kajnrig

Ah, I see. It seemed to me you were saying the story of the Westwood games were better than the story of this show, hence my confusion because this show obviously hasn't come out yet and its story is unknown... unless you have some privileged information. I gotcha now.

I haven't seen anything in the model kits section about this... Are you sure? Bandai never released a 1/72 VF-31A Kairos model kit. If this indicates that one is on the horizon, I'm very excited. If not...

Is this going to be an actual show, or...? All I know about it is that it dropped a certain same-chan into the background.

A couple basic questions because I still plan to watch it despite that goofy clip I was shown a while back: 1) Mouth animations as in when they're speaking dialogue, or just in general? 2) If for spoken dialogue, were they animated to the Japanese or English dub? 3) If animated for Japanese, did you watch in English? And vice versa.

Yep, very much this. In the case of Bandai's hobby division specifically, which is the original context of this whole situation, not the collectible toys market that most people here are thinking of, they have a massive catalog of injection molds going all the way back to the late 70s, spread across a relatively small number of manufacturing facilities. They can't simply expand to new facilities in China, say, because they still need those limited-number molds to make the actual kits with. They could make new molds, but that would be incredibly expensive, maybe prohibitively so. As much as I dislike that they don't regularly have this or that legacy kit in stock, I temper that frustration with the knowledge that to a certain degree, they simply CAN'T produce the variety of kits I want at the speed I want. This as well. Tying it back to the hobby industry, if there's a kit that I really really want - like, say, early 1/100-scale kits of a subject that have largely been supplanted by newer, better-selling versions of it - that hasn't gotten a repop in a long time for whatever reason(s), or just is no longer in production at all, then I don't really have room to negotiate on price. I paid something like 2-3x "MSRP" for this, and I'm... well, I'm not "fine" with that, but I find it an easy enough pill to swallow. I have zero doubt that they maximized production on the HGUC Nightingale, and that the demand is simply overwhelming. They do engage in artificial scarcity regularly, though, which is why I see their (I think they own HJ??? maybe, maybe not) canning of an employee to be little more than, dare I say it, cynical virtue signaling. I think this is one of the key issues that need figuring out. "Regular consumers" are having to compete against automated bots and the like, and there's only so much they can do; the onus now is on the manufacturers/resellers to try to detect and cut out scalpers... if they really want to cut them out at all, that is. To a certain extent, they're content with (and/or maybe even need) the existence of the scalping market. Scalpers driving up the price customers have to pay for products slowly trains customers to be comfortable paying more for arguably the same, which eases tensions for the manufacturer if/when they push up their own price, etc. That's a pretty cynical and limited-view perspective, but... alas.

You didn't like the ending of The Witch? I think it was understated but rather effective. I'm in agreement about Hereditary, though; I wanted something sliiightly more dramatic to happen.

Exia w/ GN Arms Exia w/ GN Arms Repair Exia w/ GN Arms R2 Exia w/ GN Arms Repair Trans-Am Avalanche Pack ....... They'll find variants to milk, don't worry.

This is the same production company that bankrolled the likes of The Witch, Hereditary, and Midsommar. Wat? is their modus operandi.

Is the stickied thread correct that the preorder night is August 2, 4pm JST? Also, has there been any word of a 31A repop? I'd honestly rather go for the repop.

BBTS doubling down on openly carrying Macross merch now. 1/20 VF-25F nose cone model kit: https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/172336

HLJ link: https://www.hlj.com/1-20-scale-plamax-mf-51-minimum-factory-fighter-nose-collection-vf-25f-macross-f-max01249 EDIT Amiami: https://www.amiami.com/eng/detail/?gcode=TOY-RBT-6184 E2 BBTS: https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/172336 Any difference between getting in stores and ordering direct from the Goodsmile webstore?

Were the previous releases... NOT the "Final Battle" versions? Seem strange that they would wait this long to release "full" kits for a two-hour movie released some ten years ago or so--oh, is it the 10th anniversary of 00 and/or Trailblazer?

The show hasn't even debuted yet. ???? Forgot to add that despite my misgivings about the setting's aesthetic, I think the show looks interesting enough, and I'm not seeing the issues with the CGI that everyone else seems to be. And the action looks pretty slick at times, actually. I'm still not convinced that it has enough Blade Runner DNA coursing through its veins to warrant the brand name, but otherwise... yeah, it looks good.

Hobby Japan the magazine, not Hobby Link Japan the store.

The impression I've been getting from all the trailers is simply "PG-13 Ninja Assassin." Would that be accurate?

Eh... Given how much the hobby industry relies on FOMO to generate artificial demand for products, I can't say I'm too sympathetic to what amounts to the advertising arm of the industry crying foul about a third party beating them at their own game. That said, there's a world of difference between reselling your stuff for whatever price people are willing to pay and... scalping.

It doesn't look bad so much as... not Blade Runner. Blade Runner's look has always been dystopic Los Angeles more than anything else, This looks like it would fit right in with the likes of Ghost in the Shell or, yes, Alita and Matrix. Or Big Hero 6. Or any number of Future Tokyo settings, which honestly has gotten a bit stale by now.

Sharing this as an excuse to remind people that this movie is coming out this Friday, July 30.

Watched the second season of Beastars and third of Aggretsuko. Beastars s2 falters at the end, but it's a nice crescendo the entire rest of the way. It's still as weird and, frankly, uncomfortable in some parts as it ever was, but that's part of its appeal, I think. The part that weirded me out the most was probably the gazelle(?) stripper contemplating stripping for a room full of carnivores with nothing to physically separate her from them, watching their sexual lust and basic hunger comingle until they can't tell the difference between them. Aggretsuko started out a bit slow, as all seasons have I think, but gathered more and more steam as it went on. I always forget how much fun the show can be. I was wary of the idol plot when it showed up, but I really liked it by season's end. I'm a bit ambivalent about it being yet another dropped story thread; on the one hand, I like what's there, but on the other, that's exactly the issue. Inui is adorable.

Unless that's Taiwan currency, they CAN'T seriously want $900... ~$30-32 USD is what it would convert to, which seems... reasonable, I guess, I dunno action figure pricing...

Imagine if they used the oversized TV shoulder pylons. 9 feet? That boy could tango with Vampire Mommy Milkers!

Too true. D9 was his most successful work, both financially and artistically, and the one that I return to most often. Elysium and Chappie both still work well enough, but their social commentary is only surface level. I think it has to do with his being more familiar with the specifically South African apartheid that informed D9, whereas Elysium's classism and Chappie's... I forget what the term is, the "what makes a human?" idea... were either more generic in scope or tried to be specific to cultures/regions that he wasn't a part of or couldn't get good insight into. Regardless, I'm optimistic and excited about this movie.

EDIT: Accidentally submitted prematurely. Wop wop. Working on it. EDIT 2: Well, computer accidentally shut off mid-edit, so you get the CliffNotes response, sorry. Right, I read that bit of EvaGeeks, and it's compelling evidence, but again, the lack of an explicit statement within the "text" of the show itself, plus all the other vagueries of the show, leads me to leave it, and the idea of souls being needed at all, and specifically the souls of the pilots' mothers, in the gray zone of authenticity. I do like the idea, though, don't get me wrong. A couple responses: 1) I never took the MAGI setup to mean that her actual soul had been partitioned into the three MAGI supercomputers, simply that their behavior had been patterned after aspects of herself. A Dummy System of their own, so to speak. 2) I mentioned the ineptness with which Nerv handles the esoteric technologies it uses above to reinforce the idea that they didn't (before Yui, and maybe for some time after) fully know that a soul had to be present inside an Eva, and still currently don't know how exactly to go about putting one in there. The only other experiment we know of that tried to replicate Unit 01's assimilation of Yui was Unit 02's assimilation of Kyoko, and that was something of a failure. Only part of her soul was assimilated into the Eva, leading to her psychosis and eventual suicide... perhaps whereupon the rest of her soul joined in? If Unit 00 assimilated either Naoko or Rei I's soul, I assumed it did so passively, ie it was going to suck in the soul of any person who died in its vicinity, and Naoko/Rei I sufficed. If part of Rei's soul is inside Eva 00, it begs the question: Why? Why would Nerv, assuming they know that a soul is required and how and etc., not only put her soul in there, but put a fraction of her soul in there? And if they did so and it worked, why wouldn't they just do that for the rest of them? Yes, there's talk about better sync ratio and whatnot, but... the Double Rei Pilot-Soul System works. It's proof of concept that you DON'T need a pilot's mother's soul inside their Eva in order to sync with it. The fact that Rei and Shinji are able to swap Evas and sync with different "mothers" also kind of says as much... The fact that you have to qualify that statement with "likely" reinforces my point. It's canon that Evas need their pilots' mothers' souls inside them, but that canon is often enough abused that I feel comfortable disregarding it entirely. The only Evas for whom it is vitally important that they have their pilots' mothers' souls inside them are Unit 01 and, to a lesser extent, Unit 02. Unit 03, but I take your meaning. (Unit 04 is the one blown up in Nevada(?) during the experimental S2 engine installation.) Fair point. I imagine the language is... vague... about it, but all the same. Unit 02 still has a soul, so it's not functioning without one. Kaworu is able to "synchronize" with that soul, receded into itself as it is, and pilot the Eva. I think he says something like "If there were no soul, I could be absorbed into it," indicating to me that the presence of a soul is stopping him from simply becoming the Eva a la Bardiel. Mari's appearance in the manga I just took to be Sadamoto liking the design and wanting to use it in a fun, unexpected way. It wasn't made with the intent of tying back any more strongly to the Rebuilds. But, of course, fans being fans and people being people, they wanted there to be connections so they damn well made there be connections! and now we have... whatever we have in 3.0 and 4.0. Or maybe it was intentional. It did come out after the first two Rebuilds, after all. Maybe it was a hint of things to come. Regardless, I just... don't care? about Mari as a character. I don't care much about the Rebuilds in general. I'm sure 4.0 will be good. Maybe it will make sense of the nonsense that was 3.0. Maybe not. Maybe we'll finally get a reason to care about Mari other than being another fanservice vehicle. Regarding Asuka, I don't remember any part of 3.0 implying that she's a clone a la Rei, which you claimed it did. I've just never heard it, is all, and it seems rather tenuous and farfetched. Or well, maybe not the latter so much, but certainly the former.

I think I'd be more interested if it was at least a full-detail (or, well, pseudo-full-detail) kit. A nose radar, full cockpit with maybe functional EX Gear system, removable panels, wires/hoses, etc... I mean, I still have half a mind to get this just to scratchbuild the rest of it, but still...