Seto Kaiba

I honestly cannot recall the creators of Macross Frontier commenting on why they chose to make the protagonists private military contractors. I checked a variety of artbooks with staff interviews and came up dry as to the inspiration for the choice. @sketchley might know more. Now, if I were inclined to guess as to what the inspiration might be... my suspicion would run more towards similar organizations in popular fiction around the time development first began on Macross Frontier. The one that jumps to mind is MITHRIL from Shoji Gatoh's Full Metal Panic!. The second season of the anime (Full Metal Panic!: The Second Raid) aired in Summer 2005, and the original light novel was just kicking off its final climactic story arc. MITHRIL is, of course, a super-elite mercenary organization that recruits the best soldiers of fortune from around the world for its mission to prevent World War III by acting as an NGO superpower that field tests the latest and greatest robotic weapons for the NATO powers while wiping out terrorists, dictatorial regimes, and other forces aiming to destabilize the world (like their predecessor organization AMALGAM). The two organizations are quite similar in principle. though Macross Frontier's SMS is a bit more cynical given that it's run as a business (rather than being a NATO proxy force set up with implausible deniability in mind), tying into the show's theme of runaway growth of corporate power and influence. I'm inclined to suspect that there is probably no specific real world inspiration for SMS. Public perception of PMCs has always been rather unfavorable. They're not something that'd generally be considered "heroic". Particularly in the mid-2000s, when public awareness of PMCs was focused mainly on scandals, controversies, and criminal activities tied to PMC troops in the middle east.

The Shy Hero and the Assassin Princesses is another addition to the list of titles I'm dropping this season. Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer is also joining the drop list. Ruri Rocks is a lot more fun and interesting, despite being edutainment. It's clear the art department on this one likes their girls EXTRA THICC. Even Nagi's undergraduate assistant is drawn that way. Cultural Exchange with a Game Centre Girl had a pretty good episode today too. Started Hotel Inhumans... It's... it's something. I wouldn't say it's something good. The premise seems rather thin.

Yeah, that conversation between Ozma and Alto is split across episodes 2 and 3 as a prelude to Alto joining SMS. Of course, one detail that is tactfully omitted in Ozma's explanation is that the reason SMS got the lucrative contracts to support the Frontier NUNS as an advance scouting force and elite special duty unit, as well as field testing the next-generation VF-25 and Macross Quarter-class carrier, is that the fabulously wealthy interstellar shipping firm that is SMS's parent company wields an enormous amount of influence over the Frontier Government. Macross Frontier and Macross Delta both remind the audience in various ways that the PMC troops get a pretty raw deal despite being paid better than the regular military. They are legally civilians and thus enjoy none of the benefits or legal protections afforded to the government's soldiers. If they die in the line of duty, no matter how it happens, it's legally an accidental death. There's no government pension, no death benefits, no promise of an inquest or board of inquiry into wrongful death, no military burial or memorial... nothing. On top of that, it's confirmed in-series that their status as armed civilians makes them unlawful combatants in wartime so they're ineligible for legal protections afforded to prisoners of war or regular civilians. Kind of the ultimate F-about Find Out situation... PMC troops are as close to legally expendable personnel as it gets.

Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter has joined the list of titles I'm dropping this season. It's not as out-and-out creepy lolicon bait-ish and criminal feeling as Strike Witches, but it definitely leaves me ready to assume that the original light novel's author is more than a bit creepy when it comes to teenage girls.

Mr. Gilroy out there putting it mildly and humbly... Andor set the new Gold Standard for writing in Star Wars and served up one of the year's best and most impactful shows. No doubt it'll be celebrated and discussed for many years to come. It'll probably also be cursed by every creative working on a Star Wars TV series after it because Gilroy raised the bar so high that other Star Wars creatives need a telescope to even see it.

Migraine meds are a hell of a sleep aid... lol Anyway, caught the latest episode of Betrothed to My Sister's Ex. It's still adorkable. Also started Solo Camping for Two. I'd initially pegged this one as an edutainment series shilling for a particular sport or hobby like Iwa-kakeru or Let's Make a Mug Too. Instead, the series seems to be shaping up to be a comedy about a 30-something camping enthusiast who just wants to be left alone in peace and the dojikko-moe girl who keeps disrupting his quiet enjoyment of nature. All in all, very little entertainment value in this one... unless you really get off on depicting generation gap "comedy" depicting the younger generations as spoiled, selfish, lazy, and pathologically stupid.

Oh, but I do insist. I love seeing what people come up with for this sort of thing... for much the same reason I enjoy the "Squadron Marking" sections of the Master File books and the Macross Plus This is Animation Special book, and the custom model kit features in Model Graphix, Character Model, etc. It's a beautiful grab bag of "just looks cool", neat references and in-jokes to the series, and historical references to famous fighter squadrons or other things. That's kind of intentional, yeah... One detail that's not really brought up in either series but is fairly important and comes up a lot in supplemental material is that the reorganization of the New UN Forces following the Second Unification Wars (the events of Macross VF-X2) stripped the military of a lot of the authority and unchecked power it previously wielded and decentralized command to the individual (and more autonomous) emigrant governments. As a result of that and a growing reliance on unmanned fighters, the quality of the average soldier in emigrant fleet New UN Forces has declined a bit. The troop quality situation is surely not helped in the least by having PMCs owned by unfathomably wealthy mega-corporations headhunting top talent away from the military with sheer spending power. That said, the presentation of the New UN Forces at the start of Macross Frontier is pretty unfair to them. The Frontier branch of SMS is the very definition of the words "spared no expense". They are the very finest mercenaries money can buy, headhunted away from the most elite New UN Forces units and equipped with the very latest and best weapons, to protect an emigrant fleet sponsored by SMS's parent company on a mission set by the company's founder as a part of his personal obsession with finding a way to overcome fold faults. They're not just the most elite soldiers in the fleet, they're likely SMS's most elite soldiers in the galaxy. Plus the Frontier NUNS initially doesn't have weapons that can hurt the Vajra. Scorning them for feeling fear when they're fighting a fight they have no hope of winning and dying for it is pretty unfair. Once they get better munitions meant for use against the Vajra they give a pretty good accounting of themselves. It's perhaps more blatant and also less intentional in Macross Delta, where the Brisingr Alliance's economic situation means the local New UN Forces are underfunded and less well equipped, though even they still thrash the Aerial Knights despite a massive disadvantage when the playing field is leveled. Macross 7 was perhaps where it was most justified to have an elite unit with ace custom mecha. After all, the anima spiritia users were rare and effectively irreplaceable assets who were 100% necessary to oppose the Protodeviln and their forces. Maximizing their effectiveness meant non-standard gear designed for their non-standard approach to warfare, and giving them gear with the best possible defensive ability was only sensible to ensure that they came back alive. (Why the fleet military didn't assign them a permanent bodyguard unit like Diamond Force or Emerald Force is beyond me... could've saved a lot of trouble, not that Basara would've given them the time of day.)

Secrets of the Silent Witch had a pretty decent episode today.

At the very least, link it here. It's definitely on topic!

Caught the first of the new episodes last night - Part II of "Hegemony" - and I have to say I still hate what Strange New Worlds has done to the Gorn.

Macross II: Lovers Again was another one where the members of the main cast in the military all use the same model. Possibly the most strict example, since the only "ace custom" variation is a special gunpod on Nex's machine rather than any performance differences. It is rather sad that we don't get to stick around and see emigrant governments actually adopt their respective 5th Generation machines, though they do get acknowledged here and there in novelizations and games and manga and the like. (It's also worth remembering that all of Macross runs on broad strokes continuity, so there isn't any such thing as "unambiguous" canon anyway.) There's definitely an element of "the hero must have a distinct machine" that I'm sure the toy partners enforce... though as of Absolute Live!!!!!! even they seem to be dialing it back somewhat and making the ace custom machines more closely resemble the production ones. (That might have something to do with fans thinking the VF-31A looks better, too.) That said, I think the tendency to have the protagonists equipped with the latest and greatest VF ahead of the actual military is pretty silly. It kind of worked in Frontier, because the story's theme was heavily about abuse of corporate power and influence and SMS's parent company more or less ruled the titular fleet indirectly through sheer financial power and even SMS's staff were in a way dehumanized as disposable. Delta doesn't do as good of a job with it, since the whole premise is lazily copied from Frontier even though Xaos is not anywhere near as wealthy or influential as SMS or its parent company. I get the feeling Macross's creators have started to cool on the idea of PMCs too, since the materials for the second movie increasingly depict Xaos as incompetent and other PMCs as criminal. Hopefully once we get away from PMC protagonists we'll see more mass production machines getting to shine. NGL, that kinda rocks. I'd buy that in a DX. We've gotten a couple New UN Forces color schemes for the VF-25 thus far. The two main ones that show up most often are essentially the same as Alto's VF-25F and the generic SMS VF-25A but with New UN Forces markings instead of SMS ones. There's also the unlockable New Game+ colors for Havamal in Macross 30.

I quite like this one. It feels like a very natural evolution of the pre-Federation Earth Cargo Service freighters from Star Trek: Enterprise and a nice sort of middle ground with the TOS/TAS-era Antares-type.

The amazing recycling technology that Humanity uses to make its emigrant fleets so efficient and long-term sustainable had to come from somewhere... and we know the New UN Gov't has put a lot into studying and restoring factory satellites. Maybe one use-case for the fold-capable factory satellites is to move them into the vicinity of old battlefields and have their robot ships hoover up the wreckage and debris in order to break down the composites, alloys, and organic compounds from ships, pods, and dead bodies into usable raw materials for the manufacture of fresh ships, pods, and soldiers to man them all. Perhaps that's where they got the technology they're using to recycle the bodies of the dead in Macross Frontier.

We've already heard about it all the way back TOS's first season episode "The Menagerie", which recycled large chunks of the "The Cage" series pilot. We've also actually seen the training accident happen in Star Trek: Discovery's second season episode "Through the Valley of Shadows", thanks to some timey-wimey crystals that show Pike his future when he touches them. There was a reactor accident aboard a training ship full of cadets while he was aboard for an inspection tour, and he was near-fatally irradiated while trying to save as many cadets as he could in the ship's engine room. You can watch the series on other services... even YouTube's digital library service has it. Here's a clip from the episode of Star Trek: Discovery where the accident is shown.

The Water Magician is going where the vast majority of isekai stories have gone before. New Dandadan today too...