Seto Kaiba

32 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Yeah... I think by now, the One Year War has been fought and refought so many times in the various series, that Amuro and Char are probably receiving royalties.

When all's said and done, the conflict between the Federation and Zeon actually lasted 43 years.

The One Year War may have officially ended on New Year's Day UC 0080, but Sunrise's writers were so unwilling to let Zeon go and come up with a new antagonist faction that the Earth Federation is stuck fighting a seemingly neverending supply of Zeon remnants and splinter factions literally right up to the point that the Crossbone Vanguard takes over as the main antagonist in UC 0123.  (Seriously, the last battle against a Zeon remnant is just a couple months before Cosmo Babylonia is founded.)

Even then, Cosmo Babylonia's philosophy and goals are little different to Zeon's and the same is broadly true of their successors the Zanscare Empire.  Even the Juptier Empire is essentially just Zeon with the social darwinism and contempt for life turned up to 11.

I'd like to see them branch out and try something different with the UC timeline instead of just swapping out store-brand Zeon stand-ins.  

There's a few thousand years to play in before they run into the Correct Century and the Regild Century.  

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I figured use the suckiest of mechanimes, it'd be over before Jean has a chance to say something stupid.

Nah, handle that SRW style and you'd have half a dozen episodes of Marie and Lana gushing over Bright for slapping some sense into Jeanne. 😆

7 hours ago, davidwhangchoi said:

I will watch Erin Hathaway be a terrorist. I hope his dad show's up and slaps him. 

In the light novel, his dad does show up... but not to slap him.

Honestly, if we're talking UC... I'd like to see some capital emphasis New Development.  We've seen too goddamn much of the One Year War in terms of do-overs, alterniverses, side stories, and such.  The UC timeline has some war or other major conflict in the Earth Sphere every few years for three quarters of a century from UC 0079 all the way to UC 0153 and the ending of Victory Gundam.  That balloons out to almost a century (93 years) if you count Crossbone Gundam's spinoffs about conflicts with/within the Jupiter Sphere which drag out into the UC 0170s.  

Depending on how canon they decide G-Saviour is, they potentially have a free run of hundreds or thousands of years before the next story in the chronology... lots of room to do something new.

9 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

On another note: instead of "speed running" all the greatest moments of an anime in an "adaption",  they'd be better off doing what the new version of Dune did: spread it out over a few movies. But I can imagine most studios wouldn't want to commit to that for several reasons.

Maybe, maybe not... but considering how live action anime adaptations usually do, nobody is going to go into one banking on getting a sequel green-lit.  

Even One Piece, the 800lb gorilla of shounen anime, played it safe by opting to make each live action season a single complete story arc from the manga so that the story wouldn't be left hanging if Netflix didn't renew it for another season.

5 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

I have an idea for what would probably be the shortest Gundam series of all time.

Ready?

  Hide contents

Crossover Event: Gundam Vs. Super Dimensional Army Southern Cross.

*ducks and runs away*

There are loads and loads of crossovers between Gundam and other mecha anime... that's pretty much the entire Super Robot Wars game series in a nutshell.

That other series was never popular enough to be included, AFAIK, but plenty of others have already done.

If they really wanted the shortest-possible story... all they need to do is do a SEED spinoff where Kira isn't feeling angsty.  He's the Godmode Sue.  The minute he gets serious the fight is OVER.

50 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

Seto, your description of how it may have gone under the WB is apt. Along with the aforementioned actors, including Pedro Pascal, don't forget Giancarlo Esposito as the American version of Col Shikishima. Add a couple good kid actors to play the Espers and voila, a Hollywood adaptation that likely, due to the Production's insistence on "creativity" would, despite the heavy star power, resemble Akira in name only, cost approx $200M, and totally flop at the box office b/c it made little sense to non-anime fans, was too convoluted, and strayed so far from the source that it pissed off anime and manga fans. In every way, it would miss the mark, tie-in merchandise would linger on shelves and get clearanced, and Blu-ray sales would be decent, but not great either.

Even in the absolute best-case scenario that the Akira movie were made by an Akira superfan with enough clout to keep the execs at bay, it's likely that much of the original story and setting would end up on the cutting room floor in the name of trying to fit every iconic moment from the source material into a 90 minute film.  

50 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

Referring to the live action Ghost in the Shell, I don't think who they cast as the Major was as big a blow as the reworking of Motoko's origin. [...] I thought they did a good job with Batou, and the mecha looked good. The action was good. The Major's origin subplot was the biggest headscratcher- it wasn't necessary- just give her a good case to solve and let her and Section 9 do their thing. Anyway, I thought it was pretty close to being a good LA adaptation. Alita still gets my vote for best, or at least the most enjoyable. Looking forward to the sequel.

It was missing most of what makes Ghost in the Shell iconic, interesting, or in any way memorable.  It was watered down into a fairly generic cyberpunk movie that takes some loose inspiration from Ghost in the Shell while omitting most of the characters, set pieces, and settings.

50 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

Moreover, I hated that they just called her Major, like it was her name and not her rank. Coming from a military background, it bugged me throughout the entire film.

Now, in all fairness, that's not necessarily the adaptation's fault... that's how she's addressed by everyone in every version of Ghost in the Shell and they just did a crummy job of working it into the live action adaptation by trying to make it significant.

On 6/29/2025 at 8:12 AM, PointBlankSniper said:

Crossbone should have been the brain dead pick, since a long time ago. But the problem now is that they've already milked it to death. I'm not sure anyone actually cares about the buggo and clow looking grunts, so theres probably little incentive to squeeze it anymore. Astray is in the same place imo. 

From what I've seen, there's still plenty of demand for Crossbone Gundam among the UC fans.

It's pretty much the #1 most-requested adaptation whenever anyone mentions what they should do with the UC next.

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, of course, is a mostly dry well to the point that they're doing a prequel to the movie to explain a fairly trivial background event because that's all they can think of.

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

"Stealth"? 

In my culture, it is expressly forbidden to speak of that... "motion picture". [...]

Yet here we are, talking about it. 😆

Given that several news outlets that interviewed Stealth director Rob Cohen reported that he cited Macross as an inspiration for the film we can tentatively toss it on the pile of awful anime adaptations too.  It makes for an excellent example of what happens when a creative tries to rework an anime title for "western sensibilities" and ultimately ends up removing everything that made the original enjoyable or distinctive in the first place. 

It's a safe bet a similar fate would have befallen Akira, had Warner Bros not finally given up on it and let the license expire.

Just imagine... Akira, but Neo Tokyo is never named and is filmed in Toronto, the biker gangs aren't present at all, the Akira Project is instead being run by terrorists or Evil Russians because the military can't be vilified, Kaneda's played by Daniel Radcliffe with a spray-on tan and 30 minute subplot devoted to explaining he was adopted by Japanese immigrants, and Tetsuo's played by Chris Pratt or Jack Black because casting one of them is practically mandatory right now.

5 hours ago, Big s said:

I didn’t know they ruined Doom twice. I saw a live action one a few years back that really sucked and maybe that was enough that when I hear the name Doom, I stay far away unless it’s for a video game 

Yeah, there are two... Doom (2005) and Doom: Annihilation (2019).

The first one was supposed to be an adaptation of Doom 3, but ultimately deviated from it so much in development that by the time it went into production it was essentially a totally unrelated work that was just borrowing the Doom name.  The second one was a very loose adaptation of Doom 3 on a hilariously tiny budget that was still bordering on in-name-only status.

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I'll agree; One Piece does a good job at that for the most part. I just cringe anymore when it's announced a studio "has an adaption coming".

A deep sense of foreboding is the appropriate reaction to the announcement of a Hollywood anime adaptation.

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I think I know the answer already, but I'll just ask anyways: why do they ignore the source material when doing this? I know some stuff may not translate well into our culture or may be too weird/ perverted/ violent/ other-reason-I-can't-think-of-right-now. But in much of what I've seen, these things are barely recognizable from their sources and in at least a few cases, are practically unwatchable (imo).

Reasons vary, as you'd expect.

The most commonly given reasons come down to trying to broaden the appeal of the movie.  Anime may be more mainstream now than it was even ten years ago, but it's still not something that's widely accepted.  Premises get made more generic and "accessible", plots are streamlined and simplified, potentially controversial characters and situations wind up removed, and so on.  By the time they're done cutting and streamlining and simplifying they've often removed most of the original work's personality.

Then, of course, they sometimes have to make concessions for casting decisions too.  For instance, Ghost in the Shell cast Scarlett Johansson for her star power and ability to fill out a catsuit... then had to essentially center the entire plot on deflecting accusations of racism and whitewashing for casting a white woman to play a Japanese woman living and working in Japan.

If the studios had their way with Akira, it's likely the only thing left of the original when the dust settled would've been Kaneda's iconic bike.

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

*praying they never try a live action adaption of Macross Plus*

They kind of already did... like twenty years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_(film)

It's basically Macross Plus with the serial numbers filed off.

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Do you know if they currently have any flights or cruises out to there?

Asking for a friend...

Probably inadvisable.  There's a reason one of the five main types of Irish folk song is "The fae are back on their bullsh*t and I got bamboozled". 🤣 

Seems like it'd be in poor taste to name a resort ship meant for tourism after a magical island that you can't leave without recreating the "He chose poorly" scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  Doubly so if the scholars are correct and Emhain is an cognate of what's now called Avalon in Arthurian mythos.  Avalon isn't a place of bounty for living souls to visit, it's a place for the dead and dying and not somewhere people generally come back from.

Then again, naming a resort ship with an underground factory after a beautiful seaside town in a kingdom ruled by underground by a power-hungry technocrat is a bit on the nose too.  

7 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Do you think anyone here in the west has any idea of how to do a successful "live action" version of an anime? I think even One Piece  has its' issues, tbh...

I'd argue that One Piece is proof that it is possible for there to be such thing as a western anime adaptation that respects the source material.

It's very much the exception that tests the rule that western anime adaptations are awful.  Of course, it was always going to have issues because One Piece is so incredibly weird that there were always going to have to be some significant compromises to make it work with living actors.

About the best we can reasonably hope for from Hollywood is something like Alita: Battle Angel which plays fast and loose with the original story in order to essentially speedrun the most iconic moments in a single two-hour span.  You only get that if there are superfans involved, though.  The far more likely fate is a western "creative" trying to give their own new interpretation of the work and turning it into a dumpster fire that proves they missed the point completely.  Akira would probably have ended up a generic sci-fi monster movie like what they did to Doom twice.

11 hours ago, sketchley said:

To add complexity to the エヴナ debate: be mindful that it may not be an English word, and that while ヴ may be "vu" in English, it may not represent "vu" in other languages.

Yeah, I searched on both the likely romanizations and the kana string itself for quite a while.

Not a string with a lot of plausible results, though... unless Ukyo Kodachi is really into tapas.

11 hours ago, sketchley said:

• (more likely): エヴァン（エヴナ） in Tír na nÓg: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ティル・ナ・ノーグ (the land of eternal youth in Irish mythology):
  • specifically in the section on ブランの航海 (The Voyage of Brân):
    • "同作品では、エヴァン（エヴナ）はマナナーンの国とは別で、「女の国」である。" ⇒ In the work, Evan (Evna) is a "country of women" separate from the country of Mananaan.
• (less likely): Malick Evouna https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/マリク・エヴナ

Emhain Abhlach (pronounced Ah-win) is certainly an alternative, though not one I'm sure fits the story... or the kana if we're being honest.

It is a mythical island paradise... but in keeping with the usual themes of magical and otherworldly locales in Irish mythology and folklore, it's one of those places where Time Works Differently and You Can't Go Home Again.  Emhain Abhlach is your standard Land of Plenty and Ease where mortal wealth is so abundant to have lost all value, with abundant food and water that needs no human labor to cultivate or maintain, and of course a population of... how can we put this politely?... "welcoming" women.  The catch being that, when you leave, you discover that you've been gone for hundreds of years and will instantly age those hundreds of years the minute you get off the boat.  

It doesn't seem to have any meaningful connection to the tropically-themed ocean resort ship in Macross the Ride.

11 hours ago, sketchley said:

Interestingly, "Evna" is apparently the capital of the Land of Ev (https://oz.fandom.com/wiki/Evna)

That's the one I hit on as a likely suspect.

Evna is a beautiful town near the Nonestic Sea in the Land of Ev, which is under the corrupt influence of a malevolent industrial capitalist autocrat (the Nome King) who rules his domain through an industrial monopoly, treats his own people as borderline slave labor, and actively conspires to oppress people in other lands.  The resort ship Evna belongs to the Macross Galaxy fleet, and has a Galaxy corporation secret factory in its sublevels, meaning it's a beautiful seaside community ruled from underground by malevolent industrial capitalist autocrats (the cyber-nobles) who treat their own people as slave labor and want to oppress other nations similarly.

11 hours ago, sketchley said:

Personally I think the Irish mythological connection is a better fit than the connection to "The Wizard of Oz".  But one never knows. 🤷‍♂️

Some commentary from Kodachi would be nice.

5 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Err...what? Really really confused by this, because... that doesn't make much sense. 

B and V are the second most infamous "Japanese does not make a distinction" pair of consonant sounds after R and L [...]

That's the thing with general rules like that in language... they're true until they're not.

Or to put it another way, they're always someone demanding an exception.  Japanese is far from the worst offender among the languages I've studied over the years. 😆 

5 hours ago, SebastianP said:

Edit: OK, I googled the kana itself from your post, and found a wiktionary page. It's a real kana, used exclusively for transliteration, and it's noted to be a relatively recent addition, which is likely why it's not in my scanned-from-schoolbooks tables.   But... as mentioned, Japanese itself does not make a distinction, and we have plenty of examples of Japanese natives, even working professionally, being *really careless* with B/V and R/L because it doesn't come naturally. 

If you're really sure it's specfically meant to be a V sound, then Evna from Oz sounds like the best fit. 

There's only one reading for ヴ on its own, and that's "vu".

They spell the ship's name エヴナ (e-vu-na) consistently, both in the Macross the Ride Visual Book (see Vol.2 Pg18) and in the light novel itself.  On that basis, I'm inclined to assume it probably isn't a spelling error.  Especially since it's a rather niche kana in the first place.  (Not to say they didn't make spelling errors... though they tended to make them in romanizing katakana rather than the katakana itself.

I can't find anything for "Evuna", apart from a chain of Spanish tapas bars in England.  "Evna", however, presents a bunch of different options the most likely of which seems to be the Oz connection.

2 hours ago, Old_Nash_II said:

CBR made a list

https://www.cbr.com/most-disrespectful-western-anime-adaptations-ranked/

All the usual suspects, I see.

Akira has hopefully been spared the fate of joining that particularly inauspicious brotherhood.

2 hours ago, PointBlankSniper said:

I fully understand how dead in the water Gundam mangas are. I'm not saying it will get a show. Just addressing that it is their next immediate venture into tropey themes that they are throwing money behind, yet not fully commiting to it, exactly in the way you described.

Just tacking on personal hopes that the writing does something I want to see, so that it could turn into something worth animating, not saying that has anything to do with plans for the project actually going anywhere.

Give it time. 

Bandai Namco Filmworks has been picking over Gundam's light novels for material to adapt for a decade or so now and they've already adapted a few higher-profile manga titles into animation like Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin, Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, and Mobile Suit Gundam-san.  Eventually the light novel well will run dry and they'll start picking over the less-well received parts of their licensed manga catalog.

Lots of fans are still holding out hope that, since we've seen Unicorn and Hathaway's Flash get animated, that Crossbone Gundam is next.

13 hours ago, PixelatedShinobi said:

The "Nome" theming might also be a connection drawn to everyone's favorite (mine, at least) Galactic Fairy? 

Maybe?  I think that may be more of a happy accident.

None of the sources I've translated thus far have shed any light on the origin/meaning of the Nome family name.  It's spelled ノーム, which is used for several different loanwords like Gnome, Noam, and Nome.  The most likely explanation I can come up with for their family name is that it is meant to be the same as "gnome", a reference to the earth spirit//fairy of Renaissance folklore that the Nomes of The Wonderful World of Oz are named for.  Not that the Nome family of Macross have any real resonance with the folkloric creatures the way Baum's Nomes do.

3 hours ago, Old_Nash_II said:

Great Simon Furman's Ghost

Akira is dead!

May it stay that way.

Hollywood's track record with anime is so bad that all I can do is celebrate the demise of a project like this.  The odds of it being another dumpster fire like Cowboy Bebop, Dragonball Evolution, or Speed Racer are far higher than the odds of them producing anything watchable.

21 minutes ago, PointBlankSniper said:

Well, SD Gundams with original stories are all basically fantasy already. Build Divers already had a dude stuck in the game, although that was somehow linked to a real alien planet.

Not to mention the Nobel Gundam in Mobile Fighter G Gundam already totally looks the part of a magical girl-themed Gundam since its motif is sailor fuku... so much so that even the Gundam franchise itself has joked that it looks like Sailor Moon, and the high-mobility version from the manga is acknowledged to be based on Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon S.

21 minutes ago, PointBlankSniper said:

The next thing they seem to be pushing for, with a kit to accompany the launch, but don't have the balls to commit to animating, is the new Gundam Eight manga. Seems like it's some sort of post (alien invasion?) apocalypse survival thing. Something about the last 258 humans on earth using the lone Gundam to survive, and it looks like an ugly AF unpainted tryhard kit bash of conflicting geometry and a lot of pla plates.

Woof... yeah, that Gundam ain't winning any beauty contests.

6 hours ago, F-ZeroOne said:

So between witches from Mercury and sorcery is "Gundam" becoming a magical girl show? 😄

Already has done... Char has a magical girl transformation in GQuuuuuuX.

30 minutes ago, Big s said:

hopefully, you never know until it’s finished, but I really liked the first movie 

Eh... it should be pretty damn difficult for Bandai Namco Filmworks to screw up Hathaway's Flash Part II.

After all, Hathaway's Flash is an adaptation of the vintage light novel by Yoshiyuki Tomino himself that was penned at the peak of the Universal Century.  This isn't some half-assed fanservice-a-thon with an inconsequential plot like Unicorn or Phenix Hunt.  This is a story written back when Gundam had a soul and a message.

4 hours ago, lechuck said:

 

Finally, some competent storytelling.

On 6/24/2025 at 6:51 PM, jvmacross said:

If you have some time to kill....

https://www.starwars.com/star-wars-galaxy-map

Yeah, making hyperdrives "speed of plot" engines really was the only way to go.

1 hour ago, VF8000G said:

  Hide contents

There is no assumption.  The one universe where Amuro isn't present, the Gquacks universe, Char survives.

1 hour ago, VF8000G said:

Spoiler

Putting the metafiction and memberberries aside, the main reason the RX-78-2 was chosen as the "last boss" is because the series itself serves as a sort of wish fulfillment for people who want to see Char and Lalah get their "happy ending" which they were denied in 0079.  Amuro is not allowed to exist because he shatters that ship with his mere existence, therefore the RX-78-2 has to serve as the stand-in [...]

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...

1 hour ago, VF8000G said:

As a side note, for being a series claimed to be written by fans for fans, it's funny how hard Khara misinterprets Char and Lalah's relationship in the original series.  It was unhappy and exploitive on Char's end, where Lalah's demise wasn't the real cause of his grief,  and was only an excuse and scapegoat for Char to latch onto to fuel his "complex feelings" for Amuro.  But I suppose I shouldn't expect such critical thinking from writers who think "Zeon are the good guys and should have won"   

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.

16 minutes ago, VF8000G said:

That's not quite how I see it.

  Hide contents

The "instrument of Char's demise" was Amuro.  As seen in the collage of the various other Char MS that he got killed in by Amuro, who was unquestionably piloting different suits other than the RX-78-2 (one of the suits referenced was Yamashita's Sazabi, which has its own Nu counterpart that he designed).  The entity that shows up to kill Lalah was not actually the RX-78-2, it was an apparition that simply took the form of the original RX-78-2.  It could have taken any form it wanted too, hence why it later became a Giant Naked Rei ripoff.  The reason it took the form of the RX-78-2 is because it's typical metafictional rubbish dangling nostalgia memberberries in front of the audience.  Ghostbusters lampooned this embarrassing trope decades ago with with the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man yet here it's played straight. 

5 minutes ago, VF8000G said:

I'll just say this -

  Hide contents

the RX-78-2 showing up in Gquacks has more in common with the RX-78-2 in Ready Player One than any other incarnation of the design.  The entire reason for its existence is for the audience to clap and eat their memberberries.  It serves zero importance to the story outside of its own metafictional context and could have been replaced with any other entity.

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...

3 minutes ago, VF8000G said:

[...] I didn't think Gundam or Khara would stoop that low to be such a lazy slop imitation [...]

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.

3 minutes ago, VF8000G said:

This is why I'm now more than ever convinced that this show was meticulously planned and controlled by some committee that wanted to make sure all the boxes were checked.  

It's a franchise series.  Of course it was.  They're literally listed in the credits. 🤣

3 minutes ago, VF8000G said:

As for 00, it wasn't fanservice

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.