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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The Water Magician's season finale was as uninspired as the rest of the series. It doesn't do anything wrong, per se... but it doesn't really do anything particularly right either. It's watchable, but it's so bland and insipid that it doesn't make a lasting impression. It's the plain quaker rice cake of isekai anime. It can be consumed, but literally anything else is a superior option if you want flavor with your viewing experience. It's clear the studio wants the series to get a second season as they end on an obvious sequel hook, but I have a feeling this one won't get renewed. I've finished Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra as well. My first impression was pretty much dead-on. It's not so much Diet Overlord as Great Value brand Overlord and it's clearly taking a lot of "inspiration" from Maruyama's series to such a degree that most prominent characters are obviously minimally-altered Overlord characters. Takuto is just Momonga without the loneliness motive and undead complications. Atou is Albedo in everything but name and Miss Fanservice proportions. There are even a pair of dark elf twins clearly based on Aura and Mare, but without the crossdressing. Its one and only innovation on the genre is that each of the multiple "players" who have ended up reincarnating in this fantasy world after death is working with god mode hax from a different genre of game. Takuto's powerset comes from the 4X game he was the #1 ranked player of. The unnamed "Demon Lord" draws his forces and powers from what looks to be a Famicom-era JRPG, while another villain appears to be a mercilessly min/maxed NPC villain from a TTRPG. Quite a bit of the drama in the second half seems to stem from how those different styles of game logic interact and impose on each other. It could be an interesting premise in the hands of another, better author with a less derivative story and cast.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    🤔 Yeah, it would work better as a farce or a parody wouldn't it? Literally all that's missing is the self-awareness that comes with a farce or parody and some canned laughter. Maybe the Xenomorph can end season two by whipping out a straw boater hat and cane and belting out a cover of "Hello, Ma Baby" like in Spaceballs...
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'd put more faith in the amateur reviewers and general audiences than the professional critics, mainly because the latter group are often indirectly in the employ of the studios via the media companies that own the papers and websites and seem to be afraid to give negative reviews unless the film or series is borderline unwatchable. 40+ point disparities between critic and audience scores are pretty common now. The audience scores are trending downward, but still well on the positive side of neutral... which is fair. Alien: Earth isn't unwatchably bad like The Acolyte or Star Trek: Discovery, both of which have 50+ point disparities between their glowing critical praise and scathing audience reviews. It's a clumsy effort that feels like it needed a bit more time in the oven, but it has spirit and in the flashback episode there's some sense that the showrunners do understand the assignment... or are at least copying the homework of someone who does. With a little work, Alien: Earth as a whole could've gone from iffy to good or even great, and the flashback episode could've gone from good to amazing with a bit more polish.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    If so, that would make the decision to green-light the show's development and production a rather idiotic move. The entire premise of the series was "Boba Fett is back from his Disney Villain Death in Return of the Jedi and his new ambition is to take over Jabba the Hutt's criminal empire". Why green-light a series about an explicitly villainous bounty hunter at all if he has to be Mr. Space Rogers? If he can't be shown doing crime, why make the focus of the story his new life goal to change careers to Crime Lord and take over his old boss's criminal empire built on drug smuggling, slave trafficking, protection rackets, space piracy, and murder-for-hire? Poor Din was the one sane man poking his head into an Idiot Plot. That even a poorly written character could be written worse. Bo-Katan was always rather thinly written, and the people writing her often forget she was the right-hand man to the coup leader who framed and overthrew her sister and plunged Mandalore into the chaos that led to its takeover by Maul, the one who effectively started the civil war that led to its takeover by the Empire, etc. Considering how often poor Din tends to get overshadowed by characters from Filoni's past works... I'm a bit worried he's going to be playing second fiddle to the likes of Zeb and Rotta in his own movie.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    A couple months back, James Gunn made some rather enlightening and illustrative remarks on that point in an interview with Rolling Stone. In his view, the number one reason the film industry is struggling (or "dying", in his words) is that studios are shooting shows and movies without a finished screenplay in hand. The problem is potentially more severe than having nobody review the writing. Studios are moving projects into production with incomplete screenplays and then literally attempting to make up the rest as they go. Which would explain an awful lot of Alien: Earth's problems like wildly inconsistent pacing, a lack of meaningful character development for almost the entire cast, the underutilization of most of the monsters from the Maginot, the way characters and monsters seem to engage in offscreen teleportation, the inconsistent security of the "secure lab" that requires door codes only and is supposed to be Synths only when it's dramatic but otherwise lets any rando walk right in and out, or the hilariously forced Peter Pan motif that doesn't actually fit in the story thematically after the first episode or two.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    All right, let's stick a fork in this space turkey. Season finale: "The Real Monsters". I've heard it said that Noah Hawley confessed to using ChatGPT to write this series, as a way of explaining Boy Cavalier's incorrect attribution of Clarke's Third Law. I think he might've used it to try to understand how tides work too. And our next contestant on the galaxy's favorite show Play Stupid Games is... We get a sitrep from Eins to show how screwed they all are. That seems like a rather glaring oversight, doesn't it? More of Noah Hawley's oral fetish. This is why this series is not scary. Nobody in this series behaves like they want to survive this. There's no fear or tension built by the monster if everyone is a Maximum Idiot who seemingly craves annihilation by the monster. OK, almost nobody. Credit where credit is due, Hermit's old unit actually seem like they want to live. ... what? Surprising lack of main character deaths so far... let's see if we can't bump those numbers up. Oh ho... I guess that's one we didn't see coming. Gettin' real tired of your Mary Sue BS, Wendy... Back to the beach? First... ugh. Second... UGH! I can't even call that hot garbage. It's more like a retaining pond of room temperature untreated sewage. They are clearly banking on getting a second season, and I don't think that's going to happen. So there's this non-ending with no significant plot progress, no closure, nothing in terms of interesting scares or even impressive practical effects. Just a bunch of PG-13 stock jump scares and pretentious nonsense. They clearly want this to be a big thing, like a huge threat to the planet or something, but we know nothing comes of it because Aliens is set 59 years after this and, y'know, Carter Burke and all don't mention half of Earth being destroyed by a horde of rampaging killbeasts and murderous synths. I'd say I look forward to Alien: Earth II: the Wholly Preventable Consequences of Idiocy... but I'd be lying.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Ward's seems to like it too. There was a press release today that the Dodge Charger BEV Daytona Scat Pack is one of Ward's 10 Best Engines & Propulsion Systems for 2025. https://www.wardsauto.com/internal-combustion-engines/electrification-in-full-force-on-this-year-s-wards-10-best-engines-propulsion-systems-winners-list Stellantis Media - Electric Attitude: Dodge Charger Daytona Earns 2025 Wards 10 Best Engines & Propulsion Systems Award The other honorees, for those who want the Cliffnotes version, are the: BMW M5 PHEV with the 4.4L turbocharged V-8 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 with the 5.5L twin-turbo V-8 Ford F-150 HEV with the 3.6L turbocharged V-6 Honda Civil HEV with the 2.0L inline 4 Hyundai Ioniq 9 BEV Lexus LX 700h HEV with the 3.4L turbocharged V-6 Lucid Gravity BEV Mercedes-AMG E53 PHEV with the 3.0L turbocharged inline 6 Nissan Leaf BEV
  8. Seto Kaiba
    You're not wrong... I'm just saying it's not the character's fault. 😜 Of course Favreau and Filoni bent over backwards to make Bo-Katan Kryze look good in The Mandalorian even at the expense of the show's own protagonist. Why? Because Bo-Katan Kryze is one of Dave Filoni's OCs from The Clone Wars. Same as season two's scene stealer Badass-By-Creator-Fiat Ahsoka Tano. Din stealing the show in The Book of Boba Fett is more a problem of Boba being incredibly badly written and boring. He's a bounty hunter who doesn't do any bounty hunting, a crime lord who does no crime, a ruler who doesn't actually rule anything, a clueless schmuck, and a Fake Mandalorian to boot.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    You misspelled "Dave Filoni" there. 😜 Don't go puttin' that evil on the character when it's the writers and creative director who can't go two minutes without forcing at least one callback to The Clone Wars into the story. Hell, they even brought back Jabba's chronically flatulent kid from The Clone Wars for an apparently significant role in the movie. (I can only describe him like that because chronic flatulence was literally his only character trait.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the end of My Dress-Up Darling S2 over lunch. This is just one of those shows where the season never feels long enough. Decided to take another whack at Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra and got quite a bit farther this time. It really is just Diet Overlord and it's not remotely shy about it either.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't the point of spending flipping great wodges of cash on the Disney+ Star Wars originals to give the Disney+ Star Wars originals movie-quality visuals? IMO, the trailer looks fine visually. It's just unmistakably a trailer for a kids movie. (Well, that and unmistakably an unnecessary coda to The Mandalorian's story full of Filoni-isms.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The HEMI is definitely not dead. https://www.media.stellantis.com/em-en/ram/press/the-legend-returns-2026-ram-1500-offers-5-7-liter-hemi-v-8-etorque-engine-with-proven-performance-and-capability https://moparinsiders.com/jeep-boss-confirms-the-hemi-v8-is-here-to-stay/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/chrysler/2025/08/07/jeep-will-bring-back-hemi-v-8-in-more-models-brand-ceo-says/85564696007/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=true&gca-epti=z118937p116450c116450e000000v118937b0056xxd005665&gca-ft=167&gca-ds=sophi That leaked back in March in Car & Driver. IIRC, it's been publicly confirmed 5.7, 6.2 and 6.4L HEMI are back in the lineup.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I made the mistake of not checking the runtime when I bought my ticket so I was at an 8:15pm showing too. 🙃 For what it's worth, Demon Slayer the Movie: Infinity Castle was engaging enough that I didn't think "Wow I've been watching this for a long time" and check my watch until the story started to drag in the second act of Akaza's extensive Tragic Backstory™️ at around the film's two hour mark. I guess it goes to show how much theater seating has improved that I wasn't uncomfortable in the slightest for the entire duration. Is it just me, or have anime films gotten longer? Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom was two hours, Overlord: the Sacred Kingdom was two and a quarter, and now Demon Slayer the Movie: Infinity Castle at two and a half. I feel like 90 minutes used to be the standard, or maybe that's just because most of the ones in my collection are compilation movies.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Just got back from seeing Demon Slayer the Movie: Infinity Castle. For better AND for worse, Demon Slayer the Movie: Infinity Castle is a two hour and thirty-five minute long episode of the Demon Slayer TV series. What I mean to say is that it shares the TV anime's tendency to punctuate its fights with extended flashbacks revealing the backstory of the villain(s) rather than work their history into the story in a more organic way. It wasn't so bad in the TV anime where those flashbacks were infrequent and maybe 5 minutes or so on average. Infinity Castle breaks up every fight with at least 2-3 flashbacks and the largest of them (Akaza's) is close on THIRTY MINUTES LONG. It dragged on so long that I had honestly forgotten the fight wasn't actually over and the immediate resumption of the fight on its conclusion was a bit of a shock. UFOTABLE did a fantastic job with the animation as usual. Its only real flaw is how the massive titular Infinity Castle backgrounds are an endless parade of tan and brown tatami mats, shoji doors, and wooden rails so every room feels identical and the color palette of the film as a whole is a flat brown except for the haori worn by the slayers. It does kind of show that it's only the first part of a series of films in that most of the characters have nothing to actually do in this portion of the story and get an obligatory line or two at most. It's really only Tanjiro, Zenitsu, Giyu, Shinobu, Akaza, and Doma who are engaged with the story. Nezuko's not even in the castle, Inosuke's... Inosuke-ing somewhere, and the rest of the slayers spend the entire film running around aimlessly. Shinobu's almost an advertised extra herself... The series big bad, Muzan, is also barely in the film despite the fact that this is his castle they're fighting in. Almost the entire thing revolves around Tanjiro and Giyu fighting Akaza (Upper Moon Rank 3), with a minor digression for Zenitsu of all people to have a moment of out-of-character Total Badassery...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Now that's some disappointing news.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    DanDaDan episode 24 has a bunch of different mecha anime references all crammed together thanks to the focus character being a sci-fi fan who uses nanomachines to create his own giant robot to fight the supernatural monster of the week. The visual design references a lot of Ultraman, GoLion, and Gundam with the giant robot Buddha having five cockpits and what are very obviously fin funnels. Some of his Called Attacks reference other mecha anime including Macross, like his Daedalus Attack at about 8 minutes in. (He even does Dai-Guard's infamously awful rocket punch.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Summer '25 is wrapping up... Betrothed to My Sister's Ex had a reasonably satisfying conclusion. Some good closure for the story after oh-so-much waffling with the evil parents getting their comeuppance for their various crimes. Secrets of the Silent Witch's penultimate episode is another good one. I decided to bite the bullet and buy the light novel to get more. Solo Camping for Two decided to try some actual character development for its penultimate episode, and it honestly fell pretty flat for me. Mainly because the protagonist has never really had any character traits beyond being an antisocial jerk whose only real interest seems to be driving into the wilderness to drink large amounts of cheap beer and eat canned food like a hobo. Dan da dan... y'know I've never figured out of it's meant to be DanDaDan or Dan Da Dan... are we really watching an Ultraman monster fight a giant robot Buddha with the Nu Gundam's fin funnels? You have to admire the audacity, if nothing else, even if it feels increasingly like the series is just throwing random sh*t at the wall to see what sticks. Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant had a predictably unremarkable ending. Not bad, but shockingly bland for a protagonist whose whole schtick is cooking. The Fall '25 simulcast lineup is being announced now too. https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/seasonal-lineup/2025/9/17/fall-2025-anime-crunchyroll Still a LOT of generic-sounding isekai titles in the Fall '25 simulcast season lineup. A Gatherer's Adventure in Another World, A Wild Last Boss Appeared, Campfire Cooking in Another World S2, Dad is a Hero Mom is a Spirit I'm a Reincarnator, My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's, Tales of Wedding Rings S2, The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess, and The Fated Magical Princess. Color me surprised that that hot mess Tales of Wedding Rings got a second season. That was an open air tire fire of a story. There are some titles of considerable merit and interest though. A Mangaka's Weirdly Wonderful Workplace seems to be another case of the manga industry documentarizing itself, albeit with a lot less ecchi than last time. Let's Play, a series about a video game developer whose first-ever game release is derailed by a terrible review from a famous streamer. I really want to see where they go with that one. One Punch Man season 3 promises to be amusing, if nothing else. Spy x Family season 3... what can I say except "Yes, please and thank you" and doubtless "Please sir, may I have some more?" at the end of the season. Tojima Wants to be a Kamen Rider promises to be interesting too. It's the story of a lifelong Kamen Rider fanboy who, armed with a fairbooth Kamen Rider mask, sets out to fight crime. Phrasing is dead. I stopped cold seeing titles like L'il Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right, Pass the Monster Meat, and This Monster Wants to Eat Me. Maybe I just have a filthy mind. Actually, no... I definitely do... but still. Phrasing. That first one's description sounds like the center of a Venn diagram of Rosario+Vampire and Actually, I am... and the second sounds like a series about some relatives of Laios from Dungeon Meals with a couple who are connoisseurs of consuming fantasy monsters.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    You did indeed call it... three weeks ago on August 27th, to be precise. 👍 That, IMO, is the sucker bet. Practically guaranteed to happen to prevent an outbreak.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Since Tesla's abominable safety record came up recently, this feels a bit relevant: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/09/tesla-model-y-door-handles-now-under-federal-safety-scrutiny/ The Office of Defects Investigation in the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is the latest national regulatory body to take up the question of whether the flush/retractable door handles used on Tesla vehicles (and on select models of other brands) meet vehicle safety standards in the event of a crash or a 12V bus failure. Similar regulatory probes are already underway in Europe and China, with the latter already floating discussion of a ban.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Alien: Earth's showrunners and writers did not understand the assignment. Xenomorph XX121 has never been less scary. The mature one spends the first three episodes mugging for the camera before being killed with the cutting arm from an office paper cutter by a girl/synth with no combat experience or training, and the second one is... The other four groups of critters really don't seem to be engaged in the story to any significant degree. The main source of menace seems to be the obligatory Horror Movie Stupidity that most of the cast contracts at one point or another, and that's not exactly scary because you can see it coming a light year away.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    McCoy just likes to snark. It's his main character trait. One of the very first things we're told about Kirk waaaaaaay back in TOS "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is that the man was a certified workaholic with no time for romance in his life. Gary Mitchell described him as "a stack of books with legs". He was such a workaholic that he famously had to be tricked into ordering himself to take shore leave. We do meet a few of his ex-girlfriends in TOS, but it's clear in almost every case that the relationship was short and ended rather badly. Most were in his academy days, when he wasn't quite as career-focused. For instance, the infamously awful villain of the show's final episode Janice Lester, hostile prosecutor Areel Shaw, and hostile baby momma Carol Marcus. In pretty much every case, Kirk's relationships were short and fell apart because he's Married to the Job. Most of Kirk's "romances" onscreen are him either under duress, being manipulated, or attempting to manipulate the femme fatale of the week. Like when he was given a false memory of being in a relationship with an enlisted crewman in "Dagger of the Mind", hooked up with Minamanee under the influence of amnesia in "The Paradise Syndrome", the one-sided crush Miri had on him in "Miri", Kodos's daughter trying to get close to him so she can assassinate him in "The Conscience of the King", the Scalosians attempting to use him and other Enterprise crew as breeding stock in "Wink of an Eye", etc. The man had a grand total of one functioning relationship, and that's one that happened offscreen after Star Trek VI... a woman named Antonia that he met after retiring. Unless you count the shippers (which Kirk makes a meta joke about by calling the mind meld their "first date" in the "New Life and New Civilizations") who see Kirk and Spock as a couple instead of heterosexual life partners. Then it's two. Strange New Worlds's Kirk is on-brand with the TOS depiction... a man generally too busy to be interested in romance, and definitely not the kind of guy who goes around hitting on women the way Abramsverse Kirk did. (The whole introduction of Kirk back in "Charades" was a massive refutation of Chris Pine's dimwitted fratboy arsehole take on Kirk.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, especially in this era of streaming where a series might have as few as six episodes and may end up wasting a nontrivial percentage of its runtime setting up story hooks for a second season that probably isn't coming. (e.g. The Acolyte) I agree, it would have worked better if there had been more build-up to it. As it is, it comes out of nowhere and the explanation is hot nonsense. The writers determination to have a "pure evil" villain is just silly, and there are so many plot holes and highly unscientific arguments in Batel's massive leaps of logic that it sounds more like she's just a crazy person. It essentially turned into a whole plot reference to the first Doom movie... with the whole "genetically engineered into an angel to defeat demons" schtick. That part was never the problem. We've had that kind of weird temporal shenanigans before... like TNG "All Good Things" with the anti-time anomaly. Kirk's womanizing is massively oversold by fans. I've been rewatching the remastered TOS with friends who've never seen Trek before, and while Kirk has several old girlfriends he's almost never actually hitting on anyone. I was actually pretty happy SNW acknowledged and then dismissed the meme, with Kirk's concern for Uhura being mistaken for hitting on her and him acknowledging he's in a complicated/messy relationship with his future baby momma Carol Marcus. (Kirk in the '09 movie is based more on meme Kirk than the actual one in TOS.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming that Expanded Universe lore is canon. In most franchises, it wouldn't be. Oh boy, "Emergence". Here things go emerging again. We've got idiocy, we've got negligence, we've got corporate malice... it's basically the Xenomorph's superbowl. Seems like they've settled on "Strange Brew" by Cream for their opening reference in the last couple episodes. Did they run out of money to license music for the sake of one on-the-nose lyric? I would like to credit Smee with the first actually-believable reaction by a person in this work. Every story where immortality is a fixture of the plot needs to have that moment where someone is reminded forcibly of the important difference between functional immortality and complete immortality. It's one thing to be The Ageless, it's quite another to be impervious to physical harm. The Hybrids are the former, not the latter. Well, OK then. In most Human cultures, murder is considered a dick move. So we have a new narrative problem. Who do you root for when absolutely everyone is a maximally sh*tty person? We had a protagonist until a minute ago, now we just have some kind of Villain Battle Royale. I'm gonna have to say I'm joining Team Horrible Space Monsters. Somehow, they're the least horrid people in this story. Time for some unnecessary digressions! We get a closeup of the weapons that the Prodigy troops are carrying. One looks to be a forerunner or variant of the pulse rifle seen in Alien: Romulus and Alien 2. Another seems to be the same M134-based minigun seen in Predator. This was meant to build tension and then deliver a sharp shock, but it falls flat because the outcome was so incredibly obvious and cliched. You can't do horror effectively if everyone in the story is behaving like an idiot with no sense of self-preservation. It stops being scary and starts being unintentionally funny. You can tell that this is a dock by the rusted generic shipping containers just sitting places. That's a thing that docks have, right? Do Star Trek-style transporters exist in Alien? Because this episode has a lot, and I mean a LOT, of people just popping right TF outta nowhere the minute it's dramatic to. Someone really loves that scene at the end of Goldeneye where Bond and the girl discover the patch of grass they were making out on was like the one patch of grass in eyeshot that WASN'T a dude in a ghilli suit and three helicopters nobody noticed appear as if by magic. Well... decisions were certainly made. Not good ones, in my opinion, but decisions nonetheless. I'm going to go ahead and call it now.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    For two more, in fact. Paramount announced that the series had been renewed for a 4th and 5th season back in June. The fifth season is slated to be the show's last, similar to what was already done with Lower Decks and Discovery. It has also been indicated that the final season will be shorter, comprising only six episodes instead of ten. They announced a day or two ago that season 5 is going to be shorter than the others, with just six episodes. Apparently Paramount originally wanted to end on a movie, but showrunners pushed to continue the episodic format. There is a little bit of speculation that the short season five is another case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, diverting funding to the Starfleet Academy series. EDIT: According to the showrunners, the reason season 3 ends the way it does is it was originally written as a potential series finale in case Strange New Worlds was not renewed for another season.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Even then, if you think about it, Armus's evil is still subjective. The species that created him had to decide what traits of theirs were negative and inclining them to destructive behavior and physically removed those aspects of themselves somehow. It's narratively convenient that their definition of "evil" matched Humanity's. It'd be nice if they didn't have him get over it too quickly. Then again, I guess that kind of depends how much of a time skip there is between season 3 and season 4. If it follows on right away then he should definitely still be broken up about it. If there's a couple months in the middle, it'd be weird if he were still totally devastated.
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