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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Indeed. The scale of the threat posed by the remaining Zentradi forces really can't be overstated. Not only are there still approximately 3 million ships of the 4,795,122 ship Boddole Zer main fleet still abroad in the galaxy after retreating from the final battle of humanity's First Space War, there are said to be between 2,000 and 3,000 of the original 5,000+ main fleets still at large. Each of those main fleets has hundreds or thousands of its branch fleets spread across massive areas of space searching for, and engaging, the Supervision Army. The best-equipped (or most excessive) emigrant government New UN Forces have the firepower to defeat a branch fleet on their own... the smallest regular operating unit of the Zentradi forces. Anything much bigger, and the best choice is to tuck tail and run. The mechanics of fold navigation are a double-edged sword that mostly works in humanity's favor at this stage. Because it's essentially a form of teleportation by folding higher dimensional space, the odds of chance encounters with the Zentradi are quite low. Still nonzero, but low enough that humanity is still essentially flying under the radar despite its burgeoning interstellar civilization.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe the new villain is a former events coordinator from that resort Picard stayed in on Risa, determined to take her revenge for his stubborn insistence on doing nothing but reading. Really, they're running out of anyone who has any real reason to even dislike Picard never mind feel murderous rage towards him and the Federation. The Next Generation was too episodic for Jean-Luc Picard or the crew of the Enterprise-D to gather much in the way of recurring nemises (nemesi?) or offend anyone badly enough that they'd come screaming out of nowhere to try to destroy the Federation and murder him. He only really managed a few people who had something against him personally and they're all either dead or in such disgrace that they can't really get at him personally never mind try to destroy the entire Federation. This villain either has to be a "remember the new guy?" or this crazy lady is a Son'a/Ba'ku come for revenge for some reason. Are we looking at Ru'afo's mum or something? That problem ended up getting magically solved offscreen and then never mentioned again. (Voyager's VG warp nacelles were supposed to be the fix, at least initially.) Two in one season... this means that, somewhere along the way, both Will Riker's USS Titan and Worf's USS Enterprise-E were destroyed somehow offscreen. Why do the writers have it in for everyone and everything like this? Everyone MUST be miserable and haunted and broken and nothing familiar from better days is allowed to exist. My question would be more why they didn't use the name of the Odyssey-class ship Picard commanded before retiring... the USS Verity. The tie-in/prequel comic that set Picard up had him commanding the USS Verity as his flagship for the Romulan evacuation. Why not just use THAT one? It's just lazy writing. Destroying the Enterprise once was a sucker-punch to the audience who were certain the writers would never do it. Past that point, it became an expectation that the writers WOULD do it because they went and established that practically every Enterprise ends its service in a violent demise.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming humanity doesn't end up destroying itself first or getting destroyed by the Zentradi... yeah, probably. Emigrant governments are going to need quite a bit of time to build up substantial defense forces that can independently withstand even a Zentradi Branch Fleet's attack. Even in 2060, all but the emigrant governments with the largest and most powerful defense forces have to call upon their neighbors for reinforcements when they come under attack by a Zentradi branch fleet or other sigificant threat. The obligation to answer such calls comes up in Macross Delta: the False Songstress when Macross Galaxy sends a distress call in the face of a Vajra attack and in Macross Delta: The White Knight of the Black Wing when Windermere IV's Aerial Knights take a beating helping to repel a Zentradi fleet attacking one of Windermere IV's neighboring systems. With most emigrant governments being able to muster only a few dozen to at most a few hundred warships, they're badly outclassed by the sheer scale of Zentradi forces. It will take quite a while for humanity to be able to deploy a military force on anywhere close to that insane scale or to develop weapons that can sufficiently level that playing field. (Master File presents a story about a 2030s-era encounter with a very small main fleet of just 120,000 ships that was still time for the brown trousers. Spica III was wiped out, and the New UN Forces had to draw every available ship and fighter from Earth and all the neighboring systems to wipe the main fleet out before it stumbled on any other worlds in the immediate vicinity of Earth.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    If nothing else, I have every confidence Jack Black's performance as Bowser will leave no piece of scenery free of toothmarks... which is 100% on-brand for Bowser. I am just NEVER going to get over the idea of Mario actually having dialog.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    So... that was a thing that I watched. I have no idea what the hell it was, though. If I had to guess based on the content of that trailer, I would say either Patrick Stewart or the rest of the writers room are on a mission to burn what remains of TNG to the ground in a fit of pique after seeing Picard's reviews. Either that or it's a cry for help. There's nothing sane about repeatedly writing yourself in scenarios where everyone hates you and you and your friends are miserable and likely to die horribly. Jean-Luc Picard was a consummate diplomat. Why do so very many people seem to harbor murderous hatred for him now that he's like a hundred and a robot? The cast reunion the showrunners swore Picard wouldn't become aside, are they just grenade-fishing for loose ends to tie up for fanservice's sake? Lore and Moriarty? Those two were done to death back in TNG.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, it does sound logical at first glance... but it's not the safest option on the table. Avoidance is. By the 2030s, emigrant fleets use taskforces of stealth warships to scout ahead of the fleet on its planned course and provide a defensive early warning picket in a wide area of space around the fleet's current position. Nothing's safer for the civilian population than spotting trouble ahead of time before it spots you and getting out of dodge before that trouble in potentia can detect you or at least before trouble can reach you. Nobody wants to be caught in a do-or-die defense of an emigrant fleet against a superior force. That ends poorly way too often, like Macross Galaxy getting wiped out by the Vajra. Variable Fighter Master File adds a few extra details in the VF-25 book. Namely, that emigrant fleets making an emergency fold jump to escape a threat will deploy a fold wave jamming unit to mask their departure and that there is a (thankfully little-used) practice of either self-destructing or otherwise destroying ships that cannot escape and are left in imminent danger of falling into Zentradi hands with information about Humanity.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Really, nothing about "Lady M" makes sense... and to make matters worse, all the information about her is presented as either secondhand or rumor.
  8. Seto Kaiba
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be a hell of a plot twist...
  10. Seto Kaiba
  11. Seto Kaiba
    There may well be. Then again, there may not. Someone has to be brave enough to actually test the hypothesis first before we'll know for sure. Disney's not as confident in the brand as they were when they were before fans tore them a new one over the sequel trilogy and Solo. With Andor handily grabbing most of the attention, I suspect we'll see more efforts towards original storytelling with a minimum of fanservice. Nothing succeeds like success, after all. If they can keep bringing fresh product like Andor that isn't buried in self-indulgent fanservice they can probably undo a lot of the damage the sequel trilogy and Solo did. Yes, novels are adapted to screenplays all the time... but there's a big difference between adapting an already-popular novel that had broad appeal like, say, Jurassic Park or Harry Potter, and adapting a licensed novel intended to cater to a much smaller audience. It's almost exclusively the former. (It can work under the right conditions, but because western audiences are still locked into "animation is for the children" Japan's cheap way of doing it is seen as unattractive to most studios and the production cost of these direct-to-streaming shows is absolutely insane so studios are being very cautious. Mind you, being cautious is not the same thing as exercising good judgement either... it's possible to very cautiously make huge numbers of terrible decisions, like The Rise of Skywalker.) Being a fan of something does not mean you are not able to recognize its flaws. It usually means you love something despite, or even because of, its flaws. If there are writers who are fans of the EU, they're no doubt exercising their professional judgement to separate what they personally enjoy from what's workable for the general audiences. 😉
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they can't all be gems... but talk about a missed opportunity for a prequel meme!
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how many questionable mushrooms he ingests, it's possible he's just having a REALLY bad trip.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Forgive me for belaboring the obvious point, but there's quite a galaxy of difference between the kind of writing in licensed works that is intended to appeal to die-hard fans and the kind of writing intended to appeal to and engage general audiences. What die-hard fans might consider good or even exceptional writing in Expanded Universe material is not at all likely to be well-received by the casual audience because the fundamental expectations regarding what constitutes "quality" are different. One of the main reasons Andor stands head, shoulders, knees, toes, and a human pyramid of wookiees above its contemporaries in the Star Wars franchise is that its writers are actively avoiding the self-indulgent obsession with fanservice that is the hallmark of EU writing and that too often becomes the norm when you have fans working on properties they started as fans of.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That is just plain cruel. 😅
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, technically speaking everything the Zentradi use is a "Protoculture design"... but given that the ship was configured to be crewed by giants and there is mention of battle pods recovered from the wreck, it's a very safe bet it was something the Protoculture designed for the Zentradi to use. Possible explanations for why the class itself is associated with the Supervision Army include that it was manufactured by one specific region of the Protoculture's civilization for the Zentradi fleets protecting them and never achieved widespread adoption, or that the factory satellites for the Zentradi fleets operating around Earth were destroyed long ago and the Supervision Army forces are the only ones still operating that class in that region of the galaxy. (In DYRL?, its origin was changed to being a Meltrandi ship, as they became stand-ins for the Zentradi's enemies in that in-universe movie.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's worth noting that that rule did bend quite a bit in the recent movie, and has had the occasional little deviation here and there in previous works.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, it did. Exactly like that, in fact... because that art by Kazutaka Miyatake depicts Alien StarShip 1 shortly before she crashed on Earth. It's based on the production line art that Miyatake drew for the Supervision Army gunship encountered in "Viva Maria" which was said in-series to be the same type as the Macross, and which official publications (e.g. Macross Chronicle) use as art of the Macross's original (pre-refit) appearance.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Spoiler tag your spoilers, the movie just became available to most fans outside Japan. Boy did I ever underestimate what a bunch of hacks were working on Delta... Quite a lot of fans seem to be rather upset by the whole thing too, both because it's a cheap and meaningless attempt to garner some interest from older fans that has no real impact on the plot and because it's a tediously mundane answer to the setting's most enduring mystery.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Wow, so Chris Pratt's Mario voice is just... regular-ass Chris Pratt voice. Having seen Super Mario Bros. in theaters as a kid my hopes were not high to begin with, but it's weirdly disappointing to hear Mario not sounding like the outrageous (but not entirely unrealistic) Italian stereotype Charles Martinet has been voicing since 1992. EDIT: In a way, it's even weirder to hear Mario having actual dialogue instead of just various reaction sounds.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Misa is really bad at parallel parking. Yeah, and the liner notes actually mention that there was concern about even giving Max a blue YF-29 because they were concerned it being a YF-29 might get it mistaken for Alto's or its blue paintjob and Frontier connection might get it mistaken for Michael's. Regardless of model, it was going to be Blue Valkyrie No.2 in the movie since blue is also Hayate's signature color. (Master File also offers a blue paintjob for an Emerald Force VF-25.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    From the outside looking in, the "Why not?" is pretty obvious. Andor is the exception, not the rule. It's the only one of the four Disney+ Star Wars series so far that is being carried by the quality of its writing and acting rather than the quantity of its self-indulgent fanservice. There is absolutely no guarantee that they do any other story, regardless of genre, at this level of quality. Goodness knows if they could do that on command they would've done it where it counted... like in Solo, the sequel trilogy, the prequel trilogy, the other three shows, the Expanded Universe, etc.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    No, the Varauta forces in Macross 7 are using modified versions of the same ships and mecha they used before their planet (named Libera, according to the recent movie) was taken over by the Protodeviln. Even Gepernich's huge flagship is just the former flagship of the Varauta NUNS with some modifications. The Fz-109 is a modified VF-14 Vampire. The Az-130 is a modified VA-14. The FBz-99 is a modified VAB-2. The only original design that the post-Protodeviln Varauta forces had was a large aircraft carrier that is just a stretched version of their standard model. Contrary to what the name might make you expect, the Supervision Army was not founded as anything like an organized formal military service. It was a force the Protodeviln threw together out of whatever ships, mecha, and spiritia-drained personnel were on hand and its approach to "recruitment" could best be described as the stuff of vampire action movies. They would attack Protoculture settlements and anyone who wasn't killed in the fighting would be drained of their spiritia and subjected to mind control for use as soldiers to attack more Protoculture settlements and capture more people. Lather, rinse, repeat. The Supervision Army and Varauta Forces are basically legions of ghouls created by space vampires. Odds are their equipment was initially nothing like standardized and they had little or nothing developed for them. It was a force made up entirely of captured ships and mecha that were crewed by the Protodeviln's mind-controlled victims. Millennia of warfare probably saw it deteriorate into something like a standardized force after irreplaceable Protoculture ships were all lost fighting the Zentradi and they were left with the equipment and personnel produced by captured factory satellites.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I consider this video meme completely appropriate and even on topic considering the big-eared Ferengi-like aliens we see in The Labyrinth of Time. The first one is actually answered in the Macross Delta TV anime directly, so I don't see a reason to spoiler tag that one. By "ruins" I'm assuming you mean the Protoculture System. Yes, the Protoculture System's resonators are physically real. They're hidden/stored in fold space when they are not active, either because the Protoculture were concerned someone might tamper with them after they died out or simply to keep them out of the way. For the record, the answer is the egg did. Eggs predate chickens by approximately 340 million years. </overlyliteralgag>
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle. You can see one of the prepunched holes for the binders on the left side of the image.
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