Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13439

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, GQuuuuuuX just barely tosses that nonsense in at the very end as a way to justify the Rose of Sharon peace-ing out. GQuuuuuuX is, in the main, a "fix fic" for Zeon glazers and Gihren's Greed fanboys who've spent literal decades arguing that the Federation are the real Bad Guys in Gundam and that the Universal Century would be a much less grim timeline if the Principality of Zeon had won the war. The whole "Char has a red RX-78 Gundam" schtick is literally straight out of one of the routes in Gihren's Greed. The Federation's practically absent from the main story because Zeon's power is unmatched, Zeon is protecting the autonomy of spacenoids, and Zeon's war crimes are dismissed out of hand. It even indulges in a bunch of Zeon fan memes like mass producing the Big Zam being a major key to Zeon's strength. At the end, when the dust settles... It's actually even more "by fans for fans" than you're giving it credit for. Her backstory in GQuuuuuuX is based on Tomino's novels like Secret Meeting - Amuro and Lalah, which do make it clear that Char and Lalah had an actual relationship and that Char was jealous of Amuro and Lalah's friendship. That's also where the idea that he found her in that high-class brothel and bought her freedom came from.
  2. Seto Kaiba
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't the RX-78-2 in Ready Player One a last minute licensing-induced plot substitution? IIRC, it was meant to be Ultraman but they couldn't get the rights. Anyway...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's Khara. Lazy slop is pretty much a two-word summary of their entire original filmography. Did you SEE Rebuild? It's basically just Anno jerking himself off for three movies and change. It's a franchise series. Of course it was. They're literally listed in the credits. 🤣 It absolutely was fanservice. The 0 Gundam looks exactly like the RX-78-2, and its pilot is voiced by Tohru Furuya. There's no other word for that but fanservice. Especially since both Setsuna and Ribbons swap GN drives into older Gundams for their last fight instead of finishing with their season two upgrades.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    PHRASING! 🤣
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's framed in such a radically different context from the one in 00... I'd give it a pass easily. Rather than simply being a villain dusting off their old MS for fanservice's sake, this was... Besides, if we want to complain about the hero fighting an "evil" version of the RX-78, 00 was the THIRD time. It was done twice before in Zeta and 0083. Gundam has always liked to repeat itself.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Khara leans extremely heavily on its legacy ties with Gainax - its soft reboot of Gainax's Neon Genesis Evangelion being most of its minimal self-produced output over its 19 years in operation - but a good amount of what that video samples from GunBuster to accuse GQuuuuuuX of copying was GunBuster copying Gundam in the first place! Khara's obnoxious self-indulgence and inability to establish a creative identity outside of Evangelion is certainly a problem...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, this series was definitely meant to be this short. There's a lot they could have done with it, but most of what they did was screwing around to waste airtime because they didn't even have enough actual story to fill twelve episodes.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Have done... unfortunately I've come up dry. It's a loanword, so I'm kind of swinging for the fences no matter what. I've tried several common substitutions in case it's a typo, but no luck thus far. Since the other ship name references have all been folklore and fantasy, I bounced it off some friends with degrees in history and literature and they reckon it's probably meant to be the Oz reference we suspect it is. Evna in the Oz books is a beautiful seaside town in a land that sits on top of the underground mines and factories of the Nome King, while the Evna in the Macross light novel is a seaside resort ship with a hidden Galaxy corporation factory in the sublevels under the resort. (Possibly also a particularly smug in-universe authority figure making a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the Macross Galaxy fleet by comparing it to Oz and the Emerald City, a place of illusory wealth and mass delusion.) Alas, no... "bu" and "vu" are completely different kana.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, GQuuuuuuX ended today. I'll say this for it. The ending is the best episode of the series. Still not great, but actually enjoyable to watch where a lot of the rest of the series has felt like a bit of a slog though filler. There's a fair amount of fanservice, multiple betrayals, and a proper explanation of WTH is actually going on with the universe.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    What "local threats", though? Who else is operating a Navy on these planets? Emigrant fleets are colonizing uninhabited planets. There are laws against colonizing planets that already have sentients living on them. The VF-4's Navy variant is said to be mainly an interceptor and anti-ship strike fighter. Whose ships is this thing made to attack when there's only one Navy anywhere? The VF-4's Navy variant is from a period when even emigrant planets were few and far between, well before the era when there was anti-government terrorism and civil wars amongst the emigrant governments. It feels like one of those details where the creators forgot that there really weren't any significant threats left planetside. The VA-3's an all-regime machine, not an atmosphere-optimized one. Also, the VF-5000 was developed to supplement/compensate for the VF-4's shortcomings as an atmospheric fighter and dogfighter not as a companion craft for the VA-3. Eh... it's not that surprising, really. The Macross Frontier fleet is more or less set up as a pre-First Space War theme park. The fleet recreates large portions of several famous cities or districts like San Francisco, Shibuya, Akihabara, Beijing... even things like period-correct cars are recreated (albeit with modern technology under the hood). Given that the fleet bothered to reproduce an old model air defense Destroid as cannon fodder and build up replicas of pre-war helicopters for a movie, it's not surprising they'd reproduce other period machines if they felt it was advantageous. They're really committed to the bit. It's absolutely ridiculous overkill for the purpose, though. A GU-15 or GU-17 against unarmed, unarmored Zentradi prisoners? That's like going deerhunting with a tank destroyer. That's about the level I'd expect in terms of capability... not actually viable on the battlefield, but adequate for bullying unarmed Zentradi inmates in the absence of newer dedicated machines that don't fit the fleet's visual aesthetic. An out-of-date model sold off as an unwanted asset by the military that eventually become purely decorative. Mind you, the way this is phrased it makes it sound like the prison was being attacked from the outside which is a bit silly given that fleet's only had chance encounters with rogue Zentradi and they were all fended off before threatening the environment ships. Maybe... though the branch seems to predate the existence of fighters which could quickly ascend to orbit from a planetary surface, and it also has the misfortune to come after the concept of "floating stands" (space airbases) in gensynchronous orbit as part of planetary defenses. Perhaps they're the aviation units left to man things like moon bases or satellite cities.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    "What about orbital progress assessments? Eadu research journals? We found TWO YEARS of Jedha working group printouts in your files!" - Director Krennic (to Dedra Meero) Based on Krennic's remarks to Meero in S2E11... at least two years. The way his accusatory rant to Meero in that episode is framed, starting with "Ghorman mining", it suggests that Meero was accidentally put on the distribution list for those other classified reports when she was officially read in on the Ghorman operation. Since we know she assumed control of Ghorman two years ago in 3BBY, and was put on the job three years ago in 4 BBY, that suggests a time period of 2-3 years.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's not just one file. It's a bunch of them that she received over a period of years. That's a big part of why Director Krennic is so incredibly pissed at her. She was mistakenly copied on classified reports from his Jedha Working Group that she was not cleared to have for at least two entire years. That suggests the mistake was made somewhere around Ep4 "Ever Been to Ghorman?" and that she had been receiving classified files without authorization the entire rest of the series prior to her arrest in Ep11 "Who Else Knows?".
  14. Seto Kaiba
    This season is drawing to a close, and so too is the parade of forgettable nonsense that was my watch list. Of the twenty or so shows I gave a whirl, I don't think I found a single one besides The Apothecary Diaries that I'd say stood out in a positive way. There were a lot of mediocre shows like The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl, Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive?, and The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows that I'd call "watchable, but forgettable". So forgettable, in fact, that I actually had to look up Brilliant Healer's title because I couldn't ****ing remember it. 😆 Classic★Stars, however... that is easily the worst-written anime series I've seen in years. It's an excuse plot so thin you could be forgiven for missing its existence entirely that's serves only to justify a string of Macross Delta-esque virtual idol performances of j-pop, j-rock, and j-rap arrangements of public domain classical music. The story of Classic★Stars is an incoherent mess. The characters... exist, I guess. The animation is anywhere from passable to iffy. The music that's supposed to be the main attraction, however... well, it runs the gamut from the merely odd and out-of-place-sounding to the kind of bizarre sort of mess you'd expect from a music major's bar bet all the way out to the kind of auditory torture that makes you hope the vengeful ghosts of past classical composers visit the arranger's house A Christmas Carol-style to terrorize them into repentance and an immediate change of career. That this is apparently meant as promotional material for a pre-existing mixed media project is slightly baffling to me.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not, IMO. The titular character in L. Frank Baum's Ozma of Oz is a woman. Princess Ozma, ruler of the Land of Oz. There's only room for one princess in SMS Skull Platoon, and everyone knows that's Alto. 😜 Ozma Lee's name is probably a reference/homage... but not to L. Frank Baum's Oz series. He's probably named for the titular character in Osamu Tezuka's 1961-1964 sci-fi manga series Ozma Taichou (オズマ隊長, lit. Commanding Officer Ozma). The rest of his unit does insistently refer to him in exactly those terms.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    So... I have a weird bit of esoterica that's been vexing me and I'm wondering if one of the other contributors here might help. In Macross the Ride, Ukyo Kodachi seems to have indulged himself in giving any reasonably plot-relevant ship or mecha a Meaningful Name. Most of them are reasonably straightforward. The YF-27-3/YF-27-5's name and the name of Wisla & Oder were a bit of a struggle because they're misspelled. The one that's still got me stumped is the Macross Galaxy fleet's Riviera-class resort ship... its name エヴナ is either Evna or Evuna. I cannot find a satisfactory reference, either to a place or story, that fits this one, aside from the Town of Evna from L. Frank Baum's Oz series, which doesn't seem to have thematic relevance. Can anyone think of any places or people (from fiction) named "Evna" or "Evuna"?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    So... that's a bit of a rabbit hole in its own right since there are seemingly two separate Marine Corps. When the then-newly inaugurated Earth Unification (UN) Government officially commenced business in February 2001, one of the first things they did was to establish the Earth UN Forces to reorganize and integrate the various national militaries of Earth into a cohesive fighting force for planetary defense. The Earth UN Forces originally had four branches: the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps. These four conventional forces were exactly what you'd expect given their names. We know relatively little about them, as the story doesn't focus on any of them directly and they show up infrequently in the print lore. However, we know a few details like that the Daedalus-class was developed in large part with the Marines in mind (originally the US Marines who formed the backbone of the UN Marines) and that they had an interest in VFs as a replacement for aging VTOL/STOVL jets used in close air support to have their own VF-0 variant (the VF-0C). The fifth branch, the Spacy (space force) was added two years later in 2003. After the First Space War, things get a little bit weirder and a little bit harder to explain. The New Unification Government takes over for the destroyed Earth Unification Government in 2010 and at some unknown date in 2010 or early 2011 someone in power makes the decision to have portions of the Spacy spun off as separate branches of service: the Spacy Air Force and Spacy Marine Corps. Exactly what the organizational division of responsibilities there is is unclear at best. As far as I am aware, they have never been properly explained. They first appear in the This is Animation book for the Macross Plus OVA in Variable Fighters Aero Report, with the Spacy Air Force subsequently appearing in Macross Plus and the Spacy Marine Corps in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta. The Spacy Marine Corps seems obvious enough. They've got to be ground forces and related air support attached to/transported by the Spacy's fleets. The Spacy Air Force makes less sense. Presumably they're the non-carrier aviation arm of the space forces... but that seems to leave their role overlapping with that of the Air Force, since the one base of theirs that we see directly is planetside. With respect to the "why do they still exist?" part... if Isamu's service record is any indication, there is a fair amount of inter-service mobility (more aligned to the JSDF) in the New UN Forces and there is still some semblance of a blue water navy left given that Isamu serves a brief stint about the UNN Enterprise in 2035.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's Ideon... one of those shows where Tomino clearly needed the dosage of his antidepressants adjusted. Nah, they were trying to explain what's been going on... they just left it too late to do any damn good.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Emigrant governments do have some surface-based defenses, but as seen in Macross VF-X2, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta... but they're pretty consistently shown to be rather minimal. One could even call them token. The ground-based defenses in Macross VF-X2 are inevitably overpowered by a single platoon of Valkyries or sometimes even just a single Valkyrie. The Frontier fleet's ground-based defenses don't fare any better. They have infantry, some tank destroyers, and some AA destroids. All in all, the infantry isn't much use against anybody, the tank destroyers may be able to hurt something like a battlepod but they're not mobile enough to be effective, and the AA destroids only show up as jobbers. There's never really been a good explanation for why some of those atmosphere-focused designs exist. The VF-4's Navy variant is a great example of that. Who the hell needed that? Granted, the writeup in the Macross the Ride Visual Book does claim that "second generation destroids" are seen as a valuable fighting force by fleets and emigrant planets. One would assume that "second generation destroids" mainly means the Cheyenne II, the only one we've seen that is used in more than one place. As far as we know, the "Super Defender" isn't even widely used in the Macross Galaxy fleet never mind elsewhere. It's only mentioned as being used aboard the resort ship Evna. In the actual story, the remarks about it in the Visual Book are treated like in-universe ad copy and it absolutely does not live up to the performance claims made about it... to the considerable dismay of its operators in the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army. On paper, they're meant to be capable of reliably shooting down 4th Generation VFs like the NUNS's VF-171. In practice, even in a target rich environment they struggled to hit anything. I'd even question the claim that the Super Defender - explicitly a modified ADR-04-Mk.X - is a "second generation" machine. It's a modified first generation machine, not a new design. From what we're told in Macross Chronicle and other works, places that allow Zentradi to live as giants seem to be quite rare in the galaxy. Enough so that Sheryl Nome, a touring idol on top of the charts across the galaxy, had apparently never seen one before visiting the Macross Frontier fleet. Ouroboros seems like a pretty good example of why most planets don't allow giants. The inevitable rioting. To be fair, that was also the ethos behind the idea of combining the walking war robot "Battroid" with the next-generation fighter project that became the Valkyrie. We haven't seen very many Variable Attackers in the franchise but a big part of that is likely that most Valkyries are designed to be multirole strike fighters. Maybe Aegis had two redshirts riding along who just didn't get any voice lines? That seems likely... though as we saw in Macross Frontier, even the NUNS Marines have aviators. In the TV anime, they use the Queadluun-Rhea/56 like SMS's Zentradi pilots do. In the novel, they use the Neo Glaug bis too, IIRC. I'd assume the second Battle 13 in command of Earth's defenses is probably a newer model Battle-class more similar to the Battle Astraea or Battle Frontier since it was several years newer than even the first Battle 13. Battle Astraea is supposed to have been a standard central NUNS Battle-class before Cromwell went rogue, stole the ship, and had it modified by the Epsilon Foundation. It seems relatively safe to assume that Battle 13 might be a similar or even the same design. As I mentioned, that's one of the connections the novels draw. Fold carbon and fold quartz had not been established yet at the time of Macross VF-X2, so the "hyperspace resonance lens" was just a new gimmicky macguffin Manfred Brando's company had come up with. The Macross Frontier TV anime established the existence of fold carbon and fold quartz and how they fit into existing technology. Then the later novelization of same came along and connected a bunch of Macross VF-X2's plot to Macross Frontier's including making Manfred the sponsor of the 117th research fleet, the resonance lens a piece of fold quartz acquired from the Vajra, and Dr. Nome's theories about the Vajra's hive mind the basis for the Jamming Sound.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    What he said. As far as I am aware, both from written material and from line art, the VT-1 and VE-1 are supposed to be using the same kind of conventional bell nozzles as the VF-1 in their Super parts. From what I was able to find on a quick search, this appears to be a particular eccentricity of the Hasegawa plastic model kits for the VT-1 and VE-1. The Bandai DX Chogokin and Hi-Metal toys show a conventional bell nozzle like what's in the line art.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    No, no I am not. That "reveal" was so incredibly obvious that I don't think it even counts as any kind of spoiler. I mean, come the f*** on... who didn't guess that the Mysterious Blonde Man who goes by an Obvious Alias, conceals the upper half of his face, and otherwise both looks and sounds exactly like the missing Char Aznable is Char Aznable? Especially in the mid-UC 0080's, where Char has already infamously done that once before in Zeta Gundam as under the rather atrocious alias Quattro Vageena. 'bout the best they did to try and hide it even a little was cast Yuuki Shin instead of longtime Char voice actor Shuichi Ikeda... but that's still an actor with prior credits playing Char. Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX does absolutely bloody nothing to foreshadow that Shuji Ito is...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    In fairness, I'd still call Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX substantially more watchable than any of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. GQuuuuuuX's main problem is that it has a potentially interesting premise that it just fails to deliver on. The series never takes the time to explore and do proper worldbuilding in its Alternate UC setting, several potentially interesting plot threads are teased and never explored or touched on in only the most cursory way, and the main characters aren't engaged in the main story in a meaningful capacity. These problems are all eminently fixable with a capable writer. The Big Reveal at the end of the most recent episode should be a Big Deal if properly foreshadowed... but it wasn't, so it just feels like an Arse Pull. At times, it's hard to believe the series was in development for over five years when the result is this messy and unpolished. Rebuild's main problem, by contrast, is its own pretentiousness. It's tries so hard to pretend that the original was doing something deep and complex and artsy not just parodying the many cliches of 90's mecha anime. They spent the better part of the last episode dumping dustbins worth of exposition on us. There's not much more they can usefully exposit on at this point without distracting from resolving the main plot.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I've had a similar feeling about the series from a very early point. Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX doesn't bother to develop any of its main characters, it derails the development and motivations of the secondary ones who actually run the story, it drunkenly stumbles through a premise from a previous series and then frantically rushes through a bunch of familiar plot beats to tick off some obligatory appearances on its way to what seems set to be an uncharacteristic-for-the-franchise happy end. When you think about it, all Studio Khara really did here was give Mobile Suit Gundam the Rebuild of Evangelion treatment. The Beginnings movie is basically Rebuild of Gundam 1.0 and 2.0 which recap the original story and its different outcome, and GQuuuuuuX proper is Rebuild of Gundam 3.0 where a radically different outcome is depicted.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Oof... yeah, that sounds even more brutal than what we have to deal with here in the US, shipping-wise.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Mobile Suit Gundam-san Char absolutely would.😆
×
×
  • Create New...