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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Movie Xaos definitely seems to be a much larger, more established organization than their TV counterparts... who had the one Macross Elysion-type ship, a handful of frigates, and not much else. (Of course, given how badly they get rolled by the Aerial Knights I'm not sure that actually makes their situation any better. If anything, it makes the curbstomping they receive less excusable even if the Elysion-type seems to be an older model Macross than the Quarter-class.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Thanks to a moderately slow day, I got to start watching this season's offerings. Started with Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It r=1-sinθ, the second season of Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It. This show is just as weird as I remember it being, equal parts edutainment program about the scientific method in general and occasionally biochemistry in particular, and a love comedy about two of the most willfully oblivious people around. The second season started more or less exactly where the first season left off, though the first episode has a lot more fanservice than I remember it having. The new characters, Chris and Suiu, are a couple and VERY showy about their relationship and public displays of affection that border on public indecency... to the dismay and bewilderment of Himuro and Yukimura. The whole mess - involving measuring oxytocin levels using saliva tests - very quickly winds up a pastiche of Dragon Ball Z complete with a backdrop of a barren wasteland full of plateaus and rock formations. It's just weird enough to draw you in if you let it, and just absurd enough to keep you watching to see what nonsense they'll get up to next.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's more a concern for fleet size in general... the 1st Generation and 2nd Generation emigrant fleets that used the Megaroad-class emigrant ships were small, with populations in the tens of thousands and only a few dozen ships in total. A fleet like that can't realistically expect to fight a Zentradi branch fleet even with the advantage of surprise, so for that period evasion was basically the only option. (Mind you, the Megaroad-class was far from defenseless... it just wasn't a warship in and of itself. They had Valkyries of their own, but were mostly dependent on escort ships for anti-warship defense. Some of those early fleets were able to bolster their forces somewhat with one of the twelve mass-production Macross-class ships.) Later fleets using the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Generations of emigrant ship had much larger populations and were consequently much better defended. Those fleets were built for long-term operations with plenty of breathing room for population growth. The 3rd Generation City-class could support 350,000 people all on its own and the exemplar Macross 7 fleet (37th long-distance emigrant fleet) had a total population of approximately 1 million and almost 200 escort ships. Its successors went even bigger, with the 5th Generation Island Cluster-class (e.g. Macross Frontier) supporting 10 million while operating at only a fraction of their maximum capacity. (Some of the emigrant fleets from that same period in the non-official setting materials like Master File are alleged to have ~900 warships in their escort details.) Newer generations of Valkyrie, stealthier and higher-performance warships, and simply way more forces in general made having to actually fight a Zentradi force a bit less untenable, but avoidance was still the normal because hey... why take chances with that many lives? There isn't one... that's a translation problem. In short, the same kanji (移民 imin) is used for both "immigrant/immigration" and "emigrant/emigration". Which one you use is dependent on a contextual reading of the sentence and/or situation it's used in. Properly, in this case it should be "emigrant/emigration" since these fleets are departing Earth (nominally a nation) to go establish a new nation on an uninhabited planet somewhere. You're only an immigrant (or immigrating) if you're moving into an existing nation with the intent to take up residence there. Most machine translations just go with whatever Definition #1 for a word is since they're not sensitive to context, so they tend to default to rendering it as "immigrant/immigration" rather than the proper, contextually-correct "emigrant/emigration". (This tendency is a big part of why those translation apps tend to produce Engrish and cases of My Hovercraft is Full of Eels, especially with tonal languages.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That's basically what I described... the cast was so huge that most of them ended up as specific, but undeveloped, character archetypes that the audience was expected to project onto instead of relate to. They did an OK job developing Hayate, Freyja, etc., but IMO too many characters on the protagonist side were expected to float on by on their resemblance to Frontier characters who were properly developed. Arad being a suspiciously similar substitute for Ozma, Mikumo for Sheryl, etc. In the late series, Roid for Grace and Keith for Brera.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    "This End Towards Enemy".
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Xaos, but yeah... it's shocking how Xaos was basically living paycheck-to-paycheck in the TV series and ran out of money almost immediately once they were ousted from Brisingr, but in there and the movies they seem to have an infinite bank account to fund expensive custom Valkyries. Hm... maybe those two things are connected. Maybe the reason Xaos is flat broke is because they're spending their entire operating fund on these super-expensive ace custom Valkyries.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Normally the DX Chogokin toys have at least a brief bit of specs in the manual, but apparently that got left out of the Kairos Pluses and other later Delta designs. But yeah, the YF-29 is a fun case of parallel development using shared, jointly-developed hardware... the Frontier Government kept costs down by having the YF-29 share parts with the VF-25.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's what happens when you decide to have a main cast easily twice the size of other Macross shows... you don't have enough time to develop them all. It's pretty clear they were planning to clean up on character goods, though. The members of Walkure cover the standard harem anime character archetypes, and the Aerial Knights following the reverse harem character archetypes so closely that their promotional art feels like it was drawn with an Ouran High School Host Club crossover in mind.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That part is a carryover from the VF-25. On the VF-25, that's a gunmount where the 25mm beam machine guns or 25mm high-speed machine guns are located. The grille is presumably there to facilitate the gun's cooling system. On the YF-29, that part seems to be one among many that is shared with the VF-25 as a result of their parallel development and common hardware. There is no gun there, per the YF-29's stats, but the housing seems to have been carried over as a shared part.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Delta is basically Frontier 2 by way of Macross 7... its plot borrows a LOT from Frontier, to the point of straight-up ripping the entire ending off, but thematically it's much more like the Macross 7 series.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department. For a series with such a strong start and unconventional premise, the ending was pretty disappointingly weak and predictable. A story that satirizes Japanese corporate culture via a tokusatsu superhero style evil organization's corporate front ending on a plot involving a potential hostile takeover by a foreign investment firm? The second half feels like a rush to include every (quite real) regional tokusatsu hero/mascot group connected to the series... and oh boy are there A LOT of them. It kind of stops being a parody and starts playing itself razor-straight right at the end... only reverting back to from after the fight is over and tokusatsu hero is asked to help Kuroitsu remove the (malfunctioning) toku hero outfit she's wearing, ending in his nominal defeat via explosive nosebleed as a response of overthinking her request to help her take it off. All in all, maybe 7/10? A really enjoyable start and some terribly relatable plotlines about corporate idiocy, with a weakish ending.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The remnants of the Koper fleet were also in that position where avoidance wasn't really an option... it was either try to subdue them and risk failure, or play it safe and wipe them out to avoid putting the ~10M people aboard the emigrant ship at risk. The Macross Valiant situation described in Master File seems to be more typical, with a Zentradi main fleet being detected along the emigrant fleet's path and the fleet taking an emergency fold to avoid being detected at all.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    About time... I really hope this'll be accompanied by some official publications. The dearth of information for Absolute Live!!!!!! is kind of upsetting. For Macross Delta as a whole, really. The Blu-ray liner notes are about the only decent-quality publication about it.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    You, my friend, have come to the right place to satiate that curiosity. Sort of? The UN Forces in Macross II's "parallel world" continuity do make fairly liberal use of the Minmay Attack to deal with the Zentradi fleets of various sizes that wander into their territory on a semi-regular basis. That said, there's still very much an element of "kill it with (thermonuclear) fire" in their strategic outlook that becomes increasingly vital as the size of the enemy fleet increases or if the enemy shows resistance to the Minmay Attack. The Macross Cannon-class gunships were essentially Plan B in the event that fleet couldn't be thrown into disarray using the Minmay Attack, with four of them having enough firepower to effectively one-shot an entire 1,000+ ship branch fleet. After a couple of disastrous incidents in the 2030s (see Macross 2036, Macross: Eternal Love Song), the UN Forces weren't exactly going to take it as read that the Minmay Attack was going to be effective the first time, every time. In many cases, the Minmay Attack worked best as a way to distract enemy forces long enough to decapitate the command structure of those larger fleets, triggering a retreat. Eh... you could say it depends who the Zentradi encounter, and how big the Zentradi fleet is. One major limiting factor is that emigrant fleets and emigrant planets are not so overblessed with armed forces that they can risk engaging the larger Zentradi formations. Most have a few dozen to a few hundred warships and a couple hundred to a couple thousand Valkyries at their disposal. They usually practice a policy of avoidance, since one of the signature strategies of those branch fleets when they encounter more resistance than expected is "Summon Bigger Fish"... which means they may come under threat from larger branch fleets or even a main fleet if they draw too much attention to themselves. Since the Minmay Attack is not 100% effective on every Zentradi, the only way to ensure that no retreating forces give away your fleet or planet's position and come back with seven billion of their best mates to have another go is to kill them all before they can escape. If the fleet is small - a few dozen or maybe a hundred or so ships - then an emigrant fleet or planet can potentially absorb that without overstretching their logistics. Trying to integrate millions of Zentradi into your population is an invitation to trouble, like Earth found out the hard way with 8 million Zentradi refugees after the First Space War. While I don't recall any (canonical) instances of the Minmay Attack being used in that specific time period, it's worth noting that time period is also largely a blank space on the timeline.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's enjoyable for what it is, IMO... and we should all be grateful that nobody's been stupid enough to do a film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Precisely. Morality is fundamentally subjective, and varies from culture to culture... and fictional cultures are no exception to that. What's more, the morality of fictional cultures is also under no obligation to even necessarily make sense to humans in-universe or out. It only has to make sense to the characters following it in-universe. Like, for instance, the Klingons in Star Trek. Their definition of "honor" doesn't always line up with what humans consider "honor" or "honorable behavior" in many situations. Or the Covenant in Halo, who follow an entertainingly wrong moral code derived from the hilarious misunderstandings of their cargo cult religion that doesn't see anything in particular wrong with genocide. The one really distinctive thing Southern Cross's story had going for it was how utterly bizarre Zor society and culture is, and it's actually kind of a shame that the series never got to explore it in any depth. (Assuming, of course, that Tatsunoko bothered to think about the implications when they based Zor society on the Ammonite staff's team structure.) As a race of human-all-along "aliens", the Zor's culture is quite alien. The trauma of the nuclear holocaust that sent Glorie into a nuclear winter and forced them to abandon it for Phi Eridani for centuries also compelled them to reengineer their entire society in distinctly inhuman ways. They rewrote the entire concept of the individual in their society into a tripartite existence of identical triplets who constitute a single being, each dedicated to a separate part of rational thought (information, decision, and action). Exactly how they arrived at that would've been a very interesting story to tell. Their nominal pacifism is more explicable, as refugee survivors of a planetary apocalypse caused by war (twice over, considering they're descendants of colonial pioneers sent from Earth), though their hypocrisy in brainwashing people to fight on their behalf is less so.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Gonna rewatch Ascendance of a Bookworm for a refresh on it since the new season is airing. It's mostly feel-good stuff, and surprisingly well-composed and unconventional for an isekai, so I plan to enjoy the hell out of it.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I hate to say it, but they've made Credence look like Lord Farquaad from Shrek.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Crunchyroll is continuing to add new simulcasts to the Spring 2022 season. The full list now includes: One Piece Boruto The Rising of the Shield Hero (S2) Dragon Quest: the Adventure of Dai Digimon Ghost Game Detective Conan Ascendance of a Bookworm (S3, though listed as S4 on their service due to OVAs) CUE! I'm Kodama Kawashiri Build-Divide - #000000 - Code Black Date a Live Science Fell in Love: So I Tried to Prove It (S2) Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Shadowverse Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club The Dawn of the Witch Requiem fo the Rose King Shenmue: the Animation RPG Real Estate Aharen-san wa Hakarenai Tomodachi Game Love All Play Healer Girl Miss Shachiku and the Little Baby Ghost The Greatest Demon Lord is Reborn as a Typical Nobody Fanfare of Adolescence Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs Love After World Domination Deaimon: Recipe for Happiness ESTAB LIFE: Great Escape BIRDIE WING: Golf Girls' Story Mahjong Soul Heroines Run the Show Skeleton Knight in Another World So far, I'm pretty pleased with the diversity of offerings this season. There is the usual selection of heavily derivative isekai garbage, but also a much better selection of other genres with more original thought on display as well. First time in a while that I've found myself bookmarking a bunch of shows all at once. I finished Police in a Pod a few days back. It got HEAVY, with the final few episodes involving a manhunt for a pair of sex offenders and one short arc involving the protagonist being traumatized by seeing a child who'd died in a fatal auto accident.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I'm keen to see if the Worldwide VF-25 is going to be part of a series of special edition DX VFs. I rather like the paintjob, so I'd like to see the major VFs all together in that... the VF-0, VF-1, VF-11, VF-19, VF-25, and VF-31.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yup.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's debatable, since many alien cultures in fiction tend not to share the same values, morals, and priorities as humans... which makes them less relatable to most audiences. You could say that it boils down to moral "purity" and moral "relatability" not being the same thing... No, I'm afraid not... because it is an objective matter of record that Southern Cross was a failure as a series. Despite coming out at the height of the mecha genre's popularity and a favorable time slot previously held by highly successful shows, it bombed so hard and got such poor viewership numbers that its broadcast run was cut almost in half in mid-production, its merchandising partners abandoned it, and it failed to be vindicated by the reruns either in Japan or abroad. Its reception abroad was only marginally better, and to be fair was mainly a result of association with better shows. Even then, its reception as part of the Robotech series was still so overwhelmingly negative that merchandising for the Southern Cross portion was explicitly indicated to be not worth the effort by their licensees and it was even excluded from rebroadcast in some markets due to its poor ratings performance. That's a pretty damned strong performance-based argument that it's not a good show.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Off with your head. 😛 We lost the axe, so we're gonna have to do this with dental floss. Please hold VERY still. The Logan is about the worst thing you could possibly conceive of to fight the Zentradi. It's smaller than they are by a good bit, it's like 80% cockpit so a center mass shot will kill the pilot dead, its weapons are too light to fight... well... anything, and the Zentradi rebels were wiped out in the early 2010s in Robotech and the rest shipped off into deep space in 2022. ... wrap-around monitors weren't a thing in Robotech or Southern Cross though, and that doesn't really justify an armored fighting vehicle with a drivers compartment that's exposed to enemy fire from the front. While Robotech made it unambiguously canon that the Southern Cross Army was the military's dumping ground for incombustible garbage, I'd always privately suspected that the Spartas was literally designed to get its pilots killed or maimed in live fire exercises as a way of gently encouraging the worst offenders to leave the service voluntarily or in a free military issue permanent sleeping bag. For Southern Cross, my assumption was more like that the Southern Cross Army was an all-flash no-substance chocolate box regiment meant to keep the bored colonist kids who would otherwise be causing trouble in one place and under adult supervision. The series never really explains why the colonies bother to maintain armed forces at all, since there were no aliens in the setting and no known threats anywhere in the wake of humanity abandoning Earth after nuclear war ruined it. Nor does it really offer a rational explanation - or any explanation at all - for why someone like Jeanne who all but lives in the stockade hasn't been punted out of the service on a bad conduct discharge. Considering how small the number is, even among people who like Southern Cross, it's statistically indistinguishable from zero. It's almost like the audience are humans themselves and relate best to their own kind... who'da thunk it? ... there is some hilarious irony here in that you consistently agitate in favor of clones. ... that's your opinion, let's not confuse it for fact or even fact-based.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    While I don't care for the character, I'll admit she had one really good self-aware moment when she hangs a lampshade on the fact that the audience usually only sees the exciting bits... and that most of space travel and space exploration is just getting there via very long, very dull spans of straight line warp flight.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    FWIW, I found DS9 to be about the ideal blend of serialized and episodic storytelling in its last four seasons. If Strange New Worlds can manage about that level of balance between the two, it'll be doing better than the other offerings by quite a bit right out of the gate.
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