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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Nice that this thread should pop back up right now. 😀 I'm moving, so I've got all my framed posters out at once... and a few more I'll be having framed once I'm done moving now that I'll have the wall real estate for all of them. Still got half a dozen from the last SDCon before the start of the pandemic waiting on frames.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Eventually rehashed as the Admiral Leyton's coup plot in Deep Space Nine once Gene was out from underfoot. Some ideas are just too good to let go of... Unfortunately, the Relaunch novelverse's obsession with tying up loose ends from the TV series saw them revisit the parasites from "Conspiracy". The big reveal there was that the parasites were... "Q Who" really makes it out that Guinan is something much more powerful than just an El-Aurian. Q actually warns Picard about her twice, and her reaction implies that she was aware of his abduction of Picard and that she can actually prevent him from "expediting [her] departure" or defend herself against his powers in some way. It's probably better that way, yeah... especially given the quality of modern Trek's writing. OK there are a few ones there I've never seen before... especially that clip of Gene, Michael, Barrie, and Patrick singing. One of the favorite things I've learned about the show's production is that Patrick Stewart was the one who wanted everyone to grim up and stop goofing around initially, and he ended up being one of the worst offenders when it came to goofing off on set. I remember reading that The DS9 cast was aimilarly grim, until Michael Dorn joined the cast and became their patron saint of screwing around. (TBH, I find that hilarious somehow... the actor behind the incredibly grim and deadpan Mr. Worf was Mr. Fun Times on set.) (Right up there with learning at a convention from no less a person than Kate Mulgrew that Voyager's prankster-in-chief was Tim Russ, who at one point broke into her trailer to cover every surface with photocopies of his posterior.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I like 'em both... but I have to admit, the Macross II setting was definitely not set up on the same massive scale as the main Macross setting. The main/ongoing Macross setting is way more "adventure-friendly" and open to different approaches to storytelling. That said, I'd probably find Macross every bit as boring as I find Gundam's Universal Century if all it did was endlessly repeat the same story with the same character archetypes in the same circumstances where all that really changes show-to-show is the proper nouns the way UC Gundam has done for decades now. Macross II is very Gundam-like in a lot of respects, possibly the influence of the Gundam veterans staffing it, but I find a fair amount of probably-unintentional hilarity in that its story has the UN Forces getting bored and a bit complacent because they've been fighting the same war over and over again for decades and always winning the exact same way.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Well, remember... different strokes for different folks. As I understand it, Macross Plus got something of a lukewarm reception in Japan because of how different it was from what audiences expected in a Macross sequel. Much like the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, it was more popular in the west where those expectations weren't as defined and audiences were generally more open to a more action-focused story. (That situation was reversed with Macross 7, which Japanese fans adored and western fans watching the fansubs found very polarizing.) Plus supposedly found itself seeing a bit of a renaissance after the Macross Frontier movies and the Blu-ray re-release the same way II did.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I'd assume they probably forgot. TNG's first two seasons had a fair few orphaned plot threads thanks to some concepts initially developed turning out to be unworkable and others simply being abandoned because the writers couldn't figure out what to do with them. Guinan and Q are in a few episodes together thereafter and he never shows any fear of her in those except when she straight-up shanks him with a fork to prove that he's lost his powers. The big one, of course, being that the aliens from "Conspiracy" were supposed to be the advance scouts of the species that was eventually reworked into the Borg. The budget balked at the idea of the cost of practical effects for an insectoid race who used biotechnology, so they were rewritten into more TV-friendly cyborgs. (Guinan gave Q astronomical amounts of sh*t in the novelverse and independent novels too... really, all the Q. Trelane included. In one book, Trelane attempts to buy drinks for the house and Guinan takes his directive of "Drinks on me!" quite literally.) Guinan's been around for an unspecified but very long time... centuries if not millennia... I'd assume she and Q simply bumped into each other when Q was on his bullsh*t in one or more of those stunts that caused much of the galaxy to hate him. If Vash's account is to be believed, quite a lot of planets have him as persona non grata for various reasons.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I can honestly say that my first thought when I saw the above announcement was... Wow, I can hardly wait to see how they'll f*** this up! Then I read the actual article, and noticed this is being done by and for Netflix Japan... which means there's actually about even odds of it being watchable, instead of ten episodes of entirely unintended self-parody loosely based on a classic like Netflix US's Cowboy Bebop adaptation. I'm not going to get my hopes up, because past performance has painfully taught me not to do that, but I'm gonna keep a weather eye on this one.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    In Macross II, the Zentradi warships operated by the UN Spacy are mainly (if not exclusively) ones whose crews defected to Earth's side during or immediately following one of Earth's frequent encounters with rogue Zentradi fleets. For a while, the core of their forces were the former Vrlitwhai branch fleet until most of those ships were lost in the 2054 war. In fact, all of the Macross II Valkyries incorporate technology derived from reverse-engineering the Nousjadeul-Ger series battle suit. The VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie was the proof-of-concept for a new generation of VFs based on Zentradi battle suit tech in Macross II's setting. The VF-2 series is derived from the VF-XX. Nah, even in the original series materials (e.g. Perfect Memory) the depiction of the two types of battle suits is VERY different. The Nousjadeul-Ger's presentation vaguely mirrors that of the VF-171. It's a solid, dependable, workhorse of a battlesuit with good all-around performance and a wealth of options to let it operate well in a bunch of different roles. It's high-performance, but not so much so that a well-trained soldier can't get the most out of the design. While it's more costly than a Regult, it's cheap enough that it can be deployed in significant numbers while remaining more survivable than the Regult as well. The Queadluun-Rau, for its part, has always been depicted as "awesome but impractical" to some degree. It's much more specialized and its super-high flight performances comes at a corresponding cost in materials, manufacturing complexity, and failure rate. It was much more than an average pilot could handle, so rather than fuss about building something less over-the-top the way the New UN Forces did the Protoculture simply went and built a better grade of pilot. Despite that, the number in operation is small (relative to other mecha in the Zentradi forces) and they are mainly used by defensive fleets for their ability to punch way above their weight class. The Macross II UN Forces studied the Nousjadeul-Ger while developing improvements for their Valkyries because they were looking to improve the overall durability and reliability of Valkyries, especally in close combat scenarios. That led to the adoption of improved actuators and materials based on those of the Nousjadeul-Ger, as well as the adoption of more powerful reactors, generators, and engines to improve offensive capabilities. The main Macross timeline New UN Forces seem to have been more interested in improving flight performance, and so studied the Protoculture's last word on agility... the Queadluun-Rau... for its high maneuverability and especially its inertia capacitor to let pilots endure higher g-force loads. That's the thing... it seems like a fair number of fans prefer the VF-31A over any of the Ace Custom versions. Enough so that the DX VF-31A seems to be the show's most coveted DX Chogokin toy. I think that might be partly why movie 2 shelved the Siegfrieds in favor of having the protagonists fly an ace custom that looks more like the production model. Yeah, the continued existence of a blue-water Navy is a confusing one in Macross.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly. If there's one thing that's been consistent about the presentation of the Q in decades of Star Trek official media, the novelverse, and other licensed/non-canon media is that the Q are either truly omnipotent or so close to it that there is no practical difference. The only time that a Q has ever been depicted as struggling with something outside of scenarios involving them being deprived of their powers by others in the Q Continuum is Quinn's attempts to commit suicide in Star Trek: Voyager. He seemed to be unable to bring enough force to bear on himself to end his life, but it's well attested-to that Q are perfectly capable of killing each other. The only being ever hinted to have the power to actually resist or defend against a Q is Guinan, in a forgotten moment in "Q Who" in which Q seems to be on guard against her or even afraid of her. The only thing stopping the Q from exercising their powers in ways that would have upsetting consequences for the fabric of reality is the Continuum's social conventions and the majority's holier-than-thou view of the Q as being the multiverse's highest form of life. In the novelverse, the Q are basically omnipotent. They're almost never depicted as being threatened in any way, and on the rare occasion they are it'll be by a one-of-a-kind entity that nearly rivals a single Q for power. That's 0, the ringleader of the gang of ne'er-do-well higher beings Q summons into the galaxy in prehistory for a laugh and who was sealed outside the galaxy by the great barrier the Q erected for his crimes. Also Afsarah Eden, a one-of-a-kind anti-Q created by all the horrible things Janeway has done to the fabric of reality from "Endgame" thru the first half of the Voyager relaunch novel series (mainly Q Junior using his powers to bring Janeway back from the dead after she was killed off for real in the runup to Star Trek: Destiny).
  9. Seto Kaiba
    OK, now I am legitimately excited.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Now, I know in the novels that Q once used to run with several other less-powerful entities including a novel-original one named 0, the Beta XII-A entity, Gorgan, and "The One" (AKA the "God" from Star Trek V). Dunno if he ever tangled with Nagillum, but considering how he bullies the Calamarain... (That said, when Worf was busy insisting that there is "One Riker, One Bridge!" he turned out to be a bit wrong about that later on in "Second Chances". Turns out there really were two Rikers.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    To the best of my knowledge, it has never really been explained why the few all-Zentradi units we see fall under the header of the New UN Spacy Marine Corps. If I had to make a guess, I'd say it's probably because their ships routinely carry assault landers for things like battlepods even though the Zentradi as a whole seldom actually fight planetside. It's worth noting that the Spacy Marines existed in the lore for over a decade before Macross Frontier introduced the all-Zentradi 33rd Marines, and their few described units prior to that point were Valkyrie squadrons. Similarly, while the relationship between the four branches of the planetary forces is reasonably well understood because of their modern parallels (Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines) the three branches of the Space Forces are more ill-defined. The Spacy is the fleet-based force we're so familiar with, while the Spacy Air Force appears to be a space-based aviation branch is for some reason distinct from the Spacy's own flying corps and the Spacy Marines appear to be space-based infantry of some description but it isn't all that clear.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Overlord season 4 is now underway... the OP "Hollow Hunger" seems to suggest that this season is gonna cover everything up to the conclusion of The Witch of the Falling Kingdom. Brace yourselves, sh*t's about to get DARK.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Michael Dorn really was criminally underutilized on TNG. DS9 did amazing things with Worf's character. Made him a lot more subtle, but also a lot more fun when he had another deadpan snarker to play off of in the form of Odo.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Roy Brocksmith was an inspired bit of casting as Kolrami. He really brought Kolrami across as the gleefully officious, bureaucratic, judgemental arsehole desperately in need of a big slice of humble pie and made the one-two punch of Riker exceeding all expectations and Data forcing him into a ragequit in his game of choice incredibly satisfying. I love Worf's deadpan delivery of exactly how unfortunate it would be for the Hathaway's warp drive to fail to activate. "Very unfortunate. We will be dead."
  15. Seto Kaiba
    First Contact made them too human, and Voyager just absolutely destroyed them... repeatedly getting REKT by a Starfleet science vessel is not exactly dignified for a species that supposedly far exceeds the Federation in power. Loved this one... not just because it's the second use of the Picard Maneuver, it's also the moment Data learns how to be a massive troll.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'm just looking forward to whatever obscure references they'll dig up.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Give it a little longer and you can get it on deep discount in the bargain bin. 😉
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I have to admit, so far I'm pretty disappointed in this season's offerings. Nothing's really jumping out at me except Overlord season 4... which was a forgone conclusion because I love the light novel. The only one on Crunchyroll's currently available simulcasts for this season that really grabbed me was The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting... which seems like it will be either a laugh riot or terrible, with no middle ground whatsoever. I might pick up The Devil is a Part-Timer season 2, but there is just nothing else here. I guess it's going to be a good season for my backlog, at least.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II's "parallel world" setting is a very different place to the setting of Macross Plus and later installments. Macross II: Lovers Again, its timeline, and its two prequels Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song give much more attention to the ongoing threat posed by the Zentradi than the later titles did. The ongoing Macross timeline has the surviving ~3 million ships of the Boddole Zer main fleet retreat into deep space seemingly never to return. Macross II didn't get so lucky, with rogue branch fleets and other forces of varying size periodically wandering back into the Sol system to have another go. Some of those surviving forces even linked up with other main fleets. That led to the 2036 invasion by the Neld main fleet in a bid to exact vengeance for the destruction of the Boddole Zer main fleet, and a 2037 attack by the Burado main fleet who were hoping to use Earth's culture as a weapon against the Meltrandi fleet chasing them. As a result, the UN Forces of the Macross II timeline not only became intimately familiar with how the Zentradi and Meltrandi wage space warfare... they also ended up with a small mountain of secondhand Zentradi and Meltrandi military hardware and multiple factory satellite complexes. Their defense strategy was heavily influenced by lessons learned from the First Space War and what they later gleaned from commanders like Vrlitwhai who joined the UN Forces in the aftermath of the war. What developed was a battleship-based force not dissimilar to what the Zentradi and Meltrandi field composed mainly of Zentradi warships with a couple Earth-built ships. It wasn't until after the disastrous 2054 Zentradi invasion of the Sol system wiped out most of the former Vrlitwhai branch fleet that the UN Forces started giving serious thought to force modernization. Earth's engineers put a lot of time and effort into reverse-engineering all of their captured Zentradi and Meltrandi technology over the years and this was finally put into practice with a new generation of warship designs, valkyries, and destroids built on a combination of Human, Zentran, and Meltran overtechnology. The end result was all of the new designs in Macross II: Lovers Again... which led to the UN Forces absolutely steamrolling the next major Zentradi invasion force to wander into the solar system in 2082. That overwhelming victory over the Zentradi was what led to the UN Forces becoming overconfident and complacent in the 2090s, leading to the disatrous events depicted in Macross II. We all thought the VF-4 book wasn't gonna happen for much the same reason... given that it appears only in Macross: Flash Back 2012 for maybe a minute or so and only ended up in a main role in some of the games (e.g. Macross M3). The VF-22 book was also a pretty big surprise. The VF-11 book less so, since that was a fairly prominent design in Macross Plus and Macross 7 that had multiple main characters associated with it incl. Milia, Gamlin, and Isamu. Minor Valkyrie designs tend to end up being covered briefly as asides in the books of more major Valkyries. Like how the VF-3000 and VF-5000 ended up being touched on by the VF-1 and VF-4 books, or how the VF-4 book launched into a brief history of Alexei Kurakin's career that touched on the VF-9 and some later General Galaxy designs since he cofounded the company. If we're going to see much coverage of the Vampire, I'd kind of expect to see it in the form of a side section in a VF-17 or VF-171 book. Of course, we know the next Master File is a complete waste of time. VF-31AX Kairos Plus. At least half of the first VF-31 book was just reprinted content from the VF-25 book, and considering the VF-31AX Kairos Plus is a production VF-31 (which is mostly VF-25 parts already) upgraded with some of the Siegfried's detuned YF-30 parts, I can't imagine there'll be much to that book. Made worse by the fact that, like the Siegfried book, it'll probably ignore the mass-production VF-31 Kairos almost entirely to focus on an aftermarket custom job with single-digit production numbers.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Roy's good, but he's not Godmode good... that's Max. Roy racked up quite the kill count in the Unification Wars according to the original series, but the events of Macross Zero are probably a pretty trivial part of that since the number of aircraft involved was only a few dozen in total and he probably wasn't allowed to officially add them to his score because the whole thing was classified top secret. That's the thing about emigrant fleets... you've got a captive population, but in order to maintain a viably large defense force the military ends up being one of the largest employers in the fleet simply because of the number of people needed to support it both in the service itself and private enterprises supplying it. They'd probably cool on that pretty quick when they realized there are only a handful of inhabitable planets in the entire galaxy, everyone's declaring genocidal war against each other, and what's left of humanity is ruled by something that's less a military dictatorship than it is a military-run kakistocracy. Only if it defolded in the Sol system... if he moved it somewhere else, or destroyed it before it arrived, the Zentradi would never have bothered looking for it on Earth. They have an ancient directive to leave miclone planets alone. This directive is not always respected. Up until the main fleets rolled up, anyway. The Macross Cannon-class were made to wipe out branch fleets in a single shot, since most of the Zentradi encounters the Spacy had were against scouting forces and remnants of the Boddole Zer main fleet. Unfortunately, they weren't developed under after the 2054 Zentradi invasion that so badly hobbled the UN Spacy in that timeline, meaning that their first real trial by fire was in 2082.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Apart from the fact that it's already out, the answer is a resounding "No" due to quality issues.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That one wasn't retained knowledge... my Google-fu is just way more advanced than the average bloke's since I spent a few years as a "Google Guide" after my employer switched from MS Office to Google's G Suite/Workspace. I ran a site search against all the pages listed under Wikipedia's index of "List of Horror Films of the 1980's" looking for synonyms related to zombies and ghosts along with the keywords "50's" and "girlfriend" and read the handful of pages the query spit out. (Some of my colleagues were not big believers in things like using descriptive file names and/or folders to organize materials in cloud storage, so power user-level searches were something I got real good at against my will to maintain my sanity.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    One thing that has been repeatedly hinted at in Frontier-era and later material, and outright stated in Master File, is that the New UN Government member nations are expected to reinforce each other should one come under attack by a hostile alien/foreign power. The Frontier movies referenced it with the Frontier Government declining to reinforce Galaxy because they believed the distress call they received was a deliberate act of subterfuge. In Delta's gaiden manga Black-Winged White Knight, the Kingdom of the Wind c.2060 is salty towards the New UN Gov't partly because of the losses the Aerial Knights sustained fulfilling their obligation to support a neighboring world that was attacked by Zentradi. For the Spica III incident in Master File, it's mentioned the New UN Forces called up every available ship and fighter squadron within reasonable fold distance to assist in making the attack on the main fleet that destroyed Spica III. Not that I'm aware, though the VF-0 was not intended for use in live combat and the total number of engagements the handful of aircraft fought in was very small indeed. Probably not THAT much bigger than what they are now... the miltary is overrepresented as a career path because of how important defense is, but as populations grow the actual percentage of the population employed by the military is likely to drop. Well, yes... that other series we don't talk about wrote out the fact that there were thousands of other Zentradi fleets. To that story, there was only ONE main fleet. By preventing the Supervision Army gunship from crashing on Earth in the first place. Mind you, he was armed with what was essentially a weaponized time machine built off the same biotechnology as the Birdhuman and the Protodeviln's Evil-series bodies. In terms of the number of ships sunk in a single discharge, the Macross Cannon-class in Macross II does appear to be quite a bit more powerful... destroying hundreds of ships each vs. dozens, and across a much wider area due to having been designed for anti-fleet saturation bombardment.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    From the description, I feel like this might be the 1985 made-for-TV movie The Midnight Hour.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I admit I'd have liked to see how that one ended too... if only because of how audacious it was for the publisher to use the Robotech license to print a borderline troll fic aimed at taking the piss out of Robotech and its fanbase. They literally made it a plot point that every previous Robotech work up to that point represented a nightmarish bad future of unending war created by a stable time loop in which all the characters are messily killed, and then made the good future timeline after they broke out of the time loop an unauthorized Macross spinoff. Bonus points for the unauthorized spinoff having a lengthy aside at least once per issue for someone (often Sad Dana from the penultimate time loop iteration) to hang a lampshade on how stupid some aspect of the "classic" Robotech story was. It felt almost like an End of Evangelion-style demonstration of contempt for the audience and the material.
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