kind of frustrating because not only does that other story sound WAY more interesting, but it's like... why not just show us that story instead of this one you're clearly not feeling? More than anything, I show up to Gundam for the character writing. It's a franchise that's had some of the strongest character writing in the industry. GQuuuuuuX could have been something really interesting, but the character writing in it is so thin that it's barely there at all. Engage with the characters and let us see what makes them tick, y'know?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, this is merely boring... not nauseating. Probably would've been better to give it an actual title instead of a literal placeholder though. Never mind little technical matters like actually developing the characters, having the story focus on them, making the designs visually appealing, etc.... What GQuuuuuuX has is a theoretically interesting concept that is massively, MASSIVELY let down by sloppy and lazy execution.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Not by choice, though... that's kind of important. Her family sold her into indentured servitude in the brothel, and she's a prisoner there until she works off that debt or someone pays it off for her like Char did in the prime timeline. There's plenty of kinds of love in the world. Not all love is romantic love.
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