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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The original Southern Cross didn't really get a chance to get into it because the show's writing was a mess and it was earmarked for cancellation early into its planned broadcast run, but these kids are the first generation to grow up after humanity was forced to abandon Earth due to the total destruction of its environment via wars and pollution. They're living on a recently colonized and only tenuously self-sufficient planet that's only slightly less inhospitable than Hoth from Star Wars.* It's implied a few of them, like Jeanne, are there because they were either the people Liberte felt would be least missed in its own government and armed forces or who were so problematic that they ended up on the "ship out" side of "shape up or ship out". * No, really. Creator commentary from TIA10 says that Glorie's average temperature at the 40th parallel (think Japan, Turkey, Kentucky, southern Spain, Sicily) is -40 degrees C in winter... Hoth is -32 to -60 degrees C! The weather on Glorie is subfreezing for 36 years at a time. Hopefully the 18 year long spring is nice, because it apparently swings to 40+ degrees C at the same latitude in the 18 year long summer. None of the series materials ever really address why there's a military at all, never mind one with giant robot weapons, when humanity had encountered no aliens and live was by all accounts relatively peaceful and focused on just plain survival after having to abandon Earth because of the damage caused by unrestricted warfare.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Sara, Shin, and Mao. It's even diagrammed on the Macross Chronicle character sheets. So... how much of a head start are we supposed to give before we hunt the heretics for sport? 😛 It's Suzie-Aegis-Aegis's VF-19 isn't it? A difference as big as Camille being a boy's name too!
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bandai Namco Filmworks/Sunrise may be handling production of the animation, but it's a relatively safe bet the series concept and direction will come from Kawamori and that its mechanical design works will come from The Usual Suspects (Kawamori, Ishigaki, Hidetaka). "I want Macross, but without the things that make it Macross" will never not be the weirdest hot take from old fans. Macross has always been a love story first, and a war story second. If you ask Kawamori, the war story has never been more than a backdrop for the love story from the original series onward.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    You're definitely in the minority there. From what I've gathered, that's kind of how the main Macross audience in Japan feels about Plus and Zero. Besides, if Macross didn't radically shake its formula up with each new installment it wouldn't be Macross anymore... it'd just be off-brand Gundam.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Not just because Kawamori et. al. have a preference for moving the story forward rather than revisiting existing stories, but also because Zero isn't really all that relevant to other works in the franchise. Its impact on subsequent works as a self-contained story is very small. That honestly sounds like it should be an in-universe b-movie. We know from Frontier that VF pilots have in-universe memes and in-jokes about things that have gotten characters killed in previous shows. This sounds like the Macross universe's version of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It would actually be rather nice to get a more diverse look at the media in the setting, since almost all of what we've seen of it is dramatizations of the events of past shows, traditional arts, and the occasional conveniently timed TV news report. You know, that might be a fun idea for a future Macross series... a story about a movie or TV series crew producing one of those in universe works of fiction in partnership with the military.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's a shame that Andor did not get the love it deserve when it first debuted. It had to work a lot harder for what it got too, since it's the only Disney+ Star Wars series that's running on the strength of its narrative rather than the sheer quantity of fan service it delivers. As a casual viewer, shows like The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett have little or nothing to offer because they require their viewer to be invested in the expanded universe mythos of the Mandalorian people and of Boba Fett in particular. If you don't have that background then you're left wondering why they based two entire shows on a guy who has maybe 30 words of actual dialogue and is basically just a less inept stormtrooper. Obi-Wan isn't a lot different in that regard, since it's clearly counting on fans being very excited to see Ewan McGregor return to the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in order to compensate for a plot that could best be described as unnecessary. Andor was able to do so much more with its story than any of the other shows because it's not wrapped up in established lore and instead is focusing on building a compelling narrative around new characters. I am so so glad that it's been nominated for an Emmy. Not just because it's richly deserved, but because I hope it'll set the series up as an example of how to tell a compelling Star Wars story without having to lean so heavily on pre-existing characters and events.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Glad to hear it. If any Star Wars series deserves an Emmy, it's Andor.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall there being any roadblock for Zero. Just for the original series and DYRL. I would assume that the reason a license hasn't been announced yet is because all of the licensees are waiting to see how the more popular titles in the series do before they get into the more niche and for fans only sort of material. Definitely not.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    For merchandising, yes... since 2001. They picked up the merchandising rights to the movie from Tatsunoko Pro back then as a part of their effort to lock Macross sequels out of the West and put a stop to toy imports from Japan. On paper, they supposedly did it to protect the toy line Toynami developed to coincide with their reboot and relaunch of the Robotech franchise. If the release were a Japan exclusive, Harmony Gold wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it. They have no rights there. The goal these days, however, is "Worldwide Macross". That means contending with the trademarks Harmony Gold has held in the US and formerly held in other markets to keep Macross out of those markets. It would not be impossible by any means, but it would be rather more legally fraught than just doing a new series since they would have to also go and deal with the trademarks Harmony Gold has on certain designs from the original series instead of just on certain key terms and the title.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It would be fair to say that Delta had all the right pieces to be successful... it had great character designs, great mechanical designs, one of the biggest and most interesting settings yet written, some absolutely fantastic music, and high quality animation. The writing just did not seal the deal. IMO rather a lot of the writing issues can be traced to the sheer size of the cast. It was easily three times the size of a usual Macross cast, so there just wasn't any opportunity for the writers to develop many of the characters and still advance the story. Having five main pilots, five members of the idol group, and then six enemy pilots (five if the twins only count as one) meant there just wasn't enough screen time to go around. With the series also functioning as a promotion for the idol group's live concerts, they put more emphasis on Walkure than was strictly necessary. Some writing choices combined in ways that were probably unintended as well, like the setting being a backwater and the way the PMC the protagonist work for loses most of the battles in the show's first half combines with their opposition to authority to make them look like incompetent jerks. (Admittedly, incompetent PMCs is kind of truth in television but they were probably supposed to come off as cool rebels doing the right thing instead of as contrarians losing because they couldn't stand to do what they were told.) Considering the prevailing legal situation, I would not say there is no hope... just that it is very unlikely because it would require much of the series and its merchandising to go through HG's approval process due to the use of designs from the original series like the VF-1. If that were the case, the results should have been very different from what they were. Were recency bias a major factor, we would expect to see Delta place much higher than it did given that the two most recent titles at the time were the Macross Delta TV series and its first movie. They placed 6th and 9th overall. We would also not expect to older shows and movies placing above newer ones, never mind both of the two oldest titles in the top five. DYRL placed 2nd, Macross 7 placed 3rd, the original series placed 5th, and Macross Plus placed 7th and 8th. The third most recent title, 2012's FB7, is the lowest ranked of the lot at 16th. Likewise, we would not have expected Basara, Minmay, and Roy Focker in the top five characters if recency bias were driving the results... Nor would we expect to see four different versions of the VF-1 on the list of top 10 mecha or the original version of DYRL at the top of the songs chart. The TL; DR here is that the results don't bear out your attempt to handwave them away as biased.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    If only it were as well written as one. There is a certain amount of that there, especially for the very oldest shows works, but it gets a lot more even as the works get newer... more like +/- 10 or 15 instead of +/- 50. The Macross Frontier titles have some of the most even distributions across the 20-29, 30-30, and 40-49 demographics.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it's no different to the other explicitly-scientific shining BS in Gundam. Just badly explained. Jeez... with this topic it feels like the Macross Delta threads where I had to keep reminding folks that "No, it's not magic or magical girls... it's not even new, this is all tech that we've seen before." ... "surprised" is true, though not all surprises are necessarily pleasant ones esp. with the Japanese audience's tastes differing somewhat from the western audience's. Mind you, Thunderbolt's edgy writing got the same kind of mixed reviews Macross Plus and Zero did and Hathaway's Flash owes its "old school" style to being a direct-to-streaming adaptation of a thirty-four year old light novel rather than an original development meant for broadcast. A story written today is not going to have the same tone or sensibilities as something written in '89. Macross Frontier did a pretty brisk trade outside Japan when it came out and was generally well-received by Macross fans. It's no accident that, when they started releasing Macross toys outside Japan, the first Worldwide Macross edition DX Chogokin was a VF-25. The promos for the Macross Shooting Insight game that's coming out soon also pretty heavily favor the VF-25 and Frontier. Macross Delta was initially received with quite a bit of enthusiasm because of Macross Frontier, and while older fans soured on it a bit because of issues with the writing it still did a pretty brisk trade among the younger viewers. I know that, going to SDCon, I've seen quite a lot of Macross Delta cosplay. Walkure seems to be especially popular. Frontier and Delta especially seem to be much more popular with women than previous installments, with the Grant Vote results for those shows being almost even with slightly more women than men as opposed to the sometimes 80 or 90% male votes for previous titles. Considering the success they've had, I think it's safe to assume Macross is going to continue building in that general direction.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    ... that show only has two seasons. Are you sure you're not confusing it for something else? No, confused teenagers are pretty much the norm for mecha anime... I was remarking on the "shooting sailor moon magic" part... It's the results from the All Macross Grand Vote that NHK conducted in March-April 2019 as a followup to their All Gundam Grand Vote from 2018. Over 250,000 votes were received during the one month response period, rating their favorite Macross animated features, mecha, characters, and songs. The results were announced at the end of Golden Week 2019 along with a demographic breakdown of voting by sex and age. My suspicion that older fans expecting something more like Plus or Zero are going to be disappointed is opinion... but based on the last several extremely successful works, it's an opinion well-supported by precedent.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    lol, we got Valks with bits and funnels back in Macross II and its tie-in Macross: Eternal Love Song in the early 90's. Though the number of dockable drones in Macross Delta is certainly veering back into that territory. Gundam-y Macross has been done before. Does nobody remember that Lord Feff is a Char, complete with horned red mecha that's three times faster? Then rejoice and be glad... because that's what we're getting. Opinions... and questionable ones at that. The Witch from Mercury was a thinly written mess with a barely-there plot that frequently forgets what the hell it's doing and why, and can't even present a consistent vision of its own setting despite being just twenty-four episodes long. Beautifully animated, tho. ... OK, as critical as I am of G-Witch, now I'm just questioning if y'all actually watched the same series I did because there is NOTHING like that in there. Which, more than anything, reflects the difference between older Macross fans in the west and the rest of the Macross fandom. Macross Plus and Macross Zero may be beloved by older fans in the west, but among the majority of Macross fans they're considered middle-tier at best. When Big West polled the fans in '19 shortly after Passionate Walkure came out, Macross Frontier was the #1 ranked series overall and had a strong showing in every category of voting. Not a surprise, given that Macross Frontier is the most successful series to date. Macross Plus ranked 7th and 8th, and Macross Zero ranked 11th (out of 16). I have a feeling that the older fans in the west are going to be somewhat disappointed with the next series, given that the darker and more action-centric titles like Plus and Zero got ranked well below the brighter and more character-focused titles like Frontier, DYRL?, 7, SDF, and Delta. They might be bringing Macross to the west, but it's a safe bet that they'll be prioritizing the Japanese audience's preferences while making it.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, Zentradi clones are produced in an adult state. Moaramia Jifon was part of a Zentradi rebel group, so she was probably born rather than cloned. The organization that raised her is just described as Zentradi guerillas, so presumably their motives were not as political as Latence's.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'm relatively certain that's just a convenience for the kit. Not that I'm aware? I think it's all standard HD (1080p) so far.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, let's hope it turns out better than The Witch from Mercury... that one limped to a finish today. Not surprised that show only lasted two cour... a very weak offering. It was, however, a bit surprising that it soured its own unearned happy ending when the epilogue snuck in a jab about how the protagonists didn't actually accomplish anything and how the status quo ante would quickly reassert itself despite Miorine's token gesture. After the series pulled a whole pantheon's worth of deus ex machinas, I wasn't prepeared for that bit of reality ensuing. IMO, UC's kinda played out though. They've got an uphill battle to make a Zeon protagonist sympathetic or interesting though. MS IGLOO proved it can be done, but... well... they've got Thunderbolt proving it ain't easy either.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    True that, some authors have gone to pretty extreme lengths to get out of their own work... like Tite Kubo spending the entirety of the final two arcs of Bleach essentially burning his own story down by openly mocking the audience and killing as many characters as he could. Considering how much in-story time is spent on analyzing the Titans and trying to figure out why they didn't make scientific sense, IMO it's not entirely unreasonable that a lot of fans are upset they never got ANY real explanation. It was THE mystery for much of the first half, even moreso than "what's in the basement?". I do worry a bit about die-hard AoT fans though... not just because it's so bleak and replete with total bastards, but because the second half is all kinds of worrying for ideological reasons.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    There are a multitude of reasons, depending on the reader... but most of them revolve around the final story arc just being a bit of a mess in general being all kinds of unsatisfying with its rushed and inconsistent pacing, the extended divergence to attempt to justify Eren's campaign of global genocide, the often problematic and ill-defined motivations of both Eren and Ymir, the unresolved implication that Ymir is the true greater scope villain, the many forced-feeling epiphanies about man's inhumanity to man, the excessive use of New Powers as the Plot Demands, the attempt to depict Eren's death as sad, and the conclusion being Eldia remaining a fascist ethnostate under Jaegerist rule and an ongoing threat to the rest of humanity while the state of Eren's grave implies that the Titans will return in the near future to attempt to finish what Eren started. All that and they never did get around to actually explaining the Titans themselves... the whole ontological mystery might as well just be "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain sh*t", which is unsatisfying to say the least.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'd like to see them get away from that again too... Granted, Macross II technically started it with Lord Feff having a custom Gigamesh in full Char Custom style. Macross Frontier: The Wings of Goodbye and Macross Delta ran a bit far with it. The YF-29's a straight-up super-prototype ala Gundam, the YF-30 retroactively became one thanks to the introduction of the economized version in the VF-31 Kairos, and of course the VF-31 Custom Siegfried and VF-31AX Kairos Plus were very much Gundam-style Ace Custom versions.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    SlashFilm's plaudit for Strange New Worlds is... well... technically correct. "The best Star Trek show in decades". It's not wrong, it's just... not exactly great praise consider how the other Star Trek shows of the last 25 years did. Voyager ended on a ratings low note. Enterprise got cancelled due to poor ratings caused by audience fatigue, Discovery flopped, Picard flopped, Prodigy didn't perform up to expectations, and Lower Decks is just sort of... present. It's way better than just "the best of a bad lot". It stands head, shoulders, knees, toes, eight Enterprises, and a whole rogue planetoid above everything that's come out since Voyager ended. I picked it up on digital library instead of physical media, but I've been enjoying the hell out of rewatching it. Probably the best fourteen or so bucks I've spent all year.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    There is definitely some bromance there on Q's side. ... wait, does this make Q Jack's atemporal stepfather? ... on further note, was the reason Q hit Janeway up for help with family planning because Jean-Luc had already shot him down? I feel like this could veer into some dangerous fan-fiction territory VERY quickly. Yeah, I know... it's a shared universe and all, but even in shared universes some protagonist/antagonist pairings just feel proprietary y'know? When the Joker's the big bad, everyone expects Batman. It's the same thing here. Yeah, Jean-Luc has history with the Borg... but it was Kathryn Janeway who was the Wrecker of the Borg's sh*t on a repeat basis for three entire seasons and a series finale which resulted in an offscreen Borg genocide that set up the entire third season of Picard.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I don't disagree... but in a long-running series or franchise like this, there's always going to be That One Enemy who has more chemistry and screen time with a particular member of the cast and becomes "their" villain. Jean-Luc Picard's signature antagonist has always been Q. Q was TNG's first AND last villain, and he had more face time with Picard than any other character. Even when he was on other Trek shows, Q always found a way to work Picard into whatever he was doing. The Borg Queen might've been introduced in a TNG movie, but almost all her appearances were in VOY, it's Janeway's name she was snarling in frustration in most of her appearances, and it's VOY that brought the Borg so low. It's not that they're exclusive, just that the Borg Queen's way more associated with Janeway than Picard... esp. since we're seeing the Borg Queen in the aftermath of what the two Janeways did to her. It doesn't really feel like a final showdown for Picard because he only ever fought the Borg Queen once, and even then Data did all the heavy lifting. It lacks a certain je ne sais quoi when it comes to a main character's final showdown, y'know? I mean, they kinda did in a way. The TNG writer's room considered the Borg to be Too Awesome To Use, which is why they appeared so infrequently in the series and only had two direct confrontations with the crew of the Enterprise prior to First Contact. It was VOY's writers who decided to use the Borg as a recurring antagonist in a similar vein to the Klingons and instigated the villain decay that landed them in the mess they're in in Picard. The Borg are in the state they're in not because of anything Picard did, but because of EVERYTHING Janeway did. There is that, yeah... but the Dominion War was largely fought by the Jem'Hadar, the Breen, and the Cardassians. The Enterprise crew fought in the war, but it was Sisko's lot who had most of the contact with the Founders because they had Odo and proximity to the wormhole. If you're doing a big finale for one of the franchise's most iconic characters, you'd want the final villain to have some serious personal resonance for that character right? Picard's never had any involvement with the Founders and, well, the Borg Queen's less his nemesis and more an annoying ex who's spent more time at loggerheads with Janeway than him. Q's the one who bookended Picard's entire experience, and they wasted him on season two.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    He kind of is, though... While Jean-Luc Picard was the first Starfleet Captain to encounter the Borg and he did suffer at their hands and might even consider them his most bitter enemy, that feeling was never mutual. The Borg Collective's villain decay might've started on Jean-Luc's watch in Star Trek: First Contact with the reinvention of the Borg as cyber-zombies controlled by a Queen, but it was Star Trek: Voyager that really put them through the wringer when they were coopted as recurring antagonists. Janeway made enough of a nuisance of herself in her encounters with the Borg for the Queen to be her signature antagonist and for the Borg Queen to absolutely loathe her after the first few run-ins. Janeway was also the one to put the Borg in the dire state we see in Star Trek: Picard. Future!Janeway from "Endgame" infected the Borg Queen with that neurolytic pathogen that wiped out almost the entire Collective and left the Borg Queen cannibalizing drones to stay barely alive on the one remaining functional Borg cube. Likewise, it was Benjamin Sisko who was really the nemesis of the Founders. He made first contact with the Dominion. He was the one the Dominion used to benchmark the Federation's reactions to the Dominion, the commander of the most important military installation in the entire Dominion War, and commanded several key offensives that led directly to the Dominion's defeat. He was also basically Starfleet's expert on changeling infiltration. Sisko's true nemesis was Gul Dukat, but the Founders and Dominion were something of an overlapping interest after Cardassia joined the war and Dukat became the Founders representative governing Cardassia. Jean-Luc Picard's nemesis was, if anyone, Q. But they wasted Q on that god-awful second season and quite honestly Picard's relationship with Q came to a more logical end in "All Good Things". Significantly watered down... it's actually a bit of a plot hole. Whatever changed about how the rogue Founders shapeshift that allowed them to pass undetected despite the anti-changeling measures from the Dominion War, it left them with the weaksauce weaknesses that were previously unique to Odo and attributed to him being an inexperienced shapeshifter. The Founders used to be undetectable and able to hold their shape indefinitely. These new ones need to return to their liquid state for several hours a day and when they go too long between rests their disguise starts to slip.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, season three is pretty much pure nostalgia-fodder. The Borg... yeah... and it doesn't help that, because Star Trek: Voyager did so much more with the Borg and the Borg Queen than The Next Generation and its movies ever did, Picard's third and final season feels like the coda of Jean-Luc's adventures is him on janitorial duty cleaning up the crumbs of Sisko and Janeway's adventures. The Dominion War was Sisko's thing and and Janeway's the one responsible for the dire straits the Borg found themselves in. It almost feels like the Borg Queen came back to get revenge on the wrong person... future!Admiral Janeway is already dead, but she and now!Admiral Janeway are the ones who wrecked the Borg Collective's sh*t so comprehensively they're down to a single barely operational cube. It could've been handled better, but at least it was better than the two previous seasons. We'll take what we can get, right? Pretty much the entire reason they cast her, if you take their press releases at face value.
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