Seto Kaiba

I had not, but I ordered mine from CDJapan and they can be a bit slow about sending that kind of notice out. It looks like CDJapan is showing "early January 2023" for a release there. On paper, it was a great idea to set the Master File book's release for the same time as the home video release of Absolute Live!!!!!!. It was probably a real bad idea to depend on the folks at SoftBank/GAGraphic to get it out on time tho.

OK, feeling a bit thrown by Thus Spoke Rohan Kishibe. Even though it's still David Production, the art style for the OVA is very different from Diamond is Unbreakable. So much so that Rohan looks like a completely different character... or a different person cosplaying as him. EDIT: Well, that was shockingly short. Just four chapters adapted, each into their own episode, and unusually for a Jojo series none dealing with stand users at all... it's four separate paranormal incidents unconnected to stands, three of which don't actually involve Rohan at all.

I've been putting it off, but I'm getting ready to start This Spoke Rohan Kishibe, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part VI: Stone Ocean, and maybe Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. My hopes for the latter aren't very high. I tried the game it's promoting, and found it pretty mediocre with the bugs being far and away the most entertaining part. Kinda mixed feelings about Stone Ocean too... more because I already know how it ends via the manga than anything and the ending's pretty bittersweet. Still hoping for David Pro to announce they'll continue into Steel Ball Run and the recently-concluded Jojolion. (IIRC, the 9th and final part, Jojolands, is supposed to start serialization in February.)

In the novelization, Max was still in the New UN Forces in 2059 and was part of the joint NUNS and SMS reinforcements coming to the Vajra planet to support the Frontier fleet. That's not personal connections at work, that's Max wielding his authority as the commander of the Macross 7 fleet's New UN Forces to get a trial production version of the latest VF during a state of emergency. That authority didn't go with him after he retired and apparently started living on Listania. (Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah asserts that the Macross 7 fleet government was one of the emigrant governments that purchased the rights to build the VF-25 for their local New UN Forces. One of the example paintjobs provided is the one for the Macross 7 fleet's special unit "Emerald Force", who supposedly carried out the operational evaluation testing on the VF-25 for the fleet government.)

Eh... like the earlier reference to The Witcher: Blood Origin, that's a bit of a false equivalency. There's quite a bit of difference between producing an adaptation of an existing work like The Witcher or The Boys and producing a for-all-intents-and-purposes original work based on the fragmentary backstory of an existing work like Blood Origin or The Rings of Power. That aside, whether straying from the source material is a good thing or not is absolutely on a case-by-case basis. Having an actor who's constantly at loggerheads with the project's writer(s), director(s), and producer(s) during production is a problem regardless of whether or not some of their feedback helps the production. Nobody wants to work with someone who's being an arsehole on the job, which is why Netflix's The Witcher production crew don't seem to be at all broken up about Cavill being let go and recast. It's a big enough issue when it's an actor behaving badly, but when it's a producer - as Cavill will be on this proposed WH40K series - who's being an arsehole on the job it has the potential to have serious impacts on the production. The concern, which I think is a fairly valid concern, is that if your passion for the project makes you difficult to work with then it'll have negative impacts on the project regardless of how well-intentioned the difficult behavior is. Cavill's supposedly very passionate about WH40K... will that passion make him a liability for the production? Time will tell, but it's not exactly an unmerited concern.

I did. In fact, I said pretty much exactly that in the part you quoted. An inadvisable assumption, given that it's demonstrably incorrect in the only other case where an Elysion-type's home branch is identified. Max, Exsedol, and the Macross Gigasion are from the Xaos branch on Listania, a planet in the Brisingr globular cluster first mentioned in the 6th episode of the TV series. Given what's said about the Brisingr globular cluster's remoteness, the most probable answer is that these ships are from other planets in the Brisingr globular cluster. Well, yeah... the Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure movie is a separate and alternate version of the Macross Delta story as per the franchise's usual approach to movies. The Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! film is unusual in that it's a film with an original story, but's a sequel to Passionate Walkure. In the series, the Macross Elysion was the only ship of its type. In the movies, we see very little of any planet in the Brisingr cluster. The first film very briefly stops off at Ionideth, but spends most of its time on Ragna and Windermere IV with a brief stop on Al Shahal. The second film starts on Windermere IV, spends most of its runtime in deep space, stopping very briefly at Alfheim on its way back to Windermere IV. It's not surprising that we don't see any other Elysion-type ships just sitting around. The only planet they actually visit for any significant length of time that probably had one is Al Shahal, and they spend most of their time there in the deep desert well away from civilization. (Of course, the cynical realist would note that the reason these ships aren't seen parked anywhere beforehand is that they were pulled out of the writers arse for the fleet scene.) I'll have to check my print copies of Macross E to see if it actually notes where Pipure is. I honestly don't recall if it was one of those planets that was "relatively close" to Brisingr or actually in Brisingr. (Or if it was one and retconned into being the other, which has happened before.) Bear in mind, Xaos is a mega-conglomerate rather than a monolithic megacorporation. Instead of being one massive corporation that controls multiple subsidiary companies in one specific industry and directly-related fields or services like Bilra Transport and its wholly-owned subsidiary SMS, it's a loose alliance of multiple smaller corporations that're all owned and controlled by the same holding company. Unlike SMS, who can be counted on to be anywhere that its parent company Bilra Transport manages interstellar commerce because they were founded as a security force for Bilra Transport's shipping, Xaos's different business interests aren't necessarily guaranteed to all be anywhere one of them is because they operate in different (and sometimes unrelated) industries. Xaos's original business was a fold communications firm, which you could reasonably assume would be found in a lot of places, but less universally-relevant businesses may be present only in specific regions. It's possible the PMC and Idol Management division are only present in certain regions like the Brisingr cluster... especially if there's stiff competition in some markets from a better-equipped, more established rival like SMS.

Well, the older ones maybe... the ones who were with the game through 5th and 6th when Matt Ward was doing his thing. How used to disappointment fans are with licensed materials would depend which category you're talking about. Video games, sure... the franchise has had too many minimum effort microtransaction-heavy mobile games and very little in the way of quality since Dawn of War and Fire Warrior. Not that that's stopped fans from engaging in girlish squeeing over the announcement of Space Marine 2. It's partly a jealousy thing, since Warhammer Fantasy got a number of actually-good games in that period that even developed factions which were previously fluff-only in the actual (defunct) Warhammer Fantasy game. Other media is generally more positively received. The novels and comics are typically well-received by fans. There are the occasional exceptions, like the novelizations of video game titles and the few stories that do too much character shilling, but on average they're typically greeted with enthusiasm if not vocal excitement. The much-criticized decision to squash fan films in order to promote official animations initially led to frosty reception of new official animations, but even those have warmed considerably as Games Workshop has started putting more effort into it.

Considering standard New UN Gov't policy is to seize any factory satellites discovered and repurpose them, it's pretty much a given that it's a captured one that was either retooled already or in the process of being retooled.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing that. I'd been thinking of the display where they show the ships firing on the Battle Astraea, which only showed eight. Twenty or so would make the most sense. While only about a dozen planets are named and/or visited in the Macross Delta TV anime, the Brisingr globular cluster supposedly has around twenty inhabited planets within its 1,000 light year diameter. Macross Delta copies very VERY heavily from Macross Frontier, so it would make sense that the Macross Elysion effected the same transition the Macross Quarter did between TV anime and compilation movies: going from one-of-a-kind to "every government has one". It makes you wonder which planet the Megasion was from. Since the Elysion was effectively the headquarters and sole ship of the Xaos Ragna branch, one can assume the same's true for the Megasion and the others. Whatever planet that ship was from probably lost its entire Xaos branch in one barrage from Sigur Berrentzs. In the Macross Delta TV anime, the Xaos branch on Ragna was depicted as the largest branch and de facto (if not de jure) headquarters of the company's PMC and Entertainment divisions in the globular cluster. They never mention or allude to the existence of any other ships of the Elysion's type, and when we see Xaos's forces regrouping to retreat from Brisingr it's only a handful of escort warships and the Macross Elysion. The mega-conglomerate Xaos was founded on Earth, though the PMC division and the Tactical Sound Units have only ever been depicted or mentioned operating in the remote regions of space around the Brisingr globular cluster. The remoteness, isolation, and difficult navigational circumstances of the Brisingr globular cluster are often listed as major factors in the economic difficulties the cluster as a whole faces, and major contributing factors in Windermere IV's war of secession in 2060. It's worth noting that after the Xaos Ragna branch is forced to flee into deep space, they never mention the possibility of receiving reinforcements from outside the cluster. Whether this is because there just were none to be had because they only operate in that region or because there was some contractual or legal obstacle is unclear... though given that Xaos's entire involvement in the Brisingr Alliance's war with the Kingdom of the Wind was illegal in and of itself, so I can't see that stopping them. While SMS was strongly implied or overtly stated to be a very large organization from the word "go" given that it was founded to protect the galaxy-wide shipping of its parent company Bilra Transport, Xaos's PMC division didn't become a large outfit until the movies where they suddenly had dozens of ships instead of just the one.

To be fair, that seems to be the new normal for entertainment news. Streaming-first productions seem to do their utmost to control what information about the production reaches the ears of the press and, through them, prospective audiences. It's only after production wraps or there's a significant shakeup like recasting or moving the series to a new platform that unfiltered news starts to come out.* We likely won't hear anything except carefully-vetted press releases about this proposed Warhammer 40,000 series until after the release is over and done with. (Not sure where you're goin' with the "No, except yes" thing... you say to take it with a grain of salt and then acknowledge that it's true in the very next sentence.) We'll see what comes of it. Hopefully there'll be some other producers able to exert a moderating influence on the proceedings. That always seems to produce the best results when the lead creative's a bit eccentric or too passionate. * Like how we only learned what a troubled production Star Trek: Discovery was after Netflix took a hard pass on Star Trek: Picard and didn't get a complete picture until Netflix successfully escaped its contract with CBS and the show moved to CBS All Access.

Launching a new Macross fansite for my translation work and lamenting the lack of any decent information for this ****ing movie. It's downright depressing how little info there is for Absolute Live!!!!!!. We're so hard up for data we have to get our info from a Master File book... assuming that doesn't get delayed again. >_<

It'd certainly fit with the presentation of Xaos in the Macross Delta TV anime. In that version, it seemed like Xaos spent every penny they had on the Macross Elysion and the five VF-31 Siegfried customs. An impression that was only reinforced by the next development in the story after fleeing from Ragna with the Island Jackpot was that the Ragna branch ran out of operating capital almost immediately and could no longer afford fuel, ammunition, and other necessities. Not to mention later remarks about how it'd take more than year's worth of the branch's total operating budget to remove and replace all of the Epsilon Foundation-provided hardware from the Macross Elysion. It'd be less explicable in the movie version, where Xaos seems to have exponentially greater resources and fields at least ten* Elysion-type capital ships in the Brisingr globular cluster as opposed to the single ship that they had in the TV anime. Especially when, in the second film, they had access to a factory satellite while they were regrouping and rearming after retreating from Windermere. You'd think that, with the limited number of personnel and trial production VF-31s at their disposal, they'd make up the difference with Ghosts. Esp. if there's something like the Super Ghost on the table, which significantly exceeds even the performance of their ludicrously expensive, ultra-high performance ace custom fighter. * Xaos fielded three Elysion-type capital ships in Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure and eight Elysion-type capital ships against the Battle Astraea in Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. With the Macross Megasion having been sunk by friendly fire from the Var-controlled Macross Grasion in Passionate Walkure and Absolute Live!!!!!! confirming that the Macross Elysion was still too badly damaged to participate in the conflict with Heimdall's forces a year later, that would put the lower bound on the number of Elysion-type warships Xaos possesses in the region at 10 in 2068. (This assumes the Macross Grasion was one of the seven unnamed Elysion-type ships in Absolute Live!!!!!!. If not, that bumps the lower bound to 11.

... a very fair point. It's especially strange given that the Master File book that is currently the ONLY source of specs for the new designs in the movie indicates those Super Ghosts have almost twice the mobility performance of the allegedly top class VF-31AX. Flood the zone with those, and they should have made light work of the Sv-303s. Now that you mention it, yeah... In hindsight, it's actually pretty weird that we don't see the Brisingr Alliance NUNS and Xaos using Ghosts during the war with the Kingdom of the Wind. Being short of cash is pretty much THE defining trait of both the Brisingr Alliance itself and the Ragna branch of Xaos. It's quite literally the reason the VF-31 exists... they developed it locally as an economic self-stimulus with an eye towards export sales. The General Galaxy QF-4000 Ghost has performance exceeding that of any 4th Generation Valkyrie at 1/3 of the cost of the relatively conservative VF-171. On cost-performance alone, you'd expect the Brisingr Alliance NUNS to be making fairly extensive use of the QF-4000 Ghost in the various planetary defense fleets. I guess that was probably a bit of necessary idiocy for the Macross Delta plot to work. The Kingdom of the Wind wouldn't have gotten very far with its invasion if the Brisingr Alliance New UN Forces swarmed them with fully autonomous Ghosts.

For what it's worth, while I'm going to hold off on having any real expectations of the project until we know whether they plan to develop an original story or adapt one of the more accessible novels. That being said, I'm kinda with the pessimists on the subject of Cavill because he's a long-time fan. It's often not a good thing when fans end up in creative control of the very property they're fans of. It tends to lead to mindless self-indulgence in the creative process. Maybe fans are just a little gunshy after what happened when Games Workshop hired Matt Ward in 2002.* Cavill's a big fan of The Witcher too, and the reports about his departure from the series claim it made him a royal pain to work with because he would argue with the directors and writers about deviations from the source material. * For those unfamiliar, Matt Ward is probably the single most-hated writer to ever touch Warhammer Fantasy or Warhammer 40,000. He penned several army books for both games that were unbalanced to the point of being literally game-breaking, but is more often remembered for a laundry list of terrible retcons that tended to turn his favorite factions and characters into unstoppable Mary Sues around whom the entire galaxy revolved. Especially what he did to the Ultramarines and Grey Knights, making the former the Gold Standard to which all Space Marines aspire and the latter an army of Godmode Sues who suckerpunch demigods on the daily.

I'm only a few episodes into part 2, but so far it's been excellent for me.

I have to admit, for a fanbase that's been wishing for some mainstream exposure for so long I'm kind of surprised how overwhelmingly negative the expectations for this series are on the few WH40K fan communities I'm on. The inevitable nerdy gatekeeping aside, a lot of fans seem to be pretty worried about the implications. They're either worried that Cavill will use his Executive Producer credit to ride roughshod over production like he reportedly tried to do on Netflix's The Witcher, or they're worried Amazon will step in and require that the series be toned down to a less-than-authentic level to be more appealing to general audiences.

Oh, so much. Sunrise apparently tailored The Witch from Mercury to a younger audience after being told that "Gundam is for old people" by a school tour group, and I've kind of started to suspect that they took it perhaps a little too personally. There've been quite a few occasions in the story where I've been left with the distinct impression that their goal changed from "make Gundam relevant to today's youth" to "mock today's youth for not 'getting' Gundam". Spy x Family, on the other hand... this show's just a gem. I'm getting caught up on it, and I honestly don't think there's been a weak episode yet and I'm into the second season. It's funny, cute, engaging, quirky... the premise itself is out there enough to be distinctive. That said, it really feels like a stronger term than "Mama Bear" is needed to describe Yor. She has that same energy that made Fullmetal Alchemist's Izumi Curtis the thing that the toughest soldiers in the country told scary stories about, but she's even more superhuman and has an actual child to protect. Even "Mama T-Rex" hardly seems strong enough. She can scare trained attack dogs just by growling back...

It does a bit, lol. The Fall 2022 season kind of limped to the finish line without much interesting to say for itself. My Hero Academia is still My Hero Academia... once it moved past quirky and self-referential hot takes on the nature of superherodom it kind of fell into the dispassionate void of "Too bleak, stopped caring". Mob Psycho 100 III managed to be pretty unremarkable. I'm the Villainess, so I'm Taming the Final Boss had a strong first couple episodes but limped in to the finish line with a weak and disappointing storyline. Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun! is doing a story arc that isn't filler, but sure as hell feels like it. Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! was consistently amusing, but they didn't get far enough with the story for the second season to have any kind of payoff unless you count the blatant reference to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Mobile Suit Gundam: the Witch from Mercury seems to be on a mission to settle the dispute over whether Gundam AGE or Reconguista in G is the worst Gundam series by being worse than both. From its totally phoned in story to the upsettingly toxic relationship the protagonists have, the series is just an endless parade of disappointment and halfassed writing. The season's standout for me was The Raven of the Inner Palace. It would've been the standout for its solid, character-focused drama even in a strong season... but in a weak one like this it feels like it won simply because nobody else put in the effort. Never got a chance to get to Lupin Zero or the new Urusei Yatsura. Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time continues to be a shockingly low-effort short series except for one moment of absolutely dreadful, I-can't-believe-you-did-that, moment in which it parodies Goblin Slayer!. Bibliophile Princess is kind of a minimum-effort mockbuster mashup of Ascendance of a Bookworm and My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! and not really worth the time it takes to watch it... and most of the rest of the season is full of isekai shovelware shows that are just increasingly derivative knockoffs of shows from previous seasons. The Winter 2023 season has at least a little of merit. A new Trigun series, Trigun Stampede, a second season of Bofuri, Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro! season 2, a continuation of the Sorcerous Stabber Orphen remake, and a second season of The Vampire Dies in No Time.

Proper discussion etiquette would be for you to make an evidence-based argument not an ad hominem. Just FYI. To clarify the matter, the point I'm making here is that you have the causal relationship backwards. As attested to by Kawamori's own Design Works book, the general body plan and transformation for the VF-1 Valkyrie were carried over from the earlier "Breast Fighter" design that had been developed for Battle City Megaroad. It's well attested-to that Kawamori drew some stylistic inspiration from the Grumman F-14 for the final version of the design when its concept was changed from a Gundam-inspired late 70's SF design to something more grounded. Kawamori didn't set out to design a robot based on the F-14. Rather, when he sat down to rework the 70's SF-inspired Breast Fighter into a more grounded aesthetic what he got was something that bore a strong resemblance to the F-14 because of many design choices that were made when the Flight Suit design evolved into the Breast Fighter a year or so earlier. Notably, the orientation of the cockpit, the way the wings folded during the transformation to robot mode, and the separation of the engines (because the pelvis was dead-center between the engines in the Breast Fighter). In short, it wasn't "I want to make an F-14 robot". It was "Hey, when I draw this in a modern aesthetic it kinda looks like an F-14. Let's explore that direction further." You can see several early drafts that bear a resemblance to his more SF design for the VF-X-3, as well as some that bear a resemblance to the BAE Hawk (esp. in the cockpit and the mounting for the gunpod). Don't blame me for the stuff Kawamori put in his own book. He's the one who mentions the resemblance the VF-1's nose has to that of Sukhoi's Flanker.

You joke, but Macross: the Lost Two Years mentions (and shows) that Meltrandi pro wrestling was a popular sport and the art of it shows Battroids refereeing matches.

Existing material does indicate that he did, for a time, live as a miclone. He returned to his giant size and reactivated his role-specific enhancements for fear that he would lose the information stored in his memories.

Depends on your definition of "utterly ruinous". The Earth Unification Government was already spending a huge percentage of the entire planet's GDP on a military build-up to resist a potential alien invasion. Macross Chronicle and other official media generally do not acknowledge the F-14 Tomcat's circumstances in any way other than to mention they were used by the UN Forces during the Unification Wars and that they had been received upgrades/updates based on OTM. This lack of detail can probably be chalked up to the F-14's relatively minor role in Macross Zero. One article published in Great Mechanics DX does note that there would have to be some divergence from the real world timeline for F-14s to still be in service in 2008, but goes no further than that. For its part, Variable Fighter Master File's unofficial/non-canonical history offers the explanation that the Earth UN Forces officially put the brakes on plans to retire the F-14 sometime in July 2001. The decision was apparently driven by difficulties in procuring sufficient quantities of the newly introduced F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the Navy variant of the new F203 Dragon II (an unofficial variant exclusive to Master File). A modernization plan for the F-14 was launched to keep the fighters viable, and in 2002 this plan intersected with the new VF Development Plan and led to "dozens" of mothballed F-14s being restored and reactivated for duty with OTM improvements for field testing as part of early VF-0 development.

Kawamori's Design Works book mentions the F203 Dragon II bears a resemblance to the F-15... but I don't think I've ever seen it said that it was supposed to BE a F-15 originally. That's a common misconception... or perhaps it would be fairer to call it an oversimplification. Macross was not originally a parody. Both the initial pitch Genocidas and the later Battle City Megaroad series concept were conceived and developed as serious sci-fi dramas in a similar style to 1979's sleeper hit Mobile Suit Gundam. After Artmic (under the name Wiz Corp.) bought in as sponsor, Artmic insisted on changing the direction of Battle City Megaroad from the serious space opera Kawamori et al. wanted to make to a Gundam parody series. Once the two companies had a falling out and Studio Nue found a new sponsor in the Big West Advertising Co., the series changed back from a Gundam parody to a serious drama. Studio Nue does credit a specific 1980 film as having significantly changed the direction of the project... but it's not The Final Countdown. It was another, rather more famous, film that came out in Japan a few days earlier: Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back. That film, and specifically the Imperial AT-ST walker, was what ultimately spelled doom for the initial Genocidas concept because many of the mechanical designs for Genocidas were reverse-jointed walkers. Other designs from Genocidas, including the Flight Suit which was to evolve into the Breast Fighter and then the Valkyrie, were carried forward into the next series concept. The F-14 was not the inspiration for the VF-1.

We can rule that out with a fair degree of confidence because we have Kawamori's draft designs going back to early 1980. As I said, it's largely a coincidence that the VF-1 ended up looking like an F-14. The design of the VF-1 Valkyrie originated from a transformable powered suit design that Kawamori drew for a series pitch titled Genocidas that also originated the GERWALK concept. It was a big, bulky, ~4m tall powered suit which could transform into a not-at-all realistic fighter mode vaguely reminiscent of the Martin Marietta X-24B. A little over a year later in March-April 1981, the design had evolved into the Breast Fighter: a giant robot with the VF-1J's visor and a body plan largely resembling the final VF-1's but retaining the Gundam-esque aesthetic. Its transformation resembled the final VF-1's as well, but the actual shape of it was more in line with the earlier Genocidas draft and bears a fairly strong resemblance to the (much later) Zeta Gundam Wave Rider. Later that year, the Breast Fighter design was revisited and reworked into a less sci-fi aesthetic while retaining much of the Breast Fighter's design and transformation, producing a fighter that looked a lot like a miniature F-14... though with aspects explicitly noted to be drawn from other aircraft like the F-15, Su-27, and BAE Hawk. You can see this design progression in the first section of Kawamori's Macross Design Works book. He did probably get the Jolly Rogers-inspired paintjob for the VF-1S from The Final Countdown, but the F-14-like design is mostly a coincidence of its development from the earlier designs that already set a similar pattern. (The Genocidas designs in particular predate the release of The Final Countdown in Japan.) His enthusiasm for military aviation is a well-noted matter of record. That second one... the Tomcats and other old aircraft were hauled out of mothballs and upgraded or prevented from being retired and upgraded to make up for the shortfalls in other areas due to losses and the like in the Unification Wars.

Emigrant fleets are, by their very nature, mobile things... it's only natural that one emigrant fleet wouldn't necessarily know the exact positions of every other emigrant fleet when they mostly only trade with the planets and fleets closest to them. They are retirees... their appearance in Absolute Live!!!!!! is Max and Exsedol after they got bored in retirement and took another gig to have something to allay their boredom. Like how a lot of retired cops and career soldiers take corporate security jobs because the working conditions are vaguely similar. The PMCs in Macross seem to hire a lot of retired NUNS officers... occasionally even ones who received bad conduct discharges (like Ozma). ... we see exactly three, all of whom are the crew of the same old Monster Destroid. The presence of three former crewmates who decided to retire together hardly makes the fleet a "Space Florida"... no matter how much Basara's antics could fall under the umbrella of "Florida Man". After the First Space War, the New UN Forces got into the practice of selling off disarmed military equipment to civilians for its secondary utility in things like construction work. That practice caught on enough for a market for VFs as pleasure and sporting craft developed, followed by actual sports for them.