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Seto Kaiba

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About Seto Kaiba

  • Birthday August 22

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    MacrossMike

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    Lagrange Terrace (a stable community)
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    Anime (duh), Antique Firearms, Cryptography, Mechanical Design

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  1. They kept the original blue-white coloration that was chosen back in the days when Gundam's animation was hand-drawn. It was chosen because a pure white makes it harder to draw light effects. 'course, the whole "White Gundam" thing goes back to the original series where the Gundam was called the "White Guy" or "White Devil" by Zeon for its white paintjob... and Tomino's desire to have the whole thing just be flat white before getting overruled by marketing.
  2. This is the early days of the Rebellion, after all. The Rebel Alliance hasn't been founded yet at this point in the timeline. Luthen et. al. are maintaining and supporting a network of independent rebel groups as best they can, but each group is still a separate entity with its own chain of command and its own agenda and priorities. There's no central command. No official training regimen. Each rebel cell has to make do with the volunteers they can find and whatever teachable skills they bring with them. For every elite rebel group like Luthen's, Hera's, or Saw's that has had actual military training, prior combat experience, significant technical skills, and/or the benefit of plot haxx like Jedi and Mandalorians, there are dozens like the Ghorman Front or Maya Pei Brigade that are made up of normal people whose only real qualifications are being angry enough with the Empire to pick up a blaster and shoot someone over it. The ones with good leadership, discipline, planning, and luck will last long enough to gain experience and grow more effective as insurgents. The ones who don't... well... you've seen what happened to the Maya Pei Brigade. That's why Mon Mothma's call for a Rebel Alliance is such a game-changer. Consolidating the individual rebel movements into a single cohesive organization allowed the rebels with critical skills and experience to train the inexperienced civilian volunteers into effective spies and soldiers for their war with the Empire.
  3. My watch group finished up the new batch of Andor episodes last night. I'm pretty satisfied with the story thus far. They didn't... the Ghorman Massacre hasn't happened yet. Apparently, as something of an olive branch to the Legacy fans, they decided to keep the pre-Disney version as a separate but less-severe event as a way of establishing the rising tensions on Ghorman. The series'll be headed back to Ghorman in future episodes, since the massacre is a pivotal event that directly gives rise to the Rebel Alliance. Yeah, Saw is... a unique personality. He was never the most stable person in the galaxy. When we first see him in The Clone Wars about 17 in-universe years before these Andor episodes, he was already a bitter and violent man fighting in a guerilla resistance movement against the Separatist occupation of his homeworld Onderon. Then the Republic sent Jedi and clones to train the Onderon resistance, which only made them better at guerilla warfare. He became even more unstable when his sister was killed fighting the Separatist droid army... and it's basically been all downhill from there. 20 years of nonstop guerilla warfare against the Separatists, and then the Empire, with the accompanying stress and paranoia has not done great things for his mental state and he's going to get even worse in the next few years until he dies on Jedha in Rogue One. It's not surprising Luthen is still willing to work with him, since Saw's partisans are basically the oldest and most experienced rebel faction out there and the ones with the fewest qualms about their goal of burning the Empire down. Once Mon Mothma forms the Rebel Alliance, his lot refuse to join because most rebels think he goes too far and Saw thinks every other rebel group doesn't go too far enough.
  4. Maybe, but there's been no indication of that thus far. Based on the last episode, it sounds like the One Year War didn't so much end as go on indefinite hiatus because neither side was able to gain a definitive advantage. Zeon "won" because the technological advantage they gained from the successful capture of the Pegasus and Gundam was just enough to offset the Federation's superior logistics and vast manpower advantage long enough for both sides to give up. Side 6 seems to be developing its own weapons despite being neutral, there are hints of a Zeon civil war, and there's maybe-rogue-maybe-not Federation pilots trying to destroy the Red Gundam. It seems like a cold war that's about to go hot again. Thus far, there doesn't appear to be any evidence that defense contractors are running Clan Battles for secret testing. All the machines we've seen or heard them mention are old ones from the war. Most competitors are using Zaku IIs. One team is apparently using Doms. That Side 6 PMC that let the Witch and another Federation pilot swap in fielded its Gelgoogs instead of Guncannons, but they're still OYW machines. The only categorically NEW hardware in play thus far is the GQuuuuuuX and that's technically stolen. With the tension that high, I'd imagine neither the Federation or Zeon would want to tip their hand so readily.
  5. I'd assume that, as in the real UC, Mobile Suits in this bad future alternate UC were developed as weapons from the start rather than as construction equipment. (It's only in the Gundam AUs that Mobile Suits were developed as nonmilitary hardware first.) Given that MS's like the Zaku are still military hardware even in alternate UC 0085, it seems unlikely that they would be in civilian hands as industrial machinery... and they're also be astonishingly expensive, making it unlikely a civilian construction firm would risk totaling one (or more) on illegal underground fights. The idea that a handful of broke refugees are able to acquire, repair, maintain, and arm something like a Zaku is pretty silly on its own. It's even worse with Shuji and the Red Gundam, since he's seemingly doing it all himself in a cramped airlock space that the Gundam doesn't even fit in. Just Anno's usual sloppy writing. Well... yeah? That's what it is. The Beginnings pamphlet from the movie suggests that Zeon cancelled the original MS-14 Gelgoog program after Char captured the RX-78 Gundam. It seems that Zeonic simply reused the cancelled program's name for their mass produced Gundam they reverse-engineered from the RX-78, making the Gelgoog literally a Zeon GM.
  6. The main problem with the Clan Battles is that they don't make sense in the context of the setting the way Duels in The Witch from Mercury do. G-Witch's Duels were mock battles with detuned weapons held as a way for the Benerit Group's various defense companies to demonstrate their latest products in combat and benchmark their rivals latest developments. Junking a few MS's in a student pissing match or for sport is small potatoes for companies who control the economy of the entire solar system. GQuuuuuuX's Clan Battles... well... the Pomaranians and some other clans are refugees living in illegal tenaments in Side 6, who nevertheless somehow have the kind of money necessary to buy the equivalent of a fighter jet on the black market and keep it fully fueled, armed, and operational. It's an illegal sport, and even with the illegal gambling on the events it doesn't quite make sense how civilian randos can manage that. The lack of a story hook is perhaps its biggest weakness. It's leaning real hard on its "What if?" storyline, but that's not enough to make it interesting.
  7. Once Upon a Witch's Death and Catch Me at The Ballpark are pretty unremarkable again this week. The Apothecary Diaries is heating up, though, so there's that.
  8. Another Tuesday, another painfully mediocre episode of GQuuuuuuX. It looks like we're going to be seeing a fair amount of recycled no-background zooming and twirling from the titular Gundam going forward. We get to see a very quick Clan Battle with recycled footage, and then people protesting against the Sodon's presence in Side 6. There's a second clan battle against a team sponsored by a PMC that normally uses Federation MS's. It's still pretty dull stuff. The Federation ace is a one-trick pony who lasts a couple minutes but never manages to land a real hit on either Gundam... Like a Newtype ghost, it's all flash and no substance.
  9. How hard the Star Wars fandom has to reach to find something in the series to complain about, and how petty those complaints are, is truly a ringing testimonial to the quality of the series. Other shows in the franchise like The Acolyte or Ahsoka are so flawed that the fans have no end of legitimate significant narrative problems to chew on. In Andor, they're reduced to picking nits about the dancing at the wedding reception, the dance mixes of the in-universe popular music, or that they have brick buildings on Ferrix. 🤣
  10. Adults might enjoy that, but I suspect Disney might find an attraction all but guaranteed to make children cry a little off-brand for their family-friendly amusement parks. Hell, I remember the Alien part of the Great Hollywood ride scared the beejezus out of me as a kid of ~6.🤣
  11. 's all right, once really was enough for that stinker. Not really... I've played several of those songs back in my music days, and they really aren't anything particularly unusual. The Mon Mothma we've seen in Andor, in Rogue One, Rebels, and Ahsoka is a very stiff and formal person... and in this case, she's also the host of the party. Given her personality and her day job, you'd expect her to be doing the rounds and chatting up the various members of Chandrila's Great and Good. That she's drunk and dancing instead is itself a conspicuous out-of-character moment. (She pounded three shots in thirty seconds, which is definitely out of character given that previous episodes show she's very good at moderating her alcohol intake at parties.) She's also visibly upset where everyone else is smiling and laughing and generally having a good time. And we can say with certainty that it was conspicuous, because we can see characters in-story notice that something is wrong. Perrin is initially seen dancing happily with the guests, but once he catches sight of Mon we see him stop dead to look at her with a very concerned expression.
  12. This is a very odd thing to get hung up on, IMO. Typically, the only thing alien about the "alien" music in Star Wars is the performers. The Mos Eisley cantina band is playing swing. The band at Jabba's palace was playing a very 80's funk piece in the original '83 theatrical cut and was updated to a horn-heavy 90's pop-rock piece in the '97 special edition. It doesn't strike me as out of place at all that there would be techno/EDM popular music in a setting with so many sentient androids. It's a big galaxy, I'd assume there's room for a lot of different musical tastes and genres. They went with a club/rave mix of the song because, hey, they're playing it at a wedding reception for guests to dance to. (Two other mixes of the same song have showed up back in season one.) (The only reason Kirk's infatuation with the Beastie Boys in the Abrams Star Trek trilogy seems so odd and out of place is that Star Trek habitually stuck with self-composed and public-domain music for cost reasons, meaning most of the diegetic music in Trek is classical by default.) Her drinking and dancing is supposed to be conspicuous and off-putting. She's so distressed that she's doing something wildly out of character in a sort of silent cry for help. She can't confide in anyone there besides Luthen without making them Luthen's next target, and Luthen is not exactly a sympathetic ear. Either that or they felt it would come off as sexist if she ran off to cry inconsolably. I'd assume they're probably trying to set something up between her and her husband Perrin, since he clearly notices her out-of-character behavior towards the end of the episode... he might not have noticed if she'd just left the party since he is a party boy.
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