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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Li'l Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right really confuses me. Despite the title, it's a squeaky clean romcom. The setting is a modern Japan where various fantasy creatures like vampires are just a part of everyday life. The protagonist hits it off with a vampire girl in his class who is desperately trying to look cool because she's awful at being a vampire. But the series never really bothers to explain how she's survived if she's unable to do the one thing vampires need to do to survive, or if there's an alternative why is she always coming to school so hungry that she can barely participate? (Not much room for romance either when the female lead's basically reduced to the status of a crying infant two or three times an episode.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I wouldn't call it miraculous... I'd call it a difference in working conditions and staffing. Rogue One and Andor are products of studio confidence in a creative team that had a clear and consistent vision for what they wanted to accomplish, and enough non-fans in senior positions to ensure that the focus remained on telling a tight, focused story set in the Star Wars universe. IIRC, Tony Gilroy said at one point that he got all of one note from the studio on Andor and that was that Maarva couldn't drop an F-bomb in her posthumous speech. The Rise of Skywalker came out hot on the heels of two highly contentious Star Wars projects so there was low confidence on the studio side from the outset. The creative team got overhauled right before filming and the incomplete script was being constantly revised during principal photography, so the creative vision was all over the place and couldn't even settle on key plot points like Rey's origin story and the studio was watching and second-guessing everything. A bunch of Star Wars superfans on the creative team probably did not help matters either, but that seems almost trivial in comparison. I'd say the difference between the likes of The Wrath of Khan and Section 31 is about that big. There are Star Wars fans who'll defend The Last Jedi and the Rise of Skywalker. I've yet to meet a Trekkie who'll defend Section 31 even in jest. Warhammer 40,000 also has an example I'd point to with the galaxies-wide gulf in quality between the exemplary Gaunt's Ghosts novel series by Dan Abnett and the near-universally scorned Inquisition War trilogy by Ian Watson, with the latter being infamous for prose so purple it practically flies and eats people and its tendency to make extended digressions into its author's sexual frustration and creepy fetishes. As Bruva Alfabusa once put it: The only reason anyone reads that dreadful tome is bile fascination... wanting to see if it's really as bad as the rumors say. The answer is always "No, it's worse."
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Let's Play dropped its fourth episode, and honestly this series is still kind of headache inducing to watch. The story fairly screams that its creator has at-most superficial knowledge of the "gamer culture" that it's supposedly deconstructing, it does demonstrate a very clear understanding of one thing: toxic online fandom. There's actually a very good moment early in this episode where Marshall Law's YouTuber girlfriend talks him out of attempting to publicly apologize to Sam for his overwhelmingly negative review of her game and shame his fans into deleting their negative reviews. She practically recites John Gabriel's Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory while explaining to him how his fans, being anonymous and knowing their actions are largely consequence-free, will likely double down instead of doing as he asks and not only make Sam's life worse but turn on him as well. The first halfway interesting thing this series has done is show Marshall grappling with the desire to make things right and the knowledge the internet simply won't let him undo the damage, and making things worse with the person he's trying to apologize to in the process. Sadly, that moment of actually-interesting character writing is short-lived and the series quickly pivots to its usual cringeworthy nonsense.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Understandable. After all, The Rise of Skywalker was a pile of desperate corporate-dictated course corrections in a trench coat pretending to be a movie. 🫤 's kind of why I've been arguing that there's no saving The Rise of Skywalker's big bad switcheroo plot twist no matter how much setup you do. He's still an outside-context problem brought in because the studio probably felt Kylo Ren's villain cred was insufficient to carry the final third of the trilogy.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    She's a minor character in The Rise of Skywalker. Rey's group meet her and her tribe of ex-First Order stormtroopers on the ocean moon of Endor while they're looking for the throne room in the wreckage of the second Death Star. She later goes with them to Exegol to fight the Sith and brings the horses they ride on top of that one Star Destroyer. At the end of the movie, she goes off with Lando Calrissian to look for her original family... though TBH the vibe I got was that she was meant to be the daughter Lando mentions was abducted by the First Order as a toddler. Nah. Disney backed away from the idea of Rose being Finn's love interest after she got almost Jar-Jar levels of hate when The Last Jedi came out. It did seem like Jannah was going to end up Finn's new love interest for a hot minute there since they were paired up several times in The Rise of Skywalker, but nothing comes of it either.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota remains cute but directionless in its fifth episode. It has exactly one joke, and that is a deadpan reaction followed by serial escalation. My Friend's Little Sister Has It In For Me has hit almost white noise levels of unremarkable.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    They've delved into his history in secondary works, based on what I can find... and his past is exactly as unremarkable as the films made it out. Basically, he was "recruited" at age 3 and raised in the First Order's indoctrination centers to be a future Stormtrooper cadet. He did well in training though got up to various comic relief-type hijinks on various assignments and the rest of his squad didn't like him so he never got a nickname. Jakku at the start of The Force Awakens was his first time in combat outside of simulations. He means Jannah, the female ex-First Order stormtrooper that Finn partners with in The Rise of Skywalker. (Yes, I had to look up her name too.) Nobody in Star Wars gets to live happily ever after. Only misery in this galaxy.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly? In my opinion, any potential Finn might have had as a character was squandered by The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. He didn't have a lot to do in The Force Awakens aside from being Rey and Han's comic relief sidekick. The film did briefly tease that he might have the force potential to become a Jedi in later installments, but that was ultimately dropped. His subplot in The Last Jedi was one of the most heavily criticized parts of the movie and I think that was ultimately what got him demoted to almost an advertised extra in The Rise of Skywalker (alongside Disney's worries about the box office take in China). None of the main characters in the sequel trilogy are what I'd call well-developed, but I feel like Finn was the one who had it the worst by a significant margin. He's basically only ever a sidekick. First to Poe, then Rey, then Han, then Poe again, then Rose, and finally back to Rey. He gets Worf'd so Rey can look good, he sets up catchphrases for Poe, etc. He doesn't ever really get to be his own man... which I find disappointing because he was set up to have a much more interesting character arc than Rey (the Chosen Mary Sue) or Poe Dameron (cocky Ace Pilot rogue) given that he was a defector from the First Order. All of that said, I feel like at this point characters and set pieces from the sequel trilogy are water from a poisoned well. He didn't have enough of an arc for there to be any sense of direction to his character that might drive an original series centered on him. If anything, he might get to come back as a minor character in some far future story where we'll learn that he's serving as a general in the Defiance as they fight the Second Order on the New New Republic's behalf because it can't be arsed. Other than that, he's probably going to be strictly an EU novels character.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota is cute, but doesn't really seem to be going anywhere story-wise... which is a bit disappointing. The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess feels like it's determined to take at least one shot at every overused otome character trope and plot device. It's a bit predictable in that regard, though it definitely lands (mostly) in affectionate parody territory.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I don't think there's any saving The Rise of Skywalker. No amount of spackling over the sequel trilogy's constellation of plot holes with moon logic and fanservice will ever make that transition between 8 and 9 feel less like the kind of shift that leaves you picking gear teeth out of your oil for a fortnight. Turns out when Palpatine was telling Anakin how the Dark Side was a pathway to unnatural things, he meant plot developments. I mean, c'mon... they literally replaced the main villain twice in quick succession. Kylo Ren offs Snoke like 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through The Last Jedi and by the next film has proven ineffective to the point that he's summarily replaced by a 119 year old literal corpse who can't even get out of his chair. Honestly, that's the dumbest part of Kylo Ren. He's not even original. If I had a nickel for every time Han Solo's son grew up to become a whiny emo kid who turns evil and starts cosplaying as Darth Vader because of questionable mentorship, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. I have to hand it to pre-Disney LucasFilm though, giving their version a name that conveyed how truly stupid and useless the idea was. They probably meant for his name to mean "Slaughter" or "Murder" (Caedes) but they apparently couldn't be arsed to pick up a Latin dictionary because the word they used was "Caedus" (lit. "can be cut down"). In short, he was Darth Expendable. Yeah, he was. He was a grunt trained as a mortarman and got a medical discharge. Reality and dramatic fiction play by different rules. In the real world, a total badass can look like anything... even a cartoonish mug. In fiction, you want characters to look a certain way that communicates aspects of their personality or character that you don't have time to communicate verbally. A strong character should have a big upper body, an evil one should have an unsettling look, that kind of thing. John Boyega's character may have been trained from childhood to be a soldier, but his role in the story was comic relief for the most part. He's meant to be a bit of a loser among stormtroopers, who are memetic losers for the most part. So not having the appearance of a hardbitten soldier works for him. Especially since he spends a lot of the first film as the plucky comic relief whose very expressive face is best used to convey his outrage and dismay at the latest inconvenient thing happening to him. He's actually a pretty good casting choice, IMO... though it is a shame his character got shortchanged so badly.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    How does one work up to an event that's basically unrelated to the plot thus far, though? After all, the main criticism of Palpatine's return for The Rise of Skywalker is that "Somehow, Palpatine returned" comes out of nowhere. There's no sense that he was involved in any way with the goings on in The Last Jedi or The Force Awakens and it's clear that the First Order exists despite him rather than because of him. He was hiding out on Exegol making his own First Order with blackjack and hookers superlaser-spamming star destroyers and red stormtroopers. IMO, any way you shake it Palpatine's return was a stupid idea and all the sequel trilogy did was repeat the same mistakes that made reading pre-Disney EU books feel like picking over the contents of a skid full of medical waste. Granted, two hours of reading slowly scrolling yellow text on a black background would be more exciting than The Last Jedi... IMO, that's just introducing unnecessary complexity in what's meant to be a fairly straightforward Good vs Evil narrative. There was already a powerful evil in the story in the form of Supreme Leader Snoke and his First Order. Why muddy the waters by introducing a second, unrelated one whose role amounts to being a walking plot hole? It would have made more sense to either A. not kill Snoke off in The Last Jedi so that he could be the Big Bad for the trilogy's final movie or B. make Kylo Ren a competent Dragon Ascendant whose soldiers actually fear and respect him instead of a comically serious tantrum-throwing manchild desperate for someone else to take the reins. Y'know what? I'm gonna garnish that last one with a hot take. Adam Driver was the worst casting decision in the sequel trilogy. I'm not saying he's a bad actor, just that he's not the right man for that role of Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren needed to be someone who could project a commanding and intimidating presence with or without the helmet, and Adam Driver just can't deliver that. His overall look is more "nerd" than "warrior" (he does great playing a comedic nerd like "Matt the Radar Technician") but he also has resting sadface, so his neutral expression makes him look like he's trying not to cry. That role needed someone with screen presence more like Ed Skrein or Michael Fassbender. Someone who can look vaguely unsettling and creepy and play "unhinged" very effectively. He's supposed to be an unstable person prone to flying into psychotic rages, but Driver's performance delivers something more like an angsty teenager throwing tantrums. If they'd had a more effective and appropriate actor for the role of Kylo Ren, they could have gotten away with offing Snoke in The Last Jedi and making Kylo Ren the main villain for The Rise of Skywalker. The return of Palpatine is 100% a vote of no confidence on Disney's part in Driver's ability to convincingly play a villain. No, I say the movie they should have made is a new menace from outside the galaxy! All those words flying through space for the opening crawl have to be going somewhere... and the extragalactic alien civilization being bombarded by all that excess verbiage should declare war on the Star Wars galaxy! 🙃
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Had a good time with the latest Pass the Monster Meat, Milady. Mechanical Marie's new episode this week is pretty fun too, though in more of a cute-and-harmless sort of way.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That's just showing your age, bro. 😆 "The slop was so much better when I was a young'un, even if we did have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to school!" The only thing separating it from the creatively bankrupt copycat isekai slop currently dominating the airwaves is its genre. There's a lot of good stuff out there, it's just a matter of your individual tastes and having the patience to try shows until you find a winner. There's a lot of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya's DNA in Dan Da Dan IMO, though I usually hear the Monogatari series referenced as the closest thing to it in terms of its genre-bending. I think their most recent title was a bit over a year ago?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, it was mostly trash back in the day too the same as American animation. What changed for Western audiences is simply that we are getting more of it and we are getting it faster. Back in the day, we were getting carefully curated collections of only the most popular and successful shows because they were going direct to video and it took like a year or more for them to come out in the west. Distributors weren't willing to risk it all for mediocre or bad shows with their razor thin margins, which is why so many older shows never got licensed at all. Nowadays, streaming is giving us so much broader cross-section of what's available in anime and we're getting it within a few days of it coming out in Japan thanks to anime having adopted the simulcast model for streaming. We get a lot more variety, but as an inevitable result of that we get more of the mediocre to awful stuff that that has always been there that licensees of the past would previously have just ignored. Even back in the '80s, for every Macross or Gundam the Mecha anime trend turned out there were probably half a dozen copycat shows that were borderline unwatchable like Southern Cross. We'll get more information in time.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    A Mangaka's Weirdly Wonderful Workplace has finally had an episode that supports the idea that it's a comedy, and it ain't bad. Kinda makes you wonder why they spent the first two depicting the main character in abject misery the entire time. A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai is still pretty darn generic to the point of being not really worth watching. It did, however, finally do something reasonably novel. My Awkward Senpai is finally attempting to do romance, though not well. The comedy aspect is still missing.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    😆 So the important bit is barely long enough to boil an egg and the rest is filler? This feels a lot like that suggestion that Star Wars's creative team use the World Between Worlds from Rebels to retcon the sequel trilogy out entirely... which would then require them to explain WTH the World Between Worlds even was, and feel like the same kind of cheap knee-jerk as what it replaced.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Another possible explanation for it is that they screwed up what was meant to be the same reference to its pilot that can be found in the game's loading screens. Several machines in the loading screens that are associated with specific characters have a / followed by the character's initials including: YF-29B Perceval /R.B. Custom VF-22 Sturmvogel II / M.J. Custom VF-22 Sturmvogel II / M.F.J. Custom VF-22 Sturmvogel II / G.K. Custom VF-27 Lucifer / M.R. Custom Queadluun-Rher (sic) / K.K. Custom YF-30 Chronos / R.S. Custom Though this convention is NOT applied to the pics for Aisha's VF-19E or Mina's VF-11C. If it had been, they would simply have put the wrong name after the slash since the VF-11C is Mina Forte's custom aircraft, not the VF-19E.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, between Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur (2010), Macross the Ride (2010-2011), and Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy game (2013) and novel (2013) versions, the question of WTH the VF-19E even is has become thoroughly muddled. I've ranted about this one before on several occasions. 😆 Macross 30's is probably the most problematic, since it implies that the VF-19E is a 1st mass production type not the 2nd type like several previous works had said. Not that Macross Chronicle is helping by identifying Aisha's VF-19E as a mass production type and saying nothing whatsoever about customizations. Probably should be shrugged off, because it's a typo in the fan translation of the light novel. 😅 The original Japanese text of the light novel doesn't have the "A", it's just VF-19E/MF. I've got some stylistic quibbles with the translation, but I'm not about to complain about it too loudly since someone actually took the trouble. What is slightly frustrating is the /MF, which denotes a local specification but we don't know from where. It's possibly they meant "Macross Frontier", which would/should make it VF-19E/MF25.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it's just a sign of Business as Usual at Disney LucasFilm. Bringing a character back from the dead unnecessarily for the sake of a hackneyed redemption arc and the promise of The Continuing Adventures is right up Dave Filoni's alley. So much so that it'd be like the third or fourth time he'd have pitched such a story in the last couple years. That was the entire premise of The Book of Boba Fett, bringing Boba's dusty arse back from being sarlacc chow to be a crime lord in name only who saves Mos Espa from the real crime lords. That was Asajj Ventress's story in Tales of the Underworld too, her coming back from the dead unable to go back to her old life and becoming an antihero. I kind of imagine the meeting worked out like that one Jimmy Neutron meme. "Dave, this is the third time you've pitched us a story about a lame and overhyped villain coming back from the dead to become a nominal good guy. Maybe get some new ideas? Ones that aren't demonstrably shite?"
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Sometimes, it's just that the producers oversold the movie's prospects in order to get funding and in so doing set the bar for "success" higher than was realistically achievable. Sometimes, it's because someone else overpromised and underdelivered or just plain overspent and gave the executives cold feet.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    A "canon" with one 'n' is something the author stands behind. A "cannon" with two is something it's unhealthy to stand in front of. Official media has not, as far as I can recall, identified where exactly the pinpoint barrier emitter is. Master File actually supports your hypothesis, though. The VF-19 Master File says that the VF-19's pinpoint barrier system has three discrete emitters: one in the antiprojectile shield and one in each shoulder. The VF-22 Master File similarly indicates that the PPB system is located in the forearms adjacent to the stabilizers that are used as reinforced shields. Presumably this arrangement carried over to later models. Yep, that's where they're hiding, even if they're almost never visible on the VF-25 in the animation.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That'd make a pretty short film, wouldn't it? He dies, and his spirit inhabits a clone body and that's all she wrote. Pretty much the same as in those terrible old novels. He dies, his ghost goes to possess a new body that immediately starts falling apart because of his evil dark side magic, lather, rinse, and repeat. That would've made the tantrums feel a bit less undignified.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, undeniably. I'm sure there's some OTM shenanigans that make the wing surface a more effective radiator than it would otherwise be, but the main way to dispose of the coolant that has absorbed heat from internal components is much more straightforward. It's also propellant, so they can just get rid of it by shooting it out of the main engines or verniers as the Valkyrie maneuvers. (Thermoelectric converters are also used in the VF's power systems, so maybe that plays a role too.) Probably just a smaller shield like the VF-19F/S's vs. the larger one on the YF-19/VF-19A/C. By this generation, the shield itself almost seems redundant given that they're working with the second generation of pinpoint barrier technology.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo wasn't even a real Sith. He was basically Palpatine's unpaid intern. He ain't just gonna walk off death itself like everyone's favorite evil space wizard.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Iger and Bergman 100% made the right call there. There's no way they were going to be able to sell the audience on more of Ben Solo, after that painfully cheap and forced redemption in the last movie of the sequel trilogy. He was such an ineffective and unintimidating villain that they literally had to bring someone else in to pinch hit for him in the final film of the trilogy. Lucasfilm might have thought that was a good idea, but their judgment under Dave Filoni is suspect at best. Let the past die, Adam. Kill it if you have to. It's the only way to become what you were meant to be... the guy they hire when they can't get Keanu Reeves.
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