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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Not really, no. Your first sentence is complete nonsense. Your second is dead-on how the ancient [alien/astronaut] hypothesis is actually applied in the faux-scholarly works of those who push that particular pile of preposterous pseudoscientific piffle. The usual presentation of the ancient [alien/astronaut] hypothesis is in the form that "primitive" culture X must have received extraterrestrial assistance to accomplish their <great cultural achievement> as the alternative would be that they actually knew more about <subject matter> than their white contemporaries of European descent. The whole theory is rooted in racism and cultural imperialism, as it functions to reinforce the idea that western European culture is inherently superior by diminishing or dismissing the achievements made by nonwhite, non-European cultures as a product of external assistance from a more advanced alien society. That's one reason among many to be glad Macross doesn't truly entertain any aspect of the ancient [alien/astronaut] hypothesis. Instead, it goes in for something that could be better described as a laser-guided take on directed panspermia broadly similar to what was referenced in the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode "The Chase" or the 1930 Olaf Stapledon science fiction novel Last and First Men. It'd be helpful if he knew anything about any of the subjects he insists on discussing, really.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Not in Macross, anyway. In Macross, the ancient Protoculture had no real involvement in humanity's development outside of having used their genetic engineering technology to instigate the evolution of anatomically modern humans. Their records of Earth and the local species that they'd reengineered there were lost when the survey ship that'd discovered Earth was destroyed while en route back to its home port. The Protoculture never came back to interfere in the natural development of human cultures, religions, societies, science, or technology the way that the various incarnations of the ancient aliens/astronauts hypothesis posit. Everything humanity achieved (or didn't) was entirely on its own merits (or failings) for the next half-million years until the Supervision Army accidentally gave modern humanity a thousand year-plus technological jumpstart when one of their abandoned gun destroyers crashed on Earth. The pseudoscientific ancient aliens/astronauts hypothesis involves more direct interference in the course of human affairs like: Anatomically modern humans supposedly being a hybrid species created by interbreeding between aliens and late pre-human homonids Various religions and myths being mythologizations of historical contact between humans and extraterrestrials "Primitive" societies with comparatively advanced scientific knowledge (e.g. Mayan or Celtic astronomy) being knowledge acquired from extraterrestrials instead of from centuries or millennia of observation and recordkeeping.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Four episodes in, and Iwakakeru - Sport Climbing Girls still has a painfully threadbare plot.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Giving Iwakakeru - Sport Climbing Girls a whirl... the poster makes it look like it'll be skeevy fanservice, but the possibilities inherent in a sports anime that's so radically outside the norm has me genuinely curious. I wonder if this was inspired by climbing being introduced as an Olympic sport for the first time (planned) in the 2021 Olympic games. The story has a definite "barely there, hitting just the obligatory plot beats for a sports anime" sort of feel. I was worried it'd be an excuse plot to justify a lot of fanservice... and I feel like that was right for the wrong reason. Instead of an anime where high school girls are forced into compromising poses and make vaguely sexual noises it's more like technique porn for rock climbing enthusiasts. So far, nothing to really grab the audience's attention unless they're hardcore into rock climbing.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but even they mainly marketed it mostly as a glorified DVD extra feature... entertainingly as "new" and "never before seen" for something that'd been fansubbed on YouTube for like fifteen years by that point.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That girl needs to be written out of the goddamn show. Her existence is something I can't understand. CBS had literal decades of audience feedback from previous Star Trek shows that should have left no room for doubt that this kind of character is cancer as far as the audience is concerned. Tilly manages to seamlessly combine the wide-eyed chirpy naivete of Kes, the total lack of growth and overwhelming whininess of Harry Kim, and the near-total social obliviousness of Neelix. That's the worst traits of three different characters Voyager's showrunners attempted to write out of the series with varying degrees of success.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    So was the tax avoidance scheme that Frank Agrama got convicted of... selling the rights to shows to shell companies he and his partners owned in tax havens at a huge markup, writing it off as a loss, and pocketing the proceeds. Eh... almost nobody really counts that as a new production, because all they really did was dub over the original MOSPEADA: Love Live Alive with a minute or two of new animation and then market it as a glorified extra features disc with a re-release of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. At this juncture, I'd like to point out that MOSPEADA: Love Live Alive predates Macross: Flash Back 2012 by two years. Love Live Alive came out in 1985. Flash Back 2012 came out in 1987. So it's not that Love Live Alive wants to be Flash Back 2012... Flash Back 2012 was Love Live Alive: but Better.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    We'll see if they can keep it up... Star Trek: Discovery's production crew ran into a lot of trouble with Netflix in the previous two seasons because Kurtzman doesn't know what "fiscal restraint" means. The previous two seasons both went way over budget because of his spendthrift attitude towards production management and all the reshoots they needed, and that led to the budget being slashed by Netflix. Easier, for sure... but it'd undermine one of the few things about Discovery that's keeping at least some die-hard Star Trek fans paying for CBS All Access. Namely, that Discovery is (on paper) a part of the "prime" universe that all of the pre-Abrams Star Trek shows and movies belong to. Kurtzman's Star Trek has enough trouble getting fans to watch it as it is even with the borrowed goodwill of the prime timeline. Take that away from it, and viewership will just drop further because it won't even technically be real Star Trek anymore. (Even now, a lot of fans refuse to watch Discovery because they insist it's part of the Kelvin timeline based on its tone and aesthetic choices.) Dialog with Tilly? HARD PASS.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.)
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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?
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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