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Seto Kaiba

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About Seto Kaiba

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    http://www.Macross2.net/m3/m3.html
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    MacrossMike

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    Male
  • Location
    Lagrange Terrace (a stable community)
  • Interests
    Anime (duh), Antique Firearms, Cryptography, Mechanical Design

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    At about the halfway point of the Spring '24 season, I'm feeling pretty disappointed in most of the 25 titles I've picked up. The ones I'm following are: Compared to previous seasons, Spring '24 has a lot more variety in terms of genres and approaches to them. There are only a few genuinely bad titles in this season, but there are quite a few that definitely feel like they're a bit half-baked or needed more development before production. The best of this season, IMO, are Viral Hit, Astro Note, An Archdemon's Dilemma, The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio, Vampire Dormitory, and As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World. Viral Note in particular is a very unconventional title that's kind of hard to watch not because there's anything wrong with it, but because it's both a lovingly rendered martial arts story with a fairly dark plot and a scathing critique of influencer culture at the same time. Its story of a young student who's bullied by his influencer classmates repeatedly and works part-time jobs to pay for his mother's cancer treatment learning to fight after discovering he can make a fortune livestreaming fights against his bullies is an underdog story that's easy to get into and more than a little depressing to follow. Astro Note, An Archdemon's Dilemma, and Vampire Dormitory are all light fluffy romance comedy fare with sci-fi, fantasy, and modern light fantasy spins. If you liked Ouran High School Host Club you'll probably like Vampire Dormitory. The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio is both a slice of life comedy and a fairly honest portrayal of the toxic working conditions of Japanese celebrities at the same time, and it does a fantastic job of getting its audience invested in the characters. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat stands out especially prominently in its genre (isekai) with a particularly unusual take. It's not an accident that the really successful isekai titles are all ones that subvert the genre's core power fantasy themes in significant ways, and As a Reincarnated Aristocrat's subversion is especally odd and handled in an intriguing way. Ars's reincarnation superpower is authentically useless in almost any context. His ability to see the potential of other people expressed numerically means that the challenges he faces are resolved indirectly. Instead of solving problems himself through force or trickery, the driving force of the story is Ars needing to understand the situations of the people that he confronts and find the right way to persuade them to join his cause becuase they hold the key to solving some greater context problem his family faces.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    So... I went and saw Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom when it hit theaters here in the US. Not gonna lie, if I were a Cosmic Era fan I might be feeling a bit cheated by the movie. It's beautifully animated, but it doesn't really do anything to take any of the characters in a new direction or develop them further in any significant way... and the antagonists are, well, ... As conclusions go, it felt pretty halfhearted to me.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Disney's a sublicensee, so the dubbing will probably be done by the distributors who licensed the shows from Big West.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Anyone holding out for universal agreement in a fanbase as large and diverse as Star Wars's will be waiting a VERY long time... I'd argue the more relevant point is the second one, that when the vocal Star Wars fans DO speak up about what they want what they're asking for usually lacks that all-important "general audiences" appeal... when it's not simply impractical or impossible. (For instance, doing away with the sequel trilogy.) I agree completely... but enough fans are into that kind of thing that it does demonstrably sell, though better practice would be to keep it to secondary media like novels and comics. 🤔
  5. Seto Kaiba
    To be frank, I'm not sure that's necessarily true. On an individual level, many fans do seem to have a pretty clear idea of what they want from Star Wars. All you have to do is ask and many of them will tell you quite a lot about what precisely they want from it. They just can't manufacture a consensus because the fanbase is so bloody big and so heavily divided against itself. It surely doesn't help that what the die-hard fans want and what is actually marketable are often two very different things. Tales of the Empire is exactly the kind of writing which the franchise has historically used to pander to that die-hard crowd. Their whole "every single background character is the hero or villain of another story" schick is standard expanded universe writing and something that Star Wars frequently indulged in before Disney. So much so that even a filthy casual like me had one or two of the "Tales of ______" books. It might be weak writing to general audiences, but to the die-hard fans it's continuity porn.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The obvious problem with that idea being that "stupid" is a highly subjective value judgement. A sufficiently skilled spin doctor can make even objectively unsound ideas sound brilliant... and with enough polish, ideas that started out sounding completely imbecilic when they were first proposed can be refined into something genius. Star Wars itself started out as the latter case. George Lucas's original concept for it was a complete trashfire, and with a truly gargantuan amount of patient refinement it was turned into one of the most iconic films ever made. Considering that the usual Star Wars story format is either a simplistic "Good vs. Evil" narrative about the eternal conflict between incorruptible pure pureness and baby-eating complete monster villainy or a side story that takes the form of a string of interstellar fetch quests, I'd reckon Star Wars could do with a bit of complexity in its life like what we got in Andor. Not that I think we'll get that from The Acolyte, since the Jedi and Sith live in a world of moral absolutes and the Dark Side seems to run on motive decay and encourages jumping off the slippery slope. FWIW, it'll be damn pretty to look at and the fight choreography is going to be very solid.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the end of the promo reel was that trailer... So we got that full fight scene, and then we got the trailer that was using the footage piecemeal.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    So... I just got back from the 25th Anniversary re-release of The Phantom Menace and got to see the promo reel they had for The Acolyte after the film. The promo reel was... All in all, pretty to look at but not very substantial. It's not enough to give a real impression of the series proper but it doesn't give me much hope for the show's writing.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    So... if there's a Most Improved award for an anime season, HIGHSPEED Etoile might be in the running. The director and animators seem to have finally figured out how to animate a race in an exciting and visually appealing manner. If everything else weren't still horrible, I'd almost believe it was a completely different show. It's not exactly a dignified plot twist that the protagonist Rin Rindo suddenly goes from propping up the bottom of the rankings to the middle of the pack as a result of...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The fatigue is indeed real. Your example is a fantastically appropriate one. The Star Wars franchise is encountering exactly the same kind of audience fatigue that Star Trek did in the late 90's and early 00's, and the Disney execs overseeing it are making the same mistakes that the Paramount execs who flew Star Trek into the ground did. They have a formula that worked well and are unwilling to consider deviating from it even as it becomes increasingly stale and uninteresting. They've got an enormous and highly versatile setting but a very narrow view of the kind of stories that are appropriate to tell in that setting, Maybe the Star Wars writers feel hemmed in by the second word in the title... everything has to come back to a war. (Not that Star Trek learned its lesson either... they just waited until the fatigue wore off and went back to doing exactly what they were doing before.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Well, after seeing this new trailer, it definitely feels like The Acolyte is headed into Plot Hole: the Series territory. We'll know for sure in a month, though. Except, of course, for any characters appearing in later titles... e.g. Yoda. They're perfectly safe.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    My money's on them going for "Little Horus" Aximand instead. He too has a miniature, but unlike Garvi he stays with the Sons until his death during the Siege.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Considering his role in the story, I doubt Garvi's going to show up as part of the Joytoy Sons of Horus line. He only spends the first three books of the sixty-four book Horus Heresy series as a member of the XVI Legion. Most of his appearances in the series are as one of Malcador's Knights Errant, the Legion-less group of Astartes that carried out various special operations on the Sigilite's orders and later... ... shortly before the start of the Siege of Terra. It was only after the Knights Errant were disbanded that he started painting his armor again, and went back to using the colors of the pre-Heresy Luna Wolves during the Siege. If a Garviel Loken figure is coming, it'll probably be either in the Knights Errant marking-less gray armor or in old Luna Wolves white.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Started Mushoku Tensei today while I was dogsitting. Ended up marathon-ing about 14 episodes of it. It's not a bad series by any means, but it does lose me pretty reliably every time Rudeas starts perving on an underage girl... which is distressingly frequent. Thus far, I'm feeling like the series is a more-or-less capably written isekai story with an engaging plot and some likeable characters that's mainly brought down by its protagonist's whole family being slimeballs.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's true. Sony's press release from after the acquisition of Crunchyroll was finalized in 2021 stated that they intended to merge the Funimation and Crunchyroll streaming libraries, and they confirmed about six months later in Q1 2022 that all of the different anime streaming services under their banner (Funimation, Wakanim, and VRV) would be consolidated into Crunchyroll. They started merging the streaming libraries shortly after that announcement and AFAIK they finished merging the libraries months ago. The last few months the news has been all about merging user accounts for people who'd had both services, but that finished for all outstanding accounts weeks ago and they've shut down the Funimation servers as of April 2. That said, Funimation stopped adding new titles to their catalog around the time the acquisition was finalized. I'm pretty sure they didn't have MOSPEADA on their service when the catalog was frozen. It may be something they've picked up recently as an addendum to having the rights to Robotech delegated to them by Harmony Gold a few years back.
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