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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Best news I've had all day.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... he's had his turn at it a fair few times. It mainly happens in the RPGs like the Paper Mario series and Mario & Luigi series. It was at its most blatant in Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door thanks to the sheer quantity of irreverent comedy in that game. Luigi just gets hit with it a lot harder since the Paper Mario games often made him out to be the hero of another, much lamer, story and then he got a solo series devoted to his ghost phobia (Luigi's Mansion).
  3. Seto Kaiba
    ... there's really nothing explicit there to censor. I have no idea why people keep acting like there is. 🙄 Crunchyroll does not censor the shows they license for streaming. Granted, there are titles in Crunchyroll's library that are censored but that censorship was done by the studios that produced the shows to make them suitable for broadcast in Japan. There either isn't an uncensored version available or Crunchyroll hasn't yet upgraded the version of the show that they have in their streaming library to the uncensored home video version.
  4. Seto Kaiba
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The most likely (in-universe) reason that countermeasures aren't used more often is that many types of missiles used in the series have multiple guidance systems. Especially the long-ranged missiles, which often have three separate guidance systems working in concert... usually radar (bolstered by powerful ECCM to overcome active stealth), infrared, and TV. Flares would be the most useful countermeasure, since micro-missiles tend to be exclusively infrared-guided.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    While they're seldom shown being used, VFs do have countermeasure dispensers for things like chaff and flares. The one instance that sticks out in my memory most clearly is in Macross Plus. During Isamu and Guld's dogfight on Earth, there is a shot of Isamu using chaff containers against some missiles Guld launches. Tech manuals like Master File and Sky Angels do mention countermeasure dispensers for chaff and flares as a standard feature. The VF-1's countermeasure dispenser is in the fighter's "backpack", while other VFs keep theirs in the legs.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Five'll get you twenty they forgot the fleet exists.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    "Schisms" was a weird one. One of the few times Star Trek has tried to do more or less straight-up horror. They never figure out who the aliens are, why they're capturing people and subjecting them to all of those invasive medical experiments, or really manage to stop them from carrying on. In a way, it feels like they should've come back to that one at some point. Kind of like those parasites from TNG season 1 that were teased as a continuing threat and then were never mentioned again.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's beautifully animated... but my brain is never going to stop saying that the characters sound wrong after 30 years of Charlet Martinet's Mario.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    At least in the films, Star Wars has always restricted the roles of alien characters to sidekicks, supporting characters, and background extras. I suspect that has a lot to do with Star Wars opting to make its aliens more physically alien. Star Trek can get away with making alien characters regulars in its main cast because its favored approach to aliens is the humanoid "rubber forehead alien". The light prosthetics and body paint they use minimally obscures the actors faces, so they can still emote like a normal actor. It's relatively easy on the actors, unless they develop an allergy to the materials. More "alien" aliens require either digital post-production animation or heavy makeup and prosthetics that are extremely time-consuming, expensive, and hard on the actors. I've heard it said that actors who play those roles tend to ask for more money in casting because of how time consuming, unpleasant, and claustrophobic working in heavy prosthetics is. Easier by far to keep aliens in the background "for local color" and leave the action to the humans. (That and Star Wars made a lot of its more recent aliens kinda racist... the Trade Federation, Jar-Jar, Watto, etc. I'd really rather not see something like that again. Another one of those would make it two steps forward and three steps back in terms of representation.) Yeah. Cassian and Andor in general benefit heavily from defying the usual Star Wars formula in favor of more nuanced storytelling. I'd hate to see them compromise that.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    ... still not the weirdest question I've gotten in that line of inquiry. Hard to say, though, since Klan Klan's height... varies. If we were to assume that her official line art represents her correct scaling, she should not be particularly large or heavy. Line art published on the Macross Chronicle Character Sheet for her wingmen Raramia and Nene shows that, in her normal/giant state she is pretty exactly between those two in terms of height. We know how tall they are, so splitting that difference is easy enough. Miclone Nene is 170cm and miclone Raramia is 165cm. So a Klan Klan who was halfway between them in height would be 167.5cm tall... or 5 feet 6 inches for the users of Imperial measurement. Klan is as athletic as you'd expect a professional soldier to be, so we'd be able to safely assume she's probably of average weight for her height. That's about 61.7kg or 136lb. (I checked this against a lady friend who has similar proportions to Klan, and it more or less tallies +/- about 6lb and 2 inches of height.) That'd make "Macro Klan" around 8.375m tall and around 7,712.5kg in weight. Of course, of all the Zentradi characters thus far her size as fluctuated the most. In the hangar scene where she's first introduced she's around the correct height of approximately 8.375m but in a number of other scenes she's depicted as being MUCH larger... including one scene where she's arguing with Michael's curiously emotive VF-25G battroid in space and seems to be as tall or even slightly taller than it is (~14.53m).
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The oldest version of the lore mentions that the ARMD-class was originally conceived as a space station that would serve as a floating dock for space warships and an airbase for space fighters operating in Earth's planetary defenses. The intent was to park them in Earth's geostationary orbit and near any facilities at the Lagrange points as the backbone of Earth's space-based defenses. The UN Forces repurposed the design as a space aircraft carrier after plans for a much larger 800m-class carrier fell so far behind it was judged to be unrecoverable. Later versions of the lore kept pretty much everything except the proposed and subsequently cancelled 800m-class carrier. Both old and new versions of the lore indicate the UN Spacy's L5 Frontline Station is the original design the ARMD-class was derived from. Most statistics involving the Zentradi are a little shocking. That statistically average Zentradi woman? She weighs 7,750kg. Oh, it's everywhere. 40 Eridani is the location of Vulcan in Star Trek and of Richese and Ix in Dune, for instance. Proxima Centauri has an Earth colony orbiting it in Babylon 5, a Starfleet ship yard is there in Star Trek, it was the destination of the titular ship in Event Horizon, and the all-Newtype colony-turned-generation-ship Dandelion c. UC 0653 in Mobile Suit Victory Gundam: Outside Story. It's also home to an Earth colony named Liberte in Southern Cross. Alpha Centauri is one suspected candidate for the original homeworld of humanity in Asimov's Foundation series, the location of the first human extrasolar colony in Larry Niven's Known Space series, it's the destination of the Jupiter 2 in Lost in Space, home to one of Earth's pre-Federation colonies in Star Trek, etc. etc. Epsilon Eridani is the star Glorie orbits in Southern Cross, is home to a Federation colony in Star Trek, it's an Earth colony in Halo, etc.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... nobody wants the return of a minstrel show-like comic relief character ala Jar-Jar Binks, and giving Cassian an alien buddy he had to translate for would not only slow the plot down a bit it'd make him feel like a low-rent Han Solo (like the Han Solo in Solo).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Not just that... look at the price tag on those shoes in "Star Date". It's mostly written in Zentradi, but the red text there says these shoes are on sale and the price is 3,679,000. The lack of a decimal point suggests that the Frontier fleet's currency is something akin to Yen. If we were to assume that was Japanese Yen, at the time the show was made the exchange rate to US Dollars would make that one pair of heels cost a whopping $35,318. Those shoes cost more than a new car, by a considerable margin. The amount of force those heels would be under would require special materials similar to those used in starship hulls or armor plating to withstand the forces of walking, there'd be no hope at all of being able to walk on the grass, and the sidewalks would have to be specially reinforced to handle the astonishing pressures involved. It's not like they've completely hung you out to dry... there's Ernest Johnson, Mirage, Mylene, Milia, Komilia, etc. Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani, and 40 Eridani are like THE low-hanging fruit of science fiction exoplanet star systems. Proxima Centauri is probably the most used and abused in all of sci-fi due to it being closer to Earth than any other star besides Sol. I can imagine that Macross's creators would want to avoid reaching for that particular low-hanging fruit, and instead went for creating a fictional exoplanet orbiting a real but rather obscure star Groombridge 1816. I'm not sure why they picked that particular star, I'd have to reach out to an actual astronomer to figure out if there were anything special about it.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    While the final acronym is almost certainly for the sake of the aforementioned lame joke, the inspiration is again a LOT more mundane and obvious. The ARMD-class was originally conceived as a combination of a space station airbase for Valkyrie squadrons in orbit and an Auxiliary Floating Dock for servicing smaller UN Spacy warships (e.g. the Oberth-class). Its design was inspired by real world Auxiliary Floating Docks (being one turned upside-down), and its hull classification symbol of "ARMD" is inspired by those of the real world mobile Auxiliary Repair Dock (Medium) for servicing destroyers, submarines, and other light escorts which was "ARDM".
  16. Seto Kaiba
    In the interest of avoiding going OT, I'll answer that ship question elsewhere... We hope, but I suspect that is a dry well.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That would be absolutely the worst possible backstory for him. Full stop. That would be enough to make me stop watching. One of the things keeping Andor accessible and interesting is that these are ordinary people who are dealing with the Empire's oppression in their own ways. Whether that means keeping their heads down and living with it, rising up and doing something about it, or even taking the Empire's side out of the belief that the law and justice are one and the same. These are people making choices. They have agency in their stories. It's not surprising, IMO... the Star Wars galaxy has always felt pretty human-centric. Aliens were mostly comic relief or secondary characters at best. It's also really hard to make a seven foot two shag carpet who talks entirely in untranslated barks and growls or a hydrocephalic fishman into characters the audience can relate to easily. Though, in hindsight, it does make sense that the Empire's deep-seated racism would even extent to its mass incarceration too. Narkina 5 is supposed to be a nicer prison, where conditions are allegedly more humane. The prison population is 100% human. One can only imagine how much worse the alien prison population has it because they're second-class citizens at best.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    銀河帝国 (ginga teikoku, "Galactic Empire") is the one that was used first in Macross's development. That shows up in the description of the original series pitch for Battle City Megaroad that was made to Wiz/Artmic in August 1980. The actual Super Dimension Fortress Macross series does not provide a name for the Protoculture's civilization when their history is discussed in the episode "Satan's Dolls". The Macross: Perfect Memory artbook from 1984 is, I believe, the first in the franchise to use 星間共和国 (seikan kyouwakoku, "Interstellar Republic") but uses both terms interchangeably. It uses "Interstellar Republic" in the timeline on page 54, but uses "Galactic Empire" on the description of every Zentradi mechanical design. "Galactic Empire" is a very generic term that had a LOT of traction in sci-fi well before Star Wars came around, even in Japan. Star Wars is the most mainstream user of the term, but it was in common use decades before Star Wars was first conceived. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is the oldest one I can find to uses that explicit term dating all the way back to 1942, though it wasn't translated into Japanese and released in Japan until 1968. Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night also calls the Human interstellar civilization a "Galactic Empire", and it was published in 1948 (and again after some rewriting in 1953). There were, of course, plenty of other space empires in fiction like the Gamilas in Yamato, or the Klingons and Romulans in Star Trek as well. EDIT: I'm not sure what "AIMD" is supposed to be, but "ARMD" is a contrived acronym play on the word "Armed", because the ships were supposed to be the Macross's arms. It stands for "Armaments Rigged-up Moving Deck", officially. I doubt it. I suspect it was simply a question of conveying the appropriate scale of the Protoculture's civilization in the development of the series. An empire that spans multiple star systems would be an interstellar empire. An empire that spans the galaxy would be a galactic empire. If it is a result of pop culture osmosis in this specific case, there are quite a few more possibilities than just Star Wars, several of which are referenced here and there by the production staff and were available in Japan well before Star Wars. We know the staff were conniseurs of printed science fiction, given that they snuck nods to several sci-fi authors into the setting of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. The first two heads of state of the Earth UN Gov't are named for multiple sci-fi authors incl. Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, and Robert Heinlein, for instance.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Sorry to hear you're unwell. I hope you feel better soon. To answer your question... yes, the Klingon death ritual first appeared in Star Trek: the Next Generation episode 01x20 "Heart of Glory" about two-and-a-half years before Nicholas Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn delivered the filming script for Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country. TNG Season 1's "Heart of Glory" had its broadcast debut on 21 March 1988. Exact dates are not available, but Meyer and Flinn started writing Star Trek VI in 1990 and handed in the final script by October of that year, with production starting 13 February 1991. Hard to say. "Heart of Glory" got roughly average ratings for a TNG Season 1 episode on its first broadcast (~10.7M) and it was nominated for Emmy consideration (in the editing category). Opinion of the episode among the cast and crew is pretty mixed, and later reviewers tend to point out the death ritual as one of the episode's sillier moments. I would assume its omission was probably intentional, because the film's priorities were elsewhere. Where Star Trek: the Next Generation was essentially trying to move past the use of the Klingons and hostilities with them as an allegory for the Russians and the Cold War and give them their own unique cultural identity, Meyer and Flinn's script for Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country went in precisely the opposite direction because it was inspired by current events. At the time Meyer and Flinn started writing Star Trek VI, the Soviet Union was creaking under the strain of the Chernobyl cleanup, the increasing internal conflicts among its member republics, and demands for governmental and electoral reforms. Since Star Trek grew, in part, out of Cold War tensions envisioning an end to the Space Cold War they had created for their story was a fitting swan song for the TOS cast. They just didn't realize how prophetic they were about it, with the film accidentally depicting the Empire's slide into collapse and a military coup against the Klingon head of state with a similar collapse and coup happened in Russia for similar reasons while the film was in production. Throwing the post-allegorical Klingon death ritual from TNG's first season into the film would probably have undermined the sledgehammer-unsubtle allegory by making the Klingons more alien.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    True. Some of the strangest discussions I've had with fellow fans came in the wake of Macross Frontier's release, when episode No.5 "Star Date" left me and a friend on an engineering tangent figuring out the physics of Zentradi clothing. It all started with her joking about the real proof of overtechnology materials being the underwire in (macro) Klan's bra, and ended with us poring over material strength metrics trying to figure out the ridiculous forces and material strengths involved in making something like high heels for a woman 9 meters tall. We ended up with a number of horrifying conclusions, including that a probable reason Zentradi are not allowed to live as giants in many emigrant fleets has to do with the sheer amount of damage sartorial decisions could inflict in key infrastructure like roads, sewers, and "underground" utility conduits. (And as a nearly 2m tall man, I can attest it's hard enough to find proper-fitting trousers as a taller miclone... Zentradi in society will certainly redefine the meaning of "big and tall" in the context of clothiers.) The VF-11 was by no means "fragile". AFAIK, I don't think they've ever been explicitly described as less durable than the VF-14. The VF-14 being so much larger than the VF-11 has a lot to do with it being designed primarily as a space fighter rather than an all-regime fighter like the VF-11. The engine technology available at the time the VF-14 was developed was the same initial generation thermonuclear reaction engine technology used on the two previous generations of VFs. That meant that, minus tuning and some improvement in materials, boosting engine power meant building a bigger, thirstier engine. That meant a bigger airframe to house it and bigger fuel tanks to feed it. Achieving the desired results when it came to space cruising range without FAST Packs meant a very large airframe with a lot of internal room for fuel. Having such a roomy airframe also made maintenance access to key systems easier and made packaging improvements and customizations a lot more forgiving. It was that combination of attributes - FAST Pack-free space cruising range, payload capacity, and ease of maintenance/upgrade - that made the VF-14 so desired by a certain type of emigrant government. It should also be noted that the "VA-14" is NOT the fighter seen in "Spiritia Dreaming". We've never seen a VA-14, and at this rate we likely never will.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's kind of an impossible question to answer under normal circumstances. Macross Delta couldn't realistically exist as Macross's first and only series because so much of its story and setting are built on, or borrowed from, previous Macross titles. That was, IMO, a big part of why Macross Delta was such a weak series. It made very little effort to stand on its own merits and outside of Walkure Delta's main appeal was the borrowed gloss from Macross Frontier. Quite a few of the show's characters are terribly blatant expies of Macross Frontier characters (e.g. Hayate, Freyja, Mikumo, Arad, Keith, Roid, and staff officer Malan, etc.), the plot depends extremely heavily on the events of Macross Frontier and even rips off its ending almost whole cloth, and Freyja's motive for becoming a singer IS one of the Frontier characters, the mechanics of Walkure's operations are built on material established in 7, Zero, and Frontier, and so on. You can't really separate Macross Delta from that the way 7 and Frontier could stand alone with just a little explaining from intro blurbs before the OP because Delta does such a terrible job of explaining itself. If you were to remove that skeleton of previous material and the audience's foreknowledge of it, the series would devolve into a borderline incoherent mess strung together by random Walkure songs.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure that follows, TBH. Putting aside the mundane reasons that an Attacker variant of the VF-14 would need a larger frame like expanded payload capacity for its role, part-Zentradi like Ernest Johnson and Ian Cromwell are statisical outliers. The vast majority of part- or full-Zentradi miclones we've seen are within Human norms for height. For example, Milia and the spy trio in the original series, Guld in Macross Plus, the rescued population of Macross 5 in Macross 7, etc. Mylene's 153cm tall, on the short side even for a Human. Nene Rora is the tallest of the Zentradi girls in Frontier and she's only 170cm in a miclone state, and part-Zentradi Michael Blanc and Brera Sterne are both about her height. Hayate's Zentradi foreman in Delta's first episode is maybe a head taller than him and Hayate's 169cm tall and Mirage is 165cm. Chelsea Scarlett, Naresuan, Angers 672, and Takeru in Macross the Ride are also normal human sized, as is Moaramia in Macross M3 and Mariafokina Barnrose and Timothy Daldhanton in VF-X2. From practically the entire body of evidence, Zentradi miclones might tend to be a bit on the tall side by Human standards but almost none of them are 200cm+ giants even when micloned.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Let's be honest, few if any of us would hold it against them if they decided to just never acknowlege this movie's events ever again. Not only was the plot a trainwreck, but they killed the most likeable character in the entire cast...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It's unexplained, but...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    So... help a filthy casual out here. Is there any kind of in-universe reason ever given for why Stormtroopers are so bad at their one job? The only thing I can recall ever being said about it apart from the aforementioned Stormtroopers on the Death Star in A New Hope were under orders from Tarkin to let the rebels go is when, in the same movie, Luke mentions he can't see a thing in his stolen helmet. It makes sense for Stormtroopers to struggle against highly-trained rebel troops, crack shots, and guys who literally have Fate on their side... but up against regular joes they ought to give a way better showing as elite troops.
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