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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure we have that long to speculate... The last two times (Frontier and Delta) they announced the existence of a new Macross series project in Spring/Summer, revealed the title in Autumn, and then rolled out the Episode 0.XX version of the first episode in December. I'd assume the Sv-303 was probably modeled on the McDonnel Douglas X-36 and Northrop Grumman X-47B based on structural commonality and the like.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    So, I've been having some issues browsing the boards lately resulting in Chrome-based browsers on mobile locking up and crashing and I think I've linked it to an existing issue. It seems that something about Twitter embeds is causing mobile browsers to crash when viewing the boards. Is there an option in the settings to disable embedding?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Nope... the FANKY doujins are more like a historical view. Kind of like how the Master File books are written as in-universe mass-market publications with declassified information, the coverage in the FANKY doujins is written like a historical overview of the various ships. It does touch on capacity at a few points, though mainly to note that the form factor of mecha contributes to a ship's carrying capacity and that carriers have an operating capacity vs. a maximum capacity.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Finished unboxing the last of my artbook collection after the impromptu renovations, and I've been on a bit of a tech-doujinshi kick. Managed to secure another copy of Sky Angels for my archive, as well as R-AREA's rather odd series of Macross doujinshi. The first volume of that rolled in today. Both FANKY and R-AREA are definitely drawing pretty heavily on Variable Fighter Master File in their work, though FANKY's a lot more explicit about it. They directly reference the Second Battle of Spica, an event first described in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur, in their writeup of the fanmade Kaga-class space carrier (the jumbo version of the Guantanamo-class stealth carrier). R-AREA's Space Fan "2051 January" issue seems to draw a fair amount of inspiration from Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix in talking about initial development difficulties encountered with adapting the F-14's basic design into a variable fighter. Their YF-0 is broadly similar to the YVF-X-0 from Master File, though they get onto some weird topics like discussing the practical reasons for excluding horizontal stabilizers and an initial mechanism for storing the hand they came up wtih that has the hand flip out from inside of the forearm 180 degrees. They also came up with a "VF-1RR" presented as a late improvement of the VF-1 that has a VF-4-like cockpit transformation (the cockpit remains horizontal) and foldable wingtips. The art's pretty obviously traced from existing Macross artbooks in a few places, and the VF-1RR's head looks suspiciously like a lower-detail version of the VF-1SR Attack Valkyrie from Macross 2036. Despite the mention of the VF-19 and VF-22 on the cover, the book has basically nothing on them. It's surprisingly light at not even 40 pages, but for 1000JPY (shipping incl.) I'm not going to shed any tears. There are a couple fun tidbits I found in FANKY's Battleships of the Galaxy that I want to see if they have any official precedent, like the idea that the Northampton-class's radar cross-section is about the size of a battlepod. They have some interesting (and mostly accurate) commentary on the usage of high-angle beam guns and the reasons why the guns aren't practical.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It's the only reason I've seen in writing from an official source: https://macross.jp/news-detail/81/ The uppercase delta Δ is also used as a mathematical symbol for change, so that's something I guess? It's also the only one of the lot that actually has a wing structure named for it... though Kawamori initially undermined it by giving the VF-31 Siegfrieds forward-swept winglets. Uppercase sigma Σ wouldn't fit nearly as well, since that's a summation operator... if you were doing an anthology show, that might be a good one to use for its title. W... well, there are other Greek letters that look more like a W including uppercase Psi and lowercase Omega.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    What I've read on the subject is that the Delta in the title was based on the letter Delta being triangular. Apparently it represents, or is evocative of, the three main aspects of the franchise as a whole: songs, wars, and love triangles.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Not in any explicit terms, no. In its heyday, the Supervision Army was an ad hoc force made up of the Protodeviln's spiritia-drained and brainwashed victims and whatever ships and equipment were available from captured facilities and enemy forces. Five hundred thousand years of dependence on captured factory satellites for their every need has probably seen what's left of them evolve into a force that's little different from the regular Zentradi forces in terms of their organization and equipment. They may have simply preserved some designs that were lost to the Zentradi and vice versa when it came to what factory satellites they were able to seize vs. destroy. Nope. Presumably they're still out there in force, given that Vrlitwhai and Exsedol note in the first episode of Super Dimension Fortress Macross that the Supervision Army withdrew from the region of space around Earth approximately 8 terms (40 years) before first contact... so in 1969.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    My guess would be probably not. Robotech is old and rather obscure, and the few attempts to tart it up for modern audiences have generally failed to capture the attention of potential new readers/viewers... or even satisfy the franchise's existing fans. The hype machine is basically nonexistent since the fans aren't hyping anything themselves and the only marketing the franchise really does is its annual convention tour that caters to fans only (and is just plain embarrassing). Most of the attention it gets is in the form of bile fascination from people who already know about it (and Macross). This new comic seems to be a pivot away from trying to make Robotech marketable and towards low-effort pandering to Robotech's existing fans by revisiting familiar stories. For their part, the fans seem rather uninterested in yet another "greatest hits" rehashing of Robotech's "Macross Saga", so it's anyone's guess if this comic'll even still be on shelves when the Macross shows drop. I'd expect there to be some understandable wiki-confusion once new Macross titles start dropping in earnest and viewers start looking up the backstory, but the concept of a bad or bowdlerized localization is familiar enough (thanks 4Kids) that it's unlikely anyone will be put off Macross by Robotech.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Indirectly, yes. They have to periodically release some SDF Macross-based merchandise in order to meet the US Patent and Trademark Office's requirements to renew the trademark they have on the word "Macross". If they lose that trademark, the 2021 distribution agreement is essentially meaningless. Big West would be able to release the Macross sequels in the US without any cooperation from, or royalties paid to, HG and they could even register that trademark themselves and forcibly shut HG out of marketing Robotech in the US.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably no more than any other prospective Macross licensee. Given that it's been quite a few years since he stepped down as CEO of Harmony Gold, it's unlikely his passing will have any impact at all on the worldwide distribution of Macross and its sequels... or Robotech's glorified hospice care at Funimation/Crunchyroll. Presumably for the same reason Harmony Gold itself did... the potential value of the "rest of world" Super Dimension Fortress Macross license and the trademarks Harmony Gold used to keep Macross's sequels bottled up in Japan for 20 years far outstrips the value of Robotech itself. (It's also a fairly safe bet that the license was not exactly expensive either. Robotech is a dead property twice over after failing to launch in 1986 and 2007, it has no future prospects to speak of, and the potential return on investment has been greatly diluted by 20 years of oversaturating the market with re-release after re-release of the same content on home video and various streaming services. Its main value is as a way to maintain Harmony Gold's trademark on the Macross name that has now given it "a say" in Macross's global releases.) This new comic is almost certainly being made largely for the purpose of meeting the minimum obligations to renew the Macross trademark - i.e. active use of the trademarked term in commerce. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to exist.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, that's easy. Harmony Gold essentially outsourced management of the Robotech franchise to Funimation back in 2019. (It's believed that that transfer of managing authority and the collapse of Harmony Gold's licensing partner KMG were what killed Robotech Remix.) Tommy is an OK comic book artist, but he's no mechanical designer. That's the reason he dodged the question of transforming the YF-4 back when he was working on Robotech's comics himself. By all indications, he hasn't really had much authority over Robotech since Shadow Chronicles failed to deliver on the grandiose promises he made to HG's execs to secure funding. Considering this design was something Ninja Division slapped together for Palladium Books to use as a pledge bonus in a Kickstarter campaign for a tabletop game, I doubt they bothered to figure it out. Maybe so, but it's not a "Macross Saga" design so the Robotech fans don't care about it.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    They literally can't afford him. They never could. Beggars can't be choosers.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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...
  20. 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.
  21. 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.)
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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).
  25. 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.
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