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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It can't. Pre-Mor's security force was disbanded by the ISB back in the fourth episode when the Empire revoked the corporation's governing authority. Admittedly, I was so sure that gun was going to turn out to be the Chekhov's Gun that would link Andor to Aldhani... but it seems to have been a fakeout. If Melshi does get arrested, it might accidentally convince the Empire he's Cassian Andor if they notice it's a stolen Pre-Mor security-issue weapon.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Considering that the YF-19/YF-21 and VF-19/VF-22 were developed at a time when operation by emigrant governments and emigrant fleets was expected to be the norm, it seems unlikely that that the New UN Forces would have tolerated having a main fighter that was dependent on specialized contractors for maintenance. We do know about one hard-to-source part that is unique to the VF-22. The ultra-high purity fold carbon in its Inertia Vector Control System. This was noted to even have been an obstacle to the widespread adoption of the Queadluun-Rau the system was borrowed from. Of course, what ultimately killed both the VF-19 and VF-22 was a combination of revised arms export restrictions prompted by a rise in anti-government activity and the Sharon Apple incident, the high initial and operating costs of both aircraft, and the loss of control accidents in early model conversion training exercises due to the excessive g-loads the fighters imposed on their pilots.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oh. Well, I'd question a few choices of words given that all the characters in it are at least as old as Minmay was at the start of SDF Macross. Bear in mind, because that series involves an idol group it amplifies the real world demand for members of such a group to have diverse individual appeal to their (predominantly male) audience by giving them diverse appearances and builds to appeal to the largest possible audience. There'll usually be at least one member who appeals to that particular widespread male preference. I'm with ya on the gratuitousness of that, but they are trying to move character goods and that's one way to appeal. (Just not in that video, which is mostly mecha goods for Macross.) Don't let my snark convince you it's bad... it's actually quite a fun show once it gets moving, it just drags heavily in the first half.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The video has Macross content, but it is not exclusively for Macross. There's very little Macross in it, it's promoting many different Tamashii Nations product lines. That's Takanori Nishikawa AKA T.M. Revolution, the singer/songwriter/producer/actor and cultural ambassador of Shiga Prefecture. He's on the show in that costume to promote a S.H. Figuarts figure of himself in that same costume (at ~19:00), which I would assume is probably something he wore in one of his music videos. ... what? There's nothing like that in that YouTube video. The closest to sexualized that video gets is Nishikawa singing in that ridiculous pleather getup. The second performance with the virtual idols is not Macross either, that's a promotion for Idolmaster. 98% of the video isn't Macross. Macross Delta is Macross 7 but with an idol group instead of a rock band and nationalistic aliens using a hate plague for mind control instead of space kaiju. You're basically seeing the equivalent of Basara going out, spraying off a quick burst of speaker pods, and then singing Planet Dance for the 11 billionth time. That said, Macross Delta does kind of bear the hallmarks of being a comparatively low-effort and rather derivative (of Frontier and AKB0048) production intended more to promote the real idol group Walkure than a series intended to stand on its own merits. Passionate Walkure is a compilation movie, so it skips a lot of the expositing that was done in the series. There are many threads for the series and one for each movie where one can cantankerously complain about the content if one wishes to do so.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That would be why, as part of the process of transitioning from one model of fighter to another, the mechanics go in for retraining the same way the pilots do.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The transformation is not, AFAIK, one of the factors listed that led to the New UN Forces deciding to adopt the YF-19. There were many cost-related concerns involving the initial cost and maintenance cost of various aspects of the design like the high purity fold carbon used in the IVCS, the wing's special deformable material, and the costs involved in many high-performance systems like the new engines, the pinpoint barrier, etc. There were also the stability and reliability concerns involving the BDI system, which were likely the bigger factor since the YF-19's design also shared many of those expensive systems and materials.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Not completely empty... the room Cassian was staying in has a new occupant who is fast asleep in the bed when Cassian breaks in to recover his belongings from the lockbox he hid in the WC. It appears to be early morning, so the guests at the resort may simply be asleep after a hard day/night's partying.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    OK... "Daughter of Ferrix". Up front, this feels like we're telegraphing that... Anyway... let's have a look-see. All in all, this episode feels like it has a few too many moving parts. It's hard to really take any of it in, because it's so scattered and most of it has no significance in and of itself... it's pieces of a bigger picture that's scattered all over hell's half-acre right now. The last episode's going to have a hell of a job tying up these loose ends.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Not the best two-parter in TNG by a long run... though it was fun that Futurama of all shows decided to lampoon the ending.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the decision to make generic hull textures instead of individually numbering each ship was probably for the sake of the production crew's sanity, and becuase they've gotten a fair amount of ribbing over how many times CV-404 got sunk during Macross 7. There's always those glamour shots where they spend a little more on the detail because they know they're going to be using it in commercials, product packaging, eyecatches, etc. Well, that's probably got a lot to do with the protagonists being from a PMC rather than the New UN Forces. Like Movie!SMS, Movie!Xaos seems to exist at this weird intersection of resources and personnel levels where they have just enough people to properly man one medium-sized ship but so much money that they can afford to make that one ship a Macross instead of hiring more people and operating more flexibly from two or more smaller and less costly ships. So when the cavalry arrives at the end to help save the day, it's literally a bunch of that one class of ship because that's all they have because they spent beyond their means to get that one big ship as their headquarters. So much so in the Delta TV series that Xaos ran out of money almost immediately when Ragna was captured and removing all the Epsilon Foundation tech from the Elysion would've taken more than the company's yearly operating budget. (Made even weirder by the fact that, in the Macross Frontier TV series, the Macross Quarter didn't even belong to SMS. It was a Frontier NUNS prototype on loan to SMS the same as the VF-25s.) This is why it's so important to get treated for anxiety disorders... otherwise you end up worrying about things that have no realistic chance of ever happening.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The film's liner notes confirm that the Macross Elysion is immobilized by the damage it sustained in the previous film, so that's probably not the Elysion. They probably reused the Macross Elysion CG model for one (or more) of the other ships of the same class in the background, expecting it would be too indistinct for the audience to notice. The same way fans were probably not supposed to notice the Battle Astraea appears to be a modification of the Battle Galaxy CG model that didn't change its hull number or any number of other subtle reuses of CG models and textures for same like that poor VF-0A pilot Tim Baker who gets killed three or four times in Macross Zero.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That's not quite accurate. Macross never really addressed the topic in any specific terms until 1992-1994. Macross II: Lovers Again's creators chose to make Macross: Do You Remember Love? the "correct" version of the First Space War and then built their setting and story on top of that. Then you had Macross Plus and Macross 7 coming along two years later along with the official statement that Macross II: Lovers Again was now a "parallel world" story and that Macross: Do You Remember Love? was really an in-universe historical drama from 2031 that had been filmed with real ships and mecha. A fair amount of ink was then spent explaining how the various new designs in DYRL? actually fit into the setting. The point really didn't end up in the spotlight until around 2008 and the launch of Macross Frontier for the 25th anniversary. There were publications asking Kawamori about how the new series fit with events from works like Macross 7, Macross VF-X2, etc., and also fan questions at events that inquired about things like the status of Macross II. That was around the time the "everything is a dramatization of a true history" thing really gained traction. Of course, since Big West wants to sell artbooks and light novels and tech manuals and the like they're kind of having it both ways on the understanding that broad strokes is in full effect. That's just the problem with Expanded Universes in general. As TV Tropes likes to say, "The Main Characters Do Everything". That's the initial difficulties in localizing the sequels plus twenty years of the now-terminated Harmony Gold embargo. The fanmade RPG supplement writers have had a field day, but the regular fic writers haven't quite caught up to it since Frontier and Delta only did the rounds via fansub.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    When it comes to successful, or at least well-publicized, revolutions, rebellions, and general insurrections the journalists and the early historians tend to whitewash or overlook the character flaws in the rebel leadership in order to make them into larger-than-life heroic figures. People don't join armed rebellions and revolutionary armies because they're full of noble, high-minded principles like Mon Mothma. People take up arms against the government because they're afraid, they're angry, they want change, the politicians aren't getting the job done, and the people are done asking. Revolutions happen because there's one or more agitators like Luthen Rael out there whipping that anger into outrage and directing that outrage to specific targets. When those agitators are people of relatively high social standing who are nevertheless willing to get their hands dirty and lead from the front, they becomes the "heroes" of that revolution and inspire others to join the cause even if their actions are kind of horrific. People aren't put off by it because they're hurting "the bad guys". Once the revolution ends and the new regime takes power, people look back at the revolutionary leaders without emotions running high and often realize they were not only not paragons of virtue but also often deeply flawed or even outright terrible people. People like Luthen Rael or Leia Organa are the kind of people who cause an armed resistance to form around them through that natural charisma and because they lead from the front. Highly principled but fundamentally passive people like Mon Mothma don't inspire people to join armed revolutions. When they're charismatic, they inspire people to nonviolent resistance like Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., Valclav Havel, etc. When they're not (like Mon Mothma), they tend to either end up against the wall with the members of the ousted government or at best kept as a powerless useful idiot the new government can use to lend itself an air of legitimacy during the transfer of power. That would be less a plot development and more a plot hole, since Mon Mothma has been utterly uninvolved in the actual business of the Rebellion and even in Rogue One the very kindest interpretation is that she's an indeceisive figurehead that nobody answers to or listens to.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps... but then again, many Macross fans find Kawamori's take frustrating and ask questions like the above about the existence of an objective value of "truth" for the series. Other franchises have run into outright fan rejection when attempting something similar. Like when Star Wars's new owners declared the old EU apocryphal or when the Star Trek: Enterprise series ended its run with an episode that was actually a holodeck program, leaving the door open to hint that the entire series had been a holodeck recreation and not a true history. It's an approach that tends to be found slightly frustrating whenever someone attempts it because people are hardwired to look for patterns. That's the intended approach. Though Big West, at least, seems to recognize that fans are often in the market for something a bit more connected and make the effort to join up the dots anyway for the people who care.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    More importantly and fundamentally, trying to find the "real story" is an exercise in futility because there is no such thing and there never has been. Anything beyond that very basic reason is overthinking it. Macross runs on broad strokes continuity becuase Kawamori's not about to let continuity get in the way of telling a story the way he wants to tell it. That "it's all dramatizations" thing is just a clumsy way of telling fans to stop expecting every little detail to join up neatly.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Fair enough, though the reason Mon Mothma's subplot stands out from the others in Andor is that it just feels directionless. Luthen's raid on Aldhani essentially invalidated Mon Mothma's relevance to the story and her entire subplot thus far. She started out a critical player in the story because Luthen's rebel network needed funding badly and she needed to bypass Imperial scrutiny of her finances in order to provide it. The big win on Aldhani erased any need for Mon Mothma in the rebel big picture and left her subplot cartwheeling off towards irrelevance to the rest of the series as her focus drifts to covering up her previous involvement and then to that shady banker she dislikes. Mon Mothma's subplot needs a good kick back in the direction of the main series before it becomes a Canto Bight level plot tumor.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    In all likelihood, it was either animated for the film and cut for some reason or animated for the original theatrical trailer.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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").
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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 [...]
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