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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl has finally decided to veer into romance... which I guess is a nice change of pace from the main girl bashfully shoving the main guy through the nearest wall with her super-strength every time he gets close.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the power of dogsh*t-tier writing is a pathway to many plot developments some consider to be unnatural. That said, in Star Wars, I think we've only seen one person actually return from death and that was just recently. Emperor Palpatine and Mother Talzin both tried to avoid dying for real by using the dark side to turn themselves into the undead. Palpatine used the dark side to anchor his mind to his dead-and-rotting corpse like a classic voodoo zombie or a lich. Talzin used the dark side to turn herself into the galaxy's nastiest lingering fart, existing as a vampiric mist made of "magical ichor". Both of them needed to feed on the life energy of other people to regain a functional body and avoid dying for real. Boba Fett just pulls a "reports of my death-by-felching in a giant anus monster in the desert were greatly exaggerated" since he suffers a classic Disney villain "death" offscreen during Return of the Jedi. Dedra Meero... well... her ticket is likely to get punched in a less survivable, more verifiable manner.
  3. Seto Kaiba
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level season two has lost a lot of the wit and charm that made the first season enjoyable. All I can really say for it now is it's bland and inoffensive white noise. Classic Stars... yeesh. Seven episodes on and still as unintelligible as ever. On a lark I decided to check what its rating was in Crunchyroll's app, and it's barely holding onto a 3... which considering you have to REALLY screw up to get below 4 on Crunchyroll is pretty impressive. Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? remains pretty watchable, if rather formuliac. The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows has not really improved in any way. It remains, as it has been, one of those isekai-adjacent, low-effort, generic power fantasy titles. In other words, the laziest kind of slop imaginable. For my money, this season's standout is The Apothecary Diaries S2. Just as enjoyable as season one, and with the promise of quite the explosive payoff at the end of a major story arc from the light novel.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Very excited for that. Strange New Worlds might not be the most groundbreaking Star Trek series out there, but it really does a fantastic job of recapturing that lighthearted cameraderie, that feeling of high adventure, and the sense of wonder that was such an integral part of the original Star Trek and its successors in the 80's and 90's. Even my parents, who are OG Trekkies, absolutely love Strange New Worlds. They've been eagerly waiting for news of when the new season would drop ever since I first got them to watch the series.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I've seen video of him praising Andor's writing, particularly its handling of the Empire, at Star Wars Celebration Europe 2023. He seems to hold it in high regard, though in some other interviews he also seems to want to cling to Star Wars's kid-friendly roots as one might expect from a guy whose entire portfolio is spinoffs of a cartoon. That certainly seems to be the case. If nothing else, he's passionate about the job. That is... yes. That's it exactly.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    As much as I would love that, Tony Gilroy has indicated he's not really interested in a long-term commitment to franchise filmmaking and there is no way Disney is brazen enough to do a partial reboot on Star Wars so soon after rebooting it the first time in order to get rid of the unremarkable and unsatisfying but financially successful sequel trilogy. It sucked before... we're just going to be more aware of how much it sucks now that Star Wars has, by luck or good judgement, produced a series that doesn't. Going back to shows that read like Dave Filoni playing with his Clone Wars and Rebels action figures is going to feel like one giant leap backwards creatively, but it's far too late for them to recalibrate their creative process for Ahsoka season two or Maul: Shadow Lord, both of which are Clone Wars/Rebels spinoffs.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    ... y'know, you're right. There is a visible toilet on the Razor Crest in The Mandalorian. I guess poor Mando just has to cross his legs and wait now that he's got that Naboo starfighter. 🤣 Kiloparsecs. It's difficult to believe Andor and The Rise of Skywalker are even in the same franchise, so vast is the difference in quality. Imagine what we could have had if the likes of Tony Gilroy had been given creative control of the sequel trilogy instead of Jar-Jar Abrams.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That seems to be the case for practically any hyperspace trip in Star Wars. Jump cuts are used to preserve the flow of the story, but it definitely feels like Star Wars hyperdrives are so fast that you can get anywhere in the galaxy within a day or two. Luke and Obi-Wan's trip to Alderaan in A New Hope seems to take only a few hours. Anakin's trip from Tatooine to Coruscant in The Phantom Menace seems to be an overnight flight at most. So very many characters take interstellar flights in small fighters with no evident way to deal with basic biological necessities (and are never shown racing to the john right after landing) that it seems to suggest most hyperspace trips are a matter of a few hours at most.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, that's not quite right IMO. Disney has been fairly consistent in trying to keep Disney+ Star Wars titles at least as family-friendly as the Star Wars main series movies. However, only a few titles are actually made specifically for children. That's your LEGO Star Wars titles and Young Jedi Adventures, and arguably Skeleton Crew. Most of their output is nostalgia-driven, fanservice-based material that's aimed at an audience with fond memories of the Prequel Trilogy. Filoni's shows are practically all based on his The Clone Wars cartoon from 2008. Rebels and The Bad Batch are both direct sequels to The Clone Wars. With, I think, one exception the three seasons of Tales of are all prequels or sequels to specific character arcs from The Clone Wars and/or the prequels. Most of the stuff about Mandalorians in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett is from The Clone Wars and supported by Rebels, particularly the darksaber and Mando's weird cult. Obi-Wan Kenobi is built on fandom's profound affection for Ewan McGregor's performance as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the prequels and the character's sassmaster role in The Clone Wars. They're not aimed at kids, they're capitalizing on the nostalgia of people who were kids (or die-hard fans) in the 2000s when the prequels and The Clone Wars were new. The Acolyte is one major exception there in that it's not directly tied into any pre-existing movie or series. It's a tie-in to an ongoing Expanded Universe multimedia project instead, and suffered badly from being run by a promoted fan who was a devotee of that specific part of Star Wars history. Andor, though... Andor is what happens when Disney stops trying to pander to Star Wars's aging audience with promoted fans writing glorified fan fiction in an attempt to set the Guinness record for most franchise references per minute of screen time and, instead, hires talented non-fan creators from outside to develop and tell a character-focused story for more than just Star Wars fans.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    My group just finished Andor S2 Ep10-12. Honestly, just cancel the other Disney+ Star Wars shows at this point. Tony Gilroy and Andor have set the bar unfeasibly, unachievably, insurmountably high in a single Herculean work of cinematic mastery. This is an unfollowable act. Andor should be the model for future Star Wars stories. We have no need of the Jedi and the Sith, their lightsabers and heavy-handed talk of destiny and moral absolutes. This authentic, human drama about regular people living in the Star Wars universe has far more impact than anything else the franchise has done besides Rogue One. Like, I were working on one of the other in-development Disney+ Star Wars titles right now I'd be sweating bullets because this is what every other Disney+ Star Wars show will be compared to going forward. Hopefully the critics will have some perspective and not simply murder the next series for not being on Andor's level.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Caught today's episode of GQuuuuuuX. It's... actually not bad. The series is getting off the dime and deciding to actually do something.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Classic Stars remains delightfully unintelligible for another week. I have watched... six!... six episodes of this hot mess and I still have absolutely no f***ing clue what it's about. None. It's like that one episode of Deep Space Nine where everyone's got aphasia and can't form coherent sentences. Things sure are happening, but I don't know what any of it means.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    OK, the section in Macross Big Encyclopedia isn't very large... it's basically 2/3 of a page on pg94. The bit in Variable Fighter Designer's Note is a lot bigger, multiple full pages, starting on page 232 thru page 239. There's a concept art section for it in Shoji Kawamori Designer's Note starting from pg577 to 581 which has some good detail shots of the internals of the pack. The movie's Official Complete Book has some decent color reference too.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    My group won't be able to get together to watch it 'til Wednesday, but we've decided to make a double-header out of it... Andor S2 #10-12 followed by dinner and then Rogue One. Gonna make an occasion out of the conclusion of what, by ratings, is likely the best Star Wars title ever made. 😁
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Reality, it must be admitted, has terrible writing.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    We're not told exactly how much cloning was done, but it was apparently done quite extensively... enough that recessive genetic disorders became an issue within a generation, and that they were able to crew emigrant fleets by cloning personnel with essential skills and knowledge. Macross II: Lovers Again was, I think, the first Macross title to play with the idea of a post-war world where much of the population was at least part-Zentradi. They seem to be not quite as common in Macross Plus and other later titles, since most of the characters we see are standard Humans, but part-Zentradi aren't in short supply either. Humanity adopting some Zentradi technology doesn't seem particularly strange to me, or even connected to the population numbers. Earth got its hands on a LOT of pristine overtechnology thanks to the end of the war, the defection of a hundred-plus Zentradi ships, and the capture of dozens of Factory Satellites. It's only natural Humanity would be leveraging superior versions of the technology they've been copying where possible. There's that, yeah. Though we also see some in Veffidas's backstory where she's basically participating in Zentradi street fights, and Macross 7 Trash also involves the fighting instincts of the Zentradi being hard to control. I think the guys in Circle FANKY probably agree, since they included the Daedalus II-class in their Battleships of the Galaxy series devoted to main timeline Macross. It didn't... there are several intermediate designs. The DYRL-based timeline leading up to Macross II: Lovers Again has a very different course of events and technological progression. Quite a few post-war dates and events seen during the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series still occur, but occur years after the war instead of months. For instance, the Megaroad-01 launches in 2014 not 2012, or Komilia being born in 2018. The pace of overtechnology development is a fair bit slower, and Earth only captures the one factory satellite seen in the TV series. But it advances nevertheless. The VF-1 is replaced by the VF-1 Kai Attack Valkyrie in 2018, the VF-4 is introduced in 2014 and upgraded c.2036, and then 2054 sees all the previous gen Valkyrie designs and ships get replaced en masse during a major tech boom following a massive conflict with a Zentradi main fleet out near Pluto. Earth's capture of a second factory satellite leads to a second overtechnology boom that gives rise to new classes of ship and a new generation of Valkyries and Destroids. They start with the VF-XX c.2060, then there's the VF-2 in 2072, the VF-2SS in 2081, the VF-2JA in 2086, and the VA-1SS Metal Siren in 2092. Not the one in Eternal Love Song, a Great Offscreen War in 2054 between the UN Spacy and a Zentradi main fleet that found the emigrant ship Million Star just a short distance from Sol. The fighting was so intense that a large portion of the Spacy's fleet is lost, but the factory satellite captured leads to the development of a lot of new ships and mecha seen in the OVA. Yeah. Macross II's official timeline is the first official mention of the UN Spacy mass-producing Macross-class ships... years before Macross Frontier established the existence of the Macross-class SDFNs. Exactly why they use a mixture of Macross-class and Megaroad-class ships for emigrant fleet missions is unclear, but they were launching them until 2054 at the very least. The 2054 Zentradi war is caused when a Macross-class emigrant ship stumbles directly into a Zentradi main fleet. You mean art reference or technical reference? It has its own section in books like Variable Fighter Designer's Note and Macross Big Encyclopedia. The technical writeup is in Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet F Movie SMS 04A/B. The actual writeup is pretty minimal, since the "Super Pack" is really just a small chemical rocket booster, a fuel tank, a laminated shield, and the fold wave projector/missile pods on the wingtips.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    The point is that they didn't have enough people to lock down the entire building like you're proposing should be easy. Anyone who actually knew her would know full well that she wouldn't hurt or kill anyone. Mind you, it doesn't really matter in the end. Those senators who are inclined to [believe in/support] Mon Mothma are going to question the Imperial official account of whatever happened no matter what and likely assume the Empire is lying or at least distorting the truth. Senators who are inclined to support the Empire are going to accept the sanitized Imperial propaganda version of events likely without question. Some of them have already seen one of their colleagues in the process of getting disappeared by the ISB, and are doubtless going to suspect that if Mon Mothma's escort did kill someone they did so in defense of their charge.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    There was a really prominent example that happened in a major First World country about four years back... Oh, absolutely. The Emperor is the origin of the Empire's systemic arrogance and belief that they have everything and everyone under their control. He played the Republic so completely and so well that he has reason to believe that there's nobody who can pose a real threat to his rule. Mon Mothma's story arc in the Andor-adjacent novel The Mask of Fear is basically a longform explanation of why the Emperor doesn't consider Mon Mothma any real threat. Her outspoken pacifism and naive attempts to curtail the Emperor's power through Senate legislation unintentionally buys her years of being beneath suspicion as a possible rebel in the eyes of the Empire. The ISB was never able to link her to any rebel activity despite years of surveillance since she wasn't actually involved in any. That was all Luthen/"Axis". So when the ISB starts planning her arrest, they misjudge the situation quite badly because they think they're going to get no more than token resistance from a pacifist bleeding heart senator who would never hurt a fly. This is a person whose idea of political violence is a tersely worded letter. Odds are the Empire probably didn't consider her a real threat even after her escape was aided by a rebel agent. She was just an unpopular senator from a wealthy family. Cutting off her access to her family's money and monitoring her associates would be enough to render her powerless in the Empire's eyes. As a rebel leader, she'd be more hindrance than help due to her naivete and reluctance to take decisive action. They were probably more interested in using the knowledge that she had rebel ties to help identify actual rebels and arrest them than they were in bringing her in as a "rebel mastermind". You're assuming - without evidence - that the Ghorman Massacre is just the events that we see onscreen and not something that continued after Cassian fled town. After all, this is explicitly described as a worse event than the so-called Tarkin Massacre that killed 500 people. You're assuming the people in the story have the same omniscient knowledge the audience does. Bail Organa's guards - and the ISB agent infiltrating them - were dressed as civilians and using weapons smuggled into the Senate. What bystanders saw was some random lady try to grab Senator Mothma away from her escort, shout about being an ISB agent while brandishing a blaster, and then get shot as a rebel spy by the senator's own security. The bystanders are NOT going to have a clear picture of what actually happened there... esp. since the ISB is unlikely to publicly admit that the two people who died were ISB agents. Considering the Imperial reputation for gung-ho violence that recently saw a massive massacre on Ghorman occur, some of the public might assume that the people who died (e.g. her "trusted" driver of many years) died trying to get her to safety while she was being abducted or something along those lines. Audiences would be complaining that her escape was too easy if nobody got hurt. The senators siding with her weren't going to do so openly, for fear of being the next to be disappeared by the ISB. They would already have been skeptical of the Empire's story too.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Indeed, but not by a large enough force to conclusively lock down every single potential entrance and exit as we've seen in real world examples. As far as the Empire is concerned, it's peacetime. At this point in Star Wars history, the Rebel Alliance doesn't exist yet. The Empire has yet to encounter a Rebel movement that's large and well-organized enough to present a real military threat to its control of the galaxy. Up until now, they've only really encountered independent rebel cells of squad or at best platoon size that carry out nuisance attacks on lightly defended Imperial ships and bases. The game changes when Mon Mothma declares the founding of the Rebel Alliance after reaching Dantooine, but even then the Empire doesn't truly start taking the Rebellion seriously as a threat until the destruction of the first Death Star.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    They do have security at the entrances. We see it in the episode. They have rows of some kind of metal detector equivalent and security personnel checking IDs at the building's entrances. What they don't have is loads of armed guards on the grounds. Why would they? Like Cassian noted back in season one, the Empire is so arrogant and so self-satisfied that they never even consider possibilities like this. The Empire's whole schtick is presenting a picture of stability and safety. That the new government has everything under control. The Senate we see in Andor is the very picture of a government building in peacetime. They have security at the doors and at key points to keep the public out of areas that they're not meant to access, but it's all kept deliberately low key to project a sense of confidence and control. If the halls of the Imperial capital aren't a supremely safe place, the Empire's public image as a "safe and secure society" is at risk. Putting a huge number of soldiers in or around the building at all times to lock it down on a moment's notice would be a very visible contradiction in the Empire's messaging to the galaxy. Proactively preventing threats to maintain that air of control is the ISB's job, but as we saw they're as overconfident as any other Imperial bureau and dropped the ball.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Kathleen Kennedy really does need to fly that AC130 out to Tony Gilroy's house and beg him to replace Dave Filoni. The difference is so huge it crosses the line twice and is actually pretty funny.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... clearly it is that hard. Not just because we clearly see Imperial stormtroopers fail to lock down the building and catch the escaping Mon Mothma in Andor, but because this is not even close to the worst security failure we see happen on the Senate's premises. In The Clone Wars, a group of bounty hunters led by Cad Bane were able to break into the Senate offices and take a group of ten senators (incl. Padma Amidala and Bail Organa) hostage and would have killed all ten with a bomb to cover their escape if not for Jedi intervention. Several senators were also murdered in their own offices during that same period. The Supreme Chancellor's office was also broken into three times in quick succession around the events of Revenge of the Sith. Once by General Grievous to abduct the chancellor, once by Mace Windu and three other Jedi to assassinate Palpatine, and once by Yoda to assassinate Palpatine. That's just the short list that I can remember offhand. There are more. Like Cassian noted way back in season one, the Empire's biggest problem is overconfidence. Cassian was able to rob the Imperial naval yard at Steergard with a pure Bavarian fire drill. Just put on a uniform and acted like had every right to be there, and nobody even questioned it. He does the same in "Welcome to the Rebellion".
  24. Seto Kaiba
    There's no way the Empire could lock down a building that size on short/no notice quickly... it's literally the size of a city, and not only are there a bunch of ground level entrances and exits, there's an extensive ring of landing pads on the upper levels too. They'd need to move a literal army onsite to cut off every possible entrance and exit point. Keeping a literal army nearby or onsite would definitely strain relations between the Emperor and the Senators too, since at that point he was still maintaining the illusion that the Senate is wielding its own power. (The difficulty of securing the Senate building comes up several times in The Clone Wars too.) Mind you, the ISB were also at low readiness because they were convinced she'd be unable to speak due to the day's schedule being set... and even if she managed, they thought she'd be easy to detain and arrest since she's a vocal pacifist. She's not at all the type of person to have armed agents ready to shoot their way out of the building with her.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It really doesn't. They allude to non-specific events happening during the timeskips between episodes but it's never anything of real significance. Like the last trio, where the only real detail of relevance is that Bix was traumatized because they had to shoot an innocent bystander who saw their faces during a covert op to avoid being identified. How that'd come to pass doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is how the memory is affecting Bix. They never hint that anything important happened during those time skips, just their bog-standard operations.
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