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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    They have some... alluded to back in Macross Frontier, which mentioned that galactic law forbade an emigrant fleet to invade an inhabited planet. It's not quite the Prime Directive, but it's a start. Thus far they seem to be doing pretty good, with the Vajra being their only non-friendly first contact due to the extreme differences in communication methods. Things only went south on Windermere IV because the Kingdom of the Wind was impatient about the slow pace of its economic growth due to its relative isolation. Yeah, though they did have the Apollo Base colony and the space colony clusters, so presumably at least some of that sort made it through OK.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Imagine my amusement when a little digging revealed I was spot on about Phasma... she was added because coverage of the first table read of The Force Awakens got a lot of feedback on social media about there being too many men/not enough women. In hindsight, it adds a new and cynically amusing dimension to Phasma's character. The audience demanded the writers add a new female character purely for representation's sake, so the movie's writers crowbarred her into a few scenes that totally subvert her alleged reputation as the badass action girl the fans clamored for, showed that she is so bad at her job that Starkiller Base is lost entirely because of her, and then literally threw her in the trash. Boba Fett was a background character who the fans blew out of all proportion because he looked cool... Phasma is the living embodiment of the writers saying "Don't tell me how to do my job". Fans clamored for her to not be killed off, so they brought her back in The Last Jedi to get beaten even worse. She manages a few intimidating lines and is promptly beaten by a droid and tossed down another hole by Finn after being beaten with a riot baton. What are the odds this is some kind of self-aware act of parody?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Keith and Roid's little tête-à-tête on the Sigur Berrentzs's upper hull suggests the ancient Protoculture engineered the Windermereans with short lifespans intentionally. The "why" is never discussed, but it seems to be something neither of them is entirely happy with since Keith openly resents them for his people's short lifespans and Roid's assimilation plot is at least partly motivated by a desire to give his people longer lives. It may be related to their greater level of physical ability and the demonstrated link between the fold receptors in their runes that give their species a level of natural empathic talent and the greater base level of physical ability vs. other sub-Protoculture species. (It seems likely that the Protoculture tried to create a species with greater natural empathy that would be less inclined to violence and built the short lifespan into them to delay their development of advanced technology as long as possible in a bid to have them solve their internal disputes before leaving for the stars.) Roid's belief that the Windermereans were the chosen heirs of the ancient Protoculture seems to be mainly by two factors: That the Brisingr globular cluster, and Windermere IV in particular, are believed to have been the ancient Protoculture's last stronghold before succumbing to extinction. That the Protoculture left behind the Sigur Berrentzs as the key to the Delta Wave System along with some clues on how to locate, activate, and use it on Windermere IV (even though the core of the system was actually on Ragna).
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall when the logo was unveiled offhand, but I remember when they first started teasing a new Macross series in the summer of '07 it was as "Macross 25". They announced the title at the 25th Anniversary Live in August of that year. It was either late October or November, IIRC, that we got our first real good look at the VF-25 and principal characters.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    If you're waiting for it to get less rapey, don't hold your breath... I'm two volumes into the light novel and that unsettling aspect of it most definitely is NOT going away.1 Moreover, goblin slaying is more or less all it's actually about, so at least it's exactly what it says on the tin. (Goblin Slayer is, for all practical intents and purposes, Medieval Batman by way of Doom Guy... and instead criminals, it's goblins that get his hackles up for reasons that'd make perfect sense even if he didn't have psychological problems beyond the dreams of psychoanalysts.) 1. TBH, I can completely understand why this series is accused of glorifying violence against women. Its author, Kumo Kagyu, seems to take sadistic delight in having Goblin Slayer's party find bands of adventurers made up primarily or entirely of women that meet terrible ends with monotonous, clockwork regularity. Apart from the man leading the party of three girls in the first chapter, the men seem to be mostly exempt from this.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's increasingly looking like a new series has been back-burnered or abandoned in favor of more of the Macross Delta "story". There have been a few... like the proposed live-action movie Macross: Final Outpost: Earth which was originally intended for a Christmas 1996 release, or a 3DCG series called Macross 3D that got as far as a promo video before ending up on indefinite hiatus in 2000.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The only time that phenomenon is named is in the movie Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure, which refers to it as "crystalization". Crystalization is a normal symptom of aging in Windermereans. You could call it their species version of getting liver spots. It's not (directly) harmful to their health, but it is an overt sign of old age which starts to occur in their mid-twenties as they near the end of their natural lifespan of approximately 30 standard years. Windermereans who use/abuse their runes to enhance their abilities - like Freyja's rune boosting her fold songs or the Aerial Knights bullet time "Wind Riding" shenanigans - are essentially employing a "Cast from Life Force" buff at the cost of dramatically and permanently reducing their remaining life. The most extreme case would probably be what happened to Qasim Eber-hardt in Ep22 of Macross Delta's TV series. He was 23 years old, and overuse of his rune to "ride the wind" in a dogfight with Xaos forces burned up his remaining lifespan to the point that he died in his cockpit. Prince Heinz's overuse of his runes singing the Song of the Wind is another severe example. He abused his power so much to realize his father's goals that he's as infirm at age 9 as his father was at 33. Freyja, luckily, is only just starting to see the consequences of overusing her rune to boost her fold songs. She's 15 at the end of Macross Delta, what would normally be exactly halfway through the typical Windermerean's lifespan, and she's probably shortened her lifespan by at least a few years. You're thinking of the ending of the Passionate Walkure movie, IIRC... which showed both Heinz and Freyja's crystalization partially reversing itself.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I've never understood his memetic badass status in Star Wars. I assume it comes from the Expanded Universe, since in the actual movies he growls out a few lines and the one time we actually see him fight he's almost instantly defeated by Luke and then again by Han, who accidentally knocks him into the mouth of a giant anus monster in the Tattooine desert. That isn't exactly inspiring... he's literally less effective in a fight than Jar-Jar Binks. They seem to go down when shot pretty much anywhere. One of the vague recollections I have of the Star Wars books I was exposed to as a kid was of a short story where that fact was acknowledged and explained. I think it might have been a cost thing? Like, armor that could repel kill shots was too expensive to mass produce on that scale so they went with stunproof? There was something in the story about wanting to equip the stormtroopers with a personal energy shield that was under development and their dickish treatment of the developer drove them to the Rebellion's side?
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, she and Hux are the First Order's designated buttmonkeys... if she comes back, they'll have to humiliate her even worse to one-up her getting tossed into the trash in The Force Awakens and getting beaten up by Finn and tossed into a bottomless pit in The Last Jedi. If they bring her back again, she'll absolutely end up an anticlimax boss again. Frankly, my money is on her accidentally killing herself in some spectacularly stupid way. If Phasma was one of the Knights of Ren, she probably wouldn't be a comically incompetent stormtrooper boss. I kinda figured the guards that Rey and Ren minced were the Knights of Ren. Oh, no doubt Phasma was meant to be the new trilogy's memetic badass like Boba Fett. Unfortunately, she's a little too much like Boba Fett in that her status as a badass and The Dreaded is entirely Informed Ability and isn't actually supported by onscreen performance. I hate to say it, but it's the one point where I actually find myself in complete agreement with the allegations by the new trilogy's critics that it was trying to push a socio-political agenda. Such a fuss was made in the promotional material about Phasma being a woman, and how armor on a woman didn't need to look feminine, and then the writers missed a memo or revolted against the idea and made her completely useless.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the first two episodes of Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken over dinner, and I'm kind of indifferent to it... it doesn't really feel like it's distinct from the other, very similar Isekai series that've come out recently like Overlord and Konosuba. Honestly, it kind of feels like a crossover between the two. Like a grown-up Kazuma is living a more benign version of Overlord's plot as a slime instead of an undead. Gonna give Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight a whack tomorrow over lunch. My girlfriend put me on to that one a while ago, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Deku being a crybaby gets old pretty fast but otherwise it's really good. (Considering what the internet has done with him, All Might really ought to change his name to All Meme...) EDIT: I forget if "Peace Sign" is the second or third OP... but it's a terrible earworm. Be prepared to be humming that song for days.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    From January of last year! Still, bleh... Tochiro's probably in a better position to know than anyone else here.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Seems like a lot of the light novel adaptations coming out lately are capped at 12-13 episodes in a season. There's even odds it'll pick up enough of a following to be granted a second season on the spike in light novel sales or its viewership share. Yen Press picked up the license for the light novel and manga, so that may help drive demand for a second season as well. They seem to be adapting 3 light novel volumes at a time, so it was kind of inevitable that the third season would be a bit of a slow one. Volume 7 was basically the comedown in the wake of Momon saving the day in Re-Estize in Volume 6, Volume 8 was a breather episode made up of side stories, and Volume 9 was mostly given over to laying the foundations for the next major story arcs where Ainz takes overt action in the world as the Sorcerer King instead of under the alias of Momon. Nice, I've got that one bookmarked on Crunchyroll. Haven't started it yet. I'll admit what got me to look at it was a bloody meme about a tsundere dragon I saw on Imgur.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Let's go all the way down the McCarthyist paranoia rabbit hole and start theorizing about how the PhD who wrote the paper is really a Russian agent!
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the press coverage for Discovery's second season has focused pretty heavily on how CBS is trying to appeal to the many Trekkies who were put off by the show's first season, it wouldn't come as much of a surprise. (I'm mildly amused that CBS appears to be choking down a slice of humble pie WRT their, and Jason Isaacs, boasting about not needing Trekkies in the audience.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney) has a new season that just started airing recently, which adapts the third game in the original trilogy. The first episode is eminently skippable, given that it's adapting the frigging tutorial from the game, but the rest should be pretty good. I've heard good things about Goblin Slayer, and intend to catch the first episode over lunch today. The light novels'll have to tide me over for a bit until we get a fourth season of Overlord.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Doc Hammer confirmed in one of the video interviews that the original Hank and Dean Venture were born naturally, so that theory would appear to be jossed. (If it wasn't already before that when Doc told them about their mother and clone status right before their memories were wiped by OSI.) There was a pretty good theory going around for a while that Hank and Dean were actually clones of Brock and Rusty, until it was revealed that Doc already had the clones going before Brock came on in the wake of Myra's arrest and the failed Phantomos sting. It'll be interesting to see what the next season makes of... EDIT: Oh woah... a thought occurs:
  17. Seto Kaiba
    This would be a compelling argument if we were talking about most any alien-of-the-week from Star Trek, but we're talking about the Vulcans. We've seen a pretty good cross section of Vulcan society over the years... from their pre-Federation military troops and Starfleet officers to various stripes of civilians like teachers, scientists, diplomats, politicians, religious officials, housewives, children, random civilians, some political and religious dissidents, and even a serial killer and a gun-running terrorist. The only times we've seen an even slightly unkempt Vulcan was the Vulcans who'd been living rough in the desert for religious reasons like Sybok, Syran, or T'Pau... and only Sybok eschewed typical razor-straight Vulcan hair. (Vulcan grooming standards are heavily lampshaded by comic relief Vulcans like T'Vau or T'Ryssa, whose messy personal grooming is acknowledged as a rather distinctly un-Vulcan thing.) A specific type of facial hair... the Mirror Universe goatee. Disco Spock is rocking a full Riker.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Unless he was vacationing with his hippie brother Sybok, I call BS... an unkempt Vulcan is almost a contradiction in terms in a species that has favored laser-straight bangs and the clean shaven look for centuries with no sign of change. (So much so that the only unkempt Vulcans in Star Trek media are invariably the designated comic relief character, like T'Vau in How Much for Just the Planet? or T'Ryssa Chen in the TNG Relaunch.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Season 7's been a real trip... a lot of payoffs for plot threads they've been building up since the very beginning. I haven't had a chance to watch the last episode yet, but it's been wild so far. Some of the twists were pretty predictable given past seasons, like... The one I didn't see coming was...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Are we getting Spock's rebellious phase? That beard seems weirdly out of place and unkempt for a species that seems to prefer laser-like precision in their personal grooming. You'd expect Vulcan facial hair to be a little neater.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... if they're anything like the whiny ponce they answer to, I'll bet cash money they get Worf'd to show how strong Rey has gotten. When did a convoluted explanation of that come in? The one of the only things I remember from the few Star Wars books I'd read as a kid (mine was a Star Trek household) was that the Jedi used whatever crystals they could find. I have this vague memory of an entire story centered around a master (was it Luke?) telling his trainees to f*ck off and find their own damn crystals, which led to stuff like going spelunking inside an active volcano, growing them in a lab, nicking parts from an old display, and smashing up family heirlooms for gemstones. I think it was that same series that said that the dark side users all have red because their crystals are made in a factory and that's just how they come out?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    One of the problems with those family tree designs is that, once you get to the YF-24's derivatives, no two of them seem to be in complete agreement. The most precise explanation would be that the Macross Frontier fleet's local branches of Shinsei and LAI were developing the YF-25 Prophecy and YF-29 Durandal concurrently based on the YF-24's data they obtained from the New UN Government. Development of the YF-29 stalled early on due to the fleet not having access to fold quartz of the necessary size and purity to build a workable prototype. The YF-25 advancing to trial production as the VF-25 provided a viable substitute test platform for a few of the YF-29's key features like the wingtip engines and beam turret via their incorporation into the VF-25's all-regime Tornado Pack. Test data from the VF-25's development and practical testing with the Tornado Pack, as well as a fair number of parts appropriated from the VF-25 itself, enabled the Frontier fleet to hastily complete the YF-29 prototype in 2059 using fold quartz they obtained in the course of their conflict with the Vajra. So the YF-29 isn't derived from the VF-25 or Tornado Pack, but the YF-29 prototype we see was only able to be completed because data from the VF-25 and Tornado Pack took the place of the test data they couldn't get while they were waiting for the necessary materials to build it. Yeah, I hate it when they print stuff in teeny-weeny Eye-Strain-O-Vision™. It's for stuff like that that I keep a 4x magnifying lens paperweight around. That line of text says「情報流出？」, or "Information Leakage?". What it's referring to is, as @Sildani mentioned, the fact that the design of the production VF-27 was influenced by the Macross Galaxy fleet illicitly obtaining development data from the Macross Frontier fleet's YF-29 program via intentional leaks at LAI.
  23. Seto Kaiba
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Adam Savage once said "Reality makes for a crappy special effects crew." There is a similar principle at work in both the Star Wars prequel trilogy's conclusion and more recent entries like Rogue One, The Force Awakens, and The Last Jedi. The original Star Wars trilogy was a pure science fantasy story arc with an almost literal black-and-white morality to it as the noble and selfless seekers of liberty in the Rebellion clash with the vile minions of tyranny from the Galactic Empire. Since the Senate was dissolved offscreen early in the first film, the only politicians we see are Leia Organa, Mon Mothma, and Lando Calrissian. Lando is the only one who behaves even remotely realistically in that he's mainly just looking out for his own interests and those of his constituents even if it means kowtowing to obviously evil parties to do so. He's still shown behaving as a selfless heroic individual once evil finally pushes him too far... which isn't particularly realistic for a politician. Starting in the prequel trilogy, a deeper look into the corrupt politics of the Old Republic shows us a very familiar "ripped from the headlines" picture of a governing body wherein the politicians invested in maintaining the status quo have little interest in doing anything involving the "greater good" unless their own interests are under direct and immediate threat and otherwise spend their time furthering their own agendas and those of the special interests who back them. The Galactic Civil War was literally started when the Senate issued a rare rebuke to a corporate special interest group (the Trade Federation) after its leadership got busted engaging in blatantly illegal activity and the government of the victimized world made enough noise about it that protecting that corporate special interest group from prosecution by burying the matter in a subcommittee was no longer possible. The actual war was literally the Chancellor wielding the corporate special interests that ran the Confederacy of Independent Systems as an elaborate distraction so that the self-obsessed politicians would gleefully erode the foundations of democracy for him by voting more and more power to him as long as he promised to make the boogeyman he created go away and stop threatening their interests. Likewise, the New Republic Senate being so busy and self-involved as it bickered over scaling back its armed forces and a million other trivial nothings involving establishing its public policy that it almost completely missed a threat that was practically right in front of them is, to borrow a turn of phrase from Disney itself, practically a Tale as old as time. Fairly half of the large empires that fell in antiquity fell for that exact reason... they were so preoccupied with internal matters that they didn't notice or minimized the threat of an invading power until its boot was descending upon their necks. That kind of incredible, incomprehensible stupidity is in fact distressingly common in politics even today. It just doesn't make for particularly exciting storytelling. Realistic depictions of routine politics seldom make for riveting entertainment... that's why C-SPAN's viewership is so low.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    VF-4 development began in 2005, officially. That said, that is pretty clearly the production VF-4 that didn't exist until 2012.
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