Seto Kaiba

For the second time in two seasons, I've started a romcom that didn't advertise upfront that it was BL. Go For It, Nakamura-kun! is a (well-disguised) BL romcom about a vaguely antisocial guy who develops a love-at-first-sight massive crush on one of his classmates right at the start of high school and his internal struggle to actually make a move. It's shockingly cute.

Getting to grips with the Spring '26 simulcast season... and we've already had a scandal! Wit Studio got publicly called out for using generative AI in the opening of Ascendance of a Bookworm: Adopted Daughter of an Archduke and are begging forgiveness while making promises to remove/replace the generative AI animation with traditional animation ASAP. Probably thought they were doing something clever, but got clocked on their AI slop with just one episode out the door. Good for fans sticking it to Wit for slop-ifying a great series. Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun! is back with a fourth season and all I can say is "Why?". The part of the original manga they're adapting is borderline filler. Two episodes in and all they've really done is chase a literally invisible man around the school. An Observation Log of My Fiancee Who Calls Herself a Villainess is certainly shaping up to be amusing, if nothing else. Standard otome formula with the twist being that the main character is the main capture target not the reincarnatee, and he's simply too amused by the reincarnated-as-a-villainess girl's antics to put a stop to any of it. Always a Catch! has spun its own little twist on the same genre, and it's not as fun but still at least watchable.

Did a more detailed trawl through the new Encyclopedia MACROSS: VALKYRIE and DESTROID today... Lot of nice art, but some weird omissions and additions, and a few tiny snippets of lore hidden in the captions. This is the second book to copy the VF-31AX specs from Master File and the first to do so for the Sv-303. It's also the first book to directly reference Master File's take on the low rate/trial production YF-29s floating around. Its coverage of Max's YF-29 from Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! has a note that seems to be based on Master File's section on the YF-29: Master File had previously posited that the various YF-29s we see in the hands of certain ace pilots in titles like Macross 30 and Absolute Live!!!!!! are considered a different variant from the original YF-29 flown by Alto Saotome on account of being both more technologically complete and having overall lower performance because fold quartz of the required size and purity is so vanishingly rare as to be de facto unobtainable. It presented Alto's YF-29 as "YF-29A", all others as a new spec "YF-29B", and also introduced an original one of its own "YF-29C" which attempted to substitute ultra-pure fold carbon but only achieved about 1% of the fold wave system output. This book doesn't mention the YF-29C, but it does support the idea that the various YF-29s produced after Alto's were inferior aircraft by comparison... while also acknowledging that Max is so hilariously broken as a character that he basically makes up the difference.

Now that I've got a bit more free time, a proper review of Encyclopedia MACROSS: VALKRIE and DESTROID. That the title is misspelled is not a great look for SoftBank Creative.😅 495 pages, all told, inclusive of the index and title page. 3 pages for the index and title page 67 pages for Super Dimension Fortress Macross 21 pages for Macross: Do You Remember Love? 1 page for Macross: Flash Back 2012 9 pages for "Others" incl. the Macross M3 VF-4G, the SDFM VF-X4, VF-X-11, VA-X-3 V-BR-2, VF-X-7, VF-X-3 Star Crusader, LDR-04 Maverick, and Stampede Valkyrie 42 pages of Macross II: Lovers Again 24 pages of Macross Plus 66 pages of Macross 7 20 pages of Macross Dynamite 7 24 pages of "Others" incl. VA-3M, VF-3000A, VF-5000B, VF-9A, VF-X-10, VF-14, VB-6, Gjagravan Va (officially a destroid now I guess!), VF-19A Ravens, Phayos Valkyrie 38 pages of Macross Zero 58 pages of Macross Frontier 4 pages of Macross Frontier: the False Songstress 17 pages of Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye 13 pages of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy 4 pages of "Others" incl. VF-19ACTIVE Nothung, VF-11B Nothung II, VF-19EF Caliburn, VF-11D ThunderFocus, VF-1X++, VF-0 Kai "Zeak", SV-52 Oryol, YF-27-5 Shahar F 34 pages of Macross Delta 8 pages of Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure 42 pages of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! All the usual suspects are covered, with the noteworthy oddities included covering: The cannon fodder VF-1J briefly seen in the original series VF-XS Valkyrie II, a concept art design not used in the Macross II OVA QVF-11A Thunderbolt target drone from Macross Plus VF-19 Kai "filming version" as VF-1 Super Valkyrie VF-19P "covered in galaxy whale red pollen" Multiple VT-1C Ostrich color schemes! 2059-era fold booster (normal type) VF-24 Evolution! YF-25 Prophecy VF-25Fm Family Mart promotional model 30th Anniversary DLC VF-1S "Minmay and Mylene" 30th Anniversary DLC VF-25 "Ranka and Sheryl" MDP-001W Cygnus multidrone plate Sv-262Ba Draken III Royal Guard Sv-154 Svard VF-22 Sturmvogel II Wright Immelmann Type Sv-262Hs Draken III Red Knight Noteworthy designs omitted/not covered: VEFR-1 "Funny Chinese" VF-1SOL-S VF-19F Excalibur test flight colors VF-3000B Bomber Valkyrie Macross 7 PLUS Spiritia Dreaming VF-14 The Macross Galaxy messenger craft VF-25A Messiah mass production type VF-27B Lucifer mass production type VF-9E Cutlass Nicolas Berthier "Vanquish Champion" type VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei VA-110 Neo Glaug bis Queadluun-Alma Sv-303 Parasite Fighter VF-31AX Super Ghost Parasite Fighter This book has several awkward typos like spelling Cheyenne" as "Sheyenne" or Octos as "Oxtos". Weirdly, they DID fix the spelling of "Shahar" for the YF-27-5 (something that drove me UP A WALL many years ago) but did not correct "Zeak" to "Zeke" like it should be. The most glaring of these typos is that "Valkyrie" is misspelled "Valkrie" on the cover and spine of the book. If the class turns to page 394 they will be greeted by Isamu's VF-19EF/A Excalibur ADVANCE "Isamu Special" from Sayonara no Tsubasa. This book is, overall, a very good "10,000 foot view" of the designs and has very little information besides for their basic stat blocks and little in the way of marked-up line art from animation model sheets. Noteworthy lore additions and confirmations in this book are few, but there are some. The thrust of the VF-1's liquid fueled rockets from Master File is adopted into their stat block officially here. The Master File stats for the VF-31AX Kairos Plus and Sv-303 Vivasvat are also copied here, making this book the second to do so for the VF-31AX and first to do so for the Sv-303. This is also the first book, AFAIK, to reiterate Master File's stance on the production YF-29s having lower performance than the original prototype due to using lower purity fold quartz.

They've certainly been taking their sweet time, haven't they? I wonder if they're just struggling because they can't just change the proper nouns in an older series and ship it again like they do with Gundam and Code Geass.

The problem with GQuuuuuuX's mechanical designs wasn't that they were "skinny". GQuuuuuuX's Mobile Suit designs suffer from the same bad design philosophy as Michael Bay's Transformers. The designs are so visually busy with so much extraneous surface detail and so few (if any) clean lines that they look jumbled and messy just standing still and become a blurry and indistinct mess when in motion. All that surface detail muddies their silhouettes and prevents them from really establishing a distinctive and memorable profile. I don't doubt it probably does look better as a static 3D object you can view from many angles, but on a 2D screen with only the illusion of depth it just looks messy. Of course, all that surface detail is mainly there to obscure the fact that all the hacks at Khara did was slap a Gundam head on an Eva unit and call it a day the same way they tried to pass strapping the skeleton of Rebuild's plot to a UC Elseworlds idea and call it "original". 🤣 (Honestly, the most painful part of GQuuuuuuX isn't that the designs are ugly or that the story is badly composed, it's that there's clearly another MUCH MORE INTERESTING story going on in the background that the writers thought wasn't worth showing.)

Granted, as this is like my fifth or sixth large format mechanical design encyclopedia for this franchise I am more than slightly jaded. 🤣 TBH, based on my own long experience as a collector I'd expect the exact opposite. Its doorstopper size, not being specific to a particular series, and lack of any real exclusive/important info make it a lot more likely to be downsized from collections and wind up on Mandarake, Yahoo! Japan auctions, and eBay on a semi-regular basis and likely with little to no markup. There'll be scalpers, sure, but Eh... I'm not expecting anything new or radically different from the next Macross series. Not just because Bandai Namco Filmworks hasn't had an original idea in literal decades at this point and wouldn't know what to do with one if they did, but also because Macross Delta already effectively showed us what the 6th Generation of VFs is going to be like and it mirrors real world developments like we expected. Replacement of the conventional rotary cannons with railguns and energy weapons, use of cheaper unmanned fighters as collaborative combat aircraft supporting a manned fighter "mothership", and increasing emphasis on networked combat operations. We've basically just come full bloody circle back to Macross II, which already had this stuff... like g-force support armatures in cockpits, drone wingmen, railguns and beam guns everywhere, etc. 🤣

Well, I got my copies of Encyclopedia Macross: Valkyrie and Destroid today. Not a bad little collected edition, though as per the usual for these books the only beyond-series materials they're really looking at are the non-continuity FamilySoft games from the 90's (e.g. Skull Leader, Remember Me), the four main timeline in-continuity games (M3, VF-X, VF-X2, and 30), and Macross the Ride. Master File has leaked more into these books too. Now not only are they citing the VF-1 liquid fuel rocket engine power from there, they've also adopted both the VF-31AX and Sv-303 specs from there.

Got my two copies today... an excellent collected edition. On a quick skim, little in the way of new information and there's some inconsistencies and errors copied from other books like the VF-19F/S engine thrust inconsistency from Macross Chronicle. "Cheyenne" is misspelled too. Master File continues to leak into official publications too, with several of the new additions being lifted from there.

Yeah, I'd love to be a fly on a few of those boardroom walls to hear firsthand why some of these incredibly weak shows are being preemptively greenlit for second seasons before general audiences have seen even a single episode. I've heard that, to an extent, it's meant to save on costs by eliminating stops and restarts in production and lock in cast members to avoid scheduling issues. That might explain it for shows that are middling to decent quality. For the rest, it's enough to make you wonder if anyone in any of those boardrooms actually watched any of it before it was inflicted on unsuspecting general audiences. I guess it's theoretically possible that all of these executives just have dogsh*t taste, but there has to be more to it than that. Are they taking the producers word for it that the show is good sight-unseen? Are they dealing with a culture of toxic positivity that stifles legitimate criticism? Is it simply the sunk cost fallacy? There has to be some reason that nobody, during the development and production of Maul: Shadow Lord, put up their hand and said something like "Dave, what's the bloody point of this story?", "Dave, did you forget to include a plot hook in your two-part series premiere?", or "Dave, my dog leaves tightly coiled piles of better storytelling than yours on my lawn twice daily."

Seems to be a bit of a pattern lately. Didn't The Acolyte initially pre-announce a second season and then walk that sh*t back after audiences laughed the show out of town? I'm not so sure. Starfleet Academy was absolute dogsh*t, but it at least made an effort to appeal to both die-hard Star Trek fans and casual viewers alike. Maul seems to be a creatively bankrupt exercise in pure fanservice that has no appeal to speak of outside the die-hard Star Wars fandom. The plot doesn't even make sense unless you've seen, and clearly remember, Maul's return and his extremely short-lived stint as a crime lord in a tertiary story arc in an a cartoon from over a decade ago. It's a pretty cringe-inducing in its own right given that the 51 year old co-president and chief creative officer of LucasFilm served up a story so thinly written it feels like it came from recording a ten year old playing with their action figures. Kurtzman's actually a pretty capable writer of action serials and mindless action movies... he was a writer on the likes of Transformers, Hercules: the Legendary Journies, Xena: Warrior Princess, Alias, the Hawaii Five-0 reboot, Sleepy Hollow, etc. He's just hopelessly out of his depth when he has to actually develop characters. Remember, the OT cast have historically described George as a terrible writer whose work needed a lot of polish to be remotely usable. What was it Harrison Ford said to him? "George, you can type this sh*t, but you sure can't say it!" Saying someone "knows George's (creative) sensibility" feels like a backhanded way of saying someone can't write for sh*t.

Well, the first two episodes of Maul: Edgelord Shadow Lord are out on Disney+ as of today. It really is proof - as if more were necessary - that Dave Filoni still has not mentally or artistically moved on from The Clone Wars even as that series approaches its 20th anniversary. There is just nothing here. The first two episodes of Maul: Shadow Lord are an empty, meaningless exercise in nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. One person in my watch group called it a "member berry smoothie", whatever that means. Stabba Badguyman one-dimensionally revenge-murders his way through a parade of nameless mooks in pursuit of his non-specific revenge against a largely ill-defined group of people. Maul is basically the Star Wars equivalent of a chuunibyou character. 😅 The one upside is that, with his constant nattering on about revenge, Sam Witwer's Maul sounds uncannily like James Urbaniak's Phantom Limb from The Venture Bros.

Since I had a bit of time, I decided to compare this translation to the original text and it's got a lot of little errors scattered throughout. There are a few weird cases where words are omitted from the middle of sentences (the word "cannon" seems to be a repeat victim of this). I also confirmed a few more cases of incorrectly translated terminology. There are two references in the translation to "proton" rifles being used by the Zentradi, both are fairly basic mistranslations. The text actually says "charged particle assault rifle" (荷電粒子アサルトライフル, kaden ryuushi asarutoraifuru) in the first case and "charged particle rifle (荷電粒子ライフル, kaden ryuushi raifuru) in the second. "Proton" is 陽子 (youko). The two terms aren't interchangeable, particularly in the context of particle beam weapons which fire beams of ions not elementary particles. This is a fairly commonplace mistranslation... enough so that even the Macross Mecha Manual has made this mistake and listed several charged particle beam weapons as "electron" beam weapons. Also, "housenka" is left untranslated for some reason? That's a flower, called balsam, snapweed, or touch-me-not in English. (The reason for that specific reference being that balsam spreads its seeds ballistically using a seed pod that explodes when touched.)

Ascendance of a Bookworm S4 started its broadcast run today. This is kind of my make-or-break title for this season. I really want this to be a good adaptation of Part III of the light novel. One thing I will say for it is that we've definitely entered the part of the series where the characters start to become difficult to tell apart visually because they're all related and they're all following the same style trends in clothes so they all look the bloody same except for the ones with non-standard haircuts or facial hair.🤷‍♂️ Still, I'm here for it. I can hardly wait to see Elvira or Hartmut start to go ham.

An Observation Log of My Fiancee Who Calls Herself a Villainess is yet another entry in the otome genre that's desperately flailing about for something to do with itself. Seems like the isekai genre is rapidly polarizing into otome titles and increasingly obtuse "I got reincarnated as X with Y superpower but now I'll Z my best life" titles. The one twist that this one is putting on the formula is that the protagonist/perspective character is the hyper-competent prince rather than the girl who was isekai'd into her favorite otome-game as the villainess. She's committed to the bit, but is too decent of a person, and he's just grateful to have something that doesn't play by the rules so he's actually entertained by her shenanigans. It's not bad, but pretty unremarkable feeling.

Starting another new one from this season, The Food Diary of Miss Maid. The plot summary is pretty threadbare. A slice of life series about an ethnically Japanese British maid who took a trip to Japan for a personal vacation (but apparently didn't pack any clothes besides her maid outfit) and finds she is now stuck living there for at least a year because her master's mansion in England collapsed during an ill-advised renovation project. As the title suggests, it seems to go no further than being food porn for traditional Japanese food. The first episode features taiyaki, takoyaki, odango, convenience store onigiri, and baumkuchen.. Ironically, this kind of leaves the episode feeling bland and directionless... since it doesn't seem to have really have anything to do except have the maid narrate the obvious in a cutesy voice. (You'd almost suspect this was made to promote tourism given its cultural evangelism... but Japan is getting pretty anti-tourist right now.)

Not just the NUNS... Macross as a whole has never used the new rank names created for the postwar Japan Self-Defense Forces. Most Japanese fiction doesn't use the Japan Self-Defense Forces rank names unless it's explicitly depicting the Japan Self-Defense Forces (e.g. GATE.) You could say using those older rank terms is a sort of linguistic shorthand to establish that these fictional and/or foreign militaries being depicted are not the kind of limited, purely defensive force Japan is permitted to maintain under Article 9 of its post-war constitution. Of course, this older and more sinocentric approach to rank terminology lacks a built-in way to distinguish between branches of service based on title alone and so translators are forced to either rely on guidance from the creators, in-story text, or other context clues to know whether to translate the terms into other languages as Army or Navy ranks. Mobile Suit Gundam's creators, for instance, opted to have the ranks of the EFSF translated as Navy-style ranks. Macross's creators made their intended translation clear by providing the English translations of Space Forces ranks into Army-style ranks in the production materials, in the onscreen text, etc. in a generally consistent manner throughout the franchise's official media.

One example that shows up four times in what you've posted there is "New United Nations". That's not correct to the text of the novel or the official terminology of the setting. I know that's what's in the Disney+ subtitles, but they're demonstrably incorrect in this and several other areas. "New United Nations Forces" would be 新国連軍 (Shin kokuren-gun). That's not what's in the book or in the animation. What's in the text of the book and in the animation is 新統合軍 (Shin tougou-gun), the official/correct translations of which are "New Unification Forces" or "New Unity Forces". The name of the government in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross is 地球統合政府 (Chikyuu tougou seifu) and its military is the 地球統合軍 (Chikyuu tougou-gun). The Earth Unification Government and Earth Unification Forces. Animeigo used "Unity" instead of "Unification", but both are equally acceptable correct translations. This distinction matters because the modern United Nations (新国連軍 Kokusai rengou) is a separate entity from the Earth Unification Government in the official Macross setting. It drafted the framework for the Earth Unification Government in 1999-2000 and briefly served as a transitional world government before the Earth Unification Government was ready to officially assume power at the start of 2001. It effectively ceased to exist when the Earth Unification Government started. There hasn't been a United Nations for 57 years at this point. The government that replaced the Earth Unification Government (地球統合政府 Chikyuu tougou seifu) after the First Space War is the New Unification Government (新統合政府 Shin tougou seifu). Its armed forces are the aforementioned New Unification Forces (新統合軍 Shin tougou-gun). Another one that's based on a common misconception is translating 小隊 as "Squadron". That's actually officially translated as "Platoon" and has been used as such in a bunch of official Japanese merch. It's a much smaller formation... a subunit of a squadron made up of 3-4 planes. Probably best not to confuse those two. It looks like the ranks are also translated incorrectly. Official Macross translations, onscreen in-series text, and katakana transliterations throughout the franchise use Army/Air Force ranks for Space Forces characters. The Japanese terminology is interchangeable between Army and Navy, but they've made a point to consistently translate it using the Army ranks for in-series English text, official media, and goods for decades. (This is a bit of truth in television as real world space forces are typically under the Air Force, which Stargate inexplicably got correct but almost nobody else did! Yes, the Spacy is not a Space Navy, it's a Space Army or Space Force etymologically.) Chelsea's correct rank is given as 中尉 (Chuui), she's a First Lieutenant. Just "Lieutenant" is one paygrade higher and in the Navy rank system, equivalent to the rank of Captain (大尉 Taii) in the Army/Air Force style system Macross uses. There's also a moment where the phrase "gun encampment" is used... the correct term would be "gun emplacement".

For a "cheap and cheerful" translation, this came out better than I'd expected. It has some rough spots, a fair amount of evident trouble with terminology and few romanizations, but the flow of the prose was preserved pretty well and that's what matters most. Well... yes and no? It's relative? Kind of a double-edged sword if you'll forgive the pun? In practical terms, the VF-19EF Caliburn has higher performance than the New UN Forces VF-171 Nightmare Plus that will be the main fighter of the New UN Forces into the next decade but it's actually less capable/powerful than a "normal" VF-19. Macross the Ride describes it using an old Cold War-era term: it calls it a "Monkey model". That term has a very specific meaning. Namely, an export variant of a piece of military hardware that has significantly reduced capabilities compared to the standard version. Earth restricted its arms exports after the events of Macross Plus and so the Frontier fleet had to both fill in some gaps in its specs with their own tech and apply limiters to some of its hardware to reduce its performance enough for legal production. Even then it's still kind of stuck as a small batch Special Forces VF because it's very expensive and its performance is still more than the average pilot can handle.

Starting the first of this season's new series... Always a Catch! It seems we're once again generously oversupplied with otome anime. The now-standard opening of "The prince broke off his engagement to the protagonist and now she has to find a new fiance" thing is getting kind of weird. You have to wonder if any of the authors who use this almost form letter opening ever stop to consider that having the prince of a kingdom arbitrarily dump a girl who is usually the daughter and heir of a Duke powerful enough to arrange for his daughter to marry into the royal family ought to have WAY more consequences than just "the girl is upset". Like, this ought to be a massive political faux pas that risks turning a very powerful ally of the king into an enemy if he has any kind of pride at all. Always a Catch! has all the usual staples, though the twist this time around is the protagonist is actually the cousin and best friend of the duke's daughter who gets dumped by the prince. She's an unladylike muscleheaded tomboy who's staying with her cousin to hunt for a fiance of her own because her parents finally had a boy after years of trying and she therefore isn't the family heir anymore. (That her family's coat of arms, and her hairpin, appear to be brass knuckles kind of says all that needs to be said about her.)

Compared to today, Earth is rather sparsely populated in Macross after the First Space War. We see a number of emerging cities and towns in the aftermath arc of the original series, but thereafter we don't really get to see much of the planet aside from Macross City in Alaska. Presumably any housing that they put up for housing clones destined for emigrant fleets was either demolished or subsequently repurposed as regular housing for Earth's ever growing population. It's far from the only place to live in the solar system, though. There are space colonies at the LaGrange points, surface bases and cities on the moon and Mars, "satellite cities" orbiting Venus and several outer solar system gas giants, resource stations on various other moons etc.

It's far from expensive. About $37 from CD Japan.

Or Admiral Kuznetsov. By all evidence that thing is even more cursed than the Kamchatka. Some might say the Admiral Kuznetsov is unsinkable... because a seemingly unending string of accidents, mechanical and electrical failures, and other calamities make it unlikely she'll ever leave drydock again.

No, it's nowhere near that bad. Most sources agree that the number of Human survivors of the First Space War numbered approximately 1 million.

Yep. In fact, the reason given for why the cloning program was discontinued in 2030 was a marked rise in hereditary diseases in children. (Gene therapy exists in Macross, so presumably they were able to fix at least some of that.)