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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. 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.
  4. 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:
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It was inevitable, but nevertheless welcome. I can hardly wait for season two to start.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Probably, esp. since they store the VF-1 with the wings all the way swept.
  13. 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.
  14. 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...
  15. 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.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    When all's said and done, this is basically just an admission that the Neo Constitution-class Titan-A was a mistake. They could have saved themselves a lot of time, effort, and earned a substantial number of brownie points with the fans by just using Will Riker's Luna-class USS Titan like they did in the Lower Decks series. If they had, they wouldn't have had to come up with that complicated rationalization for why the divisive Titan-A design was and wasn't Will Riker's Titan, do the Enterprise-F dirty by having her appear and then immediately get destroyed offscreen, or do the Titan dirty by having her renamed Enterprise despite her achievements in-series and the name's legacy. They literally could have just used the existing and beloved USS Titan design fans were cheering for in Lower Decks and introduced a new Enterprise - either using the existing Enterprise-F design or the Neo Constitution-one - at the end as Seven's new command and nobody would've had any reason to complain at all. (Hell, that way Seven would have been commanding the seventh Enterprise instead of the eighth... which I'm sure would make a pleasing bit of symmetry for fans.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, it kind of depends on how much There Are No Therapists is in play in this now-marginally-less gritty and grimdark take on Star Trek's 24th and 25th centuries. The younger Starfleet officers who were subjected to this new and nonsensical form of Borg assimilation didn't have to undergo the monumental physical trauma of conventional Borg assimilation techniques (and being compelled to assist with inflicting same on others). The only emotional trauma they're going to have to process is having been compelled to attack their colleagues who were unaffected. Jean-Luc Picard's assimilation was so traumatic for him because his memories and knowledge were key to the Borg's curbstomp victory at Wolf 359 and because he underwent the full physical process. None of these kids were instrumental to the Borg's plan in that manner, and they missed out on the body horror entirely, so that likely shielded them from a lot of the trauma. Given that the one who had it worst - Jack Crusher, who was not only conventionally assimilated but also the instrument of the Borg's victory like Jean-Luc was - not only becomes a Starfleet officer but is shown to be in good spirits barely a year later suggests that this was probably considerably less traumatic than the usual for Borg assimilation. Assuming Starfleet has the ubiquitous councilors that were/are depicted as being one or more to a starship from TNG's first season clear through to the present day... there might be an initial major influx of patients but I think a lot of the young officers would bounce back fairly readily as Jack himself did. How many people actually held Picard in contempt for having been assimilated and used against Starfleet in the first place? Thus far, we've seen exactly two: Benjamin Sisko and Liam Shaw, both of whom were survivors of the Wolf 359 massacre who apparently never worked through their issues with one of Starfleet's therapists. Ben Sisko's beef with Picard over it doesn't even last the entire DS9 series pilot. The number of Wolf 359 veterans was never huge, and a lot of them have likely retired by the time of Picard. The younger generations of officers never had to deal with it, and Borg assimilation was a lot better understood at the time they went to the Academy, so they'd be a lot less likely to hold anything against him regardless.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's just marked up as "missile pod" or "compound missile container". In practice, it's a bunch of separate missile systems held together in a common framework. Master File asserts that all seven micro-missile launcher systems are Bifors CIMM-5A/A type but there are two different container types: AMC-12 (three forward-facing, two rear-facing) and AMC-14 (two forward-facing). It also contains two containers for RMS-7A reaction missiles.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I am not sure why you need to prove the obvious, but whatever. So you'll follow a demonstrably incorrect methodology and when you don't get the answer you want you blame the official information instead? Are you referring to the missile launchers built into the boosters, or the modules with the red doors?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... the models for the ships aren't even accurately scaled in the games themselves, and the reused/shared features between ships in the animation were never scaled the same from the start. I thought everyone knew this, TBH. Macross Delta in particular certainly wasn't subtle about it. Guantanamo-class Advanced ARMD or Guantanamo-class space stealth carrier. Also, it's "Maizuru" not "Maiduru". In Macross 7, there was some theme naming going on with ships. The few named Guantanamo-class ships are named for port cities with either naval bases or shipyards. ARMD-362 Maizuru's named for Maizuru in Kyoto, which was home to the Maizuru Naval Arsenal that built ships for Imperial Japan and now is home to civilian shipbuilding concerns. Or that the parts were never intended to be the exact same part, and simply followed the same basic design. It has its own elevator in the middle of the deck.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    So... this week's episode of G-Witch is actually good. Like, there is some actual substance to this one. Not just the usual meaningless antics as the children of the idle rich faff about the campus of Space Hogwarts. Suletta isn't even in this one, and Miorine's barely in it. I feel like it's possibly not entirely coincidental that their absence coincides with a noticeable and even sharp increase in the quality of the storytelling. At the time that post was written, over six years had passed since the broadcast of the final episode of Iron-Blooded Orphans. The forum rules call for spoiler tags on new broadcast content for 48 hours after release. We were over 52,800 hours outside that period at the time of my last post.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, she's got dirt stains on the underside too.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The closest we have to an official statement is that she was a new build for the transwarp program that was cancelled and subsequently foisted on Kirk. An engine test article the yards threw together to test a transwarp engine, then subsequently gutted and fitted with a conventional warp drive system to "reward" Kirk for being such a pain in the fundiment. That the USS Titan-A got renamed Enterprise is probably one of the things about the finale I like the least. The Titan was instrumental in saving the day, renaming her feels pretty disrespectful to her legacy (esp. considering she was named in honor of another very influential ship).
  24. Seto Kaiba
    From what I've seen, the main tell is that ChatGPT tends to produce arguments that are superficially convincing-looking but shot through with gibberish and incorrectly-used terms. The more obscure the topic, the more evident the gibberish becomes. That if we get the transient facts, then we'll feel the info high.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, I think the thing I'm enjoying most from the finale is all the people dragging it on Facebook, Reddit, Discord, etc. for being so very Star Wars between the... Picard may be a mediocre series that will probably be quickly forgotten, but hot damn if season three hasn't become a fountain of memes. She did get a pardon... but Star Trek does have a tendency to give various characters multi-rank promotions without a clear justification: James. T. Kirk received a two-rank promotion from Captain to Rear Admiral after concluding his five-year mission aboard the Enterprise. Jean-Luc Picard received a four-rank promotion from Captain directly to full Admiral after assuming command of the Romulan relief effort. Kelvin timeline James T. Kirk received a SIX rank promotion from Cadet directly to Captain after Star Trek (2009), though he was demoted shortly thereafter. Beckett Mariner would qualify for that list too, if you consider there was no merited justification for her promotion to Lieutenant... that it was a purely malicious move on the part of her captain to torture her into transferring. (The promotions granted to the ex-Maquis on Voyager don't count, since there WAS a clear rationale for those.)
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