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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Poor writing and fanfiction aren't completely synonymous... but the vast majority of fanfiction is badly written, and poor-quality professional writing has enough in common with it for it to pass as a synonym in common use. Having been directed to some of what I'm told are the "choicest cuts" of Star Wars material by friends who are fans, I'm not sure that's a good thing and IMO it says more about the iffy quality of a lot of Star Wars's first-party offerings than anything. I agree with your general point, though my take as to the cause is reversed. To me, it feels like The Acolyte's writers are trying to write a more mature story than Star Wars's usual fare by injecting some complexity and some shades of grey into the normally rigid and inflexible Good vs Evil dynamic that accompanies any story involving the Jedi. They're just going about it in a very halfhearted and desultory way because there's only so far they can go with it before they lose the audience. The Jedi in The Acolyte are still the wise, noble, selfless, heroic defenders of truth, justice, and the Republic way™️ they are in prior works. All that's really been done to make them less saintly in this story is that their characterization is slightly more grounded, so they come off as officious and arrogant. The Witches are still very much depicted like the dark side-worshipping cults of previous stories. They're still paranoid and aggressive while espousing a "Dark is not Evil" philosophy at odds with how the Force actually works and a "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!" worldview. All that's been done to soften their evilness is that they're shown to love their children and their leader outsources maniacal laughter to another witch. The result is that neither performance comes off as convincing because they're trying to add nuance to factions that are normally one-dimensional by nature of the Force's inclination to moral absolutes. IMO, it's more a limitation of the source material. The Jedi are expected to be serene and collected warrior monks. That means a "good" Jedi performance is nevertheless a flat one, like playing a Vulcan on Star Trek. Dark Side-aligned groups like the Sith or Witches are the opposite extreme. They're expected to be emotionally volatile and quick to anger. Classic uncomplicated melodramatic villains. That still makes for a stilted performance because they can't exhibit a believable emotional range. On this, I am not sure I agree. If anything, Osha's desire to be her own person with an identity separate from that of her identical twin sister Mae's is pretty standard identical twin behavior.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That would be Shirow Masamune's own personal tastes showing through in an adaptation of his work. Motoko's outfit from Stand Alone Complex season one is a slightly modified version of one of the tamer outfits she wears in his sequel to the original manga Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface. Though that version came with a sleeved crop top-like jacket similar to what she wears in season two instead of a leather jacket. I'm not sure if you've read the original Ghost in the Shell manga or its sequels, but Shirow Masamune's work started out on the "sexy" side with a fair amount of fanservice and that aspect of his work only got more pronounced with time. Once he quit doing serialized work to focus on being an illustrator his self-published work became increasingly salacious until it crossed the line into literal hardcore pornography... though even Ghost in the Shell and Man-Machine Interface had explicit sex scenes that were removed from the western releases and reprintings.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The Jedi forget they have superpowers with monotonous regularity... I even noted that the reason... ... is because Sol seemingly forgot he can use the Force to levitate things. Mind you, I think the answer is right there in the series. They assumed (correctly) that the girls had been instructed by their parents to try to fail the test, and asked them what they truly wanted. Osha wanted to be a Jedi, Mae didn't. If Mae had actually managed to fool the Jedi into thinking she didn't have Force powers, Sol would probably have rejected the idea that Mae could be the assassin once Osha was exonerated. (The lie was never going to work anyway, because we see the Jedi take blood samples for midichlorian testing.) I believe my exact words were... 😉 Dumb sh*t - often plot-convenient dumb sh*t - happens constantly when Force users are involved. What happened with Qimir is way less egregious than the prequel trilogy's Jedi Council spending so much time around Palpatine and never realizing he was the Sith Lord they were looking for, or even that he could use the Force... something that the prequels established could be tested for objectively and scientifically with minimal effort. At least what happened with Qimir fits the idea of the Jedi as arrogant and sloppy in this era. They were about to start rifling around in his brains to find answers and stopped just because he started volunteering information. (I even commented on how stupid it was that Sol offered to let him off with a warning when his crime was, at the very least, being an accomplice to the very murder they were there to investigate.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... the hell? So it's not a business decision? It's some kind of contractual limitation preventing them from releasing the OVA in a standalone form? That's weird.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how... vocal... Mae is in this episode when it came to her disapproval of the Jedi and her sister's desire to join then, what makes you assume the Jedi had to be fooled into not recruiting Mae? When we see Osha being tested, Indara and Sol can tell right away that she's deliberately trying to fail because her family doesn't want to be separated from her. Sol then directly asks her what she wants, and after a brief discussion she says "I want to be a Jedi". They almost certainly put Mae through the same thing and almost certainly got the opposite answer, that Mae didn't want to leave her family and become a Jedi. So far, I'm not seeing the series abandoning logic... at least not any more than Star Wars usually does when the spacemagic of the Force is involved. It is undeniably poorly written though. Like others have said, it has that definite fanfic vibe. The funny thing is I wasn't even looking for it... ever since I watched The Acolyte trailer my YouTube recommendations have been full of Star Wars lore videos for some reason. Prerequisite-wise, it's definitely less onerous than Ahsoka requiring me to watch seven seasons of a mediocre cartoon and read three novels from the 80's to figure out why anyone would be insane enough to give Anakin an apprentice and why Elon Musk joined the Blue Man Group and violated a space whale in order to make stormtroopers even less effective by zombifying them. Like I said a while back, it's real easy to tell that The Acolyte was written for fans not for casual audiences. The reference density just does not support casual viewing. The two Tales of titles were the same way.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Master Indara's group of Jedi were on Brendok surveiling a coven of witches, apparently for an extended period of time. Long enough for the witches to have noticed them in turn and been monitoring their whereabouts. Sol also makes a remark that suggests they were surveiling specific people on suspicion of criminal activity. That's official investigation territory, meaning they were almost certainly sent there by the Jedi Council and would be expected to report their findings. Trying to lie to a committee made up of telepaths who can sense deception is not a winning strategy to begin with, and pointed questions will surely be asked about where Sol came by that freshly traumatized child he's calling his new apprentice and why the child is traumatized. Osha might not know what specifically happened, but she knows she saw the aftermath of a mass casualty event and that's not the kind of news you can keep a lid on. Fair, though it doesn't quite track with how the Jedi in The Acolyte started this series explicitly on a mission to apprehend Indara's killer specifically so the Jedi Order could make an example of her because the killer was (wrongly) believed to be an ex-Jedi. The Jedi seem to want to show the galaxy that their all-powerful unsupervised magic lawmen are self-policing... which may or may not have something to do with the Republic's having built a prison specifically to hold renegade Force users a few hundred years earlier. I watched a lore video earlier that explained the vow that Torbin took, and if his goal was to cover up that he participated in something horrid that is the wrong way to do it. That vow he took is apparently a penitent's vow that a Jedi only takes if they've screwed up so epically that they believe they are incapable of functioning as a member of the Order. If his fellow residents of the temple know he's taken that vow (and they do) then they know he's done something particularly heinous. It's basically the Jedi version of a nobleman being forced to take holy orders and become a cloistered monk to escape some public dishonor.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Whatever it is that happened on Brendok sixteen years before The Acolyte's present day, it can't have been that bad. After all, none of the four Jedi who visited Brendok were tried by the council and sent to The Citadel for incarceration. None of the four were expelled from the Jedi Order either... like what happened to Ahsoka Tano and Bariss Offee. Indara was already a Master, but both Sol and Torbin were subsequently promoted. Torbin was promoted twice. He was a padawan sixteen years ago and he's been a Master for something like ten years by the show's present day. Sol was promoted from knight to Master and is allowed to teach the children in the main temple on Coruscant. That's probably not something you do if you're guilty of the kind of heinous criminal act that only suicide can atone for. My guess is they're feeling guilty for something which probably isn't actually their fault, because Star Wars requires the Jedi to be the embodiment of Lawful Good. Probably because Mae was very clear about not wanting to go, and there's probably some law against straight-up kidnapping as a form of recruitment.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The movie was subs-only, AFAIK, when it was released in the west. Only the OVA version was dubbed.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... when all is said and done, The Acolyte is still Star Wars. Its cosmos is underpinned by a higher power that maintains and rigidly enforces a simplistic Light is Good vs. Dark is Evil dichotomy on its adherants. The Jedi are on the side of Light and therefore Good, and their opponents are on the side of Dark and therefore Evil. For that reason, I suspect we won't be seeing any real shades of grey from The Acolyte. The worst the Jedi are likely to get up to will likely not go beyond "Good is not Nice", while Dark Side users like Mae and her master remain the familiar overdramatic card-carrying villains we've already seen they are. Value for money, yeah... it's not worth it. Unless you have small children.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    If I'm reading this correctly, and as it is in Chinese there is a possibility that I am not, this looks to be an advertisement for a Macross convention or other gathering at a shopping complex in the Tianhe district of Guangzhou, China.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I was so thrown by the fact that the Wookiee was wearing clothes that I completely missed that he also had a shaved head and a topknot. That part is normal for Star Wars. Bottomless pits without any kind of safety rails seems to be a galaxy-wide engineering tradition.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    New episode just dropped... and the title's the overused word I loathe the most in all of Star Wars: "Destiny". Looks like the writers were in a mood to get all that pesky exposition out of the way so Mae can get back to posing like an idiot and talking like an edgelord. I know this is an incredibly trivial nit to pick, but why does every character who appears in a flashback always have to have exactly the same haircut as a child that they do as an adult? I don't know anyone who kept the same haircut for their entire life. Can I just say how unnatural a clothed Wookiee looks? For real. I guess I'm so used to seeing Chewbacca go around letting it all hang out that seeing a Wookie wearing more than just a bandolier and a smile just feels weird. I suppose it's a nice bit of continuity that we see the Jedi use the same testing methods here that they used on Anakin in The Phantom Menace. All in all, it's a backstory dump an entire episode long and yet it doesn't feel like it added anything substantial to the story. It confirmed Mae has always been at least a little bit of a psychopath and why Sol and the twins all believed one of them had died, but that's about it. This is the TV episode version of the meeting that could've been an email. Tuesdays at 9pm Eastern (6pm Pacific).
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Kid tested, Commissariat approved!
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, you're likely to get some character figures out of it at the very least... Good Smile seems to be one of the sponsors. (Also, we just sleeping on that pun I threw in there? Racy figures for a racing series?) That we do... though that was also never in any doubt considering her very first race saw her disqualified for a rules violation and something like 1/3 of her total career has been some form of disqualification. Now that they've gone and said that the AIs that've been outperforming her all series are technically not even competent racers, the win that they'll hand Rin at the end of the series is going to feel extra unearned... like how her only prior decent placement was because she was blindly following the instructions of the AI.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the latest episodes of Re:Monster, Chillin' in Another World, and I was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince while I was picking up a car... Chillin' in Another World is still cute but substance-less. The other two are just unapologetic trashfires... it says a lot about I was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince that even the protagonist is bored with the direction the story has taken.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Let's be honest, there was no right choice there because either choice had terrible implications for the story as a whole. HIGHSPEED Etoile's writers had to choose between: Revealing that V-ZEN's AI "Ami" no longer needed Rin Rindo and that AI drivers could be developed to the point of being competitive against top-tier living drivers, making the show's protagonist completely unnecessary. Revealing that V-ZEN's AI "Ami" was inherently limited in ways that mean it can never be a truly competitive driver outside of solo time trials, keeping Rin Rindo in the car and in the story by shooting several huge holes in other parts of the story. They went with the latter because it's transparently obvious they're hoping to sell racy figures of the predominantly female cast. By revealing that AIs are limited in ways that mean they can never truly be competitive against living drivers, it raises some awkward questions as to why several teams are relying on AI drivers that have no chance of winning. That also kind of kills the idea that Rin isn't blindingly incompetent, since she has consistently placed below AI-driven cars throughout the series and an AI almost certainly wouldn't be racking up disqualifications for rules violations and failing to start/finish races (never mind totaling a car). Basically, they established that AI drivers are incompetent... but that they still would've been a better choice than Rin Rindo.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    They went with a "Yes, except no." answer... Team V-ZEN's AI system "Ami" is using both her driving and the driving of her competitors as training data. The story then comes up with an excuse for why it can't simply take her job, which basically boils down to the AI system being limited by its programming to avoid taking actions that would put human safety at risk. So they can absolutely crush it at time trials, but their safety first attitude towards strategic driving means they will lose the race every time.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That topic has come up a few times, usually in connection with Circle FANKY's Battleships of the Galaxy doujinshi and its questionable assessment of the ship's interior layout as a fanmade work. I'm afraid I don't remember offhand who it was who posted it... but it was at least a year ago.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    As a casual Star Wars enjoyer, breaking points like this are a bit beyond what I can properly understand. I've never been invested in the deep lore of the Expanded Universe so most of what gets the fandom upset goes right over my head. I'm rather happy to just take these stories as they come and weigh them on their individual merits. (I'll spare everyone the engineer's rant about diverging vs. collimating beams.) Most of what I see when I look at the flaws in Disney-era Star Wars is the new heads at LucasFilm struggling to get to grips with what their audience wants from Star Wars. They're still at the point of building stories around existing characters and set pieces they know (or think) the fans already like instead of considering what makes a Star Wars story fun and engaging. The Acolyte is hardcore pandering to fans of the Jedi, but it's kind of dull because the Jedi themselves aren't relatable or interesting characters. As long as everyone's doing what's right for them as an individual, it's all good. 👍
  20. Seto Kaiba
    True, Uwe Boll's gleeful incompetence in the director's seat made him the undisputed king of awful adaptations. His schlock's usually unwatchable because it's bad on every level. Andzrej Bartkowiak's Doom was undeniably a bad movie, but it was a fun bad movie because it was still competently produced despite every single creative decision that went into it being wrong. Borderlands looks like it's shaping up to be another one of those competently produced, but creatively tone-deaf, adaptations that could best be described as "entertainingly wrong".
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Man, they weren't kidding... the prequels really DO have a meme for everything! Seriously though, there seem to be plenty of Star Wars fans willing to find and acknowledge both the good and the bad in pre- and post-Disney material.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    No, I'm more of a sadist. 😅 As to why I haven't dropped HIGHSPEED Etoile... well, I'm something of a completionist by nature and dropping a series partway through has never really felt right to me. Those rare occasions where I have dropped a title partway were because the story did something so heinous, offensive, or stupid that I couldn't bear to look at it anymore. Some of my favorite titles are shows that had a rough start but later hit their stride and became something amazing, the most recent example being Star Wars's Andor, so there's also an element of me hoping one of these scrubs will surprise me. Even a badly written title can sometimes be so gloriously insane that it becomes entertaining in an entirely inappropriate way, like what happened to Birdie Wing. The few anime titles I've dropped partway were mostly because they took their fanservice to genuinely creepy and questionable places (e.g. Strike Witches, Stratos4) or because the story became such a dumpster fire I simply couldn't pick it up without cringing. The only title I've dropped this year so far is Tadaima, Okaeri... which I dropped mainly because the show's story comes off as an excuse plot wrapped around the author's fetish and because the series fumbles its own premise so hard chasing that fetish that it's actually kind of offensive and laughable at the same time. I'm on the fence about Mushoku Tensei, since its otherwise capably-written isekai fantasy story has several truly revolting moments of sex offender behavior by its protagonist that've left me seriously thinking someone ought to call the cops on the light novel's author. HIGHSPEED Etoile is unmistakably bad, for sure. It's not So Bad It's Good or So Bad It's Awful... it's just kind of there doing a bad enough job to be bland and insipid and boring while not actually being offensive. If I had to pick a word for it, it's misguided. It could've been an interesting racing anime if the writers had any idea how to make racing interesting, but instead it's a story where racing happens and the protagonist isn't really engaged with it. I'm watching a disaster unfold in slow motion, and the suspense is killing me... especially since the studio animating it is the same one that did the 3D animation for Initial D and Initial D Second Stage. It's Studio A-CAT's first ever original work, and probably their last if this keeps up.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Each version of the story has its virtues and its flaws... I'm just glad that we're finally going to start seeing global releases that are on par with what the Japanese domestic market gets in terms of feature content. Hopefully this and the Macross II Kickstarter run by Animeigo set the tone, and we see a similar effort made for the releases of Macross 7, Macross Zero, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta. 😀
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Spring '24 is limping into the home stretch... I have to admit, I'm kind of upset with Bartender: Glass of God. Its final story arc predictably decided to delve into the faux-philosophical advice-giving bartender's own trauma, and it decided to do so by trivializing depression and suicide. Kinda wondering how many of the characters in this show are alcoholics... most people don't have a list of dozens of cocktails they want to try, or go bar-hopping multiple nights a week. Oddly, The Irregular at Magic High School seems to have become one of the more interesting titles this season thanks to the latest story arc having a very different focus from the previous two. Instead of focusing on Tatsuya being the most broken MFer around and curbstomping literally everyone who looks at him funny, they're focusing on worldbuilding and the larger setting. There's some actually pretty good stuff coming out of it now related to the international balance of power based on strategic magic, the implications that magic's importance to the military has for education, the pitfalls of relying on conventional/standardized measures of academic/athletic ability to measure a person's worth and how those can miss exceptional talents, and even the ethical and practical concerns of autonomous unmanned weapons as a substitute for living soldiers. Seasons one and two did not thrill me, but this has me about ready to start looking up the light novel. At the very least, HIGHSPEED Etoile remains a completely irredeemable turd... there's something to be said for its consistency, if nothing else. This latest episode confirms explicitly that Rin's useless and that they would actually do better to take her out of the car and let the car's AI drive. After she gets in an accident and passes out during a qualifying round, the car's AI driving autonomously without her sets new lap records. 🤣
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Called it... this is going to be Doom movie levels of bad. 🤣 That kind of makes me want to see it, just to be behold a beautiful disaster unfolding.
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