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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's hard to say for certain since those images are so small, but from the layout they appear to be Imai's blueprint sketches from when Imai was trying to develop a line of Southern Cross kits at (initially) 1/32 scale (later 1/40 and 1/48). The "Imai Files" contained drafts in that same format for the Spartas. As such, it's probably part of that allegedly vast collection of Southern Cross art that went unpublished because the series was canceled and HG gives zero f*cks. (Whether said huge art stockpile actually exists is unconfirmed.) Oh my, no. There is very little mechanical design art in This is Animation 10: Southern Cross... and nothing like as detailed or presentable as that. AFAIK, This is Animation 10 is the only true Southern Cross artbook. There were various magazine articles and color inserts around the time the show debuted, but none of them I've seen have anything like that. It's usually just the same handful of standard views of the mecha.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, the preorder price is $300 (if we can get 30 preorders).
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... you usually see an upward trend in reused material as a growing metaseries ages. Macross always felt like it was the exception that tests the rule thanks to Kawamori insisting on treating Macross more like a shared universe and making each new series a largely stand-alone story. Macross Delta's sudden adoption of a more Gundam-esque form letter reuse of plots and tropes and its plethora of expy characters feels really weird and out of place as a result even if it makes the series more like what you'd expect the product of a typical long-running anime franchise to be. It's one of Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure's better moments... but it loses a certain je ne sais quoi when you notice that all of it is lifted from Macross Frontier with the Sigur Berrentzs standing in for Battle Galaxy.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That's Delta. There were one or two Macross Frontier movie releases that had English subs (the combo packs and one other, IIRC), but nothing for the series. I'd like to see official subs for the remainder tho.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, you missed out. Macross Frontier really hit its stride starting in the fifth episode. Mikumo's basically modeled on Sheryl from the first four episodes, when she was busy being Queen Bitch half the time. Mikumo's professional interest in Freyja closely mirrors the advice Sheryl gave to Ranka when they met near the Macross Quarter's dock and had to wait out a hull breach repair in an emergency shelter. It was actually really frustrating how blatant they were about it. Really, almost the entire Delta cast came with shades of it... Xaos being a low-rent SMS knockoff complete with an off-brand Macross Quarter and Roid's entire master plan being nicked from Grace's in the Macross Frontier TV series. It was kind of weird how committed they were to it, with Xaos having the same "we're testing the next-gen VF for the military" excuse SMS had for having better gear than the NUNS and the VF-31 even sharing a majority of its systems with the VF-25. Rules being rules, that kind of direction has to be done under the proverbial radar... don't wanna step on any administrative toes, y'know?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, there are a fair number of superficial similarities between the Star Singer and Emulators... The biggest difference, offhand, would be that the Star Singers appear to be creations of the ancient Protoculture where the Mardook and their Emulators in Macross II are strongly implied by the OVA's creators to be a surviving offshoot of the Protoculture itself. The precise role of the Star Singers was not made clear, but the Emulators were priestesses in the Mardook religion. The Mardook Emulators controlled their Zentradi troops through songs that acted on those Zentradi like a battle drug due to mental conditioning, cybernetics, etc. It doesn't work on bystanders like the internally-inconsistent Var syndrome in Macross Delta does though. (Funnily enough, Mikumo's teal highlights look to be the same color as Ishtar's hair...) Nah, I was content back when Kawamori came out and utterly sank the argument that the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA wasn't a legitimate entry in the Macross franchise ten years ago. That alone killed upwards of 90% of the Macross II-bashing, which was coming mainly from Macross 7 fans who held the opinion that Macross II wasn't a "real" Macross series. To their credit, the vast majority of those critics revised their positions based on that new information and are now a lot kinder to the OVA. On the other hand, the suggestion that it took a half-assed mess like Delta to make people properly appreciate Macross II annoys me... To be fair, there's very little of the VF-31A at all in Macross Delta even though it, and not the VF-31 Custom Siegfried, is set to become the next main fighter of the Brisingr globular cluster's New UN Government members. ... you undermined your first sentence with your second. Right down to her outfit, Mikumo is an attempted Sheryl knockoff. Her bitchy attitude and her total obsession with her status as a "pro" is stolen almost whole cloth from Sheryl in the first few Macross Frontier episodes. Because she's only a supporting character, her ice queen side never defrosts like Sheryl's did starting in Frontier's fifth episode. (Seriously. Watch Sheryl's "pro" speech to Alto in Frontier's first episode and then Mikumo's one to Freyja in Delta... they weren't even TRYING to hide Mikumo's imitation-brand Sheryl status.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Like the software engineers say, "garbage in, garbage out". If you hire writers of indifferent quality to do your screenplay, you'll get a screenplay of indifferent quality out of it. The filmographies of the writers who worked on Macross Delta are uninspiring to say the least. Ukyo Kodachi's is arguably the highest profile, and that's only from working on that horrid Naruto spinoff Boruto. Frontier had a writer of a much higher caliber with more experience in series composition, so that paid huge dividends. So far, nothing on that front... the closest we've come is Macross the Musiculture, where one of the main cast finds an old Sharon Apple-era virtuoid that'd been junked. The Macross Frontier TV and Movie novelizations do suggest the Galaxy Executives were advanced enough to potentially Ghost in the Shell themselves and exist as disembodied minds. That said, in there only one of them had apparently done so... Manfred, a copy of the mind and intellect of the deceased Macross VF-X2 antagonist and fold quartz technology pioneer Manfred Brando. Still, it comes with the old Moravec-level philosophical problem of whether disembodied consciousness counts as human even if it's operating on a strictly artificial platform. Is a perfect digital copy of a human mind an AI or is it still a human being? Mobile Suit Gundam: Reconguista in G. Part of its backstory is that in the final centuries of the UC era before it was abolished and replaced by the Reguild Century, the cumulative damage to Earth was so severe that it caused famines bad enough for humanity to turn to institutionalized cannibalism. That is what "Kuntala" refers to in the series, the caste of people who were designated emergency rations (and continue to be discriminated against even a millennium after the practice was abolished). The show's resident Char clone, Luin Lee ("Captain Mask") is one... as are several other characters. It was still cultural communication in DYRL?, that prompted the Zentradi and Meltandi to muse on what'd been lost in their war to destroy each other. (There may have been an element of a genetic or racial memory there too, but still...)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Misa and Hikaru found the lyrics in the abandoned Protoculture colony ship on Earth. At around the same time, Minmay obtained the sheet music for the song that the Boddole Zer main fleet had kept as a "fragment of culture". When Boddole Zer's mobile fortress comes over the horizon to propose the truce, Minmay is singing the tune without the lyrics. If the scenes of prepping the performance are any indication, the tune may have been arranged for Earth instruments by Lynn Kaifun while Misa provided the lyrics.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, it's pretty obvious that many of the characters were intended to be expies of ones in Macross Frontier in the hopes that the similarity would be enough to sell them. Mikumo was clearly a quick and dirty knockoff of Sheryl, Arad's written as a copy of Ozma right down to his "reason I quit the military" backstory, Keith is trying pretty hard to be emotionless prettyboy Brera, and out here we've been calling Roid "Man-Grace" for so long I'm not convinced most of my friends remember what his name actually is. Without the excellent characterization that went into the Macross Frontier characters, the similarity alone really isn't enough to appeal. That's a big part of why Passionate Walkure's faster pace is an immeasurable help to Delta's story... you're not really given enough time to properly grasp how underdeveloped it all is before it speeds along to its conclusion. (Well, that and a lack of proper development is considered an acceptable sin in compilation movies.) Mikumo's situation has way, WAY more unfortunate implications than anything the Zentradi could muster. The Zentradi may have been treated as disposable tools by the Protoculture, but they still have far more actual living under their belts than Mikumo. They're emotionally mature beings, but stunted socially by their creators. Gundam... well... the franchise of everything is awful forever certainly doesn't shy away from all of the horrors of that kind of thing. "It can always get worse" might as well be the official UC motto... I've not forgotten that timeline ends in at least one historical era where there was state-sanctioned and widely-practiced cannibalism. That'd be an interesting conundrum... does a self-aware bio-android count as a sentient flesh-and-blood person or as a sentient artificial intelligence? IIRC, a purely technological android would be illegal in and of itself under the New UN Government since the technology needed to produce the self-aware AI is inherently unstable and prone to your standard self-preservationist AI insanity (e.g. Sharon Apple, whose incipient madness wasn't helped one bit by inheriting neuroses beyond the dreams of psychiatric analysts from the computer model of Myung Fang Lone's mind). Based on the very limited incidence of bio-androids and suspected bio-androids in Macross, I'd be inclined to guess that they would probably consider them a sentient being with all the rights which come with it. (Of course, since the only exemplars were the Protodeviln and that Mina Forte was briefly suspected of being one, it's not certain.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it's because this kind of straightforward question tends to get answered very quickly... so all questions of that type get merged here to spare the topic space for the really meaty questions we can dig into for tens of pages. Nah, the Google bot spiders this thread several times a day. So do Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, and a couple others. The keyword search on this forum software is also particularly robust.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    You missed the point with distressing completeness... Mikumo's actual age is just the cherry on the sundae of creepy-as-f*ck. The real substance of the problem is that Mikumo's inbuilt knowledge is narrowly focused to the point that her social and emotional development is way WAY behind for a person of her apparent biological age. Xaos's entertainment division is, for all practical intents and purposes, exploiting a developmentally disabled girl who has no legal guardian and isn't equipped to understand the social context and/or implications of the things she's being instructed to do so they can use her as a child soldier and to produce sexually-charged material. That's dodgy as f*ck and horrifying as it is... and then there's a nagging question of whether she's mentally capable of refusing an order or even allowed to do so, regardless of whether or not she can give informed consent. The best-case scenario here is they're sexually exploiting and endangering a minor. The worst is actual goddamn slavery. Macross Delta's creators obviously didn't consider the implications of attaching this bit of backstory to their Sheryl Nome knockoff. It's not often a fictional universe as upbeat as Macross's opens such an ugly can of worms... and it's an odd thing for the story to ignore since her clone status is literally her only real character trait. If the Macross Delta TV series is any indication, at least part of her time off the clock is spent floating unconscious in a big clear-glass tank like so many Rei Ayanamis. (That's what she was doing for the entire span of time that the other members of Walkure were looking for her, culminating in breaking into the hospital ship she was on.) There are several more interesting ethical, regulatory, and governmental questions surrounding her existence... How many people actually know that Mikumo Guynemer is really a 3 year old artificial life form and not the 17 year old girl she appears/claims to be? Is creating a clone like that even legal? Is adding unknown DNA from a Protoculture ruin to a clone legal? Is Mikumo the first and only one or is she simply the latest/most successful clone? If there are others, what became of them? Were they just destroyed, or are they being held somewhere? Who is the donor of the original DNA that the new Protoculture DNA was spliced into to create her, and does she know what her DNA was used for? She's clearly been programmed with basic knowledge, but what else is in that program? Did Xaos implant mind control in the knowledge they installed in her to make her easier to manipulate and stage-manage? Does she even have free will? Did Xaos appropriate an existing person's identity for her to use as a cover or did they weave an entirely-false identity from scratch? If the New UN Government doesn't know Mikumo's true nature, that makes it a near-certainty that what Xaos is doing is profoundly illegal since clones have full rights under the law. IMO that'd be a story worth delving into at least as much as the Aerial Knights backstory that never did make it into any incarnation of Macross Delta.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    When you combine it with her one piece of actual character development - being a 3 year old clone whose implanted programming doesn't include social graces - it crosses the line straight into being downright skin-crawlingly creepy. She doesn't have the social awareness to eat with other people... there is no bloody way she understands what she's doing vis-a-vis the sex appeal. Whatever writer came up with that plot twist needs to seriously reconsider his or her life choices. Oh, I agree it's not particularly bad or an uncommon thing to find in the anime industry. The reason it stands out as much as it does in Macross Delta is that Macross has rarely, if ever, been so crass and unsubtle about it. We've had fanservice of a sexual nature before and characters who were obviously designed around that kind of fanservice appeal, but Macross Delta was the first time it became an end in its own right (to the show and movie's detriment). Well, that and Makina was wheeled from background to background to show off her cleavage and occasionally gainax for the camera. I suspect I may be more annoyed by it than most, since one of my favorite things about Macross's writing has always been that it's never been shy about putting the women in its cast on an equal or greater footing than the men. Having a series where the women on the cast are largely, or entirely, decorative and the boys do all the heavy lifting just doesn't feel right to me. (I had such high hopes for Mirage, but it all came to nothing.) It's the second one... the story took a powder in favor of promoting Walkure. How many "Delta fans" are actually fans of Macross Delta and how many are just fans of Walkure? If I had to guess based on merchandise and media sales, I'd guess most are the latter. Oh my, no... they aren't even close. The oldest example I can think of was the original 90's Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon series, which had at least one openly lesbian couple in it (among the outer senshi IIRC) and a fair amount of ho yay in other places. I'm 99% certain there are examples older than that as well.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    At some point, I wanna polish my translation skills to the point that I can tackle the audio dramas... I have copies of the Macross Frontier ones, and I've heard they contain some fairly interesting stuff that isn't in the show, like Grace coming to the realization that she's started to genuinely care about Sheryl after looking after her for 11 years and having to edit her own personality in order to continue using Sheryl as a tool.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    In before the merge into the Newbie and Short Questions thread... That said, this isn't a question we get very often. Frontier is usually lauded for the strength of its writing. So... to summarize the plot here: (I don't think this really merits spoiler tags since the series is ten years old, but I'll do it anyway.) Trying to keep it short and roughly in-continuity, but it should make things reasonably clear. Yep, like Macross: Do You Remember Love? did for the original series, the Macross Frontier movies are a fairly different riff on the plot. You could read the plot summaries on MAHQ, I guess?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I like to think of Delta as Macross's version of Interstella 5555.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno... I'm a pretty enthusiastic supporter of all things Macross and even I find the substance-less fanservice in Delta annoyingly gratuitous. ... after the fuss over fan edits of The Last Jedi, I'm not so sure that's a good idea. It'd probably end up being pretty short and dull, considering how much of Delta is basically a commercial for Walkure.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    If the Blu-ray extras are anything to go by, Macross Delta is leaning VERY heavily on the fanservice to make Walkure appeal to the audience as characters in lieu of all of the characterization the writers of the series couldn't be arsed to give them. (Knowledge of Mikumo's true nature causes it to frequently veer into intensely creepy territory, as a three year old clone whose implanted knowledge doesn't cover proper social behavior Mikumo is a developmentally-disabled teenager who is being sexually exploited by Walkure and Lady M.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    A Macross project start to finish.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Plus started its development shortly after Macross: Do You Remember Love? came out, as a non-Macross project with the working title of Advanced Valkyrie. The plot was basically Macross Plus's minus the crazy AI angle, but the mechanical designs for the project were not the ones that went into the final OVA. Bandai ultimately withdrew their support of the project, and when Shoji Kawamori was invited back to Macross around the 10th anniversary Advanced Valkyrie was one of the two pitches he made for his next Macross feature. The designs he made for Advanced Valkyrie would be adopted into Macross in a rather scattershot manner, with the VA-3 coming into the franchise via Macross Dynamite 7, and the VF-9 and VF-3000 coming in via the video games of the late 90's and early 00's. Many of the rest were only formally adopted into the Macross universe with Macross Chronicle. Because he didn't want to do sequels. After Flash Back 2012, the animated realization of material originally planned for the final episode of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Macross was over and done with as far as he was concerned.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    "Lynn Minmay" is the official spelling that's used in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series and all subsequent works, as well as in pretty much all the merchandise (even in-universe, like Hikaru's poster of her that Misa turns upside-down). The only deviation I can recall is in Super Dimension Fortress Macross episode 5 "Transformation", on the sign on Minmay's bedroom door. Since she's living in her aunt and uncle's place over the Nyan-Nyan Chinese restaurant, the sign on her bedroom door fittingly uses the Chinese romanization for her name: "Minmei". (The letter addressed to her from "Olion Records" she shows to Hikaru in that same scene is addressed to "Miss Lynn Minmay", though.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It would be a nice gesture from them... especially since Macross Frontier apparently still has quite the following even ten years on, to the extent that we're still getting new singles from Sheryl and Ranka. I'd expect a Macross Frontier prequel would go over quite well. Macross Plus and Macross Zero got kind of a lukewarm reception initially, though audiences have warmed to both in the intervening years. Macross the Ride would have a bit of borrowed gloss from Macross Frontier, given that it's set in the same fleet barely a year before the events of the series and several characters from the series put in appearances.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's one of the weirdly consistent things about Robotech stuff that ends in in regular retail stores... these things just sit on shelves collecting dust. My local game store has copies of the 2nd Edition Robotech RPG that've been collecting dust on the shelves for a decade. I got the last several books in that series for free simply after the owner made the decision to stop carrying the line and write it off as a loss.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    And yet Discount Char Seifreit Weisse never got to fly one... more's the pity. At least he got his red Imitation Zaku Bioroid, right? C'mon, it's Robotech... inaccuracy is practically its calling card. Points to Jaymz for being the only consistently correct one... but then, since he actually does his research (incl. the OSM) it's not surprising he got it right. By all means.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    After watching Passionate Walkure for the second time last night, I can say that at the very least I did come away from it feeling like the ¥8,800 I spent on the Blu-ray wasn't a waste. "Money well spent" might be pushing it, though. Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure doesn't really do anything new that would justify harsh criticism of the film... but, by the same token, it also doesn't do anything new that's particularly praiseworthy. It's just a compilation movie for a series that suffered from bad writing. If anything, the shorter runtime's a point in its favor since the faster pace doesn't give the audience a chance to dwell on the flaws that plagued Macross Delta's TV series. It doesn't fix enough of the show's flaws to be truly great, but the movie is fun for what it is. Hayate and Freyja are still a trip, which is nice, and Mirage is less of a bystander this time around. That said, it doesn't really feel like Delta earned or particularly needed a movie... like it was done out of deference to tradition or a contractual obligation. They got less bad. "Good" might be stretching things a bit, given that both sides in Macross Delta are third-string scrubs who only look like big fish because the pond's so small. She did things before! Like get vomited on... or yell a lot... or clean Q-Lulu's litterbox...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Clearly an auditory hallucination caused by swamp gas... I mean, who would be foolish enough to go and bowdlerize the show while replacing all the classic Mari Iijima tracks with a noise that sounds like someone inserting a barbed-wire buttplug into a parrot?
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