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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Beautiful work... the care and attention to detail you've put into this is truly impressive. 👍
  2. Seto Kaiba
    This week's The Irregular at Magic High School is not quite as interesting as the previous episodes. There's definitely more tension since Tatsuya isn't around for the fight in this one, so the former Course 2 students have to deal with professional assassins on their own. (Though it begs the question why so many people seem to want to murder a group of high school students.) HIGHSPEED Etoile's penultimate episode seems to have gotten a bit of an animation bump. The crowd actually have faces now instead of being literally faceless masses. Sadly, the quality of the writing has not improved. Rin Rindo is still an unlikeable little stain on the upholstery with no personality beyond being an airhead. I have to wonder if the writers understand that an underdog character has to be talented but underestimated... there's nothing satisfying about a loser getting an unearned win. They're even changing the rules just to try and inject some unearned drama into this story which is already freighted with the prospect of the protagonist being fired for failing to win any races.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It is conveyed. In the meeting of the witches inner circle after the Jedi crashed the ascension ceremony, one of the witches replying to Mother Koril's proposal rules out violence by stating that if they were to spill even one drop of Jedi blood the Republic would destroy them. Another member of the inner circle does question whether the lives of four Jedi would really earn such a disproportionate response from the Republic, but the point stands and violence is ruled out. None of them seem to question that the possibility of military retaliation from the Republic is on the table, only how much it would take to provoke it. Even if they're incorrect, that enough of them believe that the Jedi have enough backing from the Republic that going against the Jedi could result in their destruction effectively means the Jedi can strongarm the witches with near impunity with the implicit threat of force. There would be practical reasons for that. After all, we've seen that it's possible to exercise force powers unconsciously and that could make an untrained user actually kind of dangerous in the wrong circumstances. Mild future sight like Anakin had is one thing, but imagine the kind of harm that could be caused if a panicky kid accidentally starts to use telekinesis. This is a galaxy full of architects who love sheer drops with little to nothing in the way of handrails after all. Mind you, the impression I got was that it was more of a "ok officer, we're cooperating so don't shoot" sort of situation. Especially considering the discussion they have afterwards about the retaliation they might face if they took up arms against the Jedi. True, but then George Lucas ran with it literally and now we're stuck with it because that's what he built the prequels and their various spin-off media around and Disney is a little bit gunshy after having the fans rip them several new orifices of indeterminate purpose over the last couple years. That's my job. 😅😝
  4. Seto Kaiba
    An Archdemon's Dilemma: How to Love Your Elf Bride has limped to its predictable but mildly enjoyable ending. The last episode kind of feels tacked-on like an afterthought, since it doesn't really feel like part of the story arc in progress up to that point, but it's still fun. The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases managed to be so utterly generic and unremarkable as a fantasy series halfheartedly playing with isekai tropes that I've just finished watching it and I can barely remember anything that happened in it. It's the narrative equivalent of white noise. Mysterious Disappearances feels like the right title for the wrong reason. Little to nothing actually disappears mysteriously in this series, except perhaps the money that must have been allocated for hiring a writer. Perhaps Studio Zero-G should look into that. This series is still basically unwatchable after ten episodes unless you are really creepily into large breasts because even the show's OP seems to think that's the only reason to watch. BARTENDER: Glass of God decided to go for a tearjerker in the home stretch with Ryu's mentor being let out of hospital for a brief period before going to hospice care. It tries real hard to be deep and emotional, but it's undermined by how incredibly pretentious it is about bartending. Its obsession with making everything faux profound gets in the way of its efforts to evoke genuine emotion, and that's a shame because if you cut some of that out you'd have a fairly touching story about an unsure young man reuniting with his mentor one final time. A Condition Called Love is one episode from its end and it never really stops being unintentionally creepy. Hananoi is so incredibly eager - even desperate - to please that he goes to unsettling lengths to make Hotaru happy. If he had an emotion besides dissonant serenity he'd feel like he should be full yandere... and this is supposed to be a romcom! A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics just kind of completely lost the plot near the end when the cult leader became a recurring character obsessing over making lewd anime figures based on the homeless knight. It's gone so far into the land of BS that the original and engaging premise has been all but lost. I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I Can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability is drunkenly stumbling to a finish. They've tried so hard to make the final fight of the series engaging and action-packed, but it's critically lacking in stakes because both participants are functionally invincible and even the characters fighting that fight are getting bored of it. If anything, this is a magnificent case study on why an invincible protagonist is a bad idea in almost any context. If the story's conflict never has any stakes, what's the point of fighting at all? Vampire Dormitory has gone to a very strange place... they've somehow cloned the protagonist AND given one of them the gender bender treatment. Worse, that development is something that came out of left field with zero foreshadowing at the behest of a character who was just introduced and whose motivations are borderline nonsense. It feels like the kind of thing you'd normally expect to be a character's fever dream, like that extended Alice in Wonderland reference in Ouran High School Host Club.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Even if Star Wars's setting followed the same rules as the real world (it doesn't), Mother Aniseya also agreed to let them go based on their wishes for the future... We don't actually know that other governments haven't outlawed it. After all, Dark Side-users tend to be... disruptive societal influences. (If the few episodes set on the witches homeworld in The Clone Wars and Tales of are any indication, their light side-aligned neighbors don't seem to like them much either.) I agree enforcement is spotty, but it's not always the case that they don't go outside their borders to stamp out slavery. The Clone Wars introduced an alien species, the Zygerrians, who aligned themselves with the Separatists because the Republic and the Jedi overthrew their once-prosperous empire because of its slavery-based economy. One of the padawans in The Acolyte, Tasi Lowa, is a Zygerrian Jedi... which must be pretty awkward for her considering that her people are still holding that grudge with downright homicidal fury more than a century after The Acolyte.) As noted above, Star Wars has some very strange standards when it comes to age and adulthood. A little Google-fu says that different worlds in the Galaxy Far Far Away set their own standards and traditions for when a person is considered an adult, with some human worlds putting that as low as 13 or as high as 21. Padme's home planet Naboo seems to be on the low end, considering she entered government service as a noble at age 13 and was elected Queen at age 14. Mon Mothma claims in Andor that she was married at age 15 and a senator by 16. Leia joined the Rebellion at around age 15 and became an Imperial senator at age 18. Quite a few of those kids may be kids by our standards, but adults by the standards of their culture and the Republic. Yup... like I said a few pages back, this show is really intended for the Star Wars superfans to dig into every little reference and continuity nod. It almost feels like they're hoping Star Wars fans will be so caught up in that that they won't notice the barely-there plot, nonexistent character development, cringeworthy dialog, or that none of the characters are relatable or interesting because Force users are hardstuck in specific inflexible character archetypes that actively prevent the actors from acting so every performance comes off as flat and lifeless.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall seeing any men, and Mae and Osha mention they are the only children in the fortress. This would track with past depictions of Witches as keeping male slaves for the purpose of reproduction and sale. The lack of men, and therefore children, would seem to be tied to them mentioning they're living in exile and are persecuted for their beliefs... and why they resorted to a forbidden and unnatural technique to conceive Osha and Mae. They picked a world outside of Republic space to hide out on because Republic law prohibits them from teaching their witchcraft to children. That's why the subject of children in the coven is such a sensitive topic when the Republic's Jedi show up, before the subject of the Jedi wanting to test them is ever raised. The Jedi might've been outside their normal jurisdiction, but they had the weight of the Republic behind them while the witches had nothing. If they drove the Jedi away or killed them, it would just prompt a more substantial response from the Republic. The Jedi can, essentially, do whatever the hell they want with that kind of backing because there aren't any near-peer interstellar states to rival the Republic's power. It doesn't seem that way, for a couple reasons. One being that they were apparently prepared to honor Mae's wish to be left with her family and only took Osha because she made her wish to come with them explicitly clear. Given that the witches are living in exile because they follow a outlawed Religion of Evil and that teaching their craft to children is itself a crime, odds are the Jedi removing those kids from the coven would've been seen in-story like protective services removing children from a criminal's home.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think it works that way, TBH... in part because perception of Star Wars is propped up by the cultural significance of the original trilogy. Mind you, there does seem to be a definite trend towards Star Wars - or at least Disney Star Wars - being seen as synonymous with poor writing thanks to the sequel trilogy, Solo: a Star Wars Story, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, and most recently The Acolyte. Of course, a significant portion of that seems to also be based on the fanbase's particular grievances over Disney having made hamburger of their sacred cows. I think there's a pretty sound case to be made for practically everything Disney has done since acquiring LucasFilm having been done out of fear of losing the audience. Doubly so since The Last Jedi and Solo: a Star Wars Story bombed. I've had the same feeling that Leslye Headland et. al. are more than a little afraid of upsetting the status quo... However, I'm not sure I would say that status quo is imagined nor the fear of upsetting the audience by transgressing it unfounded. After all, George Lucas was able to get away with making sweeping changes to the beloved franchise because he was its equally-beloved creator. He'd already managed to sell his audience on the idea that "I always meant to do X" when he was doing the Special Editions of the original trilogy movies, so the Star Wars fans seem to have been willing to take his sweeping and often ill-advised changes in stride. (There was still at some complaining, e.g. "Han shot first".) I doubt that die-hard Star Wars fans would have ever given Disney the same latitude because Disney didn't create Star Wars. They just the evil corporation that bought it. They lost whatever goodwill they might have inherited from George Lucas's stewardship of the franchise when they announced their intention to do a soft reboot of the franchise. Even then they probably could've recovered if they'd managed to blow everyone away with Episode 7, but it turned out to be a lazy rehash of A New Hope. Then came the one-two punch that was the backlash against Solo and The Last Jedi. So yeah, Disney as a whole are afraid of upsetting the status quo further... and they have reason to be, because nobody wants to be known as the one who made gooseburgers out of the goose that laid the golden eggs. It's still applicable to The Acolyte, IMO. The Jedi being synonymous with the Republic was unavoidable. One of the very first things we learn about the Jedi and the Old Republic in A New Hope is that "for over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic." Everything else we've got built on that, which made the Jedi out to be fundamentally and intrinsically intertwined with the Republic. The prequels took that idea and ran with it, and from what I can find on a quick search the old Star Wars Expanded Universe was already running with that idea for years before the prequels did. What you're proposing would probably make substantially more sense than relying on a monastic order with significantly different priorities than the government's to serve as the Republic's de facto federal police force, but it wouldn't mesh with the idea from A New Hope. As a result, the depiction of the Jedi we're stuck with is the one that started in A New Hope and was established as literal truth in the prequels... that the Jedi were enmeshed into the actual government of the Republic as a sort of police force with almost comically broad powers. I too am a casual here, the only reason I know about them is I was told Ahsoka makes more sense if you've seen The Clone Wars and started watching that recently. I've heard that the witches came out of the Expanded Universe novels originally, but haven't delved into that. The ones in The Clone Wars suffer from the same tendency that every character in The Clone Wars has of polarizing into either Sainthood or Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain, and ended up deep in the latter camp. Putting aside Mother Talzin having facial makeup/tattoos worthy of a fan of the Insane Clown Posse, she dressed and talked the part of a standard Wicked Witch, her coven worshipped the Dark Side of the Force, and their main role in the story was basically being a Dark Side staffing service selling prospective Sith apprentices to the likes of Darth Sideous and Count Dooku. (Darth Maul is one such sale, having been Mother Talzin's own son.) They get massacred by General Grievous in Tales of the Empire and one survivor (Morgan Elsbeth) aligns with the Empire to become a villain in The Mandalorian and Ahsoka, responsible for things like stormtrooper zombies. So, yeah... THAT'S the image that The Acolyte is trying to soften here. They're as far in the Evil camp as Darth Sideous and even less subtle about it. The Acolyte is only going to have eight episodes in its first (and likely only) season, so there's a limit to how much time they can invest in flashbacks.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I think I added a bit of pertinent detail. Stand Alone Complex character designer Hajime Shimomura discusses the design process in Stand Alone Complex Official Log 01 and mentions he used Man-Machine Interface's designs as his starting point for anime's, and that was Ghost in the Shell at its most exploitative. (His draft character studies use her appearance and wildly impractical dress from MMI's first chapter.) Yeah, it definitely stands out more in the less overtly 90's cyberpunk-y setting of Stand Alone Complex, though we do see a couple background characters on her level like Ran and Kurutan when they had a cameo in Ep5, the high-performance cyborgs the yakuza use as bodyguards in Ep7, and a number of background androids in various fetish-y outfits. I've often wondered if her being mistaken for a sex droid in 2nd Gig's Ep3 was a joke at their own expense there. (Ironically after she started dressing more reasonably.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Poor writing and fanfiction aren't completely synonymous... but the vast majority of fanfiction is badly written, and poor-quality professional writing has enough in common with it for it to pass as a synonym in common use. Having been directed to some of what I'm told are the "choicest cuts" of Star Wars material by friends who are fans, I'm not sure that's a good thing and IMO it says more about the iffy quality of a lot of Star Wars's first-party offerings than anything. I agree with your general point, though my take as to the cause is reversed. To me, it feels like The Acolyte's writers are trying to write a more mature story than Star Wars's usual fare by injecting some complexity and some shades of grey into the normally rigid and inflexible Good vs Evil dynamic that accompanies any story involving the Jedi. They're just going about it in a very halfhearted and desultory way because there's only so far they can go with it before they lose the audience. The Jedi in The Acolyte are still the wise, noble, selfless, heroic defenders of truth, justice, and the Republic way™️ they are in prior works. All that's really been done to make them less saintly in this story is that their characterization is slightly more grounded, so they come off as officious and arrogant. The Witches are still very much depicted like the dark side-worshipping cults of previous stories. They're still paranoid and aggressive while espousing a "Dark is not Evil" philosophy at odds with how the Force actually works and a "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!" worldview. All that's been done to soften their evilness is that they're shown to love their children and their leader outsources maniacal laughter to another witch. The result is that neither performance comes off as convincing because they're trying to add nuance to factions that are normally one-dimensional by nature of the Force's inclination to moral absolutes. IMO, it's more a limitation of the source material. The Jedi are expected to be serene and collected warrior monks. That means a "good" Jedi performance is nevertheless a flat one, like playing a Vulcan on Star Trek. Dark Side-aligned groups like the Sith or Witches are the opposite extreme. They're expected to be emotionally volatile and quick to anger. Classic uncomplicated melodramatic villains. That still makes for a stilted performance because they can't exhibit a believable emotional range. On this, I am not sure I agree. If anything, Osha's desire to be her own person with an identity separate from that of her identical twin sister Mae's is pretty standard identical twin behavior.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That would be Shirow Masamune's own personal tastes showing through in an adaptation of his work. Motoko's outfit from Stand Alone Complex season one is a slightly modified version of one of the tamer outfits she wears in his sequel to the original manga Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface. Though that version came with a sleeved crop top-like jacket similar to what she wears in season two instead of a leather jacket. I'm not sure if you've read the original Ghost in the Shell manga or its sequels, but Shirow Masamune's work started out on the "sexy" side with a fair amount of fanservice and that aspect of his work only got more pronounced with time. Once he quit doing serialized work to focus on being an illustrator his self-published work became increasingly salacious until it crossed the line into literal hardcore pornography... though even Ghost in the Shell and Man-Machine Interface had explicit sex scenes that were removed from the western releases and reprintings.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The Jedi forget they have superpowers with monotonous regularity... I even noted that the reason... ... is because Sol seemingly forgot he can use the Force to levitate things. Mind you, I think the answer is right there in the series. They assumed (correctly) that the girls had been instructed by their parents to try to fail the test, and asked them what they truly wanted. Osha wanted to be a Jedi, Mae didn't. If Mae had actually managed to fool the Jedi into thinking she didn't have Force powers, Sol would probably have rejected the idea that Mae could be the assassin once Osha was exonerated. (The lie was never going to work anyway, because we see the Jedi take blood samples for midichlorian testing.) I believe my exact words were... 😉 Dumb sh*t - often plot-convenient dumb sh*t - happens constantly when Force users are involved. What happened with Qimir is way less egregious than the prequel trilogy's Jedi Council spending so much time around Palpatine and never realizing he was the Sith Lord they were looking for, or even that he could use the Force... something that the prequels established could be tested for objectively and scientifically with minimal effort. At least what happened with Qimir fits the idea of the Jedi as arrogant and sloppy in this era. They were about to start rifling around in his brains to find answers and stopped just because he started volunteering information. (I even commented on how stupid it was that Sol offered to let him off with a warning when his crime was, at the very least, being an accomplice to the very murder they were there to investigate.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    ... the hell? So it's not a business decision? It's some kind of contractual limitation preventing them from releasing the OVA in a standalone form? That's weird.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how... vocal... Mae is in this episode when it came to her disapproval of the Jedi and her sister's desire to join then, what makes you assume the Jedi had to be fooled into not recruiting Mae? When we see Osha being tested, Indara and Sol can tell right away that she's deliberately trying to fail because her family doesn't want to be separated from her. Sol then directly asks her what she wants, and after a brief discussion she says "I want to be a Jedi". They almost certainly put Mae through the same thing and almost certainly got the opposite answer, that Mae didn't want to leave her family and become a Jedi. So far, I'm not seeing the series abandoning logic... at least not any more than Star Wars usually does when the spacemagic of the Force is involved. It is undeniably poorly written though. Like others have said, it has that definite fanfic vibe. The funny thing is I wasn't even looking for it... ever since I watched The Acolyte trailer my YouTube recommendations have been full of Star Wars lore videos for some reason. Prerequisite-wise, it's definitely less onerous than Ahsoka requiring me to watch seven seasons of a mediocre cartoon and read three novels from the 80's to figure out why anyone would be insane enough to give Anakin an apprentice and why Elon Musk joined the Blue Man Group and violated a space whale in order to make stormtroopers even less effective by zombifying them. Like I said a while back, it's real easy to tell that The Acolyte was written for fans not for casual audiences. The reference density just does not support casual viewing. The two Tales of titles were the same way.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Master Indara's group of Jedi were on Brendok surveiling a coven of witches, apparently for an extended period of time. Long enough for the witches to have noticed them in turn and been monitoring their whereabouts. Sol also makes a remark that suggests they were surveiling specific people on suspicion of criminal activity. That's official investigation territory, meaning they were almost certainly sent there by the Jedi Council and would be expected to report their findings. Trying to lie to a committee made up of telepaths who can sense deception is not a winning strategy to begin with, and pointed questions will surely be asked about where Sol came by that freshly traumatized child he's calling his new apprentice and why the child is traumatized. Osha might not know what specifically happened, but she knows she saw the aftermath of a mass casualty event and that's not the kind of news you can keep a lid on. Fair, though it doesn't quite track with how the Jedi in The Acolyte started this series explicitly on a mission to apprehend Indara's killer specifically so the Jedi Order could make an example of her because the killer was (wrongly) believed to be an ex-Jedi. The Jedi seem to want to show the galaxy that their all-powerful unsupervised magic lawmen are self-policing... which may or may not have something to do with the Republic's having built a prison specifically to hold renegade Force users a few hundred years earlier. I watched a lore video earlier that explained the vow that Torbin took, and if his goal was to cover up that he participated in something horrid that is the wrong way to do it. That vow he took is apparently a penitent's vow that a Jedi only takes if they've screwed up so epically that they believe they are incapable of functioning as a member of the Order. If his fellow residents of the temple know he's taken that vow (and they do) then they know he's done something particularly heinous. It's basically the Jedi version of a nobleman being forced to take holy orders and become a cloistered monk to escape some public dishonor.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Whatever it is that happened on Brendok sixteen years before The Acolyte's present day, it can't have been that bad. After all, none of the four Jedi who visited Brendok were tried by the council and sent to The Citadel for incarceration. None of the four were expelled from the Jedi Order either... like what happened to Ahsoka Tano and Bariss Offee. Indara was already a Master, but both Sol and Torbin were subsequently promoted. Torbin was promoted twice. He was a padawan sixteen years ago and he's been a Master for something like ten years by the show's present day. Sol was promoted from knight to Master and is allowed to teach the children in the main temple on Coruscant. That's probably not something you do if you're guilty of the kind of heinous criminal act that only suicide can atone for. My guess is they're feeling guilty for something which probably isn't actually their fault, because Star Wars requires the Jedi to be the embodiment of Lawful Good. Probably because Mae was very clear about not wanting to go, and there's probably some law against straight-up kidnapping as a form of recruitment.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The movie was subs-only, AFAIK, when it was released in the west. Only the OVA version was dubbed.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... when all is said and done, The Acolyte is still Star Wars. Its cosmos is underpinned by a higher power that maintains and rigidly enforces a simplistic Light is Good vs. Dark is Evil dichotomy on its adherants. The Jedi are on the side of Light and therefore Good, and their opponents are on the side of Dark and therefore Evil. For that reason, I suspect we won't be seeing any real shades of grey from The Acolyte. The worst the Jedi are likely to get up to will likely not go beyond "Good is not Nice", while Dark Side users like Mae and her master remain the familiar overdramatic card-carrying villains we've already seen they are. Value for money, yeah... it's not worth it. Unless you have small children.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    If I'm reading this correctly, and as it is in Chinese there is a possibility that I am not, this looks to be an advertisement for a Macross convention or other gathering at a shopping complex in the Tianhe district of Guangzhou, China.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I was so thrown by the fact that the Wookiee was wearing clothes that I completely missed that he also had a shaved head and a topknot. That part is normal for Star Wars. Bottomless pits without any kind of safety rails seems to be a galaxy-wide engineering tradition.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    New episode just dropped... and the title's the overused word I loathe the most in all of Star Wars: "Destiny". Looks like the writers were in a mood to get all that pesky exposition out of the way so Mae can get back to posing like an idiot and talking like an edgelord. I know this is an incredibly trivial nit to pick, but why does every character who appears in a flashback always have to have exactly the same haircut as a child that they do as an adult? I don't know anyone who kept the same haircut for their entire life. Can I just say how unnatural a clothed Wookiee looks? For real. I guess I'm so used to seeing Chewbacca go around letting it all hang out that seeing a Wookie wearing more than just a bandolier and a smile just feels weird. I suppose it's a nice bit of continuity that we see the Jedi use the same testing methods here that they used on Anakin in The Phantom Menace. All in all, it's a backstory dump an entire episode long and yet it doesn't feel like it added anything substantial to the story. It confirmed Mae has always been at least a little bit of a psychopath and why Sol and the twins all believed one of them had died, but that's about it. This is the TV episode version of the meeting that could've been an email. Tuesdays at 9pm Eastern (6pm Pacific).
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Kid tested, Commissariat approved!
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, you're likely to get some character figures out of it at the very least... Good Smile seems to be one of the sponsors. (Also, we just sleeping on that pun I threw in there? Racy figures for a racing series?) That we do... though that was also never in any doubt considering her very first race saw her disqualified for a rules violation and something like 1/3 of her total career has been some form of disqualification. Now that they've gone and said that the AIs that've been outperforming her all series are technically not even competent racers, the win that they'll hand Rin at the end of the series is going to feel extra unearned... like how her only prior decent placement was because she was blindly following the instructions of the AI.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the latest episodes of Re:Monster, Chillin' in Another World, and I was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince while I was picking up a car... Chillin' in Another World is still cute but substance-less. The other two are just unapologetic trashfires... it says a lot about I was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince that even the protagonist is bored with the direction the story has taken.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Let's be honest, there was no right choice there because either choice had terrible implications for the story as a whole. HIGHSPEED Etoile's writers had to choose between: Revealing that V-ZEN's AI "Ami" no longer needed Rin Rindo and that AI drivers could be developed to the point of being competitive against top-tier living drivers, making the show's protagonist completely unnecessary. Revealing that V-ZEN's AI "Ami" was inherently limited in ways that mean it can never be a truly competitive driver outside of solo time trials, keeping Rin Rindo in the car and in the story by shooting several huge holes in other parts of the story. They went with the latter because it's transparently obvious they're hoping to sell racy figures of the predominantly female cast. By revealing that AIs are limited in ways that mean they can never truly be competitive against living drivers, it raises some awkward questions as to why several teams are relying on AI drivers that have no chance of winning. That also kind of kills the idea that Rin isn't blindingly incompetent, since she has consistently placed below AI-driven cars throughout the series and an AI almost certainly wouldn't be racking up disqualifications for rules violations and failing to start/finish races (never mind totaling a car). Basically, they established that AI drivers are incompetent... but that they still would've been a better choice than Rin Rindo.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    They went with a "Yes, except no." answer... Team V-ZEN's AI system "Ami" is using both her driving and the driving of her competitors as training data. The story then comes up with an excuse for why it can't simply take her job, which basically boils down to the AI system being limited by its programming to avoid taking actions that would put human safety at risk. So they can absolutely crush it at time trials, but their safety first attitude towards strategic driving means they will lose the race every time.
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