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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Last night, @BlackRose and I rewatched Star Trek: Into Darkness... and while we can definitely say that it improved not at all the third time around, it's surprising in hindsight how much of an influence Into Darkness clearly had on Star Trek: Discovery. (A drinking game was proposed, insofar as taking a drink every time one of the characters said or did something that was obviously stupid even in context... but reinventing suicide as a group activity was deemed a poor way to spend the evening.) Overall tone is, I think, where Into Darkness's influence is most evident in Discovery. The optimism in previous prime continuity Star Trek is almost entirely absent in favor of Into Darkness's grim, fatalistic attitude towards war with the Klingon Empire. Commander Burnham and Admiral Marcus would get along famously, since they both seem to agree that the Klingons not only can't be trusted but that a preemptive strike is the only way to deal with them and NOBODY seems to really question this until it's way too late. Lorca and Marcus would get along pretty well too, since their militaristic attitudes foreshadow the obvious reveal that they were Evil All Along and are thriving in a Federation that's a stone's throw from deteriorating into outright xenophobia. Aesthetically I admit it's not until I rewatched the film that I appreciated exactly how much DNA from the Dreadnought-class USS Vengeance can be found in the Crossfield-class in Discovery. The smooth curves and soft angles are entirely replaced by hard, threatening edges. The usual off-white starship hull paint favored by the Federation is instead replaced by a darker, more ominous hue. There's the funny business with cutouts in the saucer section going on as well. The engineering hull even looks like it's shaped similarly, if you discount the absence of traditional nacelle pylons on the Crossfield-class. The security personnel even wear black including black starfleet deltas like Section 31's. It's massive and has a suspiciously small crew for such a large ship. Now, more than ever, I'm convinced Discovery is not a prime timeline show. The Crossfield-class is something that makes way more sense as a parallel program for the Dreadnought-class.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Same here... helped by the fact that, on my second go 'round, my Japanese was good enough that I could skip the godawful subs that I had watched it with the first time. They were pretty terrible. I'm glad the fansubs out there for it now are of substantially superior quality compared to that old mess. (Gladder still that new shows are getting official subs...) It'd be nice. There seems to be some interest in Macross R still... I noticed they did some egg machines of the VFs from that. That was a pretty incredible side story, IMO... with a shocking number of tie-ins to other shows, games, and stories.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The Robotech adaptation of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross made most of the characters a good deal less awful... but Claude Leon/Eli Leonard was the exception. They took him from being a hawkish, stubborn, inflexible general who could be unreasonable at times to a rabid xenophobe on steroids who thought suicide missions were an appropriate response to dissent among his advisers and would hurl his troops into unwinnable fights and berate them for not winning later. Either way, he was bad enough at his job that he was absolutely an asset to the Zor Lords/Robotech Masters. On 1st Ed., I take it? 2nd Ed. made the Masters Saga a fairly unpopular prospect since the character generation was a big mess in that sourcebook and the mecha were pretty terrible as dictated by canon.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Word of advice for 7... take it in small doses. The Macross 7 TV series takes a while to hit its stride, as the first twenty episodes are all character development and buildup for the start of the actual plot. I would advise against marathoning it, since those episodes can get rather repetitive and if you watch more than one or two episodes a day the song "Planet Dance" quickly becomes The Most Annoying Sound. Once it gets going though, it's quite a bit of fun... and I say that as someone who used to be one of the show's most strident critics. It's kind of like Macross's answer to G Gundam, you'll enjoy it much more if you don't go into it expecting seriousness. But yes, every Macross series has its virtues... some are just harder to see than others. That's why a lot of folks here are hoping for a return to classic form for its more obvious virtues.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    In all honesty, I'm not sure it actually is an agenda on the studio's part... "forced" or otherwise. I'm inclined to suspect that the studios, being equal parts lazy and greedy, are simply trying to make casts more closely resemble audiences to broaden their appeal. America's a diverse nation all on its own, and these studios have their eyes on worldwide profits too. I doubt there's any socio-political agenda behind it. I think the "diversity agenda" issue is more a question of certain groups with political agendas doing enough projecting that we could use them to show Powerpoint slideshows. We obviously can't dig into that topic too deeply without delving into the current state of politics and the politics of race in the US right now... Having seen how Star Trek develops its characters from development notes, after TOS there weren't many cases of characters where the writers had a specific race in mind when developing them. That state of affairs isn't likely to have changed much in Discovery. It's not quite the blind development that was used in Alien (where no references were even made to gender), but it's pretty close. You'll find WAY more references to female characters having "strip queen" bodies than you will to being any particular race... but that's got Gene's grubby fingerprints all over it. The only ones I recall being explicitly written as a particular race or nationality from the start after TOS are Jean-Luc Picard (as a Frenchman), Harry Kim (as "Asian" of no specific ethnicity), and Chakotay (as a Native American based on some legendarily bad advice from a new age quack).
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I would assume so? I mean, $300 is $300... 30 orders doesn't have to mean 30 people.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The Facebook spam I alluded to in the "No Love for Southern Cross?" thread a day or so back... lots of enthusiasm coupled with a gleeful disregard for niceties like proper fact-checking or contextual appropriateness. I'm not sure I'd call Wikipedia vandalism an effort worth supporting... Having beheld the "quality" of the work in question... that's a great big "NOPE". I had never seen a "translation" with a legitimate, unexaggerated 0% accuracy rating until 1st Border Red Devil brought me some of her work and asked me to check it against the original document. It turned out to be text paraphrased from a Robotech fanfic rather than any kind of translation of what was actually written in the Southern Cross advert in question. She's also responsible for starting the false rumor that the reason Southern Cross was canceled was that its toy partner went bankrupt rather than because its ratings were bad. Said toy partner was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bandai that was folded back into Bandai over a year before Southern Cross aired and continued to function as an operating division of Bandai through at least 1986 until the toy divisions were merged in a series of reorgs and mergers that produced the current Bandai boys toy division and Bandai's subsidiary PLEX corporation.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    One of the few convenient things about collecting Southern Cross stuff is that the demand is so low that markups are nearly nonexistent in most categories. I was able to score a few magazines with articles about the series for less than their original cover price last year.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... entirely too many fans in too many genres mistake "The End of the World as We Know It" for "The End of the World". It's one of those reactions that's as old as fiction itself. Let's wait until the Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure Blu-ray drops to see if there's anything else they ought to be apologizing for.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, according to the product listing for the Limited Edition Blu-Ray, the extra features are: An AR card for use with Uta Macross. Staff and cast audio commentary Promotional footage Karaoke videos Picture dramas A "Making of" feature A greeting from the staff and cast
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That's just Robotech's creative staff pandering to the fan majority. Claude Leon was a massive jerkass even in the original Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and the Robotech adaptation didn't soften him all that much. Robotech fan antipathy for him and for his command, the Southern Cross Army, has always been pretty open. If you're going to retcon one of your show's existing characters into a villain, why not go for the one who's already established as a bad boss and militant xenophobe who isn't above sending his subordinates on suicide missions for arguing with him? (It doesn't help that the Southern Cross Army has a memetic reputation for incompetence among fans of Robotech... their failure to defend Earth literally falling under "You had one job!" territory. It kind of snowballed after a while, especially once HG tapped fans to provide stats for their official "Infopedia" and some remarks about the SCA's mecha being badly designed made the cut... likely because the Southern Cross print materials aren't shy about admitting the SCA's mecha do kind of suck. Especially the Logan.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, well... neither title is particularly inspiring. Star Trek: Destiny is marred by sharing its name with a terrible trilogy in the relaunch novel 'verse about the Borg's origins. Reliant would be an odd twist... since Picard's earliest-mentioned assignment as an ensign was to USS Reliant. I'd call it a week after the cast is revealed... though hopefully the (over)reaction will be significantly more muted than it was for Discovery. 'course, hopefully whoever ends up cast in the Picard series will engage their brain before commenting on their role to avoid stirring things up. Eh... that didn't stop a lot of folks on both sides with Discovery. There was a lot of fuss and noise on the subject, with folks railing against "forced diversity" and other such nonsense, claiming that CBS was ticking off checkboxes on some kind of mandatory minorities checklist. It died down a bit after the series started airing and Michelle Yeoh's character got fridged in favor of Jason Isaacs, but it's a topic that still crops up from time to time among Discovery's most vocal critics. (Weirdly, the folks griping about diversity on Discovery seemed to have ZERO problem with previous casts. One of my former coworkers still sends me 'round the twist by complaining about Discovery's diverse casting and in the next breath saying he wishes they'd done more with Mayweather and Sato on Enterprise... there's just no rhyme or reason to it.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Only after they discover Earth and are exposed to human culture... prior to that, they're not only just clone soldiers but literally have no frame of reference for anything outside of military affairs. Remember, Harmony Gold summarily disowned all licensee-created materials created prior to 2001 when they rebooted the Robotech franchise. None of the stuff about Breetai being ancient and one of Zor's bodyguards is canon. He's just another interchangeable clone commander whose only real significance is that he was the one who found Earth first, just like in Macross. Well, yes and no... the Invid can adapt and evolve, but only with direct intervention by the Regess, a practice she didn't get into until after the Robotech Masters devastated the second Invid homeworld and which didn't produce any meaningful changes in her Invid until after she arrived on Earth. So, theoretically they could... but canonically they didn't. Mind you, old and current lore tends to suggest the Robotech Masters didn't so much fight against the Invid as roll up, flatten their planet from orbit after taking what they wanted, and then knock off for lunch. They wouldn't have been able to offer any real fight regardless, since they didn't employ ranged weaponry widely until after occupying Earth, they're armored with crepe paper and wishful thinking, and they have exactly one starship with actual weaponry. You can't have massive ground battles when one side didn't bring weapons, or massive fleet engagements when only one side has an actual fleet. That's why old Robotech material basically ignored the Invid's backstory in favor of focusing on the Tirolians... they're boring.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Have they actually confirmed a title yet? CBS has registered trademarks on two: Star Trek: Reliant and Star Trek: Destiny.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well, thank goodness it's not you they're marketing this comic to... Robotech is used to failure, but "canceled after one issue" over a story even Robotech fans don't want would be a new low water mark for the franchise. Please apply for the Creative Director position at Harmony Gold at your earliest convenience. With your Magoo-like creative vision, they could finish flying the franchise into the ground by year end! You wouldn't know it from reading the comic... but I guess there's little immediate difference between a good writer phoning it in and a bad writer actually trying. Programmers have a saying "Garbage in, Garbage out". If your input is bad, you won't get good output. Robotech's plot wasn't exactly a fantastic story to begin with, and attempting to take it into "gritty" and "hardcore" territory was more than enough to put it into "garbage" territory. It's a bit like saying you'd rather have Stevie Wonder as your chauffer instead of Ray Charles.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The brig's too good for the likes of Pine!Kirk. Maybe if they had an Agony Booth...
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I think I preferred it when they were at least trying to do something original even if it was stupid and ugly. Now we're headed back to the same old lazy imitation-brand Macross shlock they've been peddling since Harmony Gold "rebooted" the Robotech franchise back in '01. Amusingly, Titan Comics went to a lot of trouble for that hideous fan design they were using before. They went to the trouble of looking around the web for "inspiration" while planning out the comics, stole that fan design and used it without the artist's knowledge or permission, and then ended up paying the artist for post facto permission to use the design. Robotech fans. There is no other audience for Robotech-branded anything.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming everyone who was in originally is still game... 19/30 for each.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, that's Robotech fan art by yui1107... she's been posting stuff like this from her DeviantArt page all over Facebook every few days for the last couple months. (Which is a distinct improvement from her other hobbies of providing 0% accurate translations and vandalizing Japanese Wikipedia articles about Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA with material from Robotech and Robotech fanfics.) It's always fun to see what errors and eccentricities will crop up when she posts this stuff... like the inexplicably inclusion of a Robotech soundtrack CD's cover art, the Tactics Armored Space Corps heraldry with incorrect colors and inaccurate scroll, the pilot being a non-canon Robotech character from the McKinney novels, the copilot being from Macross II: Lovers Again, or the aircraft belonging to "Faerie Squadron" (from Macross II again?) and having a Major for a pilot but having the markings for the defunct US Navy reserve VP-65 Tridents (who never flew helicopters).
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The interior shots aren't too bad, but when they cut to those shots out the window/viewscreen it's bits of black metal moving across a black background with a ton of foreground lens flare... it's a pain in the butt trying to figure out what the hell I'm looking at. IMO, Spock putting Kirk off the ship was one of the few good moments in the film. Kirk is so staggeringly petty that the first thing he does when he gets out of his escape pod is to start recording a log entry complaining about Spock. Made worse by the fact that those are REAL lense flares, not added in post with CG... so there's no getting rid of 'em. Not the first time Star Trek has represented physics in an unrealistic fashion... Star Trek: the Motion Picture did something similar with its V'Ger backstory involving Voyager VI being transported across space and time by a "black hole".
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe we'll catch that wonderful deleted scene later today. We've got Star Trek (2009) on in the background while we work on scans and prioritizing documents for translation today, and I tell ya it's easy to see where Discovery got a lot of its bad habits and worse ideas. This movie's writing is an absolute goddamn mess. The scene with the Kelvin and Narada at the beginning is so visually busy that it's nigh-impossible to tell what's actually going on. Young Kirk is an unlikeable arsehole to the extent that I find myself siding more with whomever happens to be beating him up or otherwise making him suffer at the time, be it the four cadets in the bar, the Narada's crew, McCoy, or Spock. Eric Bana absolutely sleepwalks through the entire film, delivering 90% of his dialog in a voice that sounds like he's either reading it off cue cards held up just offscreen or is coming off a heavy dose of novocaine. It's kind of surprising how much of this movie's plot was driven by people making absolutely the worst, most asinine decisions possible at any given point in time... as if Nero's temporal incursion lowered the galaxy's average IQ by forty points. Pine!Kirk and Burnham are definitely cut from the same cloth...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, being Robotech absolutely IS the reason it's bad... just not in the specific sense you mean. Robotech is, by any reasonable standard, a failed 80's cartoon property that is long past its use-by date and is largely only remembered for its epic amounts of legal baggage. Having a 100% failure rate in sequel and spinoff development over the last three decades left Robotech in a position where it has neither the money nor the brand awareness to draw competent people to the franchise. The creative staff managing the franchise is understaffed, underfunded, and hopelessly untalented. Consequently, the licensees the brand attracts are indie or incompetent, often both, and the few that aren't are totally phoning it in because Robotech just isn't a big enough deal for them to bother actually trying. Titan is arguably in the latter category, as they're clearly not giving this comic their A-game... or their B-game. It's actually come up a bit, but for the first dozen or so issues it was down around Q. Oh my, no. No no no. They are ABSOLUTELY aiming this comic at existing Robotech fans. Existing Robotech fans are the only group that can be counted on to pick up this sad nostalgia circlejerk of a comic book under any circumstances. The only other reason anyone would look up this dreadful tome is for topics like this, where we can go "Gather 'round, gather 'round! Everyone look at the freak!".
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well, Robotech is dead by any conventional standard of measure... the argument could be made that this sad mess of a comic constitutes boobytrapping a corpse.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I can't honestly say that I could lay 100% of the blame for the Vengeance at Jar-Jar Abrams's door. Section 31 was responsible for its design and construction, and they were a hilariously unsubtle pack of drama queens with a complexity addiction even when they were first introduced in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Doing something like secretly constructing an enormous state-of-the-art warship for a clandestine preemptive strike on one of the Federation's enemies and making it incredibly conspicuous by forgetting to not design it like a Federation starship, designing a giant Starfleet delta into the hull, and then lazily painting it black and not applying markings is 100% in-character for them. (It's not much worse than what the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar did in Deep Space Nine, really... they just skipped the coat of black paint in favor of a cloaking device and building more than one.) After all, Section 31 are the guys who think "inconspicuous" means going everywhere in a black pleather two-piece suit like some kind of business gimp. Nah, I'd have to say Snoke's big flying wing mothership was way better looking than the Vengeance... even after Vice Admiral Bad-at-her-Job turned it into a wreck and a line of ultra-velocity shrapnel. So that's why he keeps a model of the USS Vengeance on his desk in his office where anyone can see it! It must have come with a lovely card that read "To the filthy mammal Admiral Marcus with love, from the Gorn Hegemony".
  25. Seto Kaiba
    FWIW, I'm not so sure this applies to Southern Cross fans... the ones I know, at least, are an incredibly stubborn lot for whom the absence of any real Southern Cross collectibles1 something of a sore spot.2 I would bet cash money that many of them would wait as long as it took to get enough interest for a proper Southern Cross collectible of ANY stripe. The problem is whether there are actually enough of them to get a group of 30 together to fund something like one of your kits. Southern Cross being an almost totally forgotten bit of mid-80's anime esoterica in Japan and its Robotech adaptation being a fan Un-Favorite means fans of it are pretty thin on the ground. Getting them here to preorder would be another problem, since the most vocal Southern Cross fans rather actively resent Macross and Macross fans... in no small part because Robotech's merchandising and new material development favors Macross so heavily and ignores Southern Cross entirely except for one or two moments in the comics that play on the majority fanbase's dislike of it.3 1. The Southern Cross fans I've spent the most time interacting with generally reject the minimal Robotech-branded merchandise based on Southern Cross... partly because of its iffy quality, but mostly because the few prominent pieces are character goods that all suffer from Tommy Yune's rather polarizing art style and to say they dislike Mr. Yune would be putting it mildly. ("Yuneface" has become a dismissive/derogatory term for the faces in Tommy Yune's art, which tend to all look exactly the same.) 2. Enough so that some of them spent a fair amount of time on elaborate, poorly-researched, outright fact-defying theories about why the Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross series was canceled back in '84, and equally elaborate conspiracy theories about why Harmony Gold's licensees aren't producing Southern Cross goods that normally revolve around "Macross purists". 3. Most notably, the Robotech reboot's flagship limited comic series From the Stars. Robotech's version of Southern Cross's Claude Leon (Supreme Commander Eli Anatole Leonard) puts in a brief appearance in which he is revealed to be a highly-placed spy and traitor working to sabotage the development of VFs and Destroids on behalf of the Robotech equivalent of Macross's Anti-Unification Alliance. The comic depicts him as having orchestrated the hijacking of an ARMD-class ship, a nuclear strike that destroyed the military's #2 command center in Antarctica, and attempting to do the same to "Macross Island". The Palladium Books Robotech RPG (2nd Ed.) takes this one up a notch by also making him into an incompetent military dictator who rules over a puppet civilian government and equips his forces with substandard equipment because the deep space forces took all the best people and he's too butthurt about being left behind himself that he refuses to use the same gear.
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