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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    In all likelihood, it was either animated for the film and cut for some reason or animated for the original theatrical trailer.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    We - the viewers - have no real insight into the so-called "real" Macross continuity. Nobody does, really. Why? Because it doesn't actually exist in any sense. The notion that all Macross works are fictionalized dramatizations of a "true" Macross history is Kawamori's chosen/favorite metaphor for explaining to fans that Macross runs on broad strokes continuity. "Broad strokes continuity" is, of course, an author's polite way of expressing to his or her audience that "It's my story and I'll do what I want". The past, in any given Macross series, is whatever Kawamori wants it to be. He has no qualms about completely changing the significance of events from past Macross works to suit his new story.* He'll leave stuff out, add new stuff in, some characters get forgotten and others get the "remember this new guy who was definitely with us all along" treatment. The metaphorical waters are further muddied by the existence of fictionalized dramatizations of past events within the context of individual Macross shows as well (e.g. the 2031 film Do You Remember Love?, the 2045 TV serial Lynn Minmay Story, the 2058 movie Birdhuman) that are all presumably taking their own liberties with history in general terms and specifically to the version of the backstory in that Macross series.** Characters in-universe have their perceptions of history colored by these fantastic dramatizations of history's events, including Basara Nekki, Mylene Jenius, etc. Really, the closest you're going to get to an actual yes or no answer is the official series chronology maintained by Big West in official publications like Macross Chronicle. For that specific purpose, the answer to your question is "No" because that official chronology bases its First Space War history on the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series and the events of Macross: Do You Remember Love? are an in-universe dramatization that debuted in in-universe theaters in 2031. * As seen with the significance of Macross VF-X2's events changing in Macross Frontier and Macross the Ride and the story of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! implying several technologies were banned that demonstrably were not so in previous works. ** For instance, the version of Do You Remember Love? seen in Macross 7 contains scenes not present in the real world film Macross: Do You Remember Love? including Max and Milia's wedding.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oh god, Inner Light. That was one fantastic performance by Patrick Stewart. Just absolutely amazing, and impactful enough that they kept calling back to it in little ways as the series went on.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    True, though the other Rebel leaders at least have opinions. About all that can be said for Mon Mothma in that scene is that she's physically present. She contributes nothing to the discussion on either side and in the end refuses to take a position at all until someone else literally makes the decision for her. In Andor, she doesn't get off the dime until Luthen basically cuts her out of the loop entirely by removing the need for her financial support and in Rogue One she refuses to participate in the debate at all and at the end of it declines to take any position unless the counsel is in unanimous agreement on it. That's not leadership. That's not even being a figurehead. That's just a refusal to actually make a decision. Eh... maybe, but then again maybe not. As I understand it, at this point in the story the Senate is already a nearly powerless and functionally irrelevant body that has ceded almost all of its authority to the Emperor and his various representatives. Mon Mothma's counting on her office and her (incorrect) belief that the Emperor needs the Senate in order to govern the galaxy to protect her, but she isn't doing anything particularly brave or useful. She's not exactly delivering firebrand oratory about the evils of the Emperor here. She's delivering a politely worded and unbearably dull formal critique of Imperial policy decisions to a handful of deaf ears in a mostly empty chamber. That's not exactly daring. You get the distinct impression the Emperor is probably quite happy to allow her to carry on because he knows her rhetoric is pretty much toothless. She'll make a show of her indignation where nobody will see or care, and then quietly return to her embassy and do nothing. The Emperor probably has her pegged as one of those classic politicians who's more interested in being seen to be concerned about an issue than actually working on a solution... and if so, he's only very slightly off the mark. You have to actually be engaging in some kind of resistance to inspire resistance. Based on Andor and Rogue One, Mon Mothma's inspiring little besides Luthen Rael's next migraine.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Erm... well, I don't mean to sound rude, but I fear you may have missed what I was getting at. To me, as an outsider to Star Wars fandom watching Andor, it makes no sense for Mon Mothma to somehow be seen as a major leader (if not THE leader) of the Rebellion. Luthen Rael has been the one shouldering all of the actual risks and burdens of forming, funding, supplying, and coordinating a network of Rebel cells and agents to resist the Empire. He, not Mon Mothma, is the one doing all of the actual leading. For her part, Mon Mothma doesn't seem to have actually done anything for the Rebellion except cut them a large check sometime before the series started. Her idea of rebellion seems to start and end at making pretty but ineffectual speeches to an empty Senate chamber as if that were somehow going to magically lead to a regime change. When she talks to Luthen, she seems deeply offended by what actually rebelling against the Empire entails. You say she's a figurehead... and I could agree with that if we were talking about the Senate. She's a politician with no real power, authority, influence, or support. In the Rebellion as we see it in Andor, she's not even that. She's just a naive rich person whose relevance to the cause seemingly never extended any farther than her now-useless checkbook. It's really bewildering why the Rebellion would want her even as a figurehead given how utterly uninspiring and devoid of support she was in the Senate. The only way I could see her inspiring Rebel troops would be the way she inspires Luthen... listen to her, then do the opposite of what she says. That's the age old dichotomy... in practical terms, the difference between a "terrorist" and a "freedom fighter" often boils down to little more than which side the writer sympathizes with. If you win, you're a freedom fighter. If you lose, a terrorist. For the audience, anyway. There are some hints that there's a much darker side to the Rebellion in a few points like mentions of "Bothan spies" dying in large numbers to extract the information about the second Death Star. The problem is the audience is seeing the Rebellion through Luke's story and he's pretty naive and innocent himself, and his attention is on his involvement in the cosmological struggle between Good and Evil being driven by the Force. He's dealing with moral absolutes because his story is driven by a self-enforcing moral absolute that controls destiny itself (AKA "the Force").
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's not an artifact of the translation process... it's in the original Japanese audio tracks for Macross Plus: Movie Edition. I checked. For whatever reason, the powers that be decided to record new dialog for the movie that changes Isamu's Project Super Nova callsign from "Alpha One" to "Eagle One". The various subtitled and dubbed releases of the film then faithfully carried that change over into the subtitles and dub audio tracks. It's used consistently through the entire film. I just can't seem to find anything in the print materials that says why.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    There's an official English translation of the Mobile Suit Gundam: the Witch from Mercury short story "Cradle Planet". https://en.gundam.info/about-gundam/series-pages/witch/music/novel/ It appears to sink most, if not all, of the grimdark theories about the Gundam Aerial and the series as a whole that've been circulating since the last two episodes aired.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, I dunno... taking two episodes to build up to it gave them some time to focus on the other story arcs they've been building in the background. Sprinking brief segments of Cassian's time in the Imperial labor camp among those other stories allowed them to depict the dehumanizing conditions and sheer soul-crushing monotony of his time there without bogging down in it. As to Luthen, I'm confused as to how it was Mon Mothma and not Luthen who ended up the leader of the Rebel Alliance.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, The Witch from Mercury has been INCREDIBLY heavy-handed with its symbolism and references. That makes is pretty predictable as long as you're familiar with the plays and mythology they keep referencing. Now, this is a well-reasoned argument... but it misses a fundamental and critical fact of the setting that completely changes the nature of the situation. What determines status in the world of The Witch from Mercury? To a certain extent, you're correct that the corporations of the Benerit Group are a Spacian "old boys club" that resents upstarts stealing their thunder. What your assertion missed is that 150+ corporations of the Benerit Group aren't just competing with outside corporations in space and on Earth, they're competing with each other too. The Benerit Group ranks the 150+ corporations that operate under its umbrella in terms of their overall profitability. The higher a corporation's position is in that ranking, the more influence it wields within the Benerit Group and the higher the social status of its leadership, employees, and the students it sponsors to the Asticassia School. Even without that business about the "Holder" who has the right to marry Delling Rembran's only daughter and apparently become his heir apparent, these corporations are rivals jockeying to seize as much power as they can within the Benerit Group because (according to Gundam Ace) the Benerit Group wields more power than the actual government. Now, consider for a moment: Why does the Asticassia School put such importance on a dangerous extracurricular activity like dueling with Mobile Suits? The Witch from Mercury never actually bothers to explain it, but the answer is fairly obvious if you think about it. It's not just to foster an "enemy of the week" format to drive new gunpla sales. Asticassia is a school established and run by the Benerit Group, and the student body is made up of children of executives from Benerit Group corporations and a handful of promising talents sponsored from the lower ranks of those corporations. The dominant corporations in the Benerit Group - Jeturk, Peil, Bullion, and Delling Rembran's own Grassley - are all Mobile Suit developers and manufacturers. Competition drives innovation, and being able to demonstrate that your product is superior a competitor's in a public setting is good marketing. The duels are corporate dick-measuring contests. Pride, and the reputations of the scions of corporate leadership, ensure the corporations all field their latest and greatest Mobile Suits in the duels to prove their dominance over their rivals and scope out the competition's latest offerings. This struggle for preeminence among the Mobile Suit manufacturers drives innovation in the absence of a war. So not only are these corporations going to scrutinize these duels extremely heavily because it's a chance to examine and benchmark the competition's latest offerings, they all have an excellent motivation to cry foul if anything even slightly untoward turns up in the cousre of the duel. They have a vested interest in undermining their rival corporations within the Benerit Group in order to increase their market share and their influence within the Benerit Group. They also have a good reason to avoid using illegal technology like GUND Format and to report anyone who does, since the Mobile Suit Development Council's organization Cathedral won't hesitate to jail violators, scrap offending Mobile Suits, Jeturk might be offended by having an upstart sponsored by the low-ranking Shin Sei corporation show up at Asticassia and spank the reigning champion in a hilariously one-sided match, but as far as the administration is concerned that's not just an enormous boon... that's the system working as intended. Mind you, Jeturk would naturally want to cry foul in light of having just gotten its sh*t wrecked by a nobody from nowhere, but because the duels are scrutinized so heavily they had hard evidence that something was amiss and that led directly to the MSDC inquiry about the Aerial's probable use of the banned GUND Format. Blowing the whistle on Shin Sei was a way to restore lost prestige and destroy a rival at the same time by leveraging the mechanisms of the regulatory bureau dominated by the Benerit Group. And because Peil is one of four major players in MS development and a major power in the Benerit Group, they have even more incentive to do so and so do a host of other companies including Grassley and Bullion. Peil's loss is their gain and bringing proof that Peil is engaged in banned research is an ironclad way to undermine them using the MSDC. "Unethical" is debatable. Ethics change with cultural values and we haven't seen enough of the culture to know how most of what we've seen is aligned what we're seeing is with the values of the period. The one thing that has been explicitly branded as unethical in the extreme is the development and usage of the GUND Format because of what it does to pilots. "Cheating" is also debatable. It's noted by the Dueling Committee that duels are not fair and not meant to be. They're contests between two people and all the resources they have at their disposal. That's why the code duello they enforce is so weirdly worded. The same likely applies to the corporations as a whole. They're probably playing within the bounds of the rules the Benerit Group and MSDC have set, otherwise they'd have been raked over the coals by Delling and Cathedral already. Illegal, on the other hand, is more objective. Admittedly, the dumbest part is you'd think someone like Delling would have noticed that the Aerial is just [...]
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, this one's doin' the rounds again. Yeah, for whatever reason the Movie Edition of Macross Plus changed Isamu's assigned callsign for YF-19 test flights from Alpha-1 to Eagle-1 but didn't change Guld's YF-21 callsign from "Omega-1". No idea why, because they had a theme going with the OVA version having "Alpha-1" and "Omega-1". Every bit of creator commentary I have on hand just goes on and on about the digital animation technology they used. Isamu does briefly go by an "Eagle" callsign in the OVA version though. It's when he's in his VF-11 on approach to New Edwards, and calls in a sighting of an unknown aircraft (the YF-21) using his assigned callsign of Eagle-107.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Climaxes don't come much more explosive than "One Way Out". I'm half tempted to check that my eyebrows are still on. Now that is some damn fine writing and acting on display. If they'd had that level of talent on display in the sequel trilogy then movies 7, 8, and 9 would've made roughly all the money. This is headed towards displacing Rogue One as my all-time best Star Wars title.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    True, but the beauty of the Ghost X-9 was that it was able to operate fully autonomously... and with human levels of unpredictability. One of the major casualties of the Sharon Apple Incident was the idea of a fully-autonomous unmanned fighter. The New UN Gov't felt the technology wasn't ready for primetime and pulled the plug, leading to another generation of less capable but still eminently deadly semi-autonomous unmanned fighters like the AIF-7S Ghost used by the Frontier fleet's New UN Forces and the customized version LAI loaned to SMS to protect Luca Angeloni.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Of course, the other big question is long-term sustainability. When you start drawing comparisons between the conditions on the Macross and regular cities, the comparison is already skewed by the fact that the cities you're comparing the interior of the Macross to are meant to be comfortable places to live long-term. The city inside the Macross was an ugly compromise meant to give the population of South Ataria somewhere to live and something to do while the Macross made the return trip to Earth by conventional means. Neither the ship nor the island had the resources to sustain those people long-term, so the ship had to stop and raid the proverbial (and literal) pantry at Mars Base on its way home in order to keep the people fed and watered and then take on an additional quantity of supplies when it was briefly sent back into space. The city inside the Macross was a cramped, unpleasant affair that beat a poke in the eye with a sharp stick or a slow death from asphyxiation in an air raid bunker inside a small island-turned-asteroid at the fringes of the solar system. It wasn't a place you would want to live long-term... which is probably why the first thing the ship's population did when they got back to Earth was throw a raucous party outdoors. Ships meant to be long-term sustainable are MUCH larger and/or have much smaller permanent populations. Long-term sustainability for a Macross-class ship meant a population of about 10,000 according to Macross Chronicle. The Megaroad-class was 50% larger than its predecessor and devoted most of its structure to a cityscape, but for long-term sustainability the population was constrained to about 25,000 at launch. Even then, the living conditions those early emigrant ships offered were uncomfortable enough in the long term that rioting on emigrant ships occurred often enough for the New UN Government to launch a program dedicated to developing countermeasures for it (the Sharon-type AI). The quest for improved quality-of-life for space emigrants meant building ever-bigger, ever more-advanced emigrant ships that offered progressively more of the comforts of home. There was the City-class that offered highrise living to a population of ~350,000 and a bevy of auxiliary ships joined by the Milky Road system allowing emigrants to literally get outside and go somewhere else when the cityscape started to pall. That was followed by the larger and more advanced Mainland-type and then the complete ecosystem-in-a-bottle that was the 5th Generation Island Cluster-class where the New UN Gov't pulled out all the stops and started maximizing comfort by overbuilding the hell out of its emigrant ships until they were launching at barely a tenth of their nominal capacity while still carrying millions and millions of people. This is true... though it's worth noting that the Federation Starfleet of Star Trek justifies this in much the same way as Macross's emigrant fleets. Most of the Starfleet ships we see in the various Star Trek shows and movies have such small crews relative to their size because they're designed for long-duration deep space exploration and absolutely packed to the rafters with all of the scientific equipment, lab spaces, workshops, fuel, and miscellaneous supplies needed to operate away from support for long periods while ensuring their crews have at least a moderately comfortable standard of living. Even then, we periodically see that rank still hath its privileges in terms of living space with a few ships depicting communal bunkrooms for enlisted personnel and junior officers doubling up in small cabins.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I can understand why Star Wars fans might struggle to enjoy Andor. Star Wars up 'til now has been almost entirely dominated by simple, straightforward narratives that depend heavily on action and are driven (literally and figuratively) by in-universe self-enforcing moral absolutes. Good things and good people are aligned to the Light Side of the Force. Bad things and bad people are aligned to the Dark Side of the Force. The audience doesn't have to invest any real time, energy, or thought into understanding the characters. It doesn't have to establish why the good guys are good and bad guys are bad, they just are. The Chosen One rises up to defeat the forces of Evil because Destiny Says So... which means they can skip directly to the exciting laser gun battles and swordfights between space wizards. It's storytelling at a level appropriate for all (read: "young") audiences. Andor is a much more mature story. It's looking at the why of the Rebellion and of Cassian Andor's involvement in it. Through Cassian Andor's eyes, we're seeing the cruelty and oppression of the Empire that begins to drive people normal people who were previously indifferent to, or ambivalent about, politics and the government to take action against a profoundly unjust system. We're currently watching Cassian's personal journey from being apathetic about the system of oppression he finds himself living under to being angry enough about the injustices he's seeing (and being subjected to) that he's willing to do something about it. It isn't a Good vs. Evil story with cosmological consequences like the nine main movies. This is Cassian Andor's journey from dissolute young man to driven revolutionary and, in parallel, the evolution of the Rebellion from a double handful of tiny, squabbling terrorist groups and ousted democratic ideologs to a serious and united movement bent on overthrowing an autocratic government. It's slow, yes, but right now it's gradually building towards critical mass and the eruption of organized rebellion. The drama's not basic, it's just not high stakes yet. After all, we're not yet to the point of "Cassian Andor, Rebel Intelligence". Right now, we're watching "Cassian Andor, Increasingly Pissed-Off Private Citizen".
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Not to mention that both the "real" Macross and any recreations for in-universe docu-dramas were literally making the ship appear bigger on the inside through the strategic use of holograms. Holographic false skies concealed the fact that compartment ceilings were practically scraping the rooftops in most places, giving the illusion that there was only the one layer of city when in fact it was stacked 3-4 layers deep in places.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming that this means the bio-neural chip was never installed into Sharon... Sharon Apple would have given a very visually-impressive performance at the New UN Government's 30th anniversary of the First Space War armistice. "Her" career would likely have continued for some time, to continue the development and field testing of the Sharon-type AI. Assuming no issues cropped up in future testing, the Sharon-type AI would have been released to emigrant fleets for its intended purpose of population management and emergency backup command and control. Each emigrant fleet would have a Sharon-type AI supporting its government and defense forces, able to assume control of the fleet's defenses if an emergency deprived the fleet of coherent human leadership and acting to help the populace remain calm and unstressed during the emigrant fleet's mission in deep space through a mixture of entertainment and (in emergencies) mild audiovisual manipulation. (The system was originally conceived as a way to assist emigrants in coping with the often stressful living conditions aboard early emigrant ships and prevent the riots that occasionally occurred as a result.) The Ghost X-9 would have probably been selected as the Next Main Fighter of the New UN Forces and begun to replace the VF-11 in that capacity in the early 2040s. Some emigrant governments would likely have purchased the VF-19, VF-22, or another 4th Generation VF either to supplement the Ghosts or out of distrust for them. First contact with the Vajra would have driven the New UN Government to pursue an even more advanced and powerful Ghost to effectively combat the Vajra, leading to the development of something akin to the SV-303 Vivasvat becoming the New UN Forces 5th Generation main fighter. PMCs like SMS and Xaos would find themselves out of a job, since Ghosts are significantly less expensive than manned Valkyries and there would be no need to hire PMCs for their expendability in order to test next-gen manned fighters in live combat. The Second Unification War may or may not happen, since manned forces would be unlikely to be able to keep the pace with unmanned fighters and emigrant governments would have been able to provide a lot more support to Vindirance without the need for pilots and it would be harder for Latence to manipulate the VF-X Special Forces if the forces consisted of unmanned fighters and easier for Vindirance to obtain support since you wouldn't have to convince pilots to defect. The Jamming Sound also wouldn't be nearly as effective, since autonomous Ghosts can dogfight at levels far above humans. Macross Galaxy's plans would hit a significant snag, since there would be much less justification for cybernetically-enhanced soldiers with fully-autonomous unmanned fighters as the standard. However, SMS wouldn't be there to stop them since they were on Frontier mostly so Richard Bilra's private army could protect his interests and conduct testing on the anti-Vajra VF-25. Ultimately, the Vajra may end up massacred by swarms of high-powered unmanned fighters when they attack the New UN Gov't. Macross Delta largely wouldn't happen. Without demand for Fold Quartz to power ISCs, its value would be a lot less and Windermere IV would likely have found it a good deal less worth going to war over. Never mind that the Aerial Knights would have been absolutely mulched by unmanned fighters that are immune to Var syndrome.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    ... to be accurate, we see how one family lives in the city and it's over the restaurant that is their place of work. That is not enough to extrapolate the living conditions of everyone else on the ship. The same can be said for the soldiers, since we only ever see officers quarters, and most of those being senior officers quarters for top-ranking personnel like the CAG and the ship's Captain. The movie version, of course, is its own thing and an in-universe movie to boot. Its depiction is likely the city section of a Macross-class mass production type meant to hold only about 10,000. Realism is strained a bit, but it's not nearly as bad as you make it out. That kind of depends on interpretation of individual shots, esp. once they've installed a holographic sky that makes it impossible to tell where the ceiling actually is. The military base is on the large side, but it's also a fairly densely populated thing by nature. The official art that's been published suggests that the areas where the ceiling wasn't practically brushing the rooftops were few and far between. Not just that, they built into every available space they could get including module articulations and airlocks, which is why they had such trouble with the transformation initially. Your premise also kind of ignores that the entire island these people were on wasn't much bigger than the ship and the entire city these people were already living in amounted to maybe 4 square kilometers counting the space occupied by the ship.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Given the ruthlessly economized nature of practically all Zentradi equipment, it strikes me as extremely unlikely that the ancient Protoculture would have engineered the motherships with a nature park the size of Milwaukee that recreated the conditions on their homeworld if they weren't going to have personnel aboard those ships on a regular basis and for long durations. If they were just popping in every now and again, you'd expect they'd just stay aboard the ships they came on, which were doubtless engineered with far more in terms of creature comforts than a Zentradi warship. And this has what to do with what now? Also, not a great example since this does actually work in terms of the ship's internal volume and it's well attested-to that the ship itself is mostly hollow... which enabled them to get all those people in there in the first place. (Not to mention it's also well established that it was a very suboptimal situation and the ship really didn't have the resources to sustain the population it was carrying... and that the mass-production type scaled its population back to around 10,000.) Mind you, this runs into the problem of the average person's inability to grasp the sheer scale of these ships... or even of our much smaller contemporary supercarriers. Few people have access to manmade structures large enough to be comparable. My workplace, for instance, is one such structure. You could park eight Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers in it and have room for three or four more if you parked them in the courtyards. It's square footage is approximately equal to just the footprint of the Macross (~501,700 square meters), and even with over 15,000 people and several hundred cars in it it's still pretty much empty.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Plenty, by all indications. The Birdman just messed with Sara's perceptions so she would direct it in battle, the actual combat direction appears to have been coming from her. The Fold Evil on Uroboros was being controlled by Colonel Todo. These weapons weren't designed with cockpits arbitrarily, they were designed to be piloted. Considering how ruthlessly the Protoculture economized everything else about the Zentradi's ships and equipment, it seems unlikely they would order such a thing be constructed in Zentradi fleet motherships unless they intended to actually make good use of it.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Really, the Gundam franchise as a whole kind of abandoned the entire notion of caring about serious storytelling about ten years back when Sunrise decided to see if its fans would accept a blatant, old-school, half-hour toy commercial in the form of Gundam Build Fighters. The Witch from Mercury's writing isn't quite that patronizing (yet), but the series feels very underdeveloped. It's not a good look when your writing is so sloppy and poorly planned that the only way for the story to continue is for it to break its own rules immediately after it established them for the audience. The last two episodes of G-Witch require over 150 extraordinarily wealthy and well-connected people with seemingly infinite resources who have been carefully scrutinizing everything that's happened in the story thus far to fail to spot the very thing they've been looking for in an already highly-scrutinized, regulated, televised public event... twice. TBH, I suspect a lot of the show's problems have a single root cause. It seems a fair number of the creative decisions being made in G-Witch are motivated by attempts to combat the perception that Gundam is for "old people", after Sunrise staffers got a nasty shock from an honest school tour group who told them they don't feel Gundam is relevant to them. Watching the series after learning that, you can practically see the Sunrise staff racking their brains in a messy conference room trying to figure out what appeals to "The Youth". It feels like Sunrise might've missed the point entirely. The cast are all students? Fine. That's relatable to teens, I guess. The cast is composed almost exclusively of spoiled, indolent children of the ultra-wealthy who attend Space Hogwarts where they learn of nothing except matters related to giant robots because that one industry drives the entire economy somehow and spend their days idly gambling on duels between students and harassing each other over differences in social status. Might just be me, but I don't think that is terribly relatable to teens. It actually kind of feels like mocking them and calling them sheltered brats for saying Gundam isn't relevant anymore. It's every bit as insane as Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, where an ultra-wealthy man set up a vast boarding school on a remote island to teach the finer points of a children's card game to a new generation of young people because a children's card game is somehow a spectator sport more important than politics or the economy. (And yes, I fully appreciate the beautiful irony that I was the one to make this comparison). Where G-Witch differs is that it takes itself completely seriously where Yu-Gi-Oh! GX was fully aware of how ridiculous its own premise was and engaged in ironic self-parody and lampshade-hanging at every opportunity. The worst part is she's a transfer student. She was attending some other school and apparently learned nothing there either. She's practically an idiot savant when it comes to Mobile Suit piloting, but she's completely inept at literally everything else and it seems like her mother Prospera might be too as she apparently sent her to Asticassia without any kind of preparation or any of the support that the rest of the student body takes for granted.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Now, that was true up to a point... but even if we ignore clearly-armed constructs intended for Protoculture use like the Birdman, Fold Evil, and Sigur Berrentzs, the Protoculture did not have the luxury of leaving their defense exclusively to their clone armies of Zentradi once the Supervision Army emerged. They had to take a direct hand in their own defense because their Zentradi forces were hamstrung by the directive "Do not interfere with the Protoculture". Mind you, there is some evidence to suggest that the Protoculture took a direct role in the operations of their Zentradi forces even before the Supervision Army emerged and began decimating the Protoculture's population. The Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class motherships are noted to have amenities that are clearly intended for use by Protoculture stationed there, like a 250 square kilometer (61,776 acre) nature park that reproduces the conditions of the Protoculture's homeworld. Once the Protodeviln were sealed, there's no obstacle we know about that would have prevented them from simply solving the problem forever by dropping a dimensional bomb on the planet. Or doing the same to many of the other irresponsible inventions they created.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Ernest Johnson was written out of Absolute Live!!!!!! because his voice actor Unshou Ishizuka passed away back in August 2018, about six months after Passionate Walkure came out. The in-universe reason for his absence - and that of his ship - is that Xaos is still repairing the battle damage the Macross Elysion sustained 13 months earlier during the events of the previous movie's climax. As a result, [...]
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, so you're expecting him to survive Andor and the Original Trilogy so he can be digitally added into the sequel trilogy's Special Edition re-release ten years from now? Or become an Expanded Universe character until he's been worn down to a one-dimensional nub of the character he was onscreen? Syril Karn's so pompous and so self-important that the only truly fitting way for him to die in Andor would have to be a complete anticlimax. Something with no weight or significance to it that draws a line under how utterly inconsequential he is in the grand scheme of things. Like being the first mook to die in a firefight. Or dying in a car crash early in a long chase scene. Or getting shot by his own troops for ordering a suicidal charge because they don't like him. Y'know, that kind of thing.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    My money's on them finally squaring off, face-to-face, at the end of the series proper. Karn'll get to confront his nemesis and will be gunned down anticlimactically for it.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    What a disappointing show The Witch from Mercury is turning out to be. Six episodes in, and the writers have already basically thrown in the towel.
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