Seto Kaiba

... it really is, but without the edgelord BS and pretentious music. Pretty sure that's called "being a natural badass". Roy's natural aptitude for flying led to him being a high-scoring ace in the Unification Wars... with 180 victories under his belt during the war, it'd be hard to argue he wasn't already a killing machine before he got his hands on a VF. (For reference, the top scoring ace of the supersonic jet era in the real world is Giora Epstein of the Israeli Air Force, with 17 confirmed victories.) Granted, but most of the fiddly aspects of maneuvering on the ground are handled by the VF-0's/VF-1's ANGIRAS integrated airframe management and control AI rather than the pilot himself (or herself). It's still basically point-and-click. That's well after how Roy learned to be a pilot, and more overlapping with SDF Macross Ep33... which was after D.D. defected to the Alliance. With 180 kills, Roy was already pretty ruthlessly effective before he ever set foot in a VF. If you read it, you'll want to forget it all over again. It. Was. TERRIBLE. But you can see them whenever you want... so why miss them when you can just pay them a visit? His bio in Zero suggests it was probably after he and Aries Turner broke up in college that he became a stunt pilot in the Ichijo family's flying circus... since his breakup with Aries is indicated to be what essentially turned him from a serious young man into a drinking, carousing womanizer and risk-taker. IIRC there was something in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross about Roy having had a falling-out or something with Hikaru's father over his decision to join the military and having reneged on his promise to return to the flying circus after the Unification Wars ended.

The more I read about this nonsense, the more I'm convinced they have no actual plan for this series. It really feels like there's some kind of bar bet going on here where they're trying to see how many soap opera twists they can fit into this comic before it gets canned.

Is it just me, or is he a ginger Thor?

Not sure it'd be all that interesting... As far as we know, the university he was attending was attacked somehow during the Unification Wars and he joined the military. Ivanov was his instructor at flight school. Then it's just him potting MiM-31s and older MiGs in a F203 for a while until he's tapped to serve as a test pilot on the VF-X-1 program in '07 and then seconded to model conversion training out there on the CVN-99 Asuka II in '08. There wouldn't be any VFs in it unless it got far enough to overlap the flashback episode of SDF Macross. (I may be somewhat against the idea because I've seen The Series That Must Not Be Named's attempt at it, and it was hilariously terrible. They made him into a combination of Chuck Norris and Crocodile Dundee memes.)

Go home Titan Comics, you're drunk.

The Spartas didn't have that much anime magic in its transformation... which was, by standards of the day, fairly straightforward and toy-friendly. ... it's being funded through a Kickstarter? Well, this should be amusing. AFAIK HG was forbidding crowdfunding of all types. Strange Machine Games publicly stated the terms of their license forbade crowdfunding when they picked up the RPG license. If it works out like previous Robotech Kickstarters, at least we won't have to worry about build quality or the lack thereof.

Just got an e-mail informing me that the book ahead of the VF-11 Master File in the publication queue (the M9 Gernsback Master File) got pushed back a month from mid-January to late February... seems a safe bet the VF-11 Master File also got pushed back.

One can only hope. Starfleet has produced some real moral mutants over the years, but nothing that compares to Burnham. Mark Jameson, Erik Pressman, Benjamin Maxwell, Michael Eddington, and Thomas Riker all had fairly well-considered reasons for doing the things they did. Jameson took the only available way out of a hostage negotiation and tried to salvage and re-balance the situation by arming the opposition just as well as he had the hostage-takers. Pressman was a man who saw a major and unaddressed strategic weakness that'd already cost the lives of innumerable Starfleet officers and civilians over the course of almost 200 years and sought to remedy it. Maxwell may have been motivated by untreated (possibly undiagnosed) PTSD, but he was also bang-on correct that Cardassia was gearing up to attack the Federation's borders. Eddington defected to the Maquis and organized the theft of industrial replicators in the name of protecting the colonist populations in the DMZ who'd effectively been abandoned by the Federation and forced to fend for themselves under the threat of attack by military-backed Cardassian hostiles in the DMZ. Same deal for Thomas Riker. Michael Burnham betrayed her principles seemingly on the spur of the moment because her captain refused to commit an act of unprovoked aggression (y'know, an act of war) based on nothing more than a secondhand anecdote about how the Vulcans used to do things under the Romulan-influenced leadership of the paranoid and xenophobic Vulcan High Command and the advice of an officer who was obviously emotionally compromised (and possibly mentally as well, considering she'd nearly died from having her DNA denatured by cosmic radiation some hours earlier, which can't be good for one's brain chemistry). Even the Gabriel Lorca of the mirror universe seems like a saner and stabler individual until he's back in the mirror universe and is outed as mirror Lorca.

Yeah, it really seems to me like they'd be a lot happier writing for Battlestar Galactica or a similar dystopian series. Deep Space Nine did a pretty good job showing the external and internal conflicts... from the attempted coup by a member of the Starfleet brass to the Dominion and Klingon Wars. Mind you, Star Trek was designed to be an optimistic future. The Federation IS a force for good because of what it stands for: the desire for peaceful coexistence, nonviolent conflict resolution, scientific and intellectual endeavor, and a fundamental respect for the diversity of life in all its myriad forms. It's worth preserving precisely because of what it stands for. It's not perfect, but it's an enormous aspirational step up from what we have today. That aspirational aspect of it was, as they say, the point. It's not propaganda, in-universe or otherwise... the Federation is meant to be emblematic of what we could achieve if we got our sh*t together as a species. The kind of xenophobia and general bigotry on display in Discovery is about as far from Gene's vision as it's possible to get. "Getting dirty" does not fundamentally entail compromising one's principles... which was, amusingly enough, the late realization had by Burnham at the end of Discovery's first season. Starfleet might have to occasionally bust heads to preserve truth, justice, and freedom in the galaxy... but by golly they'll bust heads with the utmost civility and to the bare minimum necessary to get the job done because those busted heads are people too. As a point of order, said frontier generally wasn't part of the Federation (yet). Sisko gave a better summation of it with the "Saints in Paradise" speech from "The Maquis"... but, then again, the colonies out in the DMZ and Bajor were also technically NOT part of the Federation ("yet" in the case of Bajor). The Federation is a pseudo-utopia, so most of the space adventure takes place beyond utopia's borders. She was, frankly, quite good as the prime universe Georgeau... to the extent that she was essentially the only character on the show who seemed to realize how a Starfleet officer should behave.

Next stop, the entire text of the light novel's first chapter!

Pass... I'm thoroughly sick of seeing the current CBS staff try to turn Star Trek into Warhammer 40,000.

I kinda wanna see how far they can take it. Like, give us a Sengoku period drama with the title Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your gentleness that of the forest. In raiding and plundering be like fire, be immovable like a mountain. and sensibly abbreviate it Fuurinkazan.

The producers, apparently... what producer could possibly pass on Springtime for Space Hitler? (Max Bialystock, call your agent.) On one level, I can understand why the edgelord-infested creative staff that shat Star Trek: Discovery's first season into existence would think a Section 31 series would have a lot of potential. When it appeared in Deep Space Nine, Section 31 was basically the ultimate expression of Star Trek fanwank. The Federation having a hyper-competent intelligence and covert operations agency that answers to nobody and protects the interests of the Federation James Bond-style while somehow also remaining so top secret that even the galaxy's finest intelligence services have no idea it exists is the stuff of terrible fan fiction. It sounded like a cool idea for exactly ONE episode, then it started to get silly. By the end of DS9, the only way for Bashir to pull a win out of a Section 31 episode was for Sloan to inexplicably grab an idiot ball so massive light cannot escape its surface because Section 31 is the organizational equivalent of a Mary Sue. Star Trek: Enterprise did a pretty good job taking the piss out of Section 31 in Season 4 though, with Reed's handler ending up getting the short end of the stick from a deal with a Klingon general who was denser than a sack of hammers. They really should take a clue from the Star Trek relaunch novel-verse. Section 31 stories are a BAD IDEA in general. They're basically James Bond fanfics written in the Star Trek setting, and the stories almost always involve pants-on-head idiocy at every level in order for the plot to function at all. They were bad enough when it was Julian Bashir who was being asked to play super-spy, and in rare moments of self-awareness on the part of the writers he seemed to occasionally realize how incredibly narmy it all was. Like when they sent him to the Gamma Quadrant to stop a rogue augment who absolutely isn't Francisco Scaramanga how dare you suggest such a thing from creating an army of genetically reengineered Jem'Hadar. It all culminated in an incredibly stupid plotline where Section 31 was revealed to be run by a pre-Federation surveillance AI that somehow runs on all the technology in the Federation and its allies without ever being detected. Can you imagine how much worse it'll be when the main character in a ridiculous spy story is not only a fantastic racist, but someone categorically incapable of subtlety? What the hell use does an organization that covertly protects the Federation have for someone who has ZERO investment in the Federation? She's less Elim Garak and more Leeroy Jenkins. It's kind of a final F*** YOU to Star Trek fans, having a series about the evil mirror universe version of the only character in Discovery who actually acted like they were in Star Trek. Burnham's Starfleet-issue moral compass is badly defective and spends most of its time wildly spinning at a pace that would shame most particle accelerators. If she wasn't so bad at the follow-through, she'd have a chronic backstabbing disorder. TBH my reaction to seeing Burnham get a pardon, have her sentence expunged, and give a speech about sticking to principles was to be downright offended. On my recent rewatch of the series, I was sitting on my sofa thinking "First of all, how dare you. Second, HOW DARE YOU?" when she started going on about how important it was to stick to Starfleet's lofty principles. I honestly consider her to be a Villain Protagonist. She's basically Captain Benjamin Maxwell from TNG, recast as a woman. A paranoid psychopath who uses her xenophobia as an excuse to chuck the rulebook at the earliest opportunity. It says a lot that they had to not only go to the Mirror Universe, but jack the Mirror Universe's evil quotient up, to make her look like less of a shitty person and even then all it achieved was to give her a Heel Realization when she fit in a little TOO well. That said, Mirror Georgeau seems to have gotten a pass from Burnham because each had fond memories of the other's alternate self. This is, of course, just one example of how the hilarious inconsistency of Burnham's moral compass is consistent in one regard only: she's an absolutely TERRIBLE judge of character. If Pike had an ounce of sense, he'd flush her out the nearest airlock or at least confine her to the brig for the entirety of his tenure in charge of the Discovery. (I'll be absolutely livid if Pike doesn't mistrust her intensely after all the bullsh*t she's pulled.) As for Lorca, even though he wasn't really any worse than Mirror Georgeau he ran afoul of some of the most unsubtle socio-political commentary in Star Trek history. He isn't Hitler, he's someone a lot more recent and a good deal more orange. Killing him off so unceremoniously after all that bluster was pretty much a "take that!" aimed at you-know-who. Meh... Star Trek: Beyond might not have been directed by Jar-Jar Abrams, but it's built on his sad attempt to turn Star Trek into a fascist bad future full of military adventurism and xenophobia. It tries, halfheartedly, to rebuke its predecessors but ultimately fails because it's made in their image. His grubby fingerprints are all over it. You have no idea how relieved I was to see that Paramount pulled the plug on the Kelvin timeline's fourth movie. Good riddance.

Hard pass. Between Jar-Jar Abrams's trio of cinematic crimes and Discovery's first season, I am 200% done with this attempt to reimagine Star Trek as a playground for protofascist characters.

Had a go at Kaguya-sama: Love is War and The Rising of the Shield Hero. Kaguya-sama: Love is War's first episode was so good I'm planning to rewatch it next. It's like someone took out the supernatural bits and reimagined Death Note as a romance comedy. Epic levels of overthinking, internal monologuing, and amateur dramatics. It's even got an OP ("Love Dramatic") that is INCREDIBLY catchy. While I'm not ready to count out The Price of Smiles or The Promised Neverland, I suspect Kaguya is about to become my favorite for the season. The Rising of the Shield Hero... exists. It's like the isekai fiction writers have stopped trying. Being pulled into a fantasy world that inexplicably runs on video game logic with an overpowered gimmick has become a default setting to the extent that The Rising of the Shield Hero doesn't bother even having the four heroes pause for thought about it. They take it completely in stride as though that were a perfectly normal occurrance. It's also rather difficult to take the protagonist's supposed intimidation seriously when he's basically menacing the town toughs with an angry beach ball.

Two episodes into The Price of Smiles and it officially has my attention. Really, episode two ought to have been episode one. It does all the worldbuilding that the first episode didn't AND stiill manages to pack in a fair amount of action. Apparently whatever planet this is set on in the far future isn't entirely compatible with the flora the colonists brought from Earth, so getting things to grow there is a bit of a chore and requires a lot of energy. The Kingdom of Soliel is being invaded by the Grandieger Empire because the Empire is keen to annex the Kingdom's agriculturally viable land to feed its population. The battle scene feels oddly Macross-y much of the time. Apparently something about the glowing rocks they use to power their giant robots (theurgears) either becomes unstable or just plain stops working above about 100m, so you get a lot of Macross-like high speed "aerial" maneuvers going on ten feet above the ground.

I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting from The Price of Smiles... An original mecha anime by none other than Tatsunoko Production to commemorate their 55th anniversary provoked too much curiosity for me to give it a miss. Unfortunately, if the first episode was meant to get the audience's attention then it failed miserably. It's just... bland. Nothing about it really stands out. I literally just watched it and I can't even recall the names of the principal characters. I'd like to call the first episode "world building" but it doesn't really do any of that either. Apart from establishing that it's future o'clock on a colonized planet where everything is powered by literal green rocks and which brought back the idea of nobility to get it through its early years of colonization for some reason, we don't really get much. Giant robots are a thing, apparently. The main character's a naive-as-hell 12 year old princess who "rules" a rich kingdom called Soliel in the wake of her parents accidental (haha... probably not) deaths, and who the episode seems to make pretty clear is the only one who doesn't realize that she's a figurehead being deliberately kept in the dark by the parliament and military. Her knight and brother figure feels like a discount Edward Elric and has "decoy protagonist" written all over him, so he's probably not long for this series. The only thing that really smacks of an actual plot is in the stinger, where it's made pretty obvious that all that talk about renewing non-aggression pacts with the neighboring Grandieger Empire was BS and they've probably been at war for a long time. The character designs are pretty unremarkable, with the only standouts being ones that look like they're nicked from elsewhere. The parliament's PM looks like a brunette version of Alto Saotome, the head of the military looks like Ozma Lee, and the princess's knight looks like Edward Elric. Wardrobe by Tenchi Muyo!, or so it looks. The princess's aide looks like her dress came from the same tailor as Ming the Merciless's usual robe tho. The Kingdom of Soliel's architecture looks pretty heavily inspired by Yukikaze and Macross Delta. The mechanical designs have that weird pseudo-skeletal look that the Seikijin from Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari had but applied to designs that otherwise looks right out of Full Metal Panic! or Iron-Blooded Orphans. They don't walk, but instead hover everywhere on a flight rig that looks like the ref board skirts on Eureka Seven's SH-101 Spearheads, but which look (and seemingly work) like those super-expensive Dyson fans if someone converted them into propane burners. The main one looks like someone grafted Kenshi's seikijin's head onto the Codarl's body. One of the other ones looks like a barely modified version of the Rouei from IBO. The enemy mecha on the website look like someone took the head off a Patlabor Helldiver and grafted it to the body of a Gjallarhorn EB-06 Graze from IBO. The second episode at least promises a look into the war that apparently everyone except the princess knows is going on, so we'll see if it becomes less insipid as time goes on.

It'll never be as dumb a renaming as when Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou was retitled Demon King Daimaou. (Another fine title from the department of redundancy department.)

Finally found the time to sit down and finish watching Lupin III Part IV: the Italian Adventure today. Lupin III doesn't normally do story arcs, and honestly I feel like this show could've done just as well without one. They never really do much of anything with the whole Lupin-is-married thing even though they built at least two whole episodes around it. The MI6 agent Nix is never really explained either despite being a recurring character. What's his deal? Why does he have at least two big superpowers? The whole thing with Leonardo da Vinci and the Dream of Italy might as well have been another show entirely or a movie (it probably would have been better as a movie). Still, tons of fun and the OP in particular is simply gorgeous. On to Conception, Kaguya-sama: Love is War, The Price of Smiles, and The Rising of the Shield Hero. If I get stuck in the lab again I can probably do all four on Monday.

Fortunately, the personal circumstances of the Yggdrasil players behind the 41 Supreme Beings of the Great Tomb of Nazarick and the guild of Ainz Ooal Gown get less relevant as time goes on... but they're rather important early in the story, since the personalities of the Great Tomb of Nazarick's NPCs and their relationships tend to reflect the personality or psychological damage of the player who created them. It's played for comedy with Aura and Shalltear and Aura and Mare, for drama between Demiurge and Sebas Tian, and for horrific implications with Demiurge on his own. (Momonga's own creation, Pandora's Actor, has some fridge horror implications the anime skips over entirely... his military uniform, tendency to lapse into gratuitous German, and large ham tendencies are modeled on the elite members of a Neo-Nazi movement that started a war between European arcologies c.2118. Momonga thought they were cool as a kid, but admits with the benefit of hindsight that the design choices he made for Pandora's Actor were in screamingly poor taste.) Nope. Overlord was originally a web novel series that began serialization in 2010, over a year before Ready Player One was published (in August 2011). The web novel was then adapted into a light novel and published in 2012, then a manga in 2014 and an anime in 2015. Overlord, like Goblin Slayer, makes a LOT of references to Dungeons and Dragons. Kugane Maruyama is generally more subtle about it though, with bland name versions of D&D's spells and metamagic feats (and at least one of Nazarick's Supreme Beings being a self-confessed RPG nut). Goblin Slayer had a frankly gratuitous moment where the titular Slayer's party encounters what is obviously a Beholder, that speaks in Pokemon Speak with the syllables of the word "Beholder", but which they studiously refuse to call a Beholder because damnit that word is a registered trademark. It's Universal Century Gundam... the teenage angst is literally mandatory. TBH, the anime's second season, Rosario+Vampire Capu2 is no better... and might actually be worse. It's VERY heavily dependent on fanservice and the harem angle. It really feels like you see more of the bat they use as a fanservice censor for the panty shots than most of the characters. (Weirdly, the OP has a disco dance theme...)

Well played, sir. Well played. It'd be nice.

Ah, there we go... I'd been wondering when that other shoe was going to drop. When I heard that Harmony Gold had finally found someone willing to acquire part of the Southern Cross merchandising rights after over thirty years, I was sure it had to be a tiny indie outfit. I was a bit surprised to hear that an otherwise-competent outfit like MAAS Toys were the fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. Doubly so when I saw that MAAS did most of its business through Kickstarter, considering Harmony Gold has been dead-set against crowdfunding ever since the embarrassing public failure of Robotech Academy's Kickstarter and the financing scandal that ended Robotech RPG Tactics. This latest update explains a lot. MAAS Toys is having problems with its crowdfunded business model. They must be hoping that transitioning to making licensed toys for retail would be a more stable revenue stream. I have a nasty suspicion they're about to join Netter Digital, Eternity Comics, Academy Comics, and Palladium Books as licensees done in by Robotech... which kinda sucks, because I really would like an Auroran. To be frank, the Robotech franchise is at death's door. They don't have anything new in development, and haven't for years. They've lost most of the fanbase through a mix of mistreatment and incompetence. They've treated licensees rather poorly over the years, and past licensees have largely exhausted the brand's merchandising potential. They've weathered a string of public failures and scandals recently, and it's public knowledge that their license expires soon and that the license seems unlikely to be renewed thanks to deteriorating relations with their Japanese partner Tatsunoko. That perfect storm of red flags has whittled the pool of licensees down to mostly just the small-time indie outfits. MAAS Toys likely got the Southern Cross license for a song. Previous licensees like Toynami flatly refused to make Southern Cross merchandise because the projected return on that investment was too small to justify the effort. Many Robotech fans believe that Harmony Gold is back to selling licenses to whoever is willing to pay in order to cash out before their rights expire. More like two half-men... since neither of them is really qualified to do the job they're doing.

Really? I thought it was kind of fun in a quaint, charming sort of way. I have the Delta OSTs, and they are dull as dishwater. There's no track on either that can even readily be associated with a character or a particular moment in the series... it's all bland and rather forgettable.

The Price of Smiles, which started airing last week, appears to be a mecha anime from no less than Tatsunoko Production. "The password is 1-2-3-4-5? That's the stupidest password I've ever heard! It's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!"

Overlord lost a bit of context in the anime adaptation. The main character was a salaryman in a crapsack future not dissimilar to Alien's where megacorporations basically run the Earth and have destroyed the environment, and his escape is a fully immersive cybernetic VR MMORPG called Yggdrasil. He was a guild master for one of the game's most celebrated and featured guilds, Ainz Ooal Gown, which was famous for PKing with its "pay evil unto evil" mindset because it was founded to present a united front against cyberbullying of players who played heteromorphic (monster) characters. They kind of took the monsters=evil mindset and said "then let me be evil" and architected their guildhall/dungeon around that premise, so all but one or two of the NPCs were card-carrying villains with terrible karma scores. Once their guild headquarters, which was also the game's toughest dungeon the Great Tomb of Nazarick) is inexplicably sent to an alternate world when the servers were due to shut down, the only logged-in player in the dungeon (guildmaster Satoru Suzuki AKA Momonga) is stuck in the body of his undead (Overlord class) character. Unfortunately, his undead body plays by the rules for the undead in this new world AND for the game... so not only is his state of mind influenced by his villainous karma score, his range of emotional responses is deadened or outright suppressed and it seems to get worse as time goes on to the extent that he worries that he's becoming his character. Not being able to feel horror or sadness over killing people has him slowly sliding down that slippery slope towards authentic evil... and having his de facto court and headquarters packed full of heteromorph NPCs who'd been programmed by the various guild members to detest humans and engage in a variety of horrific behavior isn't helping. (As to why they win... well, Momonga and the Nazarick NPCs are Level 100 in a world where the strongest warriors seldom top Level 20. Previous Yggdrasil players who ended up in that world were literally worshipped as gods.)