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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Who'd have thought the Robotech comics would be so hard-up for new material they'd tap the failed Robotech tabletop game for material? ... On second thought, I'm kind of surprised it took them this long to start scraping the bottom of that particular sewage barrel for ideas.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    You really didn't miss much. Taken with seasons one and three, it reminds me of nothing so much as the extended "Canto Bight" digression in the middle of Star Wars: the Last Jedi. The plot starts out doing one thing, then while that's going on the characters go somewhere else and do something largely unrelated to that for much of the runtime, then rejoin the main story shortly before the end. Except instead of taking an extended side trip to a resort planet to make judgmental remarks about people on holiday they go back in time by way of an evil alternate universe even more cartoonishly villainous than the normal Mirror Universe to do some hackneyed social commentary about the mid-2020s and a weird subplot about global warming.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... Picard season three was meticulously crafted to require viewing through the nostalgia glasses. Without the nostalgia glasses it's pretty mediocre television. It's eminently watchable, which is more than can be said for the previous seasons. A fast food hamburger and fries as opposed to the dumpster diving for ham scraps behind Subway that was seasons one and two or the lovingly cooked and beautifully plated steak and baked potato that is Strange New Worlds season one. It's good, it's just not great.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Last available news is that, like House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power, Andor is moving ahead with production of its second season during the strike. Presumably since the scripts are "done", Disney is feeling somewhat more confident than they ordinarily would be if they had to conclude the story using non-union writers. Disney's reportedly been sending notice to its writer-producers that the WGA strike does not excuse them from their contractual obligations in non-writing capacities and attempting to order them back to work. It seems that once again the studios and the WGA are staring each other down waiting to see who blinks first... and with the undeserved confidence so many people have in new tech like generative AI, I kind of expect this to drag out a while.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/andor-tony-gilroy-scabbing-accusations-strike-1235483978/ For extra clarity. Tony Gilroy's caught in the middle because he has contractually obligated non-writing duties as a producer and he asserts he's stopped all writing contributions, but the WGA is rightly pointing out that the script is only really finished when the show's in the can thanks to the thousand-and-one minor edits, refinements, and changes in stage direction that get made in production. So they see Gilroy's attempt to balance his duties as a writer on strike and a producer as crossing the picket line and Disney using those contracts to try to compel writers working in other capacities to perform actions prohibited during a strike. Gilroy has, in response to that argument, agreed to suspend his work as a producer as well in solidarity with the rest of the WGA.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I've not been following these movies, but seeing these posters hit me right in the nostalgia... esp. with Optimus and Arcee looking so much like their G1 counterparts.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda, yeah. At the very least, the few publications that've come out for The Witch from Mercury do a much better job of explaining the setting and story than the actual series does. There's some good stuff in The Report of Mobile Suit Gundam: the Witch from Mercury that've offered at least satisfactory explanations for some of the show's inconsistencies and omissions and a good deal more than is simply never even mentioned. For instance...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's the reason Andor is hands down my favorite of the Disney+ Star Wars releases. Many of the characters are normal people going about their workaday lives until they become inextricably caught-up in the business of the growing rebel movement. These are the people who got involved in the struggle because it took something from them personally and we not only get to see what that was, we get to see what the normal life they lost was like too. It makes the galaxy feel a lot bigger and more lived-in than stories like The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or The Book of Boba Fett that only visit a handful of familiar places or just focus on the "exciting" locales full of colorful rogues and ne'er-do-wells. It serves to remind the audience that the galaxy isn't just where the war happens... people live there.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Clearly the reason he grew up to be a failure is that he chose that over C-3PO's... the breakfast of champions fussy gits the galaxy over. (Yes I had to google Star Wars breakfast cereal for this. No, I was not expecting such a magnificent setup.) That you associate an overbearing mother-type character with a particular ethnicity is on you, mate. Those are one phenomenon among many that knows few, if any, boundaries of race or culture. (For the record, Eedy Karn's actress - Aikaterini Hadjipateras AKA Kathryn Hunter - is a Greek-American from New York who was educated in England.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    This season has some unusual offerings. I've started My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999 and Mashle: Magic and Muscles and they're both delightfully unconventional. My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999 is a romcom about a young lady who gets into playing a MMO because her boyfriend wanted to play together, only for him to dump her for a girl he met online. While attending an event for the game, she coerces a notorious pro-gamer into pretending to be her boyfriend to make her ex jealous and then ends up in an odd sort of relationship with him after getting sloppy drunk and ending up at his place. Mashle is... well... the premise was so gloriously insane that I absolutely had to give it a whirl and it has NOT disappointed even a little. It's a Harry Potter parody where the main character Mash Burnedead has no magic to speak of but is coerced into enrolling in a presigious magic school in order to become its top student. Why? To use the cash prize that comes with the title to bribe a crooked cop to let his adoptive father off the hook for illegally sheltering a muggle (him). So Mash resolves to use the incredible physical strength he's gained from years of doing little but work out at his isolated house in the woods to fake it 'til he makes it. This is basically Harry Potter if Harry were played by Saitama from One Punch Man and had absolutely zero patience for magical BS.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Representation on its own can be a pretty big deal for members of marginalized groups. A mecha series with a female protagonist isn't anything particularly groundbreaking in and of itself... those go back to at least the mid-1980's, with varying degrees of commercial success. But this is Gundam, the metaphorical 800lb gorilla of mecha anime, doing it so it's a higher profile undertaking. I actually feel pretty bad for the folks who got hyped for Gundam's first female protagonist having a female love interest. The OPs and EDs make it look like a cute relationship but the show's actual writing (up to this point) made Suletta's relationship with Miorine pretty darn toxic, exploitative, and painfully one-sided. Most of their interactions made it look a lot more like Miorine thought Suletta was a useful idot or a clingy nuisance than a friend or potential romantic partner. On its own, that's kind of a dick move on the writer's part... though it doesn't help that the only characters she's showed any attraction to are Guel Jeturk and Elan Ceres. Kind of undermines the whole premise, y'know? So, it's pretty clear why people would get excited about the idea of the show... and with a different writer the same concept could be presented in a much more engaging way than it currently is. (It is weird that the Wiki's sources for media praise for the series are all about trending hashtags though... not positive reviews or anything, but hashtag performance.) If anything, G-Witch has TOO MANY sociopaths, psychopaths, and tyke bombs on its cast right now. We've already got Delling Rembran, Prospera Mercury, Shaddiq Zenneli, Elan Ceres, Reinforced Person #5, Golneri, Nevola, Kal, Nugen, basically everyone in Dawn of Fold who isn't Nika (incl. the two Gundam Lfrith pilots), Chuatury Panlunch... It's enough to make you feel for the Earth House kids who just want to keep their heads down and get on with life... they're surrounded by rich crazies who have enough power to make their issues everyone's problem.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Hard to say, given that Gundam is one of those franchises that is effectively too big to fail. The franchise as a whole is a big enough following that even a truly dreadful installment is never going to be in any real danger of cancellation due to poor ratings or slow sales of its merch... which, IMO, has spawned a certain laziness in the franchise is creative teams. The show does get a moderate amount of praise that I've seen, though I have also seen it receive a fair amount of criticism as well. I've noticed a fair number of the Gundam groups on sites like Facebook tend to be a bit echo-chambery, but there's a lot more diversity of thought on this show on social media formats that are frequented by younger users. The praise that I've seen for the series has been largely disconnected from its actual story. A good deal of it seems to revolve around the show's premise, focusing either on Suletta as the franchise's first female protagonist or the alleged yuri aspect of Suletta and Miorine's relationship. The criticism is largely the same, a lot of focus on the premise claiming that the series feels spread too thin in an attempt to appeal outside of the usual audience for mecha with the school setting. I guess you could say that, from what I've seen anyway, quite a lot of the discussion of the series is not really about the content of the series but more about the idea of the series? Actual reviews of the series seem to be pretty middling, but not any more or less than any other AU Gundam show's typically are. It's no G-Reco (the closest they've come to actual failure) but at the same time it's no Gundam SEED either (the most successful AU in terms of average viewership).
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's not exactly riveting TV, but it was character development for a character who turned out to actually have a not insignificant role in the story. It helped clarify what drove Syril Karn to be the starcharse he is and why he's so desperate to regain his lost status. IMO it makes him a more believable character than if he were just some jack booted idiot. His desire for power and control comes from having had very little power or control over his life when he was still living with his parents. Mundane evil can be far more creepy and unsettling than the kind of Saturday morning cartoon show villains that normally populate the Star Wars universe in the form of the Sith Lords.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    G-Witch episode 17 is another pretty unremarkable story. If anything, it's biggest problem is that you could describe it as Sunrise saying:
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It was inevitable, but nevertheless welcome. I can hardly wait for season two to start.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, not that first one... the "Neo Zentran" is a political movement made up of young Zentradi who were born and raised with Earth's culture who advocate for government reforms and rearmament of the Macross 29 fleet as a means to the end of correcting its economic death spiral. Their platform isn't a warrior ethos, it's all about leveling the playing field in trade negotiations.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's definitely not the most strategically sound idea out there... However, given that the primary/default strategy that all emigrant fleets employ when it comes to encounters with the Zentradi is avoidance, it's less unsound than it sounds at first hearing. Even the best-armed emigrant fleets are not really equipped to go fighting anything much larger than a branch fleet. Defense policy generally revolves around the detection of enemy fleets before they can detect the emigrant fleet themselves, so the emigrant fleet can leg it before they end up in a fight they can't possibly win. Macross 29 is perfectly well-equipped to do that much. They're just up a creek without a paddle should the worst happen and they end up in a situation where they're unable to run away in time.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Per HG, the movie in question was/is intended to be a reimagining of Robotech as a whole... a clean slate with no ties to previous works.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly not. We have a pretty good idea what's in Harmony Gold USA's license agreement with Tatsunoko Production Co. Ltd. thanks to that license being the cornerstone of SO MANY lawsuits and threats of same against companies like FASA, Catalyst Game Labs, and Hasbro. All they have is the film distribution and merchandising rights to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series (excl. Japan), and the merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love? (excl. Japan) but not the distribution rights. In order to do the kind of thing you talked about here, they would need to secure licenses to every title they intended to use and for that specific purpose. Mind you, the main reason they don't do dubs like Robotech's anymore is because it's WAY more expensive than just doing a normal dub and exponentially more expensive than just doing accurate subtitles. The only reason it got a pass back then was because, for a time, it was believed that audiences would find Japanese cultural references offensively foreign. The practice was already being abandoned by a lot of the distribution industry around the time Robotech was made, and was largely a bad memory by the early 90's. Nowadays, that kind of dubbing is considered something like a crime... Cost aside, it's also very safe bet they're not going to do that because Harmony Gold USA gave up on further development of the Robotech animated series back in 2007. Creative director Tommy Yune had to make a lot of promises to get the ~$1M budget to make Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, and one of those promises he made was that subsequent installments would be funded by investors attracted by the OVA's pilot. The pilot episode was an unqualified disaster, not only failing to make Robotech relevant to modern anime viewers but bombing miserably with Robotech fans too. The promised investors never materialized, and Harmony Gold USA has since been basically refusing to fund any further development themselves. They tried to get fans to do it with a Kickstarter for a new series pilot in 2014, but the tasteless marketing and poor quality of the pitch and the teasers they put together saw them hastily cancel the campaign a few days early to save face when it became clear that the campaign was going to fail with not even 40% of its pledge goal. In 2019, Harmony Gold USA licensed control of the Robotech animated series to Funimation... effectively abandoning it. What Harmony Gold USA's own staff have had to say about the plans for the franchise's future is that those plans revolve pretty much exclusively around the proposed live action movie. Initially, the claim was that they were waiting for the live action movie in order to crosspromote it with Shadow Chronicles, but after they admitted that RTSC got cancelled back in '07 the focus has been 100% on the live action movie. The goal is simple: a hard reboot of Robotech as a whole using the proposed live action movie as the starting point for a new Robotech universe and story unhindered by the legal baggage dogging the old animated series. Whether they intend to outright abandon the animation after that or the animated series will continue to stagnate into infinity so they can hang onto the trademark on the word "Macross" in order to collect a trickle of revenue from Big West's worldwide releases of Macross sequels is unclear.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Not really. In official terms, it only really has the two. The three-pylon configuration was a much later, unofficial, attempt to rationalize the appearance of the VF-1s with six RMS-1s equidistantly spaced along the wing because they hadn't really considered how those missiles would be attached until the DYRL? design showed the twin mount. They're actually in the same place in the line art... that may not be accurately reflected on the toys, however. The outer pylon attach point is more or less directly aligned with the gap between the flaps, and the inner is just outboard of the inner hinge for the inner set of flaps. Master File doesn't draw it quite correctly, putting the outer pylon attach point slightly outboard of that seam and the inner one directly in the middle of the flap.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Disliked? No. Macross 29's problem is not that they're disliked by their neighbors... their problem is that making total pacifism government policy made them doormats for their neighbors in trade negotiations. So, as I understand it, your two summaries here each have a piece of the truth. The few printed materials for the musical - e.g. coverage in Chronicle, programs/booklets from the show, the old official website, etc. - do explain that the Macross 29 fleet made unarmed total pacifism into state policy and that the fleet is in economic trouble because of it. However, it is NOT because other fleets won't trade with them. Just the opposite, in fact. Because the Macross 29 fleet adopted a governmental policy of unarmed total pacifism - "the Full Relina", as it were - their aversion to conflict combined with an inability to both defend themselves and attack others with no defense force made them extremely easy to bully in trade negotiations. They have trade agreements with their neighbors, but those trade agreements are VERY unbalanced and that trade imbalance is a large part of what's ruining the fleet's economy. (The fleet's emigrant ship did also sustain some damage in some kind of gravitational wave event before the story's start too, which isn't helping by damaging the living areas of the ship AND forcing energy conservation measures which prevent the fleet from interacting with all but its nearest neighbors.) That's why the Neo Zentran movement-turned-political-party advocates rearmament. Not only is the defense industry and military a huge part of the economy in most emigrant fleets, the Macross 29 fleet wouldn't find itself forced in such disadvantageous negotiating positions if it abandoned total pacifism and rearmed. It doesn't have to become an aggressor state, it just has to not be the only guy in the Mexican standoff who forgot to bring a gun. The ending is more like that the fleet will refocus its economy from whatever the hell it was doing before to focus on cultural exports... something less dependent on trade in raw or refined materials, completed technology, etc. that also has broad appeal and aligns with the fleet's pacifist ideology. They've decided they will almost literally make love, not war... a more Macross ending you couldn't ask for. And it's not a bad plan either, really. The Macross Frontier fleet might be a tech industry powerhouse with a lot of interest in the defense sector, but it also makes a fair amount of money on cultural exports (music, movies, the arts) and it's implied that they also have something of a tourist industry with the fleet's Earth retro aesthetic. After all, top idols make STUPID amounts of money. Top idol Sheryl Nome literally charges an entire private army to her personal credit card at one point. Other forms of entertainment - like races - draw significant attention from major corporations as well. It's not like towns built around the entertainment industry aren't a thing in the real world either. Los Angeles, Anaheim, Bay Lake, Las Vegas, I could go on. As long as you can either develop the industry yourself or attract the industry to your town permanently, you've got a license to print money. If I had to pick a word to describe it, I'd say they're oversimplifying it. They're not disliked... just kind of bullied in a way that is not at all unrealistic in real world international relations.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Probably, esp. since they store the VF-1 with the wings all the way swept.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    As inconsistent as this series has been about the motives of its characters, the consequences of their actions, and the rules of its own setting thus far... it gives off a vibe very similar to a panicking GM whose players completely dodged the story they planned in the very first encounter and are six sessions deep into some desperately spitballed BS they're making up as they go along. We are literally on Prospera Mercury's fourth stated set of motivations. She gives TWO MORE sets in this episode alone! Either she has a multiple personality disorder or she's the most indecisive psychopath ever born. So many of the characters have exactly ONE character trait that it's hard to say who's Boblin the Goblin in this scenario. The one thing I CAN say is that the most interesting character in the series is NOT a main character at all. It's Guel "Call me 'Bob'" Jeturk, the only one who's had any actual character development in *checks* sixteen ****-mothering episodes?! It's actually kind of shocking how threadbare the protagonist, Suletta Mercury, is as a character. Even emotionally-dead human messes Heero Yuy, Setsuna F. Seiei, and Mikazuki Augus had more far personality and agency in their own stories than Suletta Mercury does.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well that didn't last. I'd like to say the wheels have come off G-Witch, but the previous episode was the only one to suggest wheels might have been present at some point...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    While I don't recall a specific reason ever being given for why certain weapons are placed on certain pylons other than clearance issues for specific options not included in the scope of this question... I feel like the answer is right there in the question itself. The RMS-1 is a long-range, thermonuclear reaction warhead-equipped, anti-warship and anti-formation missile. In normal operation as seen in DYRL?, the Valkyrie's going to fire the RMS-1's first to either "thin the herd" of approaching battle pods with the large blast radius of the thermonuclear reaction warhead or strike approaching enemy warships before they close to a range where they can engage with the HMM-01 micro-missiles in the FAST Packs and UUM-7 missile pods or their guns. Doing so clears the outer wing, leaving the yet-to-be-used UUM-7 missile pods on the pylons closest to the centerline. Sources over the years have been reasonably consistent in describing the RMS-1 as one of the longest-ranged, if not THE longest-ranged, missiles the Valkyrie has. A decision that's somewhat understandable given what older sources have said about the warhead. Sky Angels gives the most detailed description, suggesting the initial warhead designed for use in the RMS-1 casing was a 0.5kt thermonuclear warhead, later improved to 1.5kt, and that in practice the casing was compatible with many different warhead designs which had MUCH higher blast yields ("tens of kilotons to hundreds of kilotons" is mentioned). That's reason enough to want it to go off far away from you, even if it's a "clean" thermonuclear weapon that releases all of its energy as heat and produces no/negligible amounts of (other types of) harmful radiation. Sky Angels also mentions some of the other warheads that the RMS-1 could take include ones intended to produce gamma ray bursts and straight-up neutron bombs. (Yes, I had to read that several times to believe what I was seeing too...) EDIT: While I was re-reading that section in Sky Angels I noticed the mention tacked on at the end that the UN Forces were working on a miniaturized high-yield thermonuclear reaction warhead intended for use on the VF-4's regular missiles! The only times we ever actually see the (alleged) three-pylon configuration is in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross episode #27 "Love Drifts Away" and, I think, #30 "Viva Maria". The animators working on the original series drew the three equidistant RMS-1's on the VF-1s at the time, presumably without really thinking how those missiles would be attached. Some toys and kits for the TV series, I know, have gone with the three-pylon approach... which is where Master File got the idea, since they have borrowed a few things from the Hasegawa kits here and there.
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