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Seto Kaiba

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    Anime (duh), Antique Firearms, Cryptography, Mechanical Design

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno... the animation, and pretty much every textual description, suggests it's essentially a ballistic reentry. Macross Chronicle is, AFAIK, the only source to suggest that there was any semblance of control from the ship side beyond the unscheduled "lithobraking" maneuver at the terminal end of the descent, and it only mentions the ship slowing down not a turn. Depending on whether we're seeing the light and dust from impact or simply from the ship's passage overhead in that scene, that radically opens the field as to where he could've been. Shin could be in Novi and this would work. Sunrise on July 17th 1999 in Novi was ~06:10 and the Macross may well have been overhead around sunrise given the -13hr time zone adjustment (19:00 JST would've been 6:00 local time). Also possible. Though given that his home seems to have been unaffected by the passage of the ASS-1 overhead, and the ship is said to have cut a swath across Asia and Europe, caused volcanic eruptions in Canada, the western US would seem like the best candidate to be unaffected given a roughly ballistic flightpath. The severity of the impact would've likely caused at least some destruction in Japan, given that it was about 1,000km away and this was 13 times as energetic as Tsar Bomba, which blew out windows 780km away. Something to mathematically model later.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The Jack-of-all-Trades Who Was Kicked Out of The Hero's Party ~ A Swordsman Who Worked as an Enchanter Due to Party Circumstances Rises to Become a Master of All Trades F*** me that's a title. I can see why the localization team wanted to abbreviate it to Jack of All Trades, Party of None. This is one for the "Another Bloody" file. As in, "it's another bloody isekai adjacent j-fantasy series about an adventurer who is kicked from the Hero's party of total arseholes for being Not Good Enough and discovers he's actually amazing". Like, this is almost exactly the same series as The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become The Strongest just with a slightly different art style. This ground is so thoroughly well-trodden at this point it's legally an eight-line interstate highway. Definitely seems like it's going to be a skip-worthy snoozefest with nothing to show for itself.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    True! Yes, though the described course suggests that it continued going in more or less a straight line from Burma northwest for almost one complete orbit before hitting the island. Possibly, but given that the one thing Shin really says about it is the "one sun in the east, the other in the west" I feel like we're meant to interpret that as Shin lived somewhere east of where the ship came down. Guam is to the south and Okinawa is to the west. That and I just cannot shake the feeling that Shin being from California would be Kawamori's way of working his love of SoCal into Macross Zero. It's on prominent display in Plus, 7, and Frontier, so it'd be weird if he didn't get at least a nod to it in Zero. Zero particularly being his only chance to use ACTUAL SoCal instead of spacefuture replica SoCal.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    New season is go! Winter 2026's first few titles are dropping on streaming now. I have no use for My Hero Academia or its spinoff, so I chose to start my Winter 2026 with MF Ghost Season 3. Picks up right where the previous season left off, mid-race with an injured Kanata slowly losing ground due to an arm injury preventing him from shifting into 2nd gear. Not a hugely remarkable first episode, but clearly building to a big comeback. Honestly, the one thing that really stood out... My second pick for the season is Tamon's B-Side, a romcom about a typical-ish teenage girl who loves her favorite idol singer and works a part time job as a housekeeper. When a coworker falls ill, she takes over their shifts and finds she is now the housekeeper to her favorite idol singer and is stunned by the gap between his perfect stage-managed public image and the deeply insecure, chronically depressed mess he actually is.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The one good look we get at Shin's childhood home at the start of Macross Zero's first episode shows a house on top of a high hillside overlooking a large city directly on the coast. Given that he says he saw the ship fall to the west and we know from his bio that he's second-gen Japanese-American, we can assume that that's a western coastline. To me, that makes California seem like the most likely suspect. Honalulu faces out onto the ocean, but it faces south and east not west the way it would have to for the scene to be possible there. Not many Americans living in the Bonin islands, but Chichijima has another problem. If he saw the ship fall from there, the second sun he saw would be in the south not the west. IIRC, at the start of "Global Report", General Global attributes the failure to the booby trap compromising control of those devices.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's History Sheet about the fall of the ASS-1 mentions, in passing, that the ship decelerated far more than should be possible after entering that atmosphere, which it presents as thought to have been an intentional braking maneuver. The ship was going over 10km/s when it entered the atmosphere and by the time it crashed it had slowed to only about 1km/s. Of course, something so massive hitting at "only" 1 kilometer per second still made a hell of a dent. Macross Chronicle asserts that the impact force was equivalent to a 670 megaton explosion, creating a crater 3km in diameter, with ejecta from the impact reaching altitudes over 10km and devastating an area of 100 square kilometers with the shockwave. It also notes that the impact reduced the size of the island somewhat to 16.9 square kilometers. (One of the more unusual points Macross Chronicle introduces is that the island was inhabited. A 16-man US military communications and satellite monitoring output on the island understandably did not survive the impact.) Yeah, a 670 megaton impact is likely to shake the Earth a bit different to a usual bay area earthquake. A bit, yeah... perhaps somewhat justified in the sense that the Earth Unification Government basically threw the entire global tech industry and planetary GDP at the problem for ten years, heedless of the economic consequences, and even then ended up taking a bunch of shortcuts by reverse-engineering the materials and applying that know-how to existing theoretical and practical tech instead of trying to perfectly reproduce the alien technology. (It may also have helped somewhat that what fell out of the sky was the Protoculture's lowest-bidder, ruggedized, keep-it-simple-stupid military hardware and not a more refined or advanced ship they might've used themselves. Figuring out how Gravity and Inertia Control works was basically the key to a lot of the rest too, so once they had that understanding the rest probably fell into place a lot faster.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Not specifically, no. South Ataria is a fictional island in the Ogasawara islands (the Bonin islands to westerners) south of Japan. The coordinates we're given put it about 90km south and slightly to the west of Iwo Jima and 54km to the west of South Iwo Jima. About 1,300km almost due south of Tokyo. It's not sourced on the Wiki because the Wiki got it from Egan's old site, but remarks similar to that are in a couple older artbooks. The course described there suggests the Alien Starship 1 was traveling northwest at a high rate of speed and must have completed almost an entire orbit before crashing given that it ends up east of where it entered the atmosphere. (Considering the course, it's likely New Zealand, New South Wales, Queensland, the Solomons, and New Guinea didn't have a great time either.) Macross Chronicle also supports the idea that the ship was moving generally northwest on reentry and crashed into South Ataria that way. Shin is a second-generation Japanese-American, so presumably he was living somewhere in the US when the ASS-1 came down. Practically all of the US cities and towns with large Japanese-American populations are in Hawaii or on the west coast, so in all likelihood Shin hails from either Hawaii, California, or Washington. (There's an outside chance he's from New Jersey, Michigan, New York, or Ohio, all of which are home to small but significant Japanese-American communities, but given Shin's not f***ing melting in the South Pacific weather on Mayan it seems unlikely he's a New Englander or a Midwesterner. I'll forego the almost obligatory joke about Ohio.) Kawamori seems to really like San Francisco, given how much time was taken recreating parts of it in Macross Frontier, so I'm guessing Shin's family are probably from the bay area.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    An uninspired attempt to coin a derisive nickname for isekai anime. It doesn't make sense if you think about it even a little, because TRON's "Grid" is just the software inside of a computer not an alternate reality and doesn't fit the definition of isekai even a little. Incidentally, I did a little more checking after supper. Of Crunchyroll's current Top 10 most-streamed titles on their service, the 5th and 9th places are isekai titles (Campfire Cooking in Another World and Tales of Wedding Rings). The top four spots on the top 10 are all shounen, being held by My Hero Academia, Gachiakuta, One Piece, and Tougen Anki. Top-selling manga is also predominantly shounen too... with My Hero Academia, One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Dan Da Dan topping charts in the west. Netflix's viewership metrics have shounen anime absolutely dominating their service's anime offerings too. The top-ranked anime title for I think three years running now on Netflix is Naruto. One Piece, Seven Deadly Sins, and Demon Slayer are all on that list too. Not a single isekai title broke the top 10 on Netflix. I'm not able to find any data for Hulu, but given the pattern established thus far... well... their website has a list of 22 strongly recommended anime titles based on their platform's streaming performance data. 0 are isekai. The titles that DID make the cut include Bleach, My Hero Academia, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z Kai, Jujutsu Kaisen, Ishura, Mob Psycho 100, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and Demon Slayer. That's 9 of 22.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The point is that shounen's dominance of the anime conversation and public perception of anime goes all the way back to when the current crop of child-raising parents (Gen X-ers and Millennials) were exposed to the stuff via cable. Yeah, most anime is streaming these days but the reality is that if you go to most streaming services that carry anime most of what they're advertising prominently is not isekai... it's those big-ticket shounen titles like One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and My Hero Academia and a handful of dramas and non-isekai titles like Frieren, Spy x Family, and Oshi no Ko. Demonstrably false, I'm afraid. Most of what viewers are tuning in for when it comes to anime on streaming is shounen anime. It dominates the awards, it dominates the news, and it's also the stereotype of anime fans that's been dominant since the 2000s.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Zentradi in the original Macross series run the full gamut of Human skin tones and onwards into Amazing Technicolor Population territory with Vrlitwhai being a baby blue behemoth and Quamzin being a sort of light lavender. The beard is new, tho. I don't think we see a Zentradi with facial hair before Macross Digital Mission VF-X in '97. Also, is it just me or do these facial sculpts look... familiar? Like this one is just straight-up Arnold Schwarzenegger c. Terminator. That's literally the same face he's making on the Terminator poster, just without the sunglasses. And I wanna say this one looks like a young Laurence Fishburne...
  11. Seto Kaiba
    As far as I can recall, we don't see any Zentradi with facial hair in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Macross: Do You Remember Love?, or Macross II: Lovers Again. That said, they clearly can grow facial hair as we see several in later titles (predominantly in civilian life) who do have facial hair. The enemy Zentradi commander in Macross Digital Mission VF-X (1997) is, IINM, the first Zentradi character to be depicted with facial hair. In Macross Frontier, there are a few as well. Macross Frontier fleet sponsor and SMS owner Richard Bilra is a giant Zentradi rocking a big bushy mustache and beard, and Ranka's Zentradi manager Elmo Kridanik has a mustache. 's it just me or does that bootleg-tier Robotech figure bear an odd resemblance to a young Laurence Fishburne?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    > Australia > Spiders Of course it would be spiders. 😆 Now, we do know of at least one Macross design that IS apparently named for a specific genus of spiders. The Annabella Lasiodora mobile weapon from Macross VF-X2. Not sure what the "Annabella" part is in reference to, but Lasiodora is a genus of tarantulas native to Brazil. Huh, OK. That's a pretty solid description of the basic mechanics of a charged particle beam weapon hearkening back to Nikola Tesla's original design proposal in 1934. In principle, very similar technology to what's used in a lot of sci-fi including Macross. The description of turbolasers I remembered from long ago (which is apparently Legends now) was more in line with the gas-dynamic laser used by the VF-1's Strike Pack (using heat flows and pressure changes in a gas to generate a laser beam).
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, that's not even close to accurate. The genre that has absolutely dominated public perception of anime for like 20 years now has been shounen anime. If you turned on Cartoon Network in the late afternoons or early evenings you'd get the Shounen Jump Big Three (One Piece, Bleach, Naruto), reruns of older shounen anime like Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Ruroni Kenshin. Titles have come and gone, but shounen has basically ruled the airwaves and the conversation that entire time. So much so that the negative stereotype of anime fans - the weeaboo - is intrinsically associated with the Naruto's ninja headbands and its occasional bouts of untranslated Japanese words like "nakama". 😅 Isekai anime is trendy, but it's nowhere near that level. It's definitely the most numerous genre after shounen the last several years, but I think it seems more pervasive than it is that we're seeing a lot of isekai tropes leaking into non-isekai fantasy titles. Like The Banished Court Magician, I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince, New Saga, Scooped Up By An S-Rank Adventurer, Welcome to The Outcast's Restaurant, etc. Particularly instances of fantasy worlds running on JRPG or MMORPG logic for no clear reason, and stories that start with the protagonist being reincarnated in the same world but in a much different position. I do think we're entering the dying days of the isekai genre's trendiness, though. Like any new genre, you get that first couple big hits, a double handful of less-appreciated "cult classics", and then a lot of low-effort copycats. For mecha anime, Gundam, Macross, and VOTOMS basically defined the genre, you had some successful by less appreciated follow-ups like MOSPEADA, Orguss, and L-Gaim, and then a lot of unsuccessful genre followers that don't do very well like Southern Cross or Dragonar. We're in that "unsuccessful genre follower" phase right now. I wonder if it'll just peter out or if it'll die out with a last big deconstruction. I suspect not, since the actually-successful titles in the genre are mainly ALREADY deconstructions.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think it's necessarily bad, but it's definitely very Japanese in its sensibilities and relies a lot on silliness and acknowledging absurdity. I would not advise holding your breath for that one. Zenitsu develops rather slowly as a character, since part of his role was to be comic relief and a heroic coward who has the reasonable man's reaction to the insane supernatural BS going on at any given moment. There are reasons he's this way, but they don't really come up properly until the Hashira training arc (S4) and Infinity Castle movie(s) near the end of the story. Of course, he gets his in the form of being full-on Crouching Moron Hidden Badass. He may be a one trick pony, but he is very good at that one trick.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The YF-19/VF-19's wing folds backwards for storage, not up. The wing in this shot is no longer physically connected to the aircraft. That, combined with the fact that the leading edge slats are damaged and one section is straight-up missing, along with visible damage along the entire length of the wing, implies that this wing did not go gently... it hit something and was likely broken off. To be fair, that was hardly a problem unique to Isamu. The YF-19 had six prior test pilots before Isamu was assigned to Project Super Nova. Four of Isamu's six predecessors were hospitalized with injuries they'd sustained during testing and the other two died from injuries sustained in accidents during testing. The YF-19's performance was pushing the limit of what the human body could withstand in terms of g-forces thanks to its exceptional acceleration and maneuverability, and the previous-gen ANGIRAS airframe control AI used in the first two prototypes was absolutely not up to the job and as a result the prototype had extremely unforgiving handling. (That Isamu was able to not only handle the YF-19 in testing but draw out its full potential and even enjoy the experience is a testament to what an absolute goddamn MONSTER he is in the cockpit.)
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