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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like the lovechild of the Barbatos and the G-Self... with a lot of bias towards the G-Self. Another Reguild Century story? Humanity had set up space colonies in the inner solar system in that era...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Sadly, this meant a golden opportunity for a much better joke was missed... He could've been listening to "Faith of the Heart".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I wish. Yeah, they found and brought back punk-rock-on-a-bus guy from Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home for a bit part in episode 2x04. His appearance doesn't make any sense for the reasons I explained, but then he's one of a bunch of cases of that in this series... and unfortunately this episode also undermines the idea that 2024 is where the timeline diverged because Guinan is clearly upset by having experienced centuries of humanity at its worst in this episode, meaning sh*t went off the rails MUCH earlier than this supposed 2024 flashpoint. I'm really not sure what's worse, the terrible out-of-place nod to Star Trek IV, Guinan trying to draw a connection to "Assignment: Earth", or the fact that... They could afford to recast Guinan after bringing Whoopi back for an episode but not find someone new to play "The Watcher"? Yup. Were you honestly expecting a member of Star Trek: Picard's dysfunction junction to accept the consequences of their actions? All of them have backstories that involve blaming others for their problems, and that clearly isn't going to stop anytime soon.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    YouTube hasn't completely abandoned YouTube Originals... it just massively scaled back its ambitions there in favor of its much more profitable digital library streaming service, since they have enough clout to ensure they can offer products from competing networks and studios in a single marketplace at reasonable prices. It's kind of unfortunate that CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount decided to make Star Trek the flagship series of CBS All Access/Paramount+. Ultimately, it means that they'll have to fly the Star Trek franchise into the ground before they'll admit to themselves that a proprietary streaming service was probably a mistake. They did... it was back in "The Star Gazer". Dr. Jurati mentions that she was cleared of a murder charge in relation to the death of her ex-boyfriend Dr. Bruce Maddox when she's trying to shoo away a man who's attempting to flirt with her by explaining her relationships don't last long and end badly. From her description, charges were dropped because she was suffering deliberately and maliciously-induced psychosis from her mind meld with the Romulan agent operating as "Commodore Oh". Essentially, she was easily forgiven because she was brainwashed and crazy. All in all, I definitely feel like Picard is out of ideas and is desperately trying to sail onwards by sheer force of in-jokes, references, and contrived coincidence. Discovery already did the Mirror Universe thing to death TWICE, once in season one and once in season three, and it wasn't any fun on either occasion. The TOS and DS9 Mirror Universe episodes were fun because they weren't taking themselves seriously. They were an excuse for the cast to really ham it up like the villains from the kind of old school sci-fi serials that the likes of Tom Paris found so amusing. Enterprise, Discovery, and now Picard miss the point of them entirely by taking the subject matter completely seriously. Yeah, actually living in such an unpleasant universe would be awful but the audience doesn't want to see that... they were a chance to get some cheap laughs out of the cast being simultaneously aghast at the state of affairs in the Dimension of Stupid Evil and leave no piece of scenery unchewed playing the locals. Enterprise, and more prominently Discovery, deemphasized the bit about Stupid and emphasized the bit about Evil, which just made it an exercise in misery for the audience that failed to escape the fact that for Discovery it was an attempt to get Burnham out of the role of Villain Protagonist. Picard's sojourn into an even worse Mirror Universe where humanity is a successful xenophobic evil empire is just agonizing to watch because it's not even trying to make sense anymore. It's increasingly obvious it's an ill-considered stunt. This really hits a glaring point with the return of the punk guy from Star Trek IV. Why does he act like he remembers being assaulted by Spock when, in this timeline, there would not have been a trip back in time to recover whales and Spock would not have been on a Confederation ship in the first place?
  5. Seto Kaiba
    You'll want to post in the help thread, not the Newbie questions thread.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm not going to get Paramount+ for this... but I will absolutely support it if and when it comes to a digital library-type service or on physical media, because I absolutely want this level of remaster to continue into the rest of the series. Don't want this one stopping halfway thru the way they did with remastering the TV shows. With the best will in the world, The Motion Picture is jokingly called The Slow-Motion Picture for a bloody reason... but hopefully these edits make what was originally some above average VFX into something gobsmacking.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'd originally put this one on the back burner because the teaser for it was so incredibly dull, but I've started watching Hakozume (localized as Police in a Pod) and it's a surprisingly charming and relatable slice of life series about the local police in Japan. If anyone's looking for lighter fare with some actual substance to it, I'd highly recommend Hakozume. It's currently on Funimation, which means it'll get merged into Crunchyroll in the near-ish future.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, I suspect so. The infrastructure costs for a streaming service are quite expensive. So much so that any newly-launched streaming service is more or less expected to be in the red for its first couple years. It's not a great sign for Paramount+ that the 2021 Q4 earnings call included a prediction that they expect the losses to increase year-to-year for the next few years. IMO, I think we are seeing a streaming bubble that's going to burst in the next couple years. Streaming was convenient because there were only a few streaming services on the market that had everything. Cord-cutters made the cable industry feel threatened, so now the networks are Balkanizing the streaming industry in a bid to claim a portion of what third-party streaming services were making by consolidating all that material previously. Eventually they'll hit the point where a lot of them simply won't be profitable because of how few shows the networks have that draw subscribers when their streaming service mostly just means paying a premium for what's already on broadcast.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's all in the backstory... that the writers and showrunners couldn't be arsed to put in the actual show. Like the 2009 Star Trek (XI) film, the backstory for Star Trek: Picard was dispensed in the form of a limited comic series that was so poorly advertised its existence was unknown to most of the fanbase until long after it ceased publication. The TL;DR version is that "Raffi" - formerly Lt. Commander Raffaela Musiker - was aide de camp to Admiral Jean-Luc Picard for the approximately four years between his promotion to the admiralty in 2381 and his resignation-in-protest in 2385. She was, for all practical intents and purposes, Admiral Picard's right-hand man for those four years of coordination work on the Romulan evacuation. Musiker was also apparently such a problematic officer that Starfleet was planning to hit her with a bad conduct discharge, and once Picard had resigned there was a bootprint on her backside so fast she was convinced it was a conspiracy rather than a result of her substance abuse problem. Well, they did confirm in their Q4 earnings call that they're losing upwards of a billion dollars a year on it.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    A remastering of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series would be focused on restoring and enhancing/upscaling the original animation. They would not waste the time and money to create new footage to replace one mecha design with a slightly different version. An all-new animated feature would likely just use the DYRL versions of the designs, as multiple titles have already done.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    True, if the owner of a hacked account used the same password for their email their email is likely compromised too... but we're talking about the other 99.9% of the userbase who aren't. To them, just showing up and not being able to log in without any readily visible clue as to why is a problem that may lead some to believe erroneously they've been banned, that the forum has been hacked, etc.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It would probably have been a good idea to send a mass email and/or put up a more visible notice that there was a forced password reset beforehand. Just making a thread about it in the forums really doesn't cut it as notification, since most users first impulse on seeing they've been logged out will be to try to log back in before trying to read new posts in the forums and the forums'll tell 'em their account is locked.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Finally, some good news on the release schedule... Crunchyroll has the license for The Rising of the Shield Hero S2, Ascendance of a Bookworm S3, Kaguya-sama: Love is War ULTRA ROMANTIC, Legend of Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These: Collision, Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It: R=1-SING, Skeleton Knight in Another World, and A Couple of Cuckoos. They probably also have Overlord S4.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, what KMG did is more like a compulsive gambler in over their head at the blackjack table. They were taking money needed for day-to-day expenses and betting it on the next big score in the hopes that they'd win big enough to return that money with interest, with a conspicuous lack of success. Eventually it caught up to them when they had to balance their checkbook and realized they didn't have enough to cover their debts and their loan shark decided their free trial of having kneecaps was over. From what I've read, it's kind of a "yes and no" situation. All things being equal, computer animation tools do make the process faster and more streamlined which saves money... but at the same time, it also drives demand for higher quality and more detailed animation which increases cost. (The ever-more-detailed eyes of anime characters are said to be one of the most expensive things to animate in terms of person-hours per frame.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The aforementioned issue with Kew Media Distribution was very much the exception. Mind you, they weren't really in the animation business as such. Their portfolio was almost exclusively distribution rights to live action television and movies. It would not be at all unfair to say that what sank Kew Media Distribution was massively irresponsible and highly irregular behavior of its parent company, Kew Media Group. Anime production is on razor thin margins, yeah... though that's a function of how manpower-intensive animation production is vs. average revenues from a 12, 26, or 50 episode series.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It wasn't always like that... that was a development that came with the pivot away from the titans as the story's main antagonists around halfway through the series.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the monotonous regularity of tragic backstories among named characters, one could be forgiven for cynically suspecting redshirts are a form of assisted suicide. Few are the Star Trek protagonists who haven't been traumatized in some way prior to the "present day" of their respective shows...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda, yeah. After all, the Titans are the only ones left in the story with a halfway plausible claim to being victims rather than villains. They're just Eldian convicts from Marley who were sentenced to a fate significantly worse than death: the limited immortality of being trapped in one's own mind as an unaging mindless titan. Even that's only halfway convincing because a lot of the mindless titans were Eldians like Grisha who wanted to overthrow the vicious, expansionist, titan-using nation of Marley... by restoring the vicious, expansionist, titan-using empire of Eldia. Knowing that a fair number of the titans are titans because their sole objection to genocidal oppression was not being the oppressor puts a lot of them into "*sshole victim" territory at best. It's impossible to sympathize with the protagonists when the first thing they did after defeating the titans and making contact with the outside world again was to immediately validate everything Marley and the rest of the world believed about Eldians being inherently evil, bloodthirsty monsters. The closest anyone gets to heroism in the second half of the series is... And that's objectively horrible.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the winter season is limping to its conclusion. In the Land of Leadale fails to go anywhere or do anything of interest in its twelve episode run. It's only really remarkable for its sheer number of orphaned plot threads, with Cayna having essentially forgotten all of the goals she started the story with by about the seventh episode. It takes no risks, it pushes no envelopes, and it adds nothing to its genre. The series is, for all intents and purposes, a participation award. So congratulations In the Land of Leadale. You showed up. Didn't do anything, but you showed up. The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest is also wearily crawling to its twelve episode mercy killing with Mattias facing the first enemy in the series to actualy pose a challenge to anyone instead of going down like a chump. Unfortuately, there's no actual buildup to it so it feels like a combination of Giant Space Flea from Nowhere and a Big Lipped Alligator Moment. The best they could come up with for an ending was a dark lord whose existence was never so much as hinted at previously. This series is so scattered and its story so poorly told that it feels like a SparkNotes summary written by an exciteable toddler. Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department is definitely feeling some arc fatigue with its concept, having abruptly changed gears to do an idol singer episode for no apparent reason other than that Zombie Land Saga was popular when it was being drafted. The salaryman gags are fine, but there's no sense of direction to the story anymore as of episode 10. Attack on Titan is... Attack on Titan, which is to say it's still a tedious exercise in darkness-induced audience apathy that's frantically searching for something to hold the audience's attention and coming up empty. They're definitely bringing across the final arc of the manga as faithfully as possible. Unfortunately, that means it's padded like a menstruating fire hose and the characters are all unamibguously terrible human beings.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    If it weren't such an old, and comparatively obscure, property they could probably have made some decent money giving it a full-ham tokusatsu treatment as a kids movie. Unfortunately, Hollywood's short memory means every few years a new idiot crawls out of the woodwork convinced they'll be the first to turn a profit on a live-action adaptation of a classic anime property instead of losing tens of millions of dollars like everyone else who's tried.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Voltron might not be at the top of the list of things which will not translate well to live action... but it's pretty damned close. Beast King GoLion was inherently high-camp as a super robot show, and Voltron only made it campier. I wonder which live-action anime adaptation route they'll go with? Will they attempt to do a faithful adaptation of part of the series while paying extensive homage to its anime roots that turns it into a nigh-unwatchable mess (ala Cowboy Bebop), "grim up" the story to make what was a childrens show more palatable for a nostalgia-driven adult audience and suck all the soul and fun out of it in the process (ala Speed Racer), or make an in-name-only adaptation that has no connection to the title besides the proper nouns in an attempt to put their own "stamp" on it (ala Dragonball Evolution).
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I wish Discovery's writers and showrunners had enough self-awareness to try something like that. Then again, if they had enough self-awareness to parody their terrible decisions they'd never have made them in the first place. Maybe Lower Decks will give that one a go.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    'lil bit, yeah... though Star Trek has always been kind of rough on Starfleet officer protagonists. Many of them have either tragic backstories, tragic eventual fates, or both. Trauma makes drama, I guess? Though I guess part of it is probably just an acknowledgement/tie-in to the fact that in TOS living in the colonies seemed to be pretty darn rough as the Enterprise and other ships spent a LOT of time charging to the rescue of some colony or other. (Enterprise had plans on that front that went unused after its cancellation, like T'Pol supposedly being half-Romulan via her sleeper agent dad or Archer being the true identity of "Future Guy" trying to correct the distortions in history.) He gets to do both in the novels, which are based on some of the unused plans for the show's later seasons. Archer's promotion to Admiral in the novelverse came because he lost the Enterprise in the Earth-Romulan War and accumulated damage from transporter use left him with a neurological disorder that would otherwise have made him unfit for duty. It's one thing to throw in a nod to them here and there, but they're rushing to appeal to fans by saying "Hey guess what, Kirk is in this!" as if they're not at all confident that they can actually sell the series on its own merits. Kirk, Spock, et. al. are supposed to be nobodies in this time period. Spock's only real reason for drawing attention would/should have been the fact that he was the son of Vulcan ambassador Sarek. Kirk was just some guy until he became Captain of the Enterprise in the 2260s and went on a bunch of space adventures so exciting Starfleet routinely wrote his reports off as bullsh*t. When Discovery brought Spock in, they made a huge fuss over him totally out of all proportion to the fact that he wasn't anybody special except for his parentage and wouldn't be for another fifteen years or so. I kind of expect to see the same from a young Kirk as a scene-stealing squad with Spock. I can certainly understand them being a bit gunshy about fan reactions based on Discovery's... reception... but that was as much a result of their stupidly over-the-top grimdark take on Trek as the characters being a bunch of miserable and utterly unloveable bastards. This is supposed to be a return to classic form in multiple senses, and that means running on an ensamble cast.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    For my money, I want Strange New Worlds to spend less time leaning on established characters and more time building up the mostly undeveloped or original crew of the 2250s-era USS Enterprise. We've had quite enough of Kirk and Spock as it is.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, if they're going to reference the NX-01 Enterprise and her crew, it's probably better to stick to file photos. FWIW, I think they'd be better off flashing back to the transfer of command where Captain April stepped down and handed the Enterprise to Captain Pike.
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