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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The last official comment I saw from Macross Delta's creators indicated that they had never actually determined an identity for Lady M. The few tidbits we got from official publications and the show itself would tend to make Berger's claim of a Megaroad-01 connection profoundly unlikely... and also pretty well shot down the theories that she was a pre-existing character.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Or it spins out of Robin Hood: Men in Tights and she's really one of the Merry Men in drag... "Hey Blinkin! Fix your boobs, you look like a bleeding Picasso."
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Is that what that is? I thought they drew a mouth like a へ and accidentally gave her a fish mouth. I'm mildly more put off by the way her breasts appear to be attached directly to her collarbone... though that cover has enough off-putting stuff already like Rick Hunter looking like a drugged-up Elijah Wood, Breetai looking like a background character from Forging Ahead! Cromartie High School, or Roy looking like a young Willem Dafoe doing a bad Tom Cruise cosplay...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Starting in Macross Frontier, Kawamori's new "hobby horse" Aesop seems to be that megacorporations are shady as f*ck and able to perpetrate all manner of crimes under cover of the sheer size of the company. Macross Galaxy was basically an autonomous subsidiary of General Galaxy so it's not clear how much culpability the parent company had for the actions of the Galaxy Executives. The Epsilon Foundation is a more clear-cut example, since we've had at least two examples of evil (or at least greedy and amoral) executives from that organization who were directly acting to stir up conflict for the sake of their various enterprises. Ramla Saied in Macross E was leading research in weaponizing Var syndrome in 2062 and even facilitated a test that effectively took the form of an attempted coup d'etat on the planet Pipure. Berger Stone in Macross Delta, of course, was essentially pulling an Anaheim Electronics and selling arms and equipment to both sides in Windermere's invasion of the Brisingr cluster.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    ... sounds to me like he's doing a fine job replicating the Robotech creative process then. Even Harmony Gold will, somewhat shamefacedly, admit that the 1985 Robotech TV series has loads of random, contextually inappropriate, and seemingly nonsensical lines that were just thrown in because someone on staff felt a scene needed more dialog. You'd swear the (re)writers and voice actors thought they were getting paid by the word. Between the dated, stilted dialog that reads like the writer was coming off a heavy dose of dental anesthetic and all the liberties taken with stealing designs and whole plots from other franchises, it feels like a right and proper tribute to the spirit of Robotech.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The cover honestly looks like parody artwork. ... ouch, talk about damned by faint praise. It's Robotech... for all we know, this is him writing his heart out and it's crap because the source material he's working from is crap. Garbage in, garbage out... right?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    While we don't have a definitive timeline for the Sv-262's development and adoption, the gaiden manga Macross Delta: the White Knight of the Black Wing suggests that Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind obtained their Sv-262s only a year or two before the Aerial Knights first sortie at Al Shahal. If the New UN Forces had known Windermere IV had them, they probably would've identified them before they openly declared themselves. The Sv-262 definitely has some design lineage to New UN Forces fighters... particularly the VF-9, given that the SV Works were once owned by General Galaxy.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    None that we know of. It seems very unlikely that the Sv-262 would be used by the New UN Forces, given that it's known by its manufacturer's internal designation for it rather than a NUNF Variable Fighter designation. It's possible that some independent forces like PMCs or other paramilitary groups might use it, since Xaos immediately recognized it once the jamming hiding them from their gun cameras was no longer in operation. That suggests the design did get disclosed properly as required by law and that Epsilon was probably actively marketing it as an alternative to the various military 5th Generation VF designs. The "Megaroad-01 fell into a black hole" thing is, as noted previously, based on a gross misunderstanding of what that "Minmay's Last Message" postcard says... As to whether or not it was based on the YF-24... that's kind of a yes-and-no sort of thing, since it isn't structurally derivative of the YF-24 Evolution but it does have the signature technical innovations developed for the YF-24 like ISC, Stage II reaction engines, and so on.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Character biographical notes! Did you think I was translating all these books and magazines and not writing anything down? (Mind you, what @Master Dex said is totally correct too... I'm an engineer, so detailed note-taking is pretty much second nature. One of the skills they beat into you in any of the hard sciences is to obsessively document EVERYTHING. As Adam Savage once put it, "The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.") Years of my notes, collated data, and translations are what's going into the new website I'm working on building. ... I'll be terribly put out if that planet wasn't colonized by the Macross Savoy. Just give the Public Exploder a wide berth. (I want to see if anyone actually gets this...)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Episode 21, literally the first scene of the episode's lengthy and pointless series of flashbacks around 4:20 in when she's being interviewed by Ernest Johnson. Same scene. From what I've read on the subject, Kaname's home planet Divide has been at war with itself for nearly twenty years as of 2067. I don't recall where I read it, but what I recall seeing about the supposed cause of the civil war is that the Second Unification War never ended there. Apparently Divide was... divided... about whether it should side it should support in the war, and when the war ended the portion of Divide's population who'd sided with the defeated Latence faction were unwilling to pack it in the way the rest of Latence's supporters did. Basically it's Space North Ireland.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That's the beauty of idol groups... there's usually something for everybody. IIRC, it's the only thing that's ever brought up about her besides the fact that her home planet is Divide. She's never presented as bitter about it, just depressed that she couldn't live up to her dreams of solo stardom. She was also pretty clear that she accepted a job with Walkure since it was as close as she was ever likely to get to her dream. I've got a theory that the reason she's so bummed about it is because she was from Divide. I reckon she thought she'd be the Lynn Minmay of planet Divide and end the civil war there with her songs. The whole bit where she talks about feeling like she's losing her role as Walkure's leader to Mikumo, its star, is delivered in a pretty sad tone... she's clearly got a bit of an inadequacy complex going on. She's not bitter, she's just depressed by it.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yup, he did.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    All we know, thus far, is it's coming 2019 and it's supposed to be an all-original movie. Can't begin to guess what it might be about, given that the series resolved the Windermere thing pretty definitively and the movie drew a line under it.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The release of Macross Delta with subs sold well enough to do subs for the movie too... so hopefully next time they get it into their heads to re-release the library of previous Macross titles we'll see official subs there as well.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Seems that way. From the look of it, they haven't had any real difficulty securing budgets since Frontier unexpectedly set the world on fire.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's missing one or two others as well, like Macross-29 from Macross the Musiculture, Macross Valiant (AKA Macross-16), and Macross Challenger.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Told you, nobody was going to defend the 2016 Ghostbusters movie. Ranka doesn't meet any of the four criteria to be a Creator's Pet though. Out of idle curiosity, I pulled my notes on Ranka and ran her through the Mary Sue litmus test. She scored a 16, which is a low probability of being a Mary Sue. She racked up most of her points in relationships, since her friends are all incredibly good looking and she ticked half the checkboxes for traumatic past and family trouble. Mikumo, for the sake of comparison, scored a 90. On a scale where 30 is considered a high probability of being a Mary Sue and anything over 50 is a terrible Mary Sue.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    The problem with Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt is that its "promoted fanboy" writers had precisely zero clue how to write a bleak and dark story effectively. Moderation is the key to writing a successful bleak and dark story. If the story is unstintingly dark, bleak, and depressing then that just becomes the new baseline "normal" and loses all its impact and meaning VERY quickly. To use darkness effectively, it has to be broken up and interspersed with periods of lighter material that throw the darkness into sharp relief. The writers of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Mobile Suit Victory Gundam understood this principle very well. Like so many bad fan fiction authors, Gundam Thunderbolt's writers assumed a dark story needed to be uniformly and unstintingly dark and thus jumped straight to MAXIMUM GRIMDARK for the duration. Consequently, the entire story quickly became ridiculous when every character was obliged to have a dark and tragic backstory and nobody was allowed to have redeeming character traits. You can't engage with a protagonist who's an utter and unrepentant psychopath, or sympathize with a crew of complete and utter irredeemable a-holes. Crap like that is why you keep fanboys far, FAR away from the writer's chair... and why I used it as an example of why having fans write Macross sequels is a terrible idea. (You don't even want to get into alternative problems like "Creator's Pet" characters... Wesley Crusher, anyone?)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Started digging into my own backlog, starting with Masamune-kun's Revenge. The manga's initial premise was a bit unsettling at first, but the show is doing a much better job of drawing a line under what a creepy f*cking motive Masamune had at the outset. It feels a bit more comedy-heavy than the manga was at this stage, but that's all to the good IMO.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Liking Unicorn and/or Thunderbolt and acknowledging that they both suffer from the most common problems associated with titles where fans of the franchise are now part of the production staff are not mutually exclusive propositions. Unicorn was pure continuity porn, so it was only fully accessible to hardcore fans who've seen the dozen or so prerequisite shows and movies even after being reformatted into the RE:0096 TV series. Thunderbolt was an edgelord Gundam series written by Buckets of Blood guy. So... redheads, huh? Definitely not. Freyja idolized Walkure as a whole because her dream was to become a member, but she never showed any particular deference to any of its members after she'd joined... let alone the level of borderline "les yay" hero worship Ranka reserved for Sheryl. It would've been a bit weird and out of place, IMO, given that almost all of her personal interactions with Mikumo were Mikumo bullying her in full "Queen Bitch" knockoff-Sheryl mode (and that they already had a designated source of lesbian fanservice). ... there's a joke I could make here, but it's so thoroughly crass that I can't bring myself to say it. It would've been an unnatural resolution, IMO... her sole defining character trait was her anxiety over being a failure. Between her depression over having failed as a solo idol, her depression over what she saw as the inevitable creeping usurpation of her role as Walkure's leader by Mikumo, and then the trauma and subsequent depression from the death of Messer Ihlefeld shortly after he confessed that he loved her had been obsessively stalking her since she unknowingly saved him on Alfheim, giving her a near term happy end isn't going to feel very natural. Poor gal's got a LOT of issues to work through. Good thing Macross is such a relentlessly upbeat franchise.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Oh come on... isn't the writing punishment enough? As much as I love the VF-31's design, that Armored Pack is just a sinfully ugly and terribly lazy-looking piece of design work to my eyes. There's just no sense of intent to the design... like fitting/suiting the VF-31 or how the VF-31 would use it weren't even considered. It's like some intern just slapped together a bunch of different weapons systems from Macross Frontier art assets and knocked off for lunch.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    ... I have never seen anyone seriously attempt to defend the last Ghostbusters movie. I'd actually like to see someone try to keep a straight face attempting to. As in real life, unrealized potential counts for precisely f*ck-all... which left them as a one-dimensional Sheryl knockoff, a generic "broken bird", a generic "caged crook" fanservice lesbian, a generic "miss fanservice" ditz, and The One Actual Character respectively.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The huge, glaring problem with that idea is that very few fans can write worth a damn... and only a fraction of those can write a story that appeals to someone besides them. Very rarely does having fans end up writing for the series they're fans of turn out well. Much more commonly, what you get is a terribly self-indulgent legitimized fanfic. There's an uncountably vast number of examples of why this is a terrible idea in the expanded universes of most any established franchise like Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.. Then there are the standalone examples like the nigh-unwatchable Dragon Ball GT and Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, several Gundam titles like UC and Thunderbolt, Star Wars: the Last Jedi, Star Trek: Nemesis, or that last Ghostbusters movie. SonicTeam as a whole is basically the biggest example from video gaming. Matt Ward achieved memetic status in tabletop gaming for being a fan running the asylum who genuinely belonged in a straightjacket, and was near-universally reviled for his Mary Sue writing tendencies.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    While it might be a coincidence, ten years is the figure that Kawamori gave in his Otona Anime #9 interview about Macross Frontier when explaining why the New UN Government c.2059 is more decentralized than it was c.2045 in Macross 7. Namely, that the farthest-flung emigrant fleets and planets were ten years from Earth by space fold. That would be another problem, given that the "Minmay's Last Message" mail-in gift from one of the video games implied they'd found some manner of portal and may have entered it.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Sure I do! You didn't see me say anything about Big West having an untapped market for Walkure-branded braces for fans suffering from waifu-induced "tennis elbow". (Until now, anyway... now that I've said it, it'll be a preorder bonus for movie 2 tickets.) That was my point, yes. Macross Delta's sh*tty handling of Walkure could be called a genuine affront to the real idol group, being promoted through an anime series where four-fifths of the group are characters so generic you can practically see the barcodes.
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