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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Started The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows today. By about 3:30 into the first episode, I was ready to call it quits. The synopsis on Crunchyroll promised me a drama about a back-alley healer in a fantasy world running a secret clinic for the city's impoverished souls. What Studio Makaria put out, however, is a downright cringeworthy, low-quality harem series about a nondescript guy who lives with a bunch of standard anime Little Bit Beastly monster girls. It's half an episode gone before the protagonist, dressed in this season's hottest chuunibyou fashion and behaving like a standard overpowered isekai MC, gets to actually be relevant to the story in any way. (What he does isn't even healing, it's beating the stuffing out of someone followed by an exorcism.) It's eminently skippable. The other day, my watch group also watched LucasFilm's last pre-Disney non-Star Wars original feature Strange Magic. It really is quite something... in a bad way. The only way I can describe it is that it's like what you'd get if you described a Disney musical to a studio in a country where Disney musicals don't exist and then asked them to make one... it's subtly wrong in so many fundamental ways that it manages to be off-putting and even a little upsetting without actually crossing the line into being unwatchably bad. It stands quite amply as an example of why George Lucas should not write. Ever.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    When I saw this just now, the most horrid thought entered my mind and I figure "Why should I suffer alone? Share the wealth." This goofily-proportioned take on the Zaku should be the MS-06PM Zaku II PM... for "Pixar Mom". It's built like the mom from The Incredibles.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the first two episodes of Catch Me at the Ballpark. It... exists. It's not bad, but as a slice of life series what it is is nondescript. It's competently animated but absolutely nothing about it stands out or draws attention. Generic work events happen to generic employees at a generic ballpark. It has all the flavor and spice of a plain flour tortilla served with a glass of tapwater. The Too-Perfect Saint: Tossed Aside By My Fiance and Sold to Another Kingdom is... ... ... ... ... y'know how a lot of old fairy tales involve the princess or whatever being treated like total cr*p by their own family for basically no reason? Yeah, this is that but with a standard otome novel Lady Saint protagonist. Somehow, her incredible achievements, awe-inspiring Holy power, and constant service mean nothing and everyone hates her guts because she doesn't smile? Somehow, this is enough for her fiance and her own parents to gleefully and vindictively break off her engagement and literally sell her to another country. It's such a lazy and paper-thin setup for the standard "jilted girl discovers living well is the best revenge" story that it's honestly impossible to take seriously. Season two of I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years is as bland and inoffensive as I remember the previous season being. I guess they're kind of doing a Konosuba thing since the goddess responsible for isekai-ing the protagonist is now doing MLM-style public speeches after being demoted to supervising just one world for her irresponsible dispensing of standard isekai superpowers?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    There's some really good worldbuilding in some of those short stories. The audio dramas have some interesting stuff too. It's actually kind of weird how many random civvies SMS is willing to take on and train for yuks. Not just the actor who plays Shin Kudo in Bird Human, but even Sheryl Nome does a stint as an SMS trainee in the drama CDs as prep to play a pilot in a TV drama being produced in the Frontier fleet. (Kinda-sorta explaining how she's able to do a passable job of maneuvering Michel's VF-25G when he gets hurt.) Then there's the bit where Luca and L.A.I. are training to solve the whole Sharon Apple problem by creating a stable AI for unmanned fighters by basing them on the personalities of Luca's classmates.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    So... that's a bit tricky, since the short stories were run in several different publications including the Macross Frontier novelization (in Vol.4), the Macross Frontier visual collection books, Macross Ace, and in Kadokawa's bimonthly magazine The Sneaker. The easiest way to get almost all of them is to get the two anthologies: Macross Frontier: Frontier Memories and Macross Frontier: Frontier Diaries. Each volume had a new short story written exclusively for it, and between the two of them they collect all but one of the short stories that were published in Macross Ace and The Sneaker as well as the one that got published in the Sheryl Nome Visual Collection. IIRC, the only one that isn't in either volume is Cosmic Egg, which is in the 4th volume of the Macross Frontier TV novelization and in Macross Ace Vol.1. I only managed to score my copies very recently... my main copies have been the ones in Macross Ace and The Sneaker. There's dramatic and there's that. lol That's to be expected... it's a boss machine and the most advanced VF in the game that you get is one that canonically can barely keep up with it because there's nothing to keep the fleshy meats in the seat from feeling the g-forces.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Surely you jest. 😜 Mylene is Fire Bomber's Only Sane Woman! She does more to keep Basara on task than anyone else in the band or in the series as a whole. Ray's too burned-out by a decade-plus of Basara's BS to muster a decent response half the time, Veffidas is too lost in the rhythm to participate in a conversation, and their label's manager Akiko is never around. She's the lone breakwater preventing Basara's madness from sweeping the band away... and also the best character in the series. (That she at no point attempts to garrote Basara with his own guitar strings is a testament to her sheer focus, commitment, and force of will.) Mylene is seemingly so good at wrangling weirdos and eccentrics that she's briefly able to keep Quamzin Kravshera himself on-side and on-task in Macross 30. Even Vrlitwhai Kridanik and Moruk Laplapmiz struggled at that, arguably making her better qualified to claim strategic weapon status than the Ghost!
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Veering back for a moment to this strange statement from the translation of the Macross 30 novelization... This at least partly aligns with material from Macross Frontier, wherein Luca's three QF-4000 series Ghosts were also equipped with a fully autonomous air combat AI albeit under restraints and only with the special permission of the New UN Government. (It pays to be the heir to a megacorporation, I guess?) A production version of the Ghost X-9 would be under the same, or even stricter, restrictions. That said, to call it a strategic weapon with impact rivaling that of an ICBM is exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. It's a high-performance unmanned fighter with mobility exceeding 10G, but it's still only armed with like two dozen missiles and five laser machine guns. It has low operational versatility and low endurance (because of its small size, high propellant consumption, limited armament, etc.). It could probably destroy a few buildings, but it's nowhere near the threat level of even a tactical reaction warhead never mind a strategic one. That said, it's also a rather odd thing for Havamal to have... in Macross 30 it's kind of a plot point that they've gone off the grid a bit because they're acting outside their orders and are using whatever resources they can borrow from the local NUNS or use their clout to have manufactured locally. I think the AIF-7S actually makes more sense, esp. since Leon shoots down like half a dozen of the bloody things in short order, where four was a damn near insurmountable task for the most elite Special Forces of the previous generation.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    https://www.ebay.com/itm/373974751561?_skw=Macross+30+Complete+Visual&itmmeta=01JR9K47P233Z5SX4QR18GV1A1&hash=item5712a1d949:g:~qIAAOSwFVlkiBx5&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA0FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1dYk6r4Z0lm4Od%2FduNfKLDLrJfTY8uhbuV95esAP1Skm1%2BlvHvfYp5Y3Kz6w9n6xJQR%2FAwPk%2FioUnXX9PIhzkVcctc3OqneZBbo8LeBy6XcyenxHUksyoCN7RpDvwY%2FMBPHu9X2x0Bo1TYRIHu%2B72L6OQieMxFHUySIln%2FBo92YMuZjK7j2A9wQ72YRWLCxfNRSFdqrRgq9qiC8OlHolAIEVMvH541XNQ0ECTM0VdwE9AgOTDVFp%2B6xu3B4F1EW%2BOo%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR5T7kLPCZQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/405011821668?_skw=Macross+30+Complete+Visual&itmmeta=01JR9K47P2ADE1WGWVSRZ93395&hash=item5e4c95f464:g:8g0AAOSw9iBmW98d&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA8FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1e7I3fQaTqtjloRPqB%2B0tSfLkoTHr9OEjHoNLj%2FD1xNvNFlNCOWd3cdX0l3%2BGlTCmsJVVmr7zUsnGDEtcxFzsP4c1abDI9Vz6X1Ah1qQ2y%2BhfrJXDd%2BfN%2Bq80KQwdolW%2BTKPEs1ZNCCis3jC2aJSCGHRkRpfLtR%2FfH20aSV%2B%2F78uyrU77%2BGvfxrifktWJcYyd%2F5hNVSh4RQ%2FOGh6KD996y6%2Bgr8fnWyqaf1K3KkybW3WAkHHc6xIp75Fp%2BIkqguqeo9DtJEKoiy6yD%2BvkHdSmdyrjMFvLrP%2FXpVOqAPZHUfTw%3D%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR5T7kLPCZQ There are a couple copies floating around for actually-pretty-reasonable prices on eBay. https://order.mandarake.co.jp/order/detailPage/item?itemCode=1292489743&ref=list&keyword=Macross 30 Visual&lang=en And one on Mandarake too, in the Nagoya store.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Eggs are too expensive for that! D'you mean the one that comes packaged with the game's Limited Edition? It's actually not very good. The paper's quite thin, making it poor for scanning, and the actual content's not much. The Visual Complete Guide is arguably better as a reference for the designs, since it's like 4x the size and the paper's higher-quality.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The AIF-9B's not in the Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy game. It seems Ukyo Kodachi gave Havamal a bit of an upgrade when writing the novel version of the story. In the game, that same scene where Leon is attacked by Ghosts shortly after he arrives in orbit of Uroboros has AIF-7S Ghosts instead. The game only has two/three versions of Ghost in it: Macross Plus's X-9 Ghost and the Frontier AIF-7S/QF-4000 Ghost, as noted in the Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy Visual Complete Guide.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Huh, thank you! 👍 I don't have a physical copy of that game, so I've never had a print copy of the manual for same. In hindsight, it's weird that every other mecha is referred to by its proper name and designation in the multiple official visual books and guidebooks and whatnot that the game had but the Ghost is just "Ghost" everywhere. It's a shame so many other resources forget that one exists too. It'd be interesting to hear how that properly fits into the development history of the other Ghosts. Esp. since it's using the developer designation not the military's.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That is the textbook definition of "damned by faint praise". The UC is something you kind of have to introduce people to in order, otherwise things just don't flow correctly. Of course, Zeta is also a product of the time in which it was made... and it very much reflects the sexist attitudes of the late Showa era in the writing for Emma and Reccoa. The things they do make sense in context, but definitely seem strange viewed through the lens of modern western cultural attitudes on gender roles. Like the song goes, "It was acceptable in the 80's". At least it's not quite as bad about it as, say, Southern Cross which directly invokes "marriage is a woman's happiness" by NAME at the very start as a way of justifying its protagonist's flaky behavior. Still havin' a great time with The Apothecary Diaries tho. That's some quality material. Enough that I'm looking into picking up the light novel.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    An explanation which doesn't at all fit with the rest of the setting. Nobody's out there using batteries powered by some high-gravity hellworld. The New UN Forces ships, fighters, and other mecha are powered by thermonuclear reactors. So are civilian spacecraft. Conventional military and civilian vehicles are powered by hydrogen combustion engines for the most part, and EX-Gear scaled power suits run on fuel cells. From what we see of emigrant planets, municipal energy grids seem to be primarily renewables with wind farms and solar panels on prominent display (presumably backed up with lossless OTM energy capacitors in place of chemical batteries for storage and probably backup power via thermonuclear reactor plants). It does not make sense if you think about it. Banipal's another one that doesn't really make sense in context. Who needs something as primitive as fossil fuels when your civilization has cheap, clean, and ubiquitous ultra-high efficiency thermonuclear power and the technology to make renewables ultra-high efficiency with room temperature superconductors and lossless energy storage media? Unless it's not really coal as we know it, but fold carbon which is sometimes (rarely) called "fold coal". Naturally occurring deposits of high purity fold carbon left over from a past supernova would be worth mining and have practical applications. (It's implied this is also why Galactic Whales are hunted.) Given the effort the New UN Forces clearly went to to put this weapons research facility in a hideously inaccessible and dangerous place, one has to suspect that it's probably up to something illegal too. It makes sense, considering the circumstances these colonies were set up under. After all, Humanity's grasp of fold technology was not exactly great at the time of the First Space War. Low purity fold carbon and an incomplete understanding of the mechanics of space folding left Human-made fold systems somewhat less precise and capable than they would have liked. Planets that were days or weeks or even months away from the Earth became a lot more accessible as Humanity's grasp of fold technology improved. Fold navigation became more precise and efficient, and fold communications networks were built up across Humanity's sphere of influence to make communication faster and more reliable. Trips that used to take weeks or months were cut to days or even hours. The kind of seismic shift in communication and transportation that occurred with the invention of things like the telegraph or steam ships that made it way more possible for a central government to keep tabs on things. Or, if you're the cynical type, an excuse to test the next main fighter prototype in live combat in a way that nobody will complain about "reckless endangerment" or "instigation". Mikumo's case was a bit different, since she was created not by the government but by a private corporation's illegal genetic laboratory. Unfortunately, Macross Delta sweeps these implications under the rug along with several other unfortunate topics it notes and then glosses over like how Xaos's participation in the war is technically illegal. I have a feeling the end result was probably something like the government insisting Mikumo be given all the same freedoms as any other sentient being protected by interstellar law. (i.e. they can't treat her like a lab animal, force her to fight, etc. the way they were doing previously.) The funny thing is that the Macross Chronicle Technology Sheet for unmanned fighters seems nearly as frustrated with it as I am, as it insistently refers to the military-use Ghosts of the Frontier era as QF-4000 series, not AIF-7 series. There are a couple sources that've mentioned improved variants of the QF-3000... the EX type comes from a Master File book, which actually launches into an explanation of how the EX variant is a model intended for "export" (meaning deep space operations with emigrant fleets) and the distinctions between the AIF and QF numbering systems. The Sky Angels QF-5000 is similar in that respect. I'm still trying to find a source that actually calls the Ghosts in Macross VF-X2 "AIF-9B". The one book I have that talks about them just calls them "Ghost", the same way that the in-game UI does. WRT manned fighters controlling unmanned ones... it's implied that VFs with electronic warfare capabilities are able to do that, though the only ones explicitly mentioned as being able to do so are IIRC the RVF-171, YF-25, RVF-25, and VF-27. (The VF-31 and Sv-262 are seemingly also able to command drones, though it is not clear if this requires any special equipment to control just two. Master File implies the VF-31 can control a large number of unmanned fighters with special equipment added.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Copying this over from the MTL thread... One of the little details that Frontier got "wrong" - or rather an inconsistency it created - is the designations of unmanned fighters. It's an incredibly trivial thing to get annoyed over, so you bet my profoundly pedantic arse is irritated by it. 🤣 Both the pre-war Earth UN Forces and the post-war New UN Forces cribbed their hull symbol system and their classification systems for aircraft, missiles, etc. from the US tri-service system. It's not a particularly surprising outcome, given Japan's strategic position as a US ally, the choice of an American fighter as the basis of the VF-1, and the main countries behind OTEC and the early Unification Government being mainly the US and its allies. Anyway, the Ghosts used during the Unification Wars, the First Space War, and afterwards are all designated QF as you'd expect the military to designate an unmanned fighter. We have the QF-2200 and the QF-3000 series. Very old lore mentions that the developers are working on a QF-5000 to replace the QF-3000E eventually (this is from '84). It wasn't until after General Galaxy was formed from the merger of OTEC and various other defense companies and Ghost production resumed under their banner that we start seeing AIF numbers. Those AIF numbers are explicitly General Galaxy's internal product code for the Ghost, with the first mentioned being AIF-3Ex as the designation for their improved version of the QF-3000E designated QF-3100EX. When General Galaxy and the Macross Concern developed next-generation unmanned fighter concepts, we got the (AIF-)X-9 Ghostbird prototype. Macross Galaxy's corporate army developed that into the AIF-9V after equipping it with anti-Vajra equipment, while the Frontier fleet used two different versions of it under the names AIF-7S and QF-4000. The problem is that the designations are backwards. The civilian PMC should be referring to their Ghosts using manufacturer model numbers (AIF-7) while the military should be using the military QF designation. In the Macross Frontier drama CDs, LAI is developing a next-generation Ghost with the company internal designation AIF-X-8S, while in the movies Macross Galaxy's corporate army's operating a non-clandestine unmanned fighter with the designation QF-5100. So the Frontier situation's this weird one-off error where the designation usage is reversed... Yeah, it's probably Dr. Neumann.🤣 Not so much back to the drawing board, since the actual X-9 design ended up being produced just without the autonomous AI. It just kind of put the New UN Forces and New UN Gov't in the position of asking themselves "Wait, some of us are old enough to have seen Terminator, right?" and curtail the use of autonomous AI as a dangerously immature technology.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    New Mobile Report Gundam Wing has a lot of western fans whom it introduced to Gundam in the 90's, but overall I believe it's still considered a pretty middling installment. It had some writing trouble, and the plot kind of meanders in the second half. Zeta, on the other hand, is arguably the gold standard by which all other Gundam titles are judged in terms of its ratings success, its commercial success, and its influence on the franchise as a whole. Iron-Blooded Orphans is a really polarizing title due to how unstintingly, relentlessly DARK its story and setting are. All the same, I consider it to be the best of modern Gundam by a long way. It has a very distinctive art style, a memorable cast, and it punches like a prize fighter when it comes to its chosen social commentary. It unflinchingly commits to the franchise's War Is Hell moral message on a level most other titles don't. Understandably, that's a turnoff to a lot of viewers.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Not seeing nearly as much "Engrish as she is spoke" or "My hovercraft is full of eels" as I'd expected, but oy... the grammar. 🤣 It's not really that surprising, TBH. The novels are their own thing separate from either version of the animation, but even in the animation's continuity EX-Gear and other tech for the VF-25 had been evaluated using older model VFs. Macross the Ride, for instance, depicts the Frontier fleet using some of its domestically-produced VF-19EF Caliburns and the custom VF-19ACTIVE Nothung as testbeds for new technologies going into the VF-25 for a year or more before the events of Macross Frontier proper. (WRT the RVF-171, it's just a VF-171 with an Aegis Pack... its specs aren't any different.) They know their audience, all right. As I mentioned above, the novels are very much their own thing story-wise. It's not presented as a new/separate/distinct aircraft from the one in the actual TV anime. It's likely just some authorial confusion, since the Ghost X-9 is the common ancestor to both the QF-4000/AIF-7S and AIF-9V. (Esp. given that the novel will later explain that Luca's QF-4000 contains an authentic reproduction of the original X-9's system core.) Considering the Frontier fleet's Island-1 is basically a pre-war Earth theme park, that the local baseball team are the Tigers makes a lot of sense. After all, Japan's most famous and beloved baseball stadium is Hanshin Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya. Home field of the Hanshin Tigers and the venue for the National High School Baseball Championship (AKA "Koshien") that features so prominently in so many Japanese sports dramas. If the Frontier fleet were going to build ANY famous stadium, there's no question they'd reconstruct Koshien. This begs the question, though... if the Tigers are always losing, is there a KFC in Island-1?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Macross M3 Episode 4 "Black Celebration" takes place about 18 years before Humanity became first aware of the Vajra's existence. As such, the answer is almost certainly "No". The mission briefing presents the insectoid biological weapons as something the military developed independently at their New Asia biological weapons lab in Area V672. The clear implication in the briefing is that the military set up the camouflaged laboratory in Area V672 on New Asia because the biological weapons R&D the facility was built for is quite thoroughly illegal. (Macross Delta would later confirm that yes, genetic engineering to create living weapons/clone soldiers is very much banned by interstellar law.) The whole mission is pitched as a highly classified face-saving coverup, as the incident would otherwise result in a large number of senior officers having to resign in disgrace.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently not, given that the New UN Forces and Shinsei Industry brought him back to demonstrate the YF-24 Evolution in 2057. Someone somewhere at New Edwards TFC said "We need an absolute mad lad to demonstrate this latest bonkers thing Shinsei built." and someone else, probably someone who had a LOT of Isamu-induced grey hair, said "I know a guy." All things considered, Isamu's discipline problems aside he was basically the guy who won Project Super Nova for Shinsei with an incomplete and dangerous prototype. On its own, that does kind of explain why Shinsei Industry was so willing to tolerate his subsequent shenanigans.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    So... I've been watching The Apothecary Diaries, and having an absolute ball of a time with it. It's like Ascendance of a Bookworm, if that series had the romcom dynamics of Ouran High School Host Club. Maomao and Jinshi are an absolute delight to watch. I meant to only do one episode a day, but I've shot through an entire season in the space of about two. It's just that good. Gundam has always been very heavily dependent on its one formula... though I have to admit quite a few of the titles they've released recently have been pretty underwhelming or even outright badly written. It's not uncommon for them to have a middling title every so often, but lately it's felt like a string of stinkers in quick succession. I kind of feel like GQX is going to end up being my breaking point with Gundam. I've never liked those "for want of a nail" alternate timeline stories where everything's mostly the same but slightly twisted. GQX's plot is one of those, basically the UC's version of the incredibly overused "What if Nazi Germany won World War II?" AU. Something Gundam's licensed games already did to death in Gihren's Greed. My feeling is that if a series is going to intentionally do an alternate universe story then it's time to Go Big or Go Home, y'know? Do something wild and different not just "the universe where character X parts their hair on the other side"... unless you're doing it as a joke.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    "AAA" game development has been headed in this direction for a long time, price-wise. It was never a matter of "if" they would cross the threshold of $60/game, only "when". Studio spending on game development has only increased, while average sales volumes for games haven't really grown at the same rate. About 5,000 games have been developed for the Nintendo Switch and only about 2% of those have sold more than 1M units. Taking the simplest possible case of a game with no physical sales and no marketing, if your retail price point is $60 you need to move 24K copies for every $1M you spend developing it just to have any hope of breaking even after the retailer's cut. If you spend more than $41M developing your game, you need to be a Top 100 game with over 1M sales to break even. Some first-party Nintendo games like ToTK are rumored to have exceeded $100M. So Nintendo's looking at the ugly calculus of their profit margin and, instead of focusing on leaner development and tighter scopes for games are opting to raise game prices to buy themselves more breathing room. At $80/game, the sales per $1M is down to 18K. Open world games in particular are massive money pits, and Nintendo seems to be leading with one.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It can be... it depends on the period and the context. The timeframe and model we're talking about - the VF-3000 in the late 2010s - is very much a "small batch" situation where very low double digit or high single digit numbers are on the table. Especially given that the VF-3000 never entered actual production anywhere and the handful of units that the military got were purely for evaluation purposes. This is twenty years before the VF-17 and still more than a decade before the ramp-up of emigration that supported the VF-11's huge production volume. It's not really any bigger than the VF-3000, it just has a slightly longer nose... and the VF-3000 as a whole was designed with fighter-bomber capability in mind. They had other options on the table too, like the actual VB series that kicked off around that time. IIRC, in Macross M3 that's more or less explicitly the case... the Dancing Skulls are there to escort the Algenicus and oversee testing of the VF-5000. There's actually even multiple YF-11s on the Algenicus at the time. Max and Milia's input is said to have been critical for selecting the canard version of the design for production. Macross Plus itself directly acknowledges that there are multiple prototypes of both the YF-19 and YF-21. The units under active test in the OVA/Movie are the No.2 prototypes of their respective designs. Some official artbooks for the OVA and movie also talk about and even show pictures of the No.1 prototypes that preceded them. Official media usually lists three, sometimes four, YF-19 prototypes that were used for testing before the VF-19A was approved for production. Master File includes those four in its version, and adds a second group of four. Official media typically stops numbering YF-21 prototypes after No.2, and doesn't properly describe any YF-22s. Master File does. Maybe just the limitations of the system at the time... the Sega Dreamcast was not the most powerful console out there even in its heyday, and it took some real engine magic to actually do highly detailed background textures with a sense of depth to them like in Eternal Arcadia. Hm... I'm not sure that would reduce manufacturing costs, due to material requirements. As far as we know, the Inertia Vector Control System uses a very high-purity fold carbon core that is very difficult for even factory satellites to produce in large quantities where the Inertia Store Converter has a fold quartz core that cannot be synthesized with present technology and is subject to restrictions on mining and trade in fold quartz. The initial-type Variable Glaug was modeled on the VF-4 and the Glaug battle pod, neither of which had an inertia control system like that, so I'd assume it was not a factor in that design. The Neo Glaug was originally intended as an unmanned fighter, which has no reason to care about protecting the fleshy meats it wouldn't be carrying. The Neo Glaug bis might benefit from it, as it's a manned derivative of the Neo Glaug with all the performance that implies as a high-end 4th Generation VF design, but the only pilots we ever see in them are fairly elite and might not need the help. Older explanations for the VF-3000's very limited presence attributed it to issues in the design caused by simply scaling up the VF-1's airframe. This supposedly gave its joints a tendency to slip. Newer explanations of the VF-3000's rarity follow the same explanation that Master File adopts. Namely, that the VF-3000 was developed internally at Stonewell Bellcom after the war as a sort of internal rival/alternative to the VF-4 as a VF-1 successor aircraft that the company ultimately dropped of its own volition when it became clear that the VF-4 would become the next main fighter with just a few test aircraft produced. The VF-11 came about a decade later, as a successor to the VF-4 and VF-5000.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    You'd think, but not really. It's actually kind of jarring and out of character how Lacus is demoted to a distressed damsel and doesn't really do anything for most of the movie until the big bad assaults her... after which her only real role is fanservice and delivering an upgrade to Kira that lets him Mary Sue his way through the final battle. I tried to be fair to the film and actually went to see it twice while it was in theaters. It's beautifully animated, but the writing is SO lazy that it's painful and it still has that Gundam SEED problem of aggressively samey design for characters and mobile suits alike. The enemy mobile suits are the worst of the lot, looking a lot like someone just tossed a Gyan head onto a generic Gundam body. Getting started on this season's new anime in a bit. I've picked up three so far in addition to the continuing titles from last season: The Too-Perfect Saint: Tossed Aside by My Fiance and Sold to Another Kingdom Catch Me at the Ballpark! Once Upon a Witch's Death
  23. Seto Kaiba
    What you're describing there is normal franchise writing, which is not at all what I'm talking about. I actually quite enjoyed The Clone Wars for what it was. The connections I'm talking about aren't subtle in any way. In many cases, they make up a significant part of the entire show in question. IMO, it shows a rather profound lack of imagination (or perhaps a lack of confidence) when almost every new Star Wars series seems to have to be a spinoff or a sequel to the one well-received show that just happens to have been made by LucasFilm's Chief Creative Officer 17 or so years back.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I think you may have missed a key point earlier on... Andor is a prequel to Rogue One and therefore has a modest number of callbacks to the Original Trilogy, but that's different from what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is Disney Star Wars near-constantly depending on nostalgia for one very specific Star Wars title: the Star Wars: the Clone Wars cartoon. Rebels and The Bad Batch are direct sequels to The Clone Wars, picking up characters and plot threads from it. Ahsoka is a direct sequel to Rebels, featuring a character who was introduced in The Clone Wars (and even namedrops the main witch character from The Clone Wars). The Mandalorian's Mandalorians are from a faction from The Clone Wars and their traditions are too. The Book of Boba Fett is the same, but it also brings in the Pykes and Cad Bane from The Clone Wars. The Acolyte is all about the force witches based on their depiction in The Clone Wars. Tales of the Jedi alternates between being a The Clone Wars prequel and side story. Tales of the Empire alternates between being a side story and a sequel. Tales of the Underworld might be the most blatant one of the lot, being the backstory for one Clone Wars original character and a sequel to another's. Andor, Resistance, and Skeleton Crew feel like the only only corners of the Star Wars universe that are largely free of the shadow of Darth Filoni. (Not completely free, Saw Gerrera is one of his creations too...)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It has less singing, yes... Lacus is basically demoted to a macguffin rather than a character with actual agency in the story.
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