Seto Kaiba

DYRL. If the picture on the blog is anything to go by, the sheet is covering this, this, and this.

Exactly which version of Roy's death is better is always going to be a matter of personal opinion, though it probably is worth noting that in DYRL it wasn't nearly as traumatic for Claudia, who seemed to think that was probably the way he would've wanted to go. Y'know, I don't think we've ever gotten an explanation for that directly from Kawamori. It's probably a function of DYRL Hikaru's somewhat different U.N. Spacy career, where he's introduced as an officer (and in the game adaptation of the movie, was a member of Skull squadron on the Prometheus before the war even started) and skipped that intermediate phase where he was just a team leader. On the other hand, the creators of the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA did come up with a post-facto explanation for Hikaru bypassing the VF-1J altogether while they were fleshing out the backstory of both their new OVA and DYRL, which it treats as the canon version of Space War 1. Initially, only the VF-1J was compatible with the GBP-1S Protect Armor, so the existing VF-1Js were pressed into service as Armored Valkyries rather than being equipped with SP-1 series Super Parts and remaining in general service like the VF-1A and VF-1S. (As a matter of interest, Macross II's creators also do mention that the GBP-1S was later adapted to work with all existing VF-1 variants including the VF-1A, VF-1S, and VF-1D. The latter came as something of a surprise, since the D model was generally believed not to exist in the DYRL continuity... a rationale for it not appearing was also provided)

What he got the boot for here on MacrossWorld was posting a fairly racist video in a post about Doug Bendo. His status as one of the Robotech fans who seems to have come here and done little else besides post in this thread probably did him no favors in the eyes of the moderators either. What you predicted was that his interest in Macross would turn out to be a heel face turn done specifically to annoy MEMO, and that once he made up with MEMO or found some other Robotech site to take him in, we'd see a face heel turn and he'd go back to hating Macross again... which doesn't seem to have been the case.

Oh, lol... it looks like you might've been wrong about him changing sides again after being banned from MacrossWorld. It looks like he was re-banned for making a clone account to circumvent the ban on his original account, and for calling into question the honesty and accuracy of McKeever's claims that Robotech is doing better than ever by asking for actual evidence to back it up. Were it not for the slightly creepy earlier clone account where he pretended to be his own sister, I would almost be inclined to pat him on the back for standing up to the propagandists and asking that they put up or shut up... Now that Franklin fellow up at the top of the page doesn't seem to be long for the site... odds are MEMO's already working on a way to ban him for not buying McKeever's bullshit wholesale.

Link? Also, what for this time?

Joy... very little of interest for me in this one... and the prickteases didn't give me a preview page of the Metal Siren either. Really? Haven't we covered this one already? Zentradi Ships one is misc. craft from DYRL according to the promo in the blog... including that Golg Gants Charts and various flavors of shuttle. Ghost X-9 sheet's probably not going to have much of interest since we've already got one for the AIF-7S and cursory mention of the AIF-9. Hmmm... they're really draggin' the timeline out now... guess I can stop hoping they'll do a Macross II continuity in the last few issues. That first one has my attention... the second one, not so much. What's next? "The Many Dangers of Pineapple-Related Foodstuffs" as a worldguide? I foresee disappointment... probably due to a lack of detail. Bleh...

Well, there's a question that begs a definition of exactly what you consider "better off"? At least from a financial standpoint, the franchise is better off for having squirted out the mediocre, direct-to-DVD mess that we know as Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. It was made on a shoestring budget (confirmed to be less than $1 million) and sold reasonably well among the cowardly cattle of the Robotech fanbase. From a PR standpoint, it's solid gold, since it convinced quite a few fanatical Robotech fans that the promised revival was actually happening, and restored the illusion of progress to the brand... which in Robotech's case is far more important than actually making progress. Is the continuity better off? It's hard to say. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles is so bloody insubstantial and so short that it doesn't really have a chance to go anywhere or do anything. Around half of the movie is a badly executed retcon of the events of episode 85, and the other half is so devoid of actual content or story progress that the whole affair feels like an over-long intro cutscene. The retcons are slightly troublesome for people who actually care about a coherent story, but not giving a toss about continuity and obvious plot holes is pretty much par for the course when you're a "true" Robotech fan. On balance, I would say it's too early to tell what the fallout of this new direction they're taking is... though it bodes ill for the continuity of the New Generation. They've fallen back on Macross again because that's what sells... the New Generation was always a distant second to the Macross Saga in every poll and popularity contest. It doesn't help that they've been ratcheting up the prices of the MPCs steadily either, and marketing them alongside Mospeada collectibles of much higher quality at more or less the same price. The whole Maia Sterling MPC recall and the subsequent price hike for the reissue with just as many major defects as the original did a lot to erode consumer confidence in the brand and interest in future Shadow Chronicles merchandise. So they're taking the logical route and falling back on a product that they KNOW will sell no matter what.

Then, by the same token, we can handwave aside your entire series of complaints about the treatment of Roy's VF-1S since that it was destroyed isn't relevant. Insofar as what's iconic of the original series, you should take a look over at the Japanese Macross websites. What's used to represent the franchise these days is predominantly Hikaru's old VF-1J and the Macross, not Roy's VF-1S. Usually, in my experience, the "Roy's VF-1S is special/iconic" assertion tends to most frequently be made by fans who were introduced to Macross via Robotech, wherein Roy's VF-1S was a super-special, elite, fairy-dust farting one-of-a-kind mechanical wonder. In Macross, it simply isn't that allfired special, nor was the mook flying it. DYRL showed it for what it was... utterly interchangeable with any of the other VF-1S out there, and what mattered was the pilot. In that case, as in the TV series, the story wasn't about Roy, it was about Hikaru. Roy's role was as a big brother figure to facilitate Hikaru's development as a character, who then exited stage left so Hikaru could grow on his own. So it's unsurprising that, at least among fans of the original, the truly "iconic" mecha are the ones most associated with the main character and the one that served as the focus of the original story... Hikaru's VF-1J and the Macross. (In much the same way, when people consider iconic mobile suits and their pilots, they immediately leap to associate Amuro Ray with the RX-78-2 rather than any of the dozen mobile suits he piloted later. That particular combination will always stand out because that's the mecha he was piloting as the audience got to know him for the first time. Very few people hear Amuro Ray and go "Oh yeah, didn't he pilot a RMS-099 Rick Dias" or "Hey, isn't that the guy who used the Re-GZ"?) Ozma Lee is probably the most superficial character homage in Macross Frontier... the resemblance to Roy is truly only skin deep. He never really becomes a mentor figure to Alto in the way that Roy was to Hikaru, and he was rather a lot less boisterous than Roy was on account of the arbitrary tragedy tacked onto his backstory in an effort to make him more interesting. Yes, he wears black and yellow, yes he's "Skull Leader", and yes he has an near-death incident with pineapple at its center, but he's no lift of Roy Focker.

Uh-huh... you mean the iconic VF-1J that Hikaru goes through about three of in the course of the original Macross series? For that matter, there's also the Macross fortress getting severely damaged at the end of the original series and outright destroyed at the end of Macross II... Ooookay... I'm not seeing how ignoring severe torso wounds so you can traumatize your girlfriend by dying in her kitchen while she's making dinner is manly or sensible. Anyone with their head screwed on straight would've gone straight to the medic after being wounded like that. Letting Roy go out with some dignity, sacrificing himself to take down Quamzin and give Hikaru and Misa a chance to escape, makes a lot more sense. Since it's piloted by the same guy as the iconic VF-1S you're so hung up on, I don't think the VF-0S really counts as a homage... Okay, this is kind of a fractured sentence... not sure quite what you're getting at here. Fact of the matter is that there was nothing distinctive about Roy's VF-1S apart from the role of its pilot in the story. In practical terms it was completely and utterly interchangeable with every other VF-1S produced. Making it into some super-important icon of the story is more a Robotech-ism than anything else, since it was a special unit in that context. Also, not all VF-1S lifts/homages have been Skull Leader homages... like the VF-2SS, VF-19S, etc. (If anything, the former was a Max/Hikaru VF-1S homage).

Probably more than just 30 once you account for the additional 534 VF-1s stored aboard ARMD-01 and ARMD-02... but the point stands that Roy's VF-1S was far from unique even aboard the Macross in the TV series. Personally, I never found the destruction of Roy's VF-1S in DYRL objectionable. I've always felt that DYRL allowed Roy to die with much more dignity than the TV series did by letting him go out in battle instead of the eminently nonsensical "Hey, I have no more will to live... let's go have pineapple salad" end.

Really? I can honestly say I've never met a Robotech fan who wanted Tommy to churn out Robotech comics on a regular basis to replace the old comics, or thought that he would keep doing miniseries titles on a regular basis. In the Robotech fandom, comic books and novels are second-class content at best. Continuing the story of the original series has always been what Robotech fans wanted most, and it's no stretch at all to say that while most fans see the new comics as idle curiosities or vaguely interesting side stories, most of them would much rather see Tommy work on the next half-assed direct-to-DVD movie. Admittedly, the novels attached an ending where Carl Macek never intended for there to be one. In his "vision" for the unplanned and unpursued Robotech III, Robotech IV, and Robotech V, Macek explained that he wanted the story to essentially by cyclical, with the whole affair ending with an Admiral Hunter reminiscing about how the whole mess got started, looping back onto episode 1 from a planned episode numbering somewhere around 365. What Tommy did was toss that stuff was largely never intended to be there in the first place, and attempted to modify the New Generation's ending to provide a new villain for the ongoing story... and it didn't work terribly well.

Admittedly, you might have a point there... some of the more atrociously off-model moments in the old Robotech comic books are right up there with the famously-awful work of Rob Liefeld in terms of anatomical improbabilities, oddly shifting body proportions, and a bizarre inability to understand how people's bodies interact with objects around them. I wouldn't evens say that the Waltrips were exempt from these screwups, since the size of Jack Baker's chin seemed to change from panel to panel, as did the size of pretty much every character's hairdo on occasion. We have to cut them a little slack since these guys were not exactly big-name publishers, and their amateurish quality of work could easily be chalked up to their relative inexperience. Still, the one thing that probably killed more Robotech comics than any other factor was the tendency many series had to have exciting looking, reasonably well-drawn covers and contents that completely fail to live up to the promise of their packaging. "Interesting cover, bland comic" was a real problem, particularly once Academy Comics got ahold of the license. "Moderate activity" seems to consist primarily of MEMO banishing anything that resembles dissent to the hidden "Cannon Fodder" forum, and people plugging podcasts. Saying that the Robotech franchise is back where it was about 10-15 years ago is probably giving the current state of affairs rather more credit than it deserves. At least prior to 2001 there was a steady trickle of low-quality comics and novels to give the fans the feeling that the franchise was moving forward even after Carl Macek's third failed attempt to continue the story. These days, literally the only signs of life from the franchise have been overpriced toys trotted out at a rate of one or two per year. That some fans actually take ill-informed, boorish people like MEMO, Maverick, and Doug Bendo seriously is a pretty sad sign of the times for Robotech. For all practical purposes, the franchise died back in 2000 when Carl Macek's latest pet project (Robotech 3000) was canceled and Tommy Yune took over.

Totally... though for me the most interesting bit of this VF-4 translation (thanks Sketchley!) was the mention that the VF-4 does have alternate weapons modules that can be mounted in the forearms. I'd always thought that was dubious since I first saw it in a magazine article, but it looks like it's canon. Actually, as seen in Macross Zero the VF-0 didn't have reaction engines, it was using overtuned conventional turbofans, so the larger size is probably part fuel storage, part extra mass for the larger engine.

Even if it's not your thing, the job has to be done by someone. If the whole series of incidents surrounding dougbendo and Pizza the Hutt proved anything, it's that MEMO is NOT the right man for the job. Regardless of whether it was "your thing" or not, that MEMO was gleefully looking the other way while his cronies dougbendo and Pizza the Hutt were busily calling most of the site's active membership everything from trolls to pedophiles and child pornographers should have prompted a reaction from you without needing me, HP, Viper, and a handful of other people getting on your case about it. Having to wait days or weeks for moderator intervention definitely did nothing to help the already-tense situation. Now that's a stretch... even by the standards of independent publishing houses, the Robotech comics were, at best, nothing special. One of the most common complaints that crops up whenever they're mentioned is that issues often had decent cover art that caught the eye, and that the contents were almost invariably of substantially lower quality. Calling them "good or better" is definitely reaching a bit. Some of them had vaguely interesting stories (and I'm saying this as someone who has all but two or three of them), but more often than not the stories were trite, cliched, and boring, with flat, uninteresting characters and art that not only failed to ape the animation style of the original works, but frequently couldn't even stay on-model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaw Honestly, I think the decision to place the majority of the old comics and the novels outside of the continuity was easily the smartest decision Tommy has made during his tenure as creative director. The old comics and the novels diverged from the series far too frequently and contradict each other and the series far too often for their effect on the continuity to be anything other than detrimental.

The Valkyrie at the bottom of that chart is a VF-0A. Hey, it's progress... they've acknowledged the missile disparity and the ramjet engines in the wings... that alone is a nice step forward.

Unless the Robotech forums out there have undergone a dramatic transformation since last I looked, the forums are definitely not a place that will entice anyone to purchase the non-canon expanded universe material. Usually, the fans who frequent those forums react badly to mention of the old comic books and novels, with a range of responses that vary from mild antipathy to the sort of vehement condemnation that leaves you wondering if the poster's family was murdered with (or perhaps by) the expanded universe title(s) in question. Once in a while you get someone who actually likes them, but they're exceptional cases and have been growing increasingly rare since the Robotech Purists have scourged fans of the comics, novels, and Japanese originals from their midst on most sites. Well, most of them would be rather difficult to obtain without resorting to eBay or similar measures, since Harmony Gold hasn't seen fit to reprint the novels which bridge the gaps between sagas, the Sentinels novels which wrap the whole thing up, or most of the old comics. Some people pursue them as simple curiosities, evidence of a bygone age that will never come again... like taking a little kid to a museum display of obsolete technology so they can wonder how people ever got things done with monochrome green and black screens and 5" floppy disks. Others pursue them out of nostalgia (duh). Robotech's continuity is such a mess that nobody but the purists actually give a toss about it. Those who don't give a toss about continuity usually pursue them simply for their own sake as stand-alone stories. It's this cavalier attitude towards continuity that contributes substantially to making debates on Robotech sites exercises in frustration and repetition... like arguing with a deaf macaw that only knows three phrases.

At present, it doesn't look like there's any way for Harmony Gold to salvage what remains of the Robotech franchise except tossing the entire established setting and continuity out the window and starting from scratch under the direction of someone who actually knows what the hell they're doing. This is more-or-less a fair description of what they hope the live action movie will be... a reboot, created by someone competent, that stays well clear of all the intellectual property issues which make continuing the story of the "original 85" a complete boondoggle. Really, with so much of their merchandise aimed solely at nostalgic or obsessive long-time fans it doesn't seem at all out of place for Harmony Gold to reprint the more popular novelizations (in short, just the adaptations of the TV series) to appeal to the fans who are either curious or have loved their original copies to death... which many McKinney fans seem to have done over the years. Unless you're overly nostalgic, curious, or just plain stupid, there's very little reason to buy any of the merchandise in the Robotech.com store... particularly with the store's atrocious customer service record.

I know... I know... I'm just using the "flushing them" because I never liked them as a plot device, and thus it's somewhat therapeutic for me to picture them being chucked unceremoniously out the nearest airlock. Max and Milia would probably have had them hospitalized like they did with the captured enemy pilot. On the whole, I probably would've been a lot happier with the plot of ep12-13 if it'd been Varauta soldiers breaking into the ship and hijacking the fold system by force rather than having the somewhat silly (IMO) spirita vampires doing most of the legwork. Unlikely, the whole vampire business didn't really tie into the discovery of spirita regeneration by the U.N. Spacy... that was caused by letting their hospital patient listen to the radio and theorizing based on how Sivil retreated after meeting Basara. Deleting the spirita vampires from the equation probably wouldn't have had any effect on that part of the story at all.

Quite... while I won't belabor the issue of Basara bearing most or all of the hallmarks of a Canon Sue, specifically those of a "God Mode Sue", it's pretty much beyond dispute that had Max and Milia rounded up all the spirita vampires in Gepernich's advance reconnaissance party early on and flushed the lot of them out the nearest airlock they would likely have never discovered the spirita regeneration phenomenon. Without that discovery, we wouldn't have had the spirita farm plan that drove most of the plot later on. City-7's actually surprisingly small... the whole dome has an area of less than 19.5 square kilometers (or about 7.5 square miles if you like imperial notation), and that something like a fifth of its area is devoted to parkland. Since it's highly unlikely the vampires would set up shop in the city proper where anyone could easily spot and report them, it leaves just the sewers, the parkland, and the Akusho area. Remember, this isn't an open community like a city on Earth, where anyone can get in and out without attracting notice... this is a domed city traveling in space... a literal city in a bottle. This would almost certainly make the search substantially easier.

Eh... that might've been a concern initially, but the public relations fiasco and resulting loss of morale caused by repeated failures to catch the "vampires" and the subsequent escalation of their attacks would've reached a break-even point with the potential damage done by sweeping the ship and/or declaring a state of emergency. Once the vampires managed to infiltrate the fold section, trigger an emergency separation of the Battle-7, and fold the city section away from the rest of the fleet the damage to the public's confidence in the government and military would've been far worse than it would've been had they simply swept the ship and had done with it. "We're taking every measure possible to ensure the safety of our citizens" sounds a helluva lot better than "Sorry we dropped the ball and let the enemy abduct 350,000 civilians and repeatedly place them in mortal jeopardy, it won't happen again". By that point, the citizens probably would have been quite happy with a large-scale military intervention... yet the military and civilian police all but ignored the vampires on City-7, and allowed them to conduct further large-scale attacks well up through at least episode 34, a good six months later. When you think about it that way, the people who barged into Milia's office and demanded her removal were probably well justified in that demand. Despite knowing exactly what the vampires look like, and the vampires themselves not taking any pains to disguise themselves and occasionally walking around in broad daylight (Ep33), both the police and the military failed to put a stop to the attacks. Calling their security measures "inadequate" doesn't even begin to cover it. Aside from the fact that Batman can and has used guns and lethal force on occasion, particularly back in the silver age, having Max and Milia more or less ignore the vampire problem on their ship doesn't preserve their integrity as characters, it damages it. Milia is supposedly feels a great maternal protectiveness towards her citizens, and yet she sits on her hands and bitches at Max about the vampire problem, and Max, the slightly uncomfortable set of shoulders on which the duty of protecting the entire fleet rests heavily, sits around and is griped at by Milia while protesting that they don't have enough information. That's not preserving the character, that's sacrificing characterization and the character's perceived competence at their job to inflate a minor nuisance into a major threat so that Basara's singing would be necessary. It would've taken a certain something away from the borderline Canon Sue characterization of Basara and the show's entire magical spirit energy bollucks if Max and Milia were able to upset the whole spirita farm main plot by chucking all of Gepernich's advance scout out the nearest airlock and watching the explosive decompression pop them like party balloons. Eh... I think that too is a case where the damage to the public's confidence caused by inaction exceeded the damage that could've been caused by preventative action. Which is more damaging... a widespread Vajra attack throughout the entire ship, or having NUNS forces flamethrower the bloody things to death before they can cause trouble? If you said the latter, there's probably something wrong with you. The citizens probably would've been patting the NUNS troops on the back and breathing a sigh of relief that their homes and lives didn't get horribly farted up along with the ship they're living in instead of picking through debris and contemplating a growing environmental crisis.

Oh yes, I find it almost perversely amusing that after decades spent obfuscating Robotech's origins and exaggerating the importance of the TV series, Harmony Gold openly admits that Robotech's Expanded Universe was nothing but a series of knee-jerk attempts to wring a few more bucks out of the comatose franchise without getting their "creative team" involved, and that the resulting mess is so badly executed and so inconsistent with the core story that there's no way that they can classify any of it as canon. Well, even McKeever somewhat sheepishly admits that the reason the "expanded universe" titles are essentially non-canon is that they were created with little or no oversight or input from Harmony Gold's creative team. The end result is that their stories often contradict the "core continuity" of the series and each other, incorporating a great many stories, characters, and mecha which simply don't fit with Robotech's story and design aesthetic. Likely the frequent "borrowing" from other copyrighted sci-fi works like Macross: Flashback 2012, Independence Day, etc. is also a factor. If you actually take the time to examine the new Robotech material, you'll see that the only part of Robotech's expanded universe that they're overly picking up and running with is Jason and John Waltrip's Robotech II comics. The new stories pick up literally right where the old Sentinels comics left off when they were canceled, with Edwards going on a backstabbing spree before murdering Kyle and kidnapping Minmei. There are superficial similarities to End of the Circle in RTSC, but the primary title that's Tommy is using as inspiration shaking down for ideas to use is the new Battlestar Galactica series.

Owww... brain hurting... Anyway, I still don't understand why Robotech fans have such a difficult time accepting that the 1,210m long SDF-1 could accommodate 86,000 people in reasonable conditions when they readily and unquestioningly accept numbers that make that look positively conservative by comparison: SDF-1 Macross Length: 1,210m Capacity: 86,000 SDF-3 Pioneer (Post-Refit) Length: 1,240m (counting fins) / approx. 1,200m (w/o fins) Capacity: 120,000 SDF-4 Liberator (fmrly. Izumo) Length: 1,305m Capacity: 180,000 Ark Angel-class Colony Ship Length: 2,140m (w/o antennae and fins) Capacity: 750,000 On what grounds are they taking issue with the SDF-1 when willingly accept that there are ships that are only marginally larger that accommodate as many as 100,000 more people with no problems, or for that matter a ship barely twice the SDF-1's size that accommodates nearly nine times the number of people the SDF-1 can? Did they subcontract all of their shipbuilding out to the Time Lords? Not directly, no... he's still supporting lil' dougie's bitching and openly endorsing dougie's behavior.

For me, seeing Max and Milia reverse roles like that always felt a bit unnatural... like the writers got the character descriptions backwards when they started work on the series. Well, the VF-14 (and presumably its derivatives) were supposedly selected for their excellent performance in space, and thus might be at a slight disadvantage dogfighting against a fighter designed (primarily) for atmospheric combat.

Well now, that's a statement that depends entirely on your definition of "causing trouble", isn't it? One would think that his infrequent attempts to derail this thread by presenting the same ignorant, provably-wrong garbage over and over again in his usual illiterate manner is pretty much the textbook definition of trolling. He can't possibly expect us to take anything he says seriously, so what other explanation does that leave besides malicious intent? There's also his well-known habit of coming here to spy on this and other threads for "dissident behavior" so he can then target those people for bans if they're on sites where he has authority. His activities here aren't any less malicious than they are elsewhere, they're just less blatant. Honestly, I don't think a cordial manner is any excuse for willfully and repeatedly spreading malicious misinformation, and cyber-stalking and trolling anyone who calls you out on it. You've never been in direct conflict with him over anything like that... you've been taking kind of a backhanded approach to needling him (and PTH), which he doesn't seem to fully comprehend. Of course, he's so carried away with delusions of his own cleverness for getting rid of most of the dissenting voices in his Orwellian Robotech fanboy world that he'd probably miss direct insults made right under his nose so long as they didn't call into question his credibility or authority. MEMO pays the bills, but SIGHUP is supposedly the one who does most of the actual work necessary to keep the site running. SIGHUP also doesn't seem to care, as he ignored pretty much every report of Bendo and PTH's harassment. MEMO gets most things his way there anyway, because SIGHUP doesn't seem to care. The only things that seemed to get SIGHUP moving were when the troublemakers went after him personally like PTH did, or when a good half-dozen of the site's most active members were barraging him with complaints.

Well, the record for previous incarnations of this thread is 67 pages, so we're making pretty good progress on that front, albeit unintentionally.