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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That was business as usual. Every time one of their attempts at new Robotech development gets cancelled, they spend the next several years loudly insisting that it's still being worked on and giving every excuse they can think of for why it's not coming out at every convention they attend until the fans stop caring. Then they quietly admit it was cancelled all along.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Only in the vaguest possible sense... Macross has never really given any evidence that the ancient Protoculture directly interacted with - or influenced the social, cultural, or scientific development of - humanity at any point. One of the core tenets of the pseudoscientific ancient [alien/astronaut] theory is that extraterrestrials stuck around or made many visits over a long period of time to guide humanity by interbreeding with us to accelerate our evolution or teaching humans stuff like architecture, astronomy, and medicine, and being revered as gods. The Protoculture's influence on humanity was purely genetic. They genetically modified pre-modern humans to ensure the rise of modern humanity, left "insurance" to prevent us from escaping into space if we became a violent species, and left the rest to fate. The religion of the native islanders on Mayan and that of the Windermereans seems to be more on the order of a cargo cult. They didn't mythologize the Protoculture themselves, they formed systems of religious belief centered on their encounters with the Protoculture's "sufficiently advanced" technology. The Mayan islander culture's foundation myth is a recounting of the accidental activation of the Birdhuman tens of thousands of years ago, and their interpretation of events may have been shaped by the artificial intelligence that the Birdhuman used to interrogate humans about the status of human society. The Windermereans revered the Star Singer and turned the Sigur Berrentzs into a shrine (that may have been influenced by the still-operable tech that was able to communicate as it did with Roid Brehm in 2067. No, that'd be mainly because almost all of the various incarnations of the ancient [alien/astronaut] pseudoscientific theory are a tissue paper-thin disguise for fairly overt racism. You virtually never hear the ancient [alien/astronaut] hypothesis voiced in connection with developments made by white people. It's almost invariably put forward by the unsubtly crazy white armchair pundits as a way to diminish or dismiss the achievements of non-white cultures, particularly where those cultures produced something more advanced or at least greater in scale than their contemporary caucasian counterparts. The argument usually takes the form of "well, yeah it's impressive but they had outside help", albeit with a good deal of flowery language in an attempt to disguise the intent.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    On the one hand, there is some amount of inter-season baggage carried over from season two. On the other hand, season three is basically Star Trek: Discovery making as clean a break as possible with its largely reviled grimdark take on the TOS era and starting there means skipping two entire seasons of plot holes, retcons, bad fanfic-tier writing, and the race to the professional bottom as the crew treat each other with thinly-veiled contempt or overt loathing. About the only things of value you miss by skipping seasons one and two are that first couple episodes of season two where Anson Mount's Christopher Pike makes it feel like an actual Star Trek series for a bit before the cancer that is Burnham metastatizes again and the Short Trek where Harry Mudd is actually in-character instead of just being a serial killer with a handlebar mustache.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    As you defined it, yes... Robotech is a dead franchise in the US. The last serious effort to produce a continuation of Robotech's animated series was the Shadow Chronicles OVA, which was cancelled in 2007 with just one episode completed after it was poorly received by fans and ignored by everyone else. In 2014, Harmony Gold tried and failed to crowdfund the production of a pilot episode for a new TV series under the title of Robotech Academy. They quit a week before the end of their fundraising period when it became evident they were only going to reach about 40% of their pledge goal. That was the last anyone heard of Robotech's animated series except for the occasional announcement that the 85 episode TV series moved from one streaming service to another. The one and only Robotech comic book is supposedly on indefinite hiatus after the publisher just stopped releasing issues without any kind of explanation. There have been no new novels or video games. Low quantities of licensed toys and some cheap apparel are all Robotech is producing these days. It would not be a stretch to say that the main reason Robotech is remembered at all outside of its fandom is because of the legal problems Harmony Gold causes for other, far more popular, properties like MechWarrior, Transformers, or Macross. Well, yes... that's how licensed merchandising works. That's normal, even for successful franchises.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    ... I don't know if I'd go that far. Burnham is absolutely still set up to be the cause of galactic events. In this case, they seem to be pretty clearly setting her up as the prime mover behind the restoration of the Federation. To be fair, while it is objectively reasonable in purely academic terms... people tend to think of the institutions that existed when they were growing up as somehow being permanent and unchanging. Children often struggle with the idea that their parents and grandparents didn't simply spring into being at their current ages. The idea that governments can very easily come and go in a matter of years, or the space of just a few lifetimes, is kind of an alien concept to western audiences whose home nations have existed for hundreds of years, but less so for Eastern European or African audiences. When we think of long-lived civilizations we tend to think of examples like Rome, which lasted for either 985 or 1962 years (if you count the Eastern Roman Empire). As a more advanced civilization that had de facto solved most social problems, it's not altogether surprising that Burnham would be stunned to discover the Federation had dissolved in the wake of "the Burn". She is, in a way, very like the Roman citizens who were so confident the Rome was eternal. (Her first assumption that they're talking about the same Federation is pretty well borne-out by what she's been told so far, which isn't surprising to the audience since time travelers from the previous century had made it fairly clear that the Federation that was around c.3052 was the same Federation that was founded on Earth in 2161.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, to file for registration of a trademark or renew a register trademark you have to be able to demonstrate that you are actually using the trademark in a commercial context.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Unless the US reverses itself and adjusts its trademark laws to match what's done in most of the rest of the world, we're kind of stuck unless Harmony Gold either sells its rights or lets those trademarks expire due to disuse. There are a few ways that could happen, like Tatsunoko Production refusing to renew Harmony Gold's license or pricing it beyond what they're willing to spend, the franchise deteriorating to the point that it's not worth maintaining, or simply not having any merchandise sales to support asserting the trademark is in use. That is also possible. Some fans speculate that Harmony Gold is keeping Robotech limping along specifically to hang onto the Macross rights in the hopes of making a big payday on either selling it off to Macross's owners or forcing licensing to go through them so they get a small regular payday without doing any work.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well, not really... We already knew about Big West having successfully challenged Harmony Gold's trademarks in a bunch of key markets including the UK, EU, and PRC... though IIRC in the EU Harmony Gold's pro forma objections to the initial ruling in Big West's favor are still winding their way through the system. The meme you found is kind of an exaggeration. Those rulings aren't enough to inflict lethal damage on the Robotech franchise. Losing their trademarks in the UK and EU is more an inconvenience than anything, since Harmony Gold's own disclosures about their use of their trademarks there revealed that merchandise sales in that market were practically nonexistent. Losing them in China and having Big West release all of Macross's sequels there might hurt them a bit more given that they'd pinned a lot of their hopes for the future on the Chinese market. The lynchpin of their whole operation is the trademarks in the United States, which unfortunately can't be challenged the same way that the trademarks elsewhere were because US trademark law preferences first use in market over actual ownership. Robotech might have one foot and four toes on the other in the grave, but it won't be all the way in until that tiny cult American fanbase deteriorates to the point that it's no longer profitable to maintain the franchise for any reason.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    You joke... but both The Next Generation and Voyager did something that was pretty much THAT with a perfectly straight face. The one in TNG worked, but had serious implementation issues. The one in VOY worked pretty much perfectly.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That's actually a really good point. Because practically all of the alternatives to warp drive also use subspace in some way or another, if they'd just gone wtih the Final Frontier take on it they'd have almost been home free with only the "time portals" to worry about.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, it actually marks a significant improvement. I'd have characterized the first two seasons of Star Trek: Discovery as unwatchable regardless of what the title was thanks to the godawful writing and the way the characters seem to despise each other. That season three's first episode feels like it'd be strong enough to stand on its own merits if it weren't burdened with the Star Trek legacy poking holes in its plot left and right says a lot about how far the writing has come.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The so-called "Relaunch" novelverse also had a fairly consistent stable of creatives working together with a shared, coordinated direction for the story and setting... but their work was hit or miss. The rest of the novels/comics/games/etc. was your standard "whoever's willing to pay for a license" kind of arrangement and was less consistent. Oof... I should probably have spoiler tagged that.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Fear of them collapsing into each other to form some kind of singularity of extremely insincere misplaced regret? Or concern that they might drown in a tidal wave of crocodile tears. Maybe Soong can build one with a bit of the original Picard's backbone?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well... Star Trek: Discovery's third season has started coming out and morbid curiosity led me to give its first episode a look. "That Hope is You, Part 1" unfortunately continues the Star Trek: Discovery tradition of "this show would be better off without the Star Trek name on it"... because the premise would be pretty interesting if the writers hadn't completely f*cked it up or failed to think it out properly. I know this is kind of damned-by-faint-praise, but Star Trek: Discovery's biggest problem right now is that it insists on pretending it's Star Trek. If they took the "Star Trek" out of the title and just presented it as an all-original sci-fi series called Discovery from season 3's start onward, it would be an engaging show that I might actually be willing to pay for a subscription to follow.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Quite true. IMO, Star Trek had/has a pretty sensible containment strategy in considering licensee-created "expanded universe" materials non-canon and having a single creative team running the show (literally) for much of the franchise's life. Not an airtight strategy by any means, but one that shielded the franchise from the kind of issues that its spiritual sibling Star Wars encountered with its pseudo-canon expanded universe. IIRC, killing off Data was something Brent Spiner wrote into Nemesis because he felt he was aging out of the role of the theoretically immortal and unaging Commander Data. Even today's VFX tech wasn't enough to convincingly de-age him back to even where he was when Nemesis was filmed. (Copying his mind into B4 was a way to bring him back later if he changed his mind.) Bringing Data back just to kill him again was a dick move on Picard's part. Killing off Picard and bringing him back to life as an android with artificially-implanted memories and emotions? That was a Philip K. Dick move. A lot of fans seem to feel that way about it. Most of its sins could've been forgiven if only the show hadn't been so damn determined to drag Starfleet Saint Jean-Luc Picard's name through the mud.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Basara had enough actual character traits that his lack of development was allowed to pass unremarked-upon... Mikumo was so underdeveloped they had to try to turn her lack of any character traits into a character trait.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the new Trek showrunners seem to disagree that there aren't many "real" retcons given the amount of time and effort spent explaining/justifying them in live segments, interviews, etc. (In all fairness, while Star Trek does not generally consider comics to be canon they made an exception for Countdown because it was done specifically to promote the movie and its lore was corroborated by creator interviews.) To be fair, it's not like there isn't a small solar system's worth of precedent for Starfleet keeping century-plus old ship classes in continuous service with regular upgrades. The Miranda-class and Excelsior-classes that were seen so often in the Dominion War were, respectively, at least 111 and 93 years old at the time the Dominion War ended in 2378. The tugs - semi-officially called Helios-class - being only marginally older than the Miranda-class (at least 121 years) isn't that unbelievable IMO. The other tug class we saw in shots of Mars, the Wallenberg-class, didn't appear in Discovery and might be new or at least newer. (Having old, decommissioned Starfleet shuttles be repurposed for civilian commuter use isn't all that hard to believe either.) If you'd cited an actual stable society, it would have been fine. Weimar Germany was a trashfire for the entirety of its short life... marked by the succession crisis after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and just kind of decided it was a republic, the creation of a national assembly and a new constitution, the hyperinflation of its currency, the burden of war reparations, two restructurings of its national debt, abandonment of territorial claims, the Great Depression, and violence from far-right political extremists. THAT'S NOT STABLE. J.J. Abrams' goal was to make Star Trek more like Star Wars in the hopes of increasing its mass market appeal so he could make the jump to Star Wars proper... so you could say it was willful stupidity.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody is Lady M! (No really, that's their official position so far.) Also, you're missing a couple folks on your relationship chart there. Between Mao Nome and Lady M should be Dr. Elma Hoyly, who developed the fold wave amplifiers used by the Tactical Sound Units during her work with Tactical Sound Unit Thrones in the early 2060s (Macross E) based on the work of her mentor, Dr. Lawrence (from Macross Dynamite 7). Ivan Polivanov (also from Macross E) kind of belongs in the space between Grace O'Connor and Roid Brehm, as he was experimenting with using fold songs to manipulate living beings as weapons the way Grace'd tried with the Vajra.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, no. First, I can't honestly recall a single instance of having seen a fan complain about that. Second, that wasn't from the novels. That was from Star Trek: Countdown. A (lamentably bad) four-issue limited comic that written as a prequel/tie-in to the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie. It was written to do all the backstory exposition the movie didn't do... like the details of Romulus's destruction, Nero's circumstances, how a civilian mining ship ended up covered in Borg tech, where the Narada and its crew were during the film's timeskip, etc..
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... which Wiki did you use? Memory Alpha is, AFAIK, more or less the go-to for Star Trek official setting materials. Memory Beta's good for the non-canon expanded universe stuff like novels, comics, etc. though it can be confusing to read since it doesn't separate the different takes on things into different articles. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Romulan_sun It's definitely not a great bit of writing... but the smartarse fan would note it's still not the worst writing Trek has ever had. That honor still debatably belongs to either "Code of Honor", "Threshold", "11:59", or Star Trek V. It does open up some rather unpleasant plot holes in Picard and in Star Trek '09 though. The three biggest plot holes are kind of intertwined... Why did Nero insist that the Federation "did nothing, and allowed [his] people to burn while their planet broke in half" after being transported to the Kelvin timeline, when Jean-Luc Picard successfully orchestrated the construction of a rescue fleet of unprecedented scale and the evacuation of countless Romulans to planets like Vashti? Why did the Romulan Star Empire even need the Federation's help with the evacuation if the supernova only threatened one star system? Why did losing only one star system, even if it was the capital, cause the entire Romulan Star Empire to collapse? The Abrams/Kurtzman-era Trek writers seem to rather consistently forget that antagonists like the Romulans and Klingons are every bit the interstellar achievers that the Federation is, and aren't limited to one homeworld. Discovery's first season rather perplexingly asserts that destroying Qo'noS would wipe out almost the entire Klingon species, and Picard's makes the loss of Romulus out to be enough to collapse the empire and reduce the remaining Romulans to near-powerless refugees.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Uh-huh. Sure. ... ... ... You... um... weren't a very good history student, were you? The Weimar Republic was about as far from stable as it was possible to get. It's like trying to compare a building made out of concrete to one made out of cake.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 takes - no joke - about twenty episodes to actually get going properly. The pacing sucks, but once it gets going it's reasonably engaging.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    In the real world, stable societies are very slow to change for better or for worse. In pre-Abrams Star Trek, the United Federation of Planets was a very stable post-scarcity society. Altruism had become second nature to people who grew up in a civilizaton where everyone was treated with dignity and respect and everyone's needs were met. Everyone was fed, clothed, and housed. Everyone had unrestricted access to education, to medical care, and to entertainment. Everyone was able to contribute to society or even voluntarily abstain from doing so without restraint or penalty. Over two centuries of social progress don't suddenly come undone overnight even in a comparatively unstable society like our modern one, never mind an advanced civilizaton like the Federation's. Racism doesn't just suddenly become OK again in a society where it's been unacceptable for centuries. Substance abuse doesn't just suddenly become a thing again in a society that abhors it but treats it properly as a mental health issue instead of a crime and had long since invented non-habit forming, non-harmful alcohol substitutes that'd become the standard. Almost everything. The cause of the supernova was changed from a Tal Shiar screwup to unknown. The star that went supernova was changed from the remote Hobus system to Romulus's own star. The supernova event itself was changed from a sudden and unexpected event to something with enough lead time for a mass evacuation to be planned and carried out. The supernova explosion was changed from a galaxy-threatening, physics-defying event to a normal supernova that just destroyed the Romulan system. The Federation's role went from not providing any aid until it was too late to immediately constructing the biggest rescue armada ever constructed and carrying out a mass evacuation and resettlement of Romulus's populace until the evacuation fleet's ongoing construction was sabotaged by a secret organization inside the Tal Shiar. Data went from Captain of the Enterprise-E during the events of the supernova after being resurrected in B-4's body to being permanently dead and entirely uninvolved. The only aspects of it that didn't change were the bizarre insistence that destroying Romulus was the same as destroying the Romulan Empire even though they're an interstellar civilization on par with the Federation in every prior TV series, and Spock having disappeared while on a mission to save Romulus (kicking off the Kelvin timeline, though Spock's chosen method would have been just as deadly for Romulus as the supernova now that it was just a normal supernova). All in all, they managed to write around the problems with J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek movie in a way that was detrimental to both stories.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, while Star Trek does use that trope a fair bit its actual degree of usage is almost as oversold among fans as the "redshirts are doomed to die" meme. The actual number of cases of flag officers deliberately acting contrary to Federation law/ideals is pretty low. Seven if you count future!Janeway, who retrocausally doesn't exist... which was her entire plan. (The so-called "insane admirals" who didn't make the below list were omitted due to acting under alien influence, diagnosed mental illness, or simple incompetence.) Where Picard differs from those previous examples is in the fact that those previous antagonistic flag officers were always presented in a way that made it clear that what they were doing would be considered completely unacceptable by the rest of Starfleet, by the Federation Council, and by the general populace. They were always presented as Bad Guys who were brought to justice by the ideal-upholding Starfleet rank and file or at least killed by the injustice they'd perpetrated directly or indirectly. Only William Ross walked away with his rank and his freedom, though he was only an accessory to the crime not its architect. The best example of someone "defending" the Federation without upholding its ideals is Director Sloan of Section 31, who is undone by the two most idealistic members of Deep Space Nine's crew and kills himself in a bid to "protect them from themselves". The attitude we see from Starfleet in Star Trek: Picard is very much against the grain of what you'd expect from Star Trek. Eh... I don't know about that. I mean, Deep Space Nine did A LOT to emphasize that Starfleet and the Federation were NOT going to sacrifice or compromise their ideals in the name of victory over the Dominion and the protagonists were clearly shown to abhor the unlawful activities of Section 31. First Contact was pretty dark, but that was Picard up against his personal nemesis and a very personal set of psychological issues in a very confined space... and the Borg turned the lights out too. Insurrection made it really clear that the Federation Council had been kept in the dark about the real nature of Dougherty's plan and that heads would roll when they found out. Nemesis had the Federation jump at the chance to open friendly talks with the new head of the Romulan government (even if it was a trap), and ended with a relatively positive note with the Romulan military thanking the Enterprise crew for their help against Shinzon and sending over shuttles with additional medical personnel and supplies to assist in triage. Voyager ended with the implication that the two Janeways had destroyed the Borg collective or at least crippled it beyond repair, freeing billions of drones from the hive mind's control and destroyed the transwarp network. Some dark and depressing things happen, but even the TNG movies generally reaffirm that Starfleet and the Federation are committed 100% to their high-minded ideals when the dust settled in 2379 with the Borg comprehensively defeated, Shinzon thwarted, the Dominion War over, and so on and so forth. Picard - like most new Trek - had to do some pretty drastic and jarringly off-base things to make its darker, more depressing and dystopian story work. Retcons abounded, and no small number of plot holes were opened. They couldn't even make it work with the previously-established prime timeline plot that set up the failed soft reboot trilogy, and needed to retcon the cause and circumstances of Romulus's destruction (opening dozens more plot holes along the way). Consequently, this dark, defeatist vision of the Federation kinda comes out of nowhere for most fans. It comes off as excessively dark even compared to the rather action-heavy Relaunch Novelverse.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, it's a very poorly rendered model of the SDF-1 Macross (TV version). Because it was a bit of background decoration, they didn't fully model it... they just drew a vaguely rectilinear shape and then left most of the details in the texture they applied to the model. You can see the docking stations absolutely are present in the texture, they just weren't modeled. You can also clearly see the shape of the Prometheus textured onto the side of it complete with the red lower hull. http://www.macross2.net/m3/sdfmacross/macross/macross-side.gif
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