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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Second episode of Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is out... ... that was certainly something. Not sure what, exactly, but it was definitely something.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    They missed one... "Knowing it's unlikely we'll ever get a pair of Star Wars titles this good ever again." Pretty weak article. I have to wonder who it's for... since most people wouldn't go to read a blog post on StarWars.com unless they were Star Wars fans, and to Star Wars fans those points would largely be screechingly obvious. Especially #3, since people watching the rest of Disney Star Wars would already know about Imperial exploitation and crackdowns on Ryloth, Lothal, Lasan, and a dozen others.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Summer 2025 seems to have a bumper crop of isekai slop and isekai-adjacent slop. Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer is yet another painfully unoriginal isekai-adjacent series about a generic protagonist who is arbitrarily kicked out of a narcissistic Hero's party and has to make their own way in the world... a premise so overused it's the third one I've watched this season so far. On writing quality, this might actually be worse than The Shy Hero and the Assassin Princesses... a strong contender for this season's worst new anime.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Very likely. I am an engineer and an academic... overthinking things is practically my stock in trade! 😜 I do admire everyone else in the story having terribly on-the-nose naming sense though. (Made amusing on a meta level knowing the Naresuan is an Earth culture otaku... he quite intentionally gave his ship what he thought was a Cool and Meaningful Name with symbolic resonance and then probably had to weather a few weeks of "What do you mean it's not awesome?" from his crew.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Also starting Secrets of the Silent Witch... another series about a protagonist with crippling social anxiety. Is that this season's theme? This one doesn't seem like it's got much going on under the hood. I imagine the jokes about social anxiety are going to get old pretty quickly.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Giving another series a whirl while I wait for some automation processes to finish at work... The Shy Hero and the Assassin Princesses. Y'know, I'm feeling optimistic after Betrothed to My Sister's Ex. This series looks like it's going to be cringe-worthy harem fanservice material but maybe it'll have some substance after all. Aside from feeling like this series needs a counter for how many times the protagonist passes out standing up (the way Excel Saga did for Hyatt dying)... it really feels like an excuse plot wrapped around some fanservice and some barely-there character cliches.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    A bunch more episodes dropped today... so I'm starting Betrothed to My Sister's Ex over lunch. NGL, my hopes for this one are not high. Crunchyroll's synopsis makes it sound like it's Legally Distinct Anime Cinderella, so the Walt Disney Corporation doesn't sue. I have a feeling I'm going to like this one. It's very cute and funny.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Very slick, well done! As a fun fact, some of the very oldest Macross setting materials mention a VF-1 Wolfpack in the UN Forces during/after the events of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series. It's implied to be a continuation of the famous US Navy squadron, which survived the war and was subsequently assigned to ARMD-10 Haruna alongside the VF-2 Bounty Hunters. (There was also a set of Wolfpack decals for the Yamato VF-0 toy, though by that point VF/SVF-1 had since been established to be the Skulls.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    "It ain't that kind of setting, kid." Star Wars doesn't run on that kind of logic. Not yet, anyway. Stories set after the sequel trilogy might have to, but only because The Last Jedi gave the First Order the technology to track a ship through hyperspace. The Rebels in Andor don't have that problem. Knowing a place's name isn't enough to actually get you there, you need coordinates. If your destination is uncharted, you're SOL (as seen in Skeleton Crew, The Bad Batch, etc.). Jumping to hyperspace is a de facto clean getaway. Ships can only be tracked between star systems by spaceport logs (in legit travel) or by installing a physical tracking device on the ship that can be detected, disabled, and/or removed as happens often. All that really needs to be done to keep the location of secret bases or facilities secret is to wipe the navigational computer's memory, a security measure we see implemented several times. (This is also one reason droids get periodic memory wipes.) The way interstellar travel works in Star Wars is massively, MASSIVELY convenient for the rebels. There is one example of the kind of security you're talking about, but it was for an Imperial program even more secret than the Death Star in The Bad Batch, and since the waypoint was fixed the secrecy was compromised fairly easily anyway. That is multiply acknowledged in Andor. Not only is that the reason that Luthen recruits/coopts a key member of her staff to serve as an ad hoc protection detail, it's also why the rebellion needed to urgently extract her from the Senate and get her offworld after her speech. She Knows Too Much and can't be allowed to be arrested by the ISB. I disagree that keeping that secret would mean instant doom. After all, there are plenty of politicians who are privy to classified knowledge about black sites and top secret plans who manage to keep that sh*t under wraps in the real world. Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, et. al. were, as directly acknowledged in-series, basically counting on wealth, status, and public perception of them as upper-class twits offended by the very thought of violence to remain beneath suspicion as anything other than possible rebel sympathizers. Whether those plans could've been studied anywhere is doubtful.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    They are on a tight leash. We're told directly that comings and goings from Yavin IV are strictly monitored, require authorization, and so on. We're directly shown that unscheduled/unapproved arrivals get intercepted and taken prisoner if they cooperate, and shot down if they don't. We also directly see General Draven chew out Cassian and his team for leaving without clearing the op they're headed out on for Luthen with command or filing a flight plan twice. It's strongly implied that Cassian's breach of regulations was only overlooked the first time because he had more or less singlehandedly rescued Mon Mothma from the Senate and delivered her safely to rebel agents after her speech denouncing the Emperor. The second time... even though he extracts a valuable rebel intelligence agent, his ship is escorted down by rebel fighters, he's greeted by a sizable unit ready to shoot him on sight, and is ultimately grounded and confined to quarters. Perhaps... but as we see in the series and in Rogue One, it's difficult to say "No" to the spoiled rich politicians who are literally bankrolling the Rebel Alliance's activities. Bail Organa does acknowledge that they were basically all supposed to go into hiding anyway and were relying on their status to keep them from being arrested and interrogated. Not using a codename for the base may be mildly excusable in the sense that one of Star Wars's favorite tropes is the idea that there are star systems so irrelevant or so far off the beaten path that they're either effectively unknown, forgotten about, or simply ignored on navigational charts.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Forgive me, but this doesn't quite make sense in context if you think about it. After all, the characters who know Yavin is the location of the Rebel Alliance's main base are all either: Alliance soldiers who are stationed on Yavin IV, and whose comings and goings are carefully policed by the Alliance's commanders. (e.g. Cassian, Melshi, K-2SO, Vel.) Rebel senators who are the Alliance's political leaders as well as its financial and logistical backers. (e.g. Mon Mothma, Bail Organa.) Luthen Rael and Kleya Marki, rebel organizers and spymasters who built the pre-Alliance rebel network from the ground up and without whom Yavin's base would not exist. O.G. rebel Saw Gerrera, leader of the first and most extreme anti-Imperial resistance and GFFA Not Getting Caught champion (20 BBY - 0 BBY) who only really uses that knowledge to periodically call Mon Mothma up and tell her she ain't sh*t. It might seem like "everyone knows", but that's only because everyone who's not an Imperial on the main cast is a highly placed rebel organizer or operative. Cassian, Bix, and Wilmon are basically Luthen's three best agents, K-2SO and Melshi are rebel soldiers at Yavin base in Cassian's unit, Kleya is Luthen's right hand man, and Mon Mothma and Bail Organa are the ones literally paying for it. The only folks who aren't part of that tight circle who ever hear about Yavin are the Maya Pei brigade, who end up there before the base was founded and get eaten by the local fauna, and Lonni who is shot dead within a few minutes of hearing the word for the first time before he can even get out of his seat. That's just truth in television.😆
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the second episode of Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter... and oof, don't fail to miss it. It's developing exactly as I expected, as a low-effort lolicon harem series. Lord of Mysteries is also eminently skippable, as it turns out. The first new episode of My Dress-Up Darling dropped today, so that's some good news at least. Hm? You mean besides Legend of Crystania, Magical Warrior Louie (localized as Louie the Rune Soldier), and Record of Lodoss War: Next Generation? NGL, I actually rather like Louie for how incredibly irreverent it is as a fantasy series.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    So, I have good news for you then... https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/latest/2025/7/4/gate-2-tides-of-conflict-tv-anime-announced There's a new Gate series coming.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Very happy to see that a third season of The Apothecary Diaries has been announced. Between that and the forthcoming fourth season of Ascendance of a Bookworm, the "weird girl with highly situational knowledge" crowd are going to be eating well indeed. Picked up a couple more of the Summer '25 simulcast offerings. Hopefully they'll have more to offer than the likes of New Saga or Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter. Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! is yet another one of these isekai-adjacent form letter JRPG fantasy stories about a nice guy protagonist who finds himself being kicked out of The Strongest Adventurer Party because its leader is a cowardly and arrogant slimeball who clearly hasn't thought it through, and despite being a max level utterly broken demigod opts to leave his companions in the slimeball's care and quit adventuring altogether and go live a slow life boonies. Inevitably as the f***ing tides, the slimeball will slowly crash out during the season since he didn't realize how much he needed the protagonist while the protagonist lives his best life. It's nothing we haven't seen fifty times before over the last eight years. First impressions are that Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! is bland and inoffensive, lacking anything to really make it feel distinct in any sense. The Water Magician defies the trend of being isekai-adjacent j-fantasy in favor of just being a straight isekai story. 20 year old Ryou, a protagonist so generic he might as well have a barcode for a face, falls victim to legendary isekai serial killer Truck-kun and awakens to find himself in a featureless void with a being who professes to be an angel. He learns that he is to be reincarnated in a fantasy world, but not for any particular purpose, so he requests to live a slow life. The angel sets him up with a house in a peaceful area, several months of supplies, and leaves him to it after informing him he's compatible with water magic and leaving him a knife and two books on local flora and fauna. First impression... The Water Magician is unlikely to develop into anything interesting. The tropes it uses make it feel like its original web novel should be around a decade older than it is... apparently this series is from just five years ago, rather than the fifteen it feels like from how it's written. I was going to start Lord of Mysteries, but I realized after looking up its Wikipedia page that it's another bloody isekai and I'm overdosed on that trope for one night. Apparently this one is a Chinese isekai series instead of a Japanese one, with a fantasy Victorian England-inspired setting full of magic and steampunk instead of standard j-fantasy wilderness.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    So, I decided to give New Saga a whirl... and it is as painfully generic as its title suggests. In a generic medieval j-fantasy world where Humanity has been at war with the forces of the Demon King for thousands of years, generic j-fantasy protagonist "Kyle" finally slays the Demon King but is fatally wounded in the process. As he lays dying, he touches a jewel guarded by the now-slain Demon King and awakens to find he has been sent back in time to four years before the invasion began. He must use his future knowledge to try to Save The World. Don't fail to miss it. In a world where we're increasingly worried about studios will be using generative AI to churn out poorly-composed, formulaic, derivative slop with no soul or value, there are still a few brave human authors who are unwilling to concede to GenAI tools in the writing quality race to the bottom. 😆
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Is anyone really surprised? Every corporation worth a damn has spent the last year or so frantically trying to find a viable use-case for "AI" tools in their workflow and/or products because it's trendy and they're all terrified of being left behind should a competitor find a way to make the technology useful. Even companies or divisions where "AI" tools have no practical application or pose an enormous risk of leaking proprietary information. Lots of backpedaling going on there too lately. 'course the article's also been updated to say that it was an outside contractor using ChatGPT in violation of their contract. Admittedly, if you told me ChatGPT wrote Classic Stars, I'd absolutely believe it... it reads like AI slop.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, after a while they kind of run out of excuses... and even then it's not until UC 0096 and the aftermath of the Laplace Incident in Unicorn that the Federation bothers even trying to arrest anyone from Anaheim. It still doesn't stick in the end. Not that that gimmick doesn't get used... it's just not until like 10,000 years later in the Regild Century and Correct Century with the likes of Cumpa Rusita and Gym Ghingham trying to foment conflict because they firmly believe humanity needs it to survive and advance. Anaheim... eech... Anaheim just decided to be greedy in the stupidest way possible by absorbing assets from the dissolved Zeonic and Zimmad, making them an independent division within the company, and then trying to pretend they know nothing about the huge amount of war materiel that keeps falling off the back of a space truck anytime there's some Zeon remnant with dreams of starting sh*t.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Detectives These Days Are Crazy! is... certainly something. It's the story of a down-on-his-luck, chain-smoking, middle-aged private detective who was once hailed as a genius in his high school years who has spent most of his career barely making ends meet thanks to a spectacular case of gifted kid burnout. His rotten luck is changed when an extremely bossy teenage girl barges into his office with a years-old flyer demanding to be taken on as a part-time employee because she dreams of becoming a detective herself... and because his agency is closest to her house, so she won't have to commute as far. It's quite entertaining so far. I'm looking forward to more.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That just sounds like a side story about the Pegasus-class assault ships. Always and forever, the Trojan Horse's one trick is "have Gundam, will travel". 😜 WRT the UC, it is pretty funny in hindsight to consider that all the Federation needed to do to squash half or more of the Zeon uprisings was just police Anaheim better. They kept the conflicts going indefinitely by selling arms to both sides until SNRI snuck up and ate their lunch in the UC 100s.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The Summer 2025 simulcast season has finally kicked off. Only a few shows have dropped first episodes so far... Rent a Girlfriend S4, Takopi's Original Sin, Detectives These Days Are Crazy!, and Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter. Less than zero interest in Simp Simulator 2K5... er... Rent a Girlfriend S4. Takopi's Original Sin's synopsis doesn't really inspire either. Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter is... well... let's just say the start of the series screams "Excuse plot". All of about two minutes are spent setting up the story's premise - the story's protagonist being a student who failed his government exam to become a sorcerer and is being quietly fobbed off on a nobleman's daughter as a private tutor - before it's off to the races. The promotional key art seems to suggest this will be a harem series, and the protagonist unthinkingly sexually harassing two different young girls in the first seven minutes is not exactly helping. I have a feeling this one is going to be excruciatingly dull.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    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. 😆 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.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    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. 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. 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.
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