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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    For many of them, it's a matter of having interacted with them in a discussion/debate setting for years. Over 15 years in a few cases. You don't talk to someone for that long and not end up learning at least a little bit about who they are and what their lives are like. For Robotech fans in general? No. For Robotech's most "devout", fanatical, vocal fans? Probably, yeah. This is part of why I was somewhat hesitant to actually mention it... that people might think I was implying that. I am not. We'd have ended up here anyway if I'd just flatly denied that a lot of Robotech's most vocal fans don't have the discretionary income to blow on multiple DVD re-releases of the series and collectibles. I know a few who were quite salty about not being able to afford to pledge for Cap's Southern Cross kit proposal. (For what little it's worth, the Robotech fans I would rate as among the worst and most detrimental to their fandom are a pack of academics who seem to have been men on a mission to misinform.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Riker's got a kid too, huh? So does this mean we're gonna see Dad!Riker wandering around his space cabin in cargo shorts, sandals with socks, and a fanny pack? Given how depressing Star Trek: Picard is, I have to wonder if we'll find out Will Riker's accidental twin Thomas died in a Cardassian prison or something. Or maybe the trauma will just get sillier and we'll find out Will Riker was hounded out of Starfleet by a malfunctioning replicator that wouldn't stop putting horseradish on his prime rib.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not, IMO... there isn't that much fold quartz in the body of your average Vajra and it's mostly the small, low-quality stuff that the Frontier fleet was using to manufacture MDE munitions. There is one very brief scene in Macross Frontier Ep16 "Ranka Attack" @1:15 where we see a pair of SMS VF-25s (Alto's VF-25F and a Brownie) towing four strung-together Vajra general soldier corpses towards the Frontier fleet. The larger, higher-purity fold quartz crystals are only present in more advanced Vajra forms and probably get damaged often during combat given that they're situated near center mass. Well, we know the Zentradi don't really give a damn about recovering destroyed assets... as the galaxy is strewn with debris fields made up of Zentradi wreckage. The New UN Forces are presumably a bit more inclined to recover lost assets, though that presumably depends on whether it is economical or safe to do so. We see a few NUNS ships in Macross Frontier that would absolutely NOT be safe to attempt to salvage because they'd become Vajra nests. There's an account in Master File of an emigrant fleet self-destructing any ships that were too damaged or too slow to escape an attacking Zentradi main fleet using dimension eaters to prevent the Zentradi from studying them. A lot of the time when a mecha or ship is lost onscreen, it goes kaboom in a pretty spectacular fashion so recovery isn't an option... like when Luca's RVF-25 had to be abandoned inside a Vajra ship which was then blown to bits by the Macross Quarter's main gun.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    As noted on previous occasions, you are... unusual... in that respect.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Is that a spoiler for tonight's? If so, you've made me sad.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Strategic Military Services' parent company Bilra Transport had what you'd call a controlling interest in the Frontier Government thanks to having sponsored the fleet's mission to the galactic core... for Richard Bilra, everything the fleet went through was about gaining access to huge amounts of fold quartz so that he could make his dream of overcoming fold faults a reality. Of course, New UN Government regulations on the mining and sale of fold quartz probably greatly inconvenienced his plans there... in the name of not having planet-killing fold bombs proliferating like mad.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, we've never been told what the New UN Government calls the former Vajra hive planet that the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet landed on. At the very least, it probably has an itemization code like M55NGC6909 AKA "Messiah 025", the planet where the VF-25 was flight-tested for the first time. If the Vajra had a name for it, the only people who'd know would be Ranka Lee and Sheryl Nome, and they apparently aren't talking. Given how much fold quartz was on that planet, I'd be prepared to bet someone tried to name it "Paydirt". A VERY large, VERY old Vajra nest which is home to that Vajra swarm's queen that's absolutely packed with fold quartz.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    "We're doomed." - C-3PO Sounds like the best they came hope for is that The Rise of Skywalker will have lowered their audience's standards significantly. *looks at the high regard fans seem to hold Knights of the Old Republic in* ... yup, they're doomed.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, this is a problem that Robotech has been grappling with for a long time now... and something that Titan's Remix plays with in one of its more self-aware moments by taking cheap shots at the Legioss (RT: Alpha) being nowhere near a capable fighter compared to the VF-1 or VF-4. It's had an impact on the RPG, it caused a lot of grumbling when they instituted an official canon in their reboot, and even spawned conspiracy theories about merchandising.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    This.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    None yet. It's on my to-do list, but it'll be literal years before my group gets to it.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it's not even necessarily the R-word itself. It's that that franchise and its fanbase have devolved into cringe comedy.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I can grab some snapshots of the art for you when I get home today, if you'd find it helpful.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    This is legitimately gorgeous. Have you consulted the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie book for further detail on the control grips? Some of those contours are actually meant to be buttons.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The key difference being that those 40+ year old lifers are Robotech's only fans. Other franchises, like Macross, have been continually bringing in new fans by releasing steady streams of new material. The closest Robotech got to bringing in new fans was when old fans from the 80's rediscovered the series during the brief renaissance the franchise experienced as part of Harmony Gold's efforts to reboot and retool Robotech into a proper bloody anime franchise. Those same fans abandoned it again shortly thereafter, accompanied by a lot of others, when Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles laid a massive egg and Harmony Gold decided criticism of it was verboten. It was all downhill for Robotech after the TV series completed its first broadcast run. While you're (mostly) not wrong in general terms, the problem is that it IS Robotech... so those fans: Are obsessed, not "loyal"... and their obsession is rooted entirely in their nostalgia for the Robotech series. Are blinded by their nostalgia... to the extent that they will reject anything that doesn't fit with their nostalgic memories and headcanon of the Robotech series. If the franchise stops pandering to that nostalgia or tries to develop in any way they feel disrespects their (often inaccurate) memories of it, they will reject it with disgust. Often aren't actually established in a career or otherwise lack disposable income. This is the genesis of the Catch-22 that ensures any effort to continue Robotech is doomed. Robotech's fandom is too small for Harmony Gold to sustain development of new media for a fans-only audience, and Robotech's fans aren't interested in anything that doesn't pander to them directly. Robotech is too obscure and too hated to trade on its reputation for the sake of gaining a new audience, and anything they might do to get the attention of a new audience is doomed to fail because they don't understand their market and their fans (who also don't understand the genre) will pan that effort to attract a new audience for "disrespecting" the series. Consequently, everything needs to be made as cheaply as it can possibly be in order to turn any kind of a profit from a small and shrinking fanbase, which further ensures that it won't attract a new audience because it all looks like arse thanks to having been made so cheaply.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there's one cause for optimism... item 4 under "Fiction" shows that at least they've realized they have to have an actual ending. The whole new trilogy kind of showed that they'd forgotten that. The story ended in Return of the Jedi and then it just kind of forgot to stop... requiring all kinds of convoluted nonsense to justify why they didn't stop.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Most unusually for Macross, it does seem like a throwaway design. There's no line art for it in This is Animation Special: Macross Plus or This is Animation: the Select Macross Plus Movie Edition and it's not covered even in technical publications like Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur. Unlikely, IMO... the VF-17 Nightmare was already in its third year of frontline service when Project Super Nova was going on. If anything, it'd probably have had to be developed from the VF-17's beam adapter.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't really seem powerful enough to inflict meaningful damage on a ship... my guess is it's meant for dealing with things like Armoreds.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    This "relative indifference" is actually a relatively recent two-part development. Shoji Kawamori himself explicitly rejecting the idea that Macross II: Lovers Again was "non-canon" or in any way less valid as a Macross series shut quite a few of the haters up, but we didn't achieve this current peace until the MacrossWorld staff and the admins of several major Facebook groups decided to get much stricter about policing toxic behavior and put a number of the worst offenders on notice and later banned several or all of them. Basically, the Macross fan community is every bit as fractious and judgemental as any other fandom... it's just that you're seeing the nice, sanitized communities where the REEEE-ing is simply not tolerated anymore.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    So, the only source I have that talks about what this thing was intended to be packaged with is Macross Chronicle Macross Plus Mechanic Sheet 01B. The little sidebar on the left has a caption on the picture of that pack deploying that asserts that it was an option not normally included in the FAST Pack. To me, that implies that this WAS something that could be taken with the YF-19's FAST Packs. Hell if we know. There's basically no proper documentation of this thing. Given that Isamu one-shots one of the notoriously heavily-armored Destroid Monsters with the big cannon in that pack, it seems likely to be a firepower enhancement intended for use on hard-armored targets.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's a 90's thing... I was only a kid back then, so to me it's rather nostalgic. That said, the flight demonstration team colors on combat aircraft thing is never going away because Macross has to sell toys and that makes them very action figure-ous.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    All told, it's a bunch of pretentious logorrhea that boils down to a "no, except yes" in response to the very first point about having not made Star Trek a grimdark dystopia full of senseless violence in order to be trendy. He says that wasn't what they did, but follows it up by basically admitting in a very circuitous manner that that's EXACTLY what they did. These schmucks want to write Star Trek as Game of Space Thrones... for all the senseless violence and sex they can, because that sold so well until Game of Thrones's final season. Can't be... that would be a happy ending, with death as a release from a life of endless suffering and disgrace in this hell Michael Chabon has wrought. I fully expect Jean-Luc Picard will die, and that La Sirena will be renamed Picard in his honor to allow the series to continue without its most expensive cast member.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Wouldn't that just basically be a repeat of the Prequel Trilogy that doesn't end in mass Jedi-cide? (That's a serious question. I'm not trying to be a smartarse, I just don't know much about Star Wars lore.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... I hate that you're probably right. He's too good for this sinful Federation. Not a clip show, just a lot of onscreen graphics in this episode are really blatant screenshots from previous shows.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It has nothing to do with being current or trending. It's about Robotech fans being desperate to have SOMETHING to convince themselves Robotech hasn't kicked up its heels and died. Robotech's "owners" have once again given up on developing a continuation of the animated Robotech series after a string of embarrassing failures. As in the 90's, the only signs of life from the brand are a handful of fourth-rate licensees putting out a trickle of embarrassingly poor-quality merchandise that fans of any competently-run franchise would've laughed out of town. Even though the quality is insultingly low, Robotech fans will still buy it and even sing its praises to each other even if they don't actually want it or privately think it's trash just because it's SOMETHING Robotech-branded... and therefore proof that Robotech isn't dead yet. They buy things like that to validate their faith in the brand.
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