Seto Kaiba

Rampaging through my backlog again, now that it's the weekend... getting caught up on the Tenchi Muyo! OVAs. I've had OVAs 1-3 on home video since college, but Crunchyroll posted OVAs 4 and 5 a while back and I got genuinely curious. That said, I have to say they've been a bit disappointing overall. There's ten episodes between the two OVAs and the animation quality's pretty good across all ten. The main problem is that, collectively, they're an excessively elaborate and downright disjointed prequel to Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari and Tenchi Muyo! Paradise War. If you've only seen the animation, you have little-to-no chance of figuring out who many of the new characters are because they're from the light novel continuation of Tenchi Muyo! GXP and from the Paradise War spinoff of same. The studio seems to be on a mission to have absolutely every significant OVA and GXP character show up at least once... to the extent that it feels like the only ones who missed out who aren't dead are Dr. Clay, Seiryo, and Kyo Komanchi. Even Tarant Shank gets at least a mention. Unfortunately, this is also problematic for a few reasons. It's hard to keep all these characters straight, especially when so many of them are related, and the updated art style has a lot of them looking near-identical except for their haircuts... which would be OK if not for the fact that most of them have dark hair. Tenchi's almost been demoted to a background character in his own series, with much of the ten episodes being devoted to his younger brother Kenshi who becomes the protagonist of Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari. OVA 4 focuses heavily on Tenchi's father getting remarried and having another kid, and the reveal that his wife is an artificial person from Geminar (the alternate world in question). The end of OVA 4 and almost all of OVA 5 revolves around the entire extended Masaki, Kamiki, and Yamada families ensuring that Kenchi ends up crazy prepared for his mission to Geminar. The bits relevant ot the other characters are mainly in the background, like: Otherwise, it's mostly just watching Kenshi grow up to become the goddamn Terminator he is in Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari training under the most insane members of the Masaki extended family, and trying to remember who all these characters even are.

Don't get me wrong, you're making a good point here... but there are some recurring themes and plot points that undermine it a bit. Despite frequently using wars and minor armed conflicts as a backdrop for its stories, Macross is a fundamentally upbeat and optimistic series. In Macross, there are no real "bad guys". That is to say, both sides of any given conflict in Macross are typically good people doing what they believe is right and necessary and the conflict stems from the failure to communicate and understand each other. That failure to communicate is always ultimately transcended (typically by music) and in the end the two sides come out of the conflict ready to pursue a lasting peace instead. None of the antagonists are "evil" or hurting people for the lulz... they're motivated by fear (Zentradi, Mardook), desperation (Protodeviln), the anxiety of a rapidly-changing world (Anti-Unification Alliance), the desire to protect their own kind (the Vajra), trauma (Havamal, Windermere), or a desire to save as many lives as possible and uplift all of humanity (Galaxy, Heimdall). When the dust settles, yesterday's enemy is usually tomorrow's friend. Macross, essentially, is an argument that war is unnecessary. The reason we joke that "if you want a dark and gritty Macross, go watch Gundam" is that Gundam is fundamentally a depressing and pessimistic series. With the exception of the toy-centric Gundam Build series, Gundam's "War is Hell" message ultimately means that in most stories there are no "good guys". The leadership on both sides is all but inevitably thoroughly infested with complete arseholes motivated by the various "-isms": racism, classism, nationalism, and so on. It varies, but the war in any given Gundam series typically borders on unprovoked aggression or just outright revenge for some past slight (whether real or imagined). The protaginists are typically associated with the side that is callous, but at least pretends to care about its people, while the antagonists vary from punch clock villains to murderous psychopaths to genocidal madmen. But what REALLY makes it misery porn is that Gundam makes no bones about the fact that humanity learns no lasting lessons from any of the wars and that history will continue to repeat itself even after their genocidal despot du jour is defeated. Not just in terms of tediously fighting the same war with the same people forevermore like in the UC, but in broader terms too. That's the essence of Gundam's Black History:

Even the most skilled designers relied on no small amount of "anime magic" to make elaborate transformations work back in the day. That they were able to get as close as they did with the original Takatoku VF-1 toys shows Kawamori's related skill set as a toy designer. Southern Cross's Ammonite staff didn't have the talent or the experience to pull off work of that level, so they did they best they could with the minimal resources they had. As a result, an attempt at a "perfect transformation" Spartas is probably always going to look like crap. It'd probably work and look far better as a partsformer.

Even so, the Gundam franchise is thematically pessimistic where Macross is optimistic and as a result of its particular pessimistic bent all but a select few of its installments tend to be significantly darker. So much so that quite a few (even post-Tomino) could unjokingly be referred to as "misery porn". That, of course, being the reason that the traditional response to the occasional wish for a "dark, gritty Macross" is "Gundam already exists". Not just that, but the whole concept of music as communication being what saves the day is one of Macross's most central themes to the extent that Macross is "the one with the idols". They're unlikely to de-emphasize one of the franchise's signature traits. The same for the obligatory love triangle. If there's one aspect they've been willing to shed, it's the space warfare angle... as in Macross Plus and Macross the Musiculture. Not just that, but also it's apparently a stipulation of the global distribution agreement that they put the OG Macross characters behind them in future works.

Hell no, this is Macross... when a series ends, it should end as stylishly as possible. And the Macross Quarter surfing a fragment of Island-1's armored shell down into the Vajra planet's atmosphere was ****ing awesome, how dare you. 😛

Nah... it really should just never have been written. The same could be said for both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, given that the two of them are basically a Canto Bight-style plot tumor on the flank of the Alien franchise that doesn't really have anything to do with anything. Considering that they were an expensive failure, and that the cut material would be much more at home in a bad Star Trek licensed novel than a horror movie, it and the film it was written for will both hopefully be ignored entirely by this new series.

Dude looks like he's going to (in clicks) ask us if we know de wae... Still, I guess a xenomorph's definition of "fast food" is "former track and field star"... which is much less fattening. Yes. 👍👍 From what I've seen and read, a bunch of scenes and expository dialogue were cut from Prometheus that would have explained many of the final film's unclear areas. That said, the film is absolutely 10,000% better off without it. What we "missed" was a series of exposition dumps of Engineer history and religious philosophy that would've killed the film's pacing more comprehensively than the black goo it explained was killing the protagonists. It was incredibly stupid in and of itself and really didn't mesh with the story as a whole narratively or thematically... especially once Engineer Jesus (figurative) and Engineer Jesus (literal) got involved in the explanation. It didn't really explain the xenomorphs, but it did at least explain the Deacon from the end of the film.

By all accounts, fold faults are relatively commonplace navigational obstacles in the galaxy. The Zentradi supposedly know about them, but either don't really spare much thought for them because they're not an enemy or they simply don't mind losing the occasional taskforce. Humanity's history with fold faults seems to be more problematic possibly as a consequence of scale or their early instrumentation not being as good at detecting fold faults and estimating their severity. The standard case for a fold navigation accident described in Macross Chronicle and elsewhere basically consists of lowballing how much energy that a fold system will consume crossing a given fault and either getting stuck in fold space or running headlong into a higher dimensional immovable object. Humanity has presumably gotten better at detecting and measuring them over the years and adapted their strategy for long-range route plotting somewhat by having ships make shorter jumps ahead of an emigrant ship to scout out the route before the main emigrant ship makes a longer fold jump to the next area of interest. Megaroad-01 didn't have the benefit of that experience or technological advancement, so they probably blundered headlong into a severe fault on a long-ranged jump.

As noted on several previous posts, pronouncements like this tend to be very much at odds with the vast majority of the Macross fandom's views... and what the creators have had to say about what makes Macross what it is. In fact, it's Macross Frontier that the vast majority of fans hold up as Macross's finest hour and Macross 7 is frequently considered the essence of what Macross is and the second highest rated series behind Frontier. If they're aiming to satisfy the Japanese audience first, a new series is going to take a lot more from Frontier, 7, and Delta than it ever will from Plus or Zero. It might be worth noting at this point that Macross has always tried to be on the lighthearted side, and the primary audience is teenagers. Now we know for a fact that we're not going to get that for a couple different reasons. Some folks who grew up with The Show That Must Not Be Named are hung up on Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay... but in Macross, their story ended with Flash Back 2012. They sailed off into the metaphorical sunset. After that point, the Megaroad-01 is nothing more than a footnote in the history of mankind's subsequent emigration into space and has no real bearing on, or relevance to, any subsequent event until Absolute Live!!!!!!... and even that's only alleged. The Megaroad-01 sailed for four uneventful years before contact was lost abruptly in 2016 and she was never heard from again. The New UN Government wrote her off as destroyed in a fold accident. In-story, it's one of those minor mysteries that the occasional odd bird gets obsessed with but the general public couldn't care less about. The main reason Minmay's still a pop culture icon is because her story has been twisted and exaggerated by fifty years of pop fiction dramatizations after her disappearance. There's no story to tell there, because it's four years of uneventfully cruising the void between fold jumps before... But they're also not going to tell the story because, as part of their distribution agreement with a certain US-based firm, they've agreed not to include the original series characters in future works. Odds are they'll sweep the whole "Lady M" thing under the rug or it'll turn out to be someone coincidentally using the same frequency. If we're being fair, they've only technically turned up three times in animation... and even Max's inclusion in Absolute Live!!!!!! was a substitution for the character they wanted to have but couldn't becuase the voice actor passed away between films and was thus demoted to "permanently offscreen" along with his ship. That said, it's not surprising Max's descendants would be cropping up in places. He raised eight kids (seven his, one adopted) and most or all of them have had children of their own by 2068... one of whom is Mirage. With all the emigrant ships flying every which way and so many kids and grandkids in play, it's likely there's a Jenius for every corner of the galaxy and the family IS kind of military royalty. I'm with you on that one, believe me... but Macross doesn't typically do that either. The original series had the end of A world and 7 did threaten the galaxy... but by in large the stakes are much lower in the other titles. The closest we've really gotten outside of those is the prospect of societal change to adopt a human hive mind that will theoretically free humanity from internal conflict and create the harmonious existence the Protoculture desired. They did that one TWICE (Frontier and Delta). TBH, it's a running joke in the fan community. There's always That Guy in threads like this who wants a dark, gritty, action-focused war story about Destroids fighting a ground war. If you think about it, a dark, gritty, depressing land war story featuring exclusively ground-bound mecha is a description fit for most any Gundam series. There are easter eggs referencing it here and there... but they're subtle, unless it's Mikimoto's work where he hangs them out for all to see.

Kinda... if the norm for hitting a pothole and busting an axle was your car exploding and killing everyone in it or cartwheeling off the road into someone's front garden like in James Bond. Macross Frontier, Macross 30, and Macross Delta (as well as Macross Chronicle) all generally agree that trying to traverse fold faults via fold navigation is a capital-emphasis Bad Idea. If you bank enough power and calculate the fold jump correctly you can power through weak fold faults at the expense of greatly increasing the error in time measurement during the fold jump, but trying to forcibly cross stronger faults can severely damage or even destroy ships. Macross Frontier, Macross 30, and Macross Chronicle all seem to go with destruction of the folding ship (or fleet!) being the norm in such accidents. It seems, based on Macross Delta, that if you're REALLY stupidly lucky you'll get knocked back to realspace instead as Megaroad-04 was when it ran into the fold faults surrounding Windermere IV. Absolute Live!!!!!! also seems to support "the ship is destroyed" line as well, as General Cromwell was counting on the New UN Forces to assume that the Battle Astraea had been destroyed in a fold accident when she disappeared with all hands...

Sitting down to do some catching up since I've managed to catch a summer cold... Currently watching Jujutsu Kaisen 0... the more I watch of this series, the more I agree with the feeling that it's basically just an update of Bleach. When all is said and done it feels a little pointless as prequels go. This does kind of make the main series protagonist Yuji feel like a replacement goldfish for this kid if you don't count their opposite temperments. Both of them are transfer students who enter as the highest possible rank because they're possessed by a stupidly powerful curse and go through basically the same arc of going from useless to unstoppable powerhouse in a distressingly short time while living under the threat of immediate "secret execution" because they're possessed. TBH, the only thing it really has going for it IMO is the Junji Ito-esque "curses" they're fighting... though those get a lot less interesting the more self-aware they become when they start acting petty, spiteful, and entirely too human and start veering into sentai villain territory.

It does... it's an improved version of the same ISC/T021 used on the VF-25, VF-27, and VF-31. The overall effectiveness of fold devices reflects both the quantity and quality of the fold carbon or fold quartz used in their construction. The YF-29 uses a different model, the T022. The Sv-262's T021G is likely a "brute force" improvement by using higher quality fold quartz that Windermere IV had in abundance. A similar brute force improvement exists in the Sv-262's Fold Reheat system between the Ba and Hs variants, with the Hs's fold reheat having higher output due to better quality fold quartz provided by the royal family. Assuming the timeline once again moves forward for the next series, we can probably assume that fold quartz will remain a highly valuable and heavily regulated material since it can't be synthesized by Human technology (yet) and has myriad military applications including planet-killing WMDs. Maybe we'll finally get to see some results of the fold quartz "gold rush" that drove Frontier's plot in the next series, with commercial applications of zero-time fold systems. He's having chest pains caused by overexertion as of Absolute Live!!!!!!, so maybe... We've had Mazinkaiser SKL... maybe follow it up with Mazinger SDF?

70's apparently stilll on the wrong side of mandatory retirement age... Max's whole schtick in Absolute Live!!!!!! being that he took a "I'm bored in retirement" gig with Xaos after he retired from the Spacy, so presumably medical tech hasn't come that far. Max is just exceptional as ever.

Yup... the Martin Marietta X-24A, which was created specifically to test the kind of lifting body design that Kawamori would use for the QF-3000E Ghost. The Martin Marietta X-24B also pictured there (the wedge shaped one) is the inspiration for the Advanced Valkyrie design called the VF-X-7 Ghost Valkyrie. (See pg052 in Kawamori's Macross Design Works book.) The X-24B was also kind of a proof of concept for the lifting body design later used by Rockwell International for the US's Space Shuttle Orbiter. Yup, there's a section about the YF-29 being inspired by the Grumman X-29 in This is Animation: the Select: Macross Plus Movie Edition. The X-29 was a proof-of-concept for forward swept wing and canard configurations.

Not s'much... Walkure's outfits, like Sheryl's and Ranka's before them, are nothing so fancy as morphing smart materials. Their changeable costumes are holograms projected over a lightly armored bodysuit. It's a portable version of the same tech that was used for entertainment purposes in DYRL?. That said, said 70 year old man does live in a world where medical technology is way more advancd and (illegal) cybernetics have already raised the possibiity of post-biological humanity. Y'know, that got me thinking... it's been a hot minute since we've had a Macross story that showed what civilian life is like. It'd be interesting to get another title with more of a civilian focus like Macross 7 or Macross R and get a look at what folks are doing for fun and profit in the 2070s or wherever we're headed next.

Macross doesn't have a hard canon... it runs entirely on broad strokes continuity, with any given sequel freely mixing and matching details from the TV and movie versions of any or all of the previous titles. Sometimes a new series will even invent new versions of events which don't correspond to any existing version of the story it's referencing. For instance, in the Macross Delta TV series a presentation about galactic history mixes and matches aspects of the DYRL and TV series versions of the original story, and also combines aspects of both endings of the Frontier story by showing the TV series ending but with the YF-29 and the costumes from the Wings of Goodbye. Macross 7 straight up invented its own version of DYRL that included scenes that weren't in the actual movie like Max and Milia's wedding.

Don't get me wrong, the YF-29 has one of the best ISC systems around... but it's not that good. It can buffer up to 30G (an improvement over the VF-25/VF-27's 27.5G) but the YF-29 can pull 40G from a standing start... so if he's drawing the YF-29's abilities out to the fullest he's still potentially feeling 7.5-10G, which is a LOT for a 70 year old. (My best math suggests a drift racer pulls not more than about 2G.) Same. I'm still waiting for my DX VF-11C Mina Fortre... but hell, any excuse to get an updated VF-11 would be fantastic. Anything with the older Valks would be fantastic, though they'd probably have to go backwards in the timeline to do it.

Well, for the reason I just explained... any government with the means to do so would have upgraded several times since the heyday of the VF-4, VF-5000, VF-11, VF-14, and by the time of Frontier or Delta would have either decommissioned or scrapped the 3rd Gen and older VFs. That's why most Vanquish Racers use 2nd and 3rd Gen VFs... they're buying decommissioned and disarmed ex-military Valkyries at disposal sales.

It'd really depend on when you set it... and exactly how broke the operators are. Generally speaking, by the time a fighter aircraft is two generations old it's considered past the end of its useful service life and has either been retired or is in the process of being retired by anyone who used it except for the very poorest nations. This may be somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Zentradi aren't developing new weapons of their own, so it could be said that the real world pressure to upgrade isn't entirely there in Macross. Still, Macross R suggests that the New UN Forces are still largely following that guidance and retiring older models once they're two generations old. Macross 7 Trash kind of implies the same, with the Macross 7 fleet having relegated the late model VF-4s to training units while they focus on phasing in a 4th Generation VF. There are still a few countries operating 3rd Generation jet fighters like the MiG-23 and F-4 Phantom, but they're using late service life variants and either in the process of retiring them, have converted them to radio-controlled training targets, or are unable to afford to upgrade and are waiting to buy 4th Gen at fire sale prices when 5th Gen becomes the new normal. It's not totally without precedent to continue using older model VFs in Macross though. Macross Galaxy is still using some upgraded (E-type) VF-9s and VF-17s in 2059 in the TV series novelization of Macross Frontier, though the bulk of their forces are using the current-gen VF-171. Milia probably hasn't either. I'd imagine there's probably a subtle guilt trip hidden in every Christmas card or something...

The oldest explanation was that it had mechanical issues due to being essentially a "stretch" VF-1. More recent explanations like the one in Macross Chronicle take a simpler approach, saying that it was a parallel development to the VF-4 that was cancelled with only a couple of prototypes completed because of the military's decision to adopt the VF-4.

I think it's probably got a lot more to do with another series we don't talk about than it does Gundam... In all fairness, we've had no stories about the "hot new superfighter prototype of the week". Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta do all feature next-generation fighters... but in each case, they're just early adopters of the next-generation's standard model or at least the design intended to be the next-generation's standard model. Macross likes to mirror real world developments, and the latter two titles mirror the development in the real world as various nations develop and introduce their own 5th Generation fighters. (The VF-31 is an especially blatant example, as it's transparently based on the efforts made to domestically develop a next-gen fighter in Japan.) If we're going forward again, we'll likely/hopefully start to see stories where the 5th Generation VFs are the standard type. Stonewell and Bellcom only made a few VF-3000s, because of issues with the design. The VF-5000 was widely used in the late 2010s and 2020s, but it's optimized for atmospheric use and shared the main fighter role with VFs designed for space operations like the VF-4. I would love to see a series that actually uses the VF-4.

I was going for "Usagi Tsukino's not the villain of her series", but that works too.

But, oddly, not our first flirtation with Mazinger in Macross... Viz Media's original follow-up to their translated release of Tsuguo Okazuki's official Macross II: Lovers Again manga adaptation has characters from several unrelated anime and manga properties show up as holograms including Dr. Hell, Berg Katse, Char Aznable, and Usagi Tsukino (one of these things is not like the other...).

Since the film became available on YouTube today, I'm sitting down to watch Cucuruz Doan's Island. Literally the first thing you get after you get past the various studio logos is a note indicating that Cucuruz Doan's Island is an adaptation of the 15th episode of the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV anime from 1979. All in all... I agree with the production staff that the plot of Cucuruz Doan's Island isn't bad despite the abysmal execution of the original TV episode, but there's just not enough of it for a two hour movie. A 40-minute OVA episode perhaps, but way too much padding was needed to make a 109 minute runtime even after expanding the scope of the story. The place where it falls down the hardest is character development. Cucuruz Doan is as thinly written as a one-shot character in a TV episode would be, with the movie making little to no effort to explore his motivation or backstory. The antagonists - SouthernCross team - get it even worse. They're totally undeveloped flat characters with at most one character trait apiece and there was absolutely enough runtime to do more with them than simply have them call him a traitor and then obligingly get killed off one at a time in totally one-sided fights that last an average of about a minute.

Destroids are kind of screwed coming and going, because the kind of ground warfare they're designed for isn't really a thing in the Macross setting and because mobility matters at least as much as heavy armor in combat their low mobility as walking weapons makes them sitting ducks. That said, the Spacy didn't have it quite that bad against the Vajra. The Nightmare Plus did OK, but not great, against them once the Spacy switched to more powerful anti-energy conversion armor ammunition to get through the Vajra's natural defenses. Once they upgraded to the VF-171EX or VF-171-IIIF they did a lot better since the improvements made them more maneuverable and they were also far better armed, and they were able to largely keep that advantage once they discovered how to jam the Vajra hive mind on a local level so the Vajra couldn't adapt to the new weapons as readily. I'm not sure that conversion would be possible... esp. since the Neo Glaug is 20+ years newer than the Variable Glaug and presumably takes advantage of not just improvements made in things like engines, weapons, and avionics but also in materials. The designation used in Macross R does seem like it would come from the original Variable Glaug. It's a reference to Project Constant Peg and the US Air Force 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron's secrecy-preserving US designations for captured or clandestinely obtained Soviet aircraft being benchmarked at the Tonopah Test Range. YF-110 was the US's designation for captured MiG-21s. Yeah, that one's a bit odd... though it has so little screen time. We do know a modest amount about its armaments, since the line art for it details those relatively clearly. It has what are essentially non-psycommu funnel missiles, or an early version of the Laser Propelled Pod from the VF-19 Master File. The one that probably has the least actual information is the VC-079 Civilian Valkyrie AKA the SNN Valkyrie. About all we know about it is that it debuted as a commercial use VF in 2079 as a part of the Takachihof Corporation's lineup and that SNN uses at least one of them for war reportage.