Seto Kaiba

It's not like it would be any kind of a loss for him or any of the others... the odds of him ever using it are at best minimal. About the best he could hope for would be to end up like Maverick_LSC, whose harridan of a wife treats his Robotech hobby as something shameful to be concealed from their family, friends, and neighbors. (Now if only she could extend the same treatment to her husband himself, we'd all be better off) Otherwise, the best he could do would be to follow in the footsteps of Jeebers*, whose only social interaction with women comes from trying (and failing) to flirt with the rare and plainly uninterested women on Rt.com and paying $7 a letter to write to "women" at long-distance dating services in the former Soviet Union. * Jeebers is well-known for his insistence that he's an expert on every field from acoustics to zoology, his attempts to pass off his ultra-left-wing political views as irrefutable fact, and his total inability to distinguish between official canon and the material he came up with for his "original" Robotech RPG, which is just D20 Future with many names changed. To be fair, the Warzone used to be quite good... but then Steve got fed up with the continual infighting over the political and religious discussions, so he banned everything resembling intelligent discussion. That ban was one of the first changes which heralded the start of the very short, very abrupt slide into the abyss for Robotech.com. Y'know, I've known Neptunekittie for something close to six years now, and I still have great difficulty believing she's supposed to be about ten years my senior. She used to be in the minority over there as someone who couldn't be arsed to write coherently or check her spelling, but now it's getting more and more common for Robotech fans to display the thought processes and literacy levels of a gang of dyslexic third-graders. Of course, these are adults who still cling to a Santa Claus-like belief that either Tommy Yune or Carl Macek will descend from on high and deliver the promised sequel that will make Robotech popular and successful for the first time since 1985, so it shouldn't really come as a big surprise. Back in the day, I was naive enough to believe there was probably a good reason why they couldn't be arsed to write like someone even half their age. Nowadays, I just assume that the "85ers" ate a lot of lead-based paint chips... probably from their low-quality Matchbox Robotech toys. Typical preachy Robotech fan, that one... he gets all up in arms whenever someone dares criticize Robotech or its creators for any reason, but when ill-informed crap is flung at Macross fans, it's totally okay. No, we're not putting RT fans on the back of the fan bus, we're putting the lot of them on the short bus instead.

It looks like we all came to more or less the same estimate of ~12 missiles overall for the VF-17's launcher assemblies, and I'd wager the same (or similar) figure probably applies to the VF-22 (which, I guess, would mean Guld probably launched his entire complement of micro-missiles in that rage-fueled attempt to destroy Isamu's YF-19) since it's a similarly cramped fuselage. In the animation, those micro-missile launchers are always going to be (to use Kouta Hirano's word) "Cosmoguns" which hold exactly enough ammunition to run out either when it's dramatic or right after the last enemy is dead. Eh, weren't the antipersonnel-scale spirita beam weapons used in the latter part of the manga offshoots of that technology anyway?

The answers to your questions are: Easy... he's a "true" Robotech fan. Intelligence is a rare commodity among Robotech fans, and spewing uninformed hate at the mention of Macross and anime in general comes with the territory. Yes, he has... he watched it on Veoh or bought a bootleg, I forget which. Either way, his initial reaction to the show on RobotechX was to label Alto a transvestite and condemn Bobby for being gay, then leaping to condemn the entirety of the series as "pro-gay propaganda". After being told to stop acting like an ass, he accused everyone present of being "pro-gay sympathizers" and that we were working to legislate homosexuality on everyone in the world in the near future. No. Generally speaking, only the most belligerent, immature, illiterate, ignorant, and downright revolting examples of Robotech fandom try to play the "all anime is pedophilia" card, and they usually tactfully forget that the age difference between Alto and Ranka or Hikaru and Minmay is much smaller than that between Robotech's Rick and Minmei, and that had he done anything with Minmei, Rick WOULD have been a child molester. He's going on a remark Tommy made about Harmony Gold trying to cut a deal with Big West, and being rebuffed. (Reportedly Harmony Gold basically just wanted to rub it in that any future Macross licenses have to go through them because of the trademark and hope that Big West'd cave) That's the other card the most ignorant of their number play... the "Macross is ripping off show X" card. Usually it's a very general observation on par with "well they both have spaceships" or "they both have giant robots that transform into jets" or other generic malarkey along those lines. A lot of them try accusing Macross of copying Gundam as though the relationship between the two shows wasn't common knowledge. Might just be the crappy quality of the bootleg he bought since he doesn't have a computer and has to do all of his posting from a video game console. The guy's a first-class moron who spent his first few weeks over on RT.com under his previous name of "Wraith_knight" (he made a clone account to get away from all the hate he provoked) trying to say Macross wasn't a more prolific franchise than Robotech because he wasn't aware of any of the Macross shows after DYRL... he later tried to claim that wasn't true and he was just "testing" me, but anybody and their dog could see it was bullshit.

It wasn't always thus... back before Maverick and MEMO decided they were experts on everything from the legal disputes over Macross to the inner workings of Warner Bros and adopted their current policy of banning anyone who pointed out their all-too-obvious bullshit there used to be a small but vocal community within the greater Robotech.com community made up of people who knew what they were talking about and weren't above little things like doing research. Unfortunately, by their very nature the members of that little community ended up as the main opposition to the relentless campaign of bullshit, misdirection, and fraud being perpetrated against the fanbase by pathological liars and wanna-be insiders MEMO1DOMINION and Maverick_LSC. Now that the deadly duo of dangerous dimwits (with added alliterative appeal) have managed to ban almost everyone who dared to disagree with their pants-on-head imbecilic assertions, the Robotech.com community has found itself shorn of its first, last, and only line of defense against the armies of ignorant twats who make up the majority of the site's population these days. Without that small cadre of experts running around behind the lines, there's no way for anyone to get a straight answer anymore. Now even simple questions like "how big was the SDF-1" are fodder for debates that run for hundreds of posts, and there're half a dozen different threads debating the whereabouts and size of the nonexistent SDF-2.

Not really, no... I think "horrific" and "downright disgusting" would probably be better words to describe a nightmare scenario like that. Of course, Tommy would probably poo out a kidney trying to find a way to fit Macross Zero into the his rebooted Robotech continuity (the "Yune-iverse"), since that'd require scrapping most of the new Wildstorm comics to accommodate the new origins of the VF-1, effectively losing much of the continuity reboot material in the process.

Didn't we already get some of that in the Glossary Sheets? I know they covered a few of the characters from the VF-X and/or VF-X 2 game.

Nah, the well hasn't dried up completely... since they still haven't reissued the Maia Sterling VF/A-6ZX Shadow fighter MPC that was recalled by the manufacturer, they'll probably reissue that and milk their Alpha and Beta for a while yet. I'd say at the very least we can expect a Marcus Rush VF/A-6IX MPC and obviously black Beta fighters for both, and at least one "Super Shadow Fighter" with the corresponding "Synchro Beta" under some character's name (probably Marcus and Alex). After that, they can still turn around and shake down Southern Cross for some MPC designs, or maybe start in with masterpiece collection editions of the enemy mecha. They've got enough crap to keep their merchandising limping along for a while yet. Whether this latest period of inactivity during the all-important 25th Anniversary will reflect poorly on them in the eyes of their investors... it's a given they don't have anything special for this occasion.

For Harmony Gold, failure's not a some-of-the-time thing it's an all-the-time thing. (Now read that back in a Phil Ken Sebben voice) At this point, pretty much everything Robotech is one big Chinese fire drill intended to simulate signs of life for the benefit of the casual observer and the optimistic fan. Nothing will actually come of the things they do, it's just pointless motion and noise to keep their hands busy so the head office doesn't decide that they're dead weight and cut them loose. It depends what you count as actual news... the announcement of the project's existence and the working name "Shadow Rising" date back to '07, right after the DVD release of the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles movie. Since that point, the only real news we've had about it has been the announcement (and subsequent retraction) that the project was on hiatus by Kevin McKeever in either late May or early June '08, and Tommy Yune's Spring '09 correction that the movie IS in fact on hold, so Harmony Gold can twiddle their collective thumbs and wait for Warner Brothers and the live-action movie to improve the franchise's prospects in the eyes of its potential investors. Other than that, there was reportedly a brief little "teaser trailer" which was shown at conventions and had turned out to be made from recycled Shadow Chronicles footage.

And without covering half the crap I was hoping it would... You say that like it's a bad thing... Well, not exactly the most interesting assortment, what must be our fourth New Macross-class ship A sheet by now, one of the ugliest Valkyries in all of Macross, and more misc. background rubbish. It's really kind of depressing that with ten issues to go, we're still getting rather a lot of filler while some of the more interesting designs languish without having even received an A sheet yet. Okay, Macross 7-era Max Jenius and Exsedol Folmo I can live with... this isn't too bad. They're some of the only sane characters in the show. I wonder if they'll play the TV series angle with this one, or if they're going to use the DYRLized one we catch snippets of in Macross 7. Okay, so we're gonna get something about the in-universe status of DYRL... there's my reason to buy this issue. Viper will be fairly happy then...

If anything, Viper is the perfect example of the disillusionment that prompts Robotech fans to gradually drift away from the franchise. He started out as a Robotech fan writing a Robotech fanfic, but the drama and stupidity of Harmony Gold's appointed representatives (Maverick, MEMO) and their little support groups of similarly brain-damaged idiots (PTH, Bendo, under their various aliases) and the banning of many friends of his from both RT.com and RTX has him about ready to swear off Robotech altogether and got him contemplating rewriting his fanfic in a pure Macross setting. No doubt... the average active span for a user on Robotech.com used to be something like six months before the tedium and inherently repetitious nature of the message boards drove them away. Now, by all accounts, they're lucky if one lasts six days. By handing the day-to-day operation of the franchise's official website over to an airline maintenance man who believes shooting a couple home movies with friends makes him a Hollywood insider and a delusional rent-a-cop who types all in caps because he hasn't figured out the shift key (our friends Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION respectively), and giving them carte blanche to ban anyone who they feel is being disruptive, they've seriously damaged their chances of a casual observer taking the franchise seriously. It really does undermine Robotech's standing in the eyes of onlookers when fans can't get answers for simple, straightforward questions on the official franchise website. That those same inept moderators will allow their toadies almost unlimited latitude and ban anyone who doesn't agree with their opinions doesn't exactly conform to the expectation that an official site should be a welcoming place for the fans. I guess they feel that their reputation's already so abysmal that a little more damage will just be pissing into the ocean, since they've done nothing to stop the often illegal actions dougbendo has taken on their behalf, harassing and threatening Harmony Gold's more vocal critics on his show. In my various dealings with these "problem children" of the Robotech fandom, I've noticed a marked trend in the circumstances surrounding the individuals who exhibit these asinine and frequently detrimental behaviors. Assuming they're not lying, all four of the principal troublemakers have distinctly unsatisfying or unglamorous day jobs: Maverick is an aircraft maintenance engineer whose wife treats his anime hobby as something shameful to be concealed from their friends and neighbors, MEMO's some kind of security guard, Doug Bendo is a BestBuy sales floor associate, and Pizza the Hutt has (or had) an unspecified but (by his own admission) undignified service industry job (which I heard he may no longer have). Now I'm no clinical psychologist and I don't remember much from the psych courses I took during my undergrad, but it doesn't take a doctorate to see that their desire to be bigshots and respected authorities in the the fanbase are an attempt to offset their dissatisfaction with being at or near the bottom of the corporate ladder.

I know, it had me chuckling a fair bit when she first came up with it. You're spot on, I was the one who first showed her Robotech, since she had asked what the hell this Robotech business I was involved in was, and why Macross's VF-1 was prominently displayed on their website. I'd love to reiterate what she said initially about RT Minmei's singing, but since it's almost entirely profanity the wordfilter here will have a field day with it. You'd be surprised. It usually doesn't happen all at once, it's a gradual thing. People like Viper who get banned or whose friends get banned one after another slowly start to lose interest in Robotech and drift off into other interests. Can you really blame him for being a bit miffed about it? After all, he probably thought getting a job at Harmony Gold would mean he'd hit the bigtime as a troll pathological liar obnoxious pain in the ass arrogant little shitstain Robotech fan and everyone would respect and admire him. Instead, even most Robotech fans hate his guts and nobody trusts him because he's a low-level functionary responsible mainly for maintaining the layers of fraud, deceit, and chicanery that keep the Robotech franchise limping along.

Eh, it was inevitable that after that collection of old concept art came to light sooner or later someone would come along and try to integrate some or all of it into Robotech on an unofficial basis. One could say the sort of scavenger mentality we're commenting on has been a part of Robotech since the very beginning when Carl Macek lengthened Macross by attaching two other shows Harmony Gold already had in its catalog of licensed properties. Harmony Gold's continuing failure to expand on the Robotech universe in any meaningful way has left gamers and whatnot who want to go beyond what's shown in the "original 85" to their own devices. It's a lot more convenient to borrow from another anime title than it is to come up with your own new mecha (as the failure to do so on Harmony Gold's part proves), and much easier to plausibly integrate material from shows which are similar or related to parts of the universe that you're already working with... which is why we see Macross mecha getting Robotech-ized for use in the Robotech RPG all too frequently. If the rumors are true, this wouldn't even be the earliest example of those sketches being pilfered for use in some Robotech context... that heavy weapons ride armor has been pointed to as the probable inspiration for Tommy's "Super Cyclone" from the Shadow Chronicles movie, and some of the other early ride armor concepts have been pointed to as likely origins for the "Silverback" jeep seen in Prelude. Of course, Tommy consulted with Tatsunoko early on, so they probably furnished him with the unused concept art from Mospeada. (I actually remember back when I first got started with the Macross II RPG that eventually became my long-running research project, one of the first things I found on the mecha while I was waiting for the RPG books to arrive was Robotech-ized stats for the VF-2SS Valkyrie II (unarmored) and VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie on unspacy.de)

As we ARE talking about Harmony Gold here, given their track record I'm thoroughly disinclined to believe that something so obviously similar to an existing Macross design was the product of mere coincidence. I find intentional imitation a far more likely explanation for the odd resemblance between the Macross 25th Anniversary logo and the one Tommy Yune recently created for Robotech. So he's finally come full circle and is back to pretending that Macross has no significance apart from being mutilated into part of Robotech. To be frank, while your post is insightful and reiterates several excellent points, we're not really that concerned with finding a way to deal with the members of the Robotech lunatic fringe. I don't mean to be rude, but given my own experience and that of many others I can't help but think of it as painfully naive (or perhaps foolishly optimistic) to say that treating the extremist fans with a modicum of civility will get you anywhere. I don't know how much time you've spent among Robotech fans, but speaking as someone who's straddled the line between the Macross and Robotech fandoms for something like six years now I feel obligated to say that more often than not "killing them with kindness" doesn't work worth a damn. Almost as a rule, the members of the Robotech lunatic fringe thrive on the hostility and conflict they so often go out of their way to provoke. They don't want informed, civil discussion and debate... they want the opportunity to shout down and insult anyone who has a different opinion than they do. Generally, they try to invalidate any criticism directed toward Robotech and deflect any dissenting opinions when discussing Robotech by branding the dissenter/critic "not a real fan" or a "Macross purist troll", or any of a host of other labels that they've been using in their periodic fandom witch hunts. When these people are allowed to get into a position of power at a fansite, like Robotech.com or RobotechX, the site immediately takes a nosedive once they start exploiting their authority to post their opinions and theories as fact and banning anyone who questions or contradicts them... as we've seen Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION do on both sites in question. The worst examples are trolls like Pizza the Hutt and Doug Bendo, who are so desperate for attention and are possessed of an almost fanatical desire to defend Robotech from criticism and the harsh truth of its origins and standing in the anime industry that they seek out and attack just about anyone they see as a threat to the "true fans", meaning similarly immature, confrontational, borderline-delusional fans.

Showed those around to some of my friends, and had a CAN'T UNSEE moment when my friend Saori ("BlackRose" here on MW) pointed out that with her hair down and without her glasses Grace looks suspiciously like a female version of Alto.

That would imply that there's someone out there who actually LIKES Jar Jar Binks... and I don't think that's true.

"I know what I'm doing!" - Almost always immediately followed by ample proof that the speaker doesn't. "Trust me." - Inevitably followed by a screwup or betrayal. "Trust me, I know what I'm doing." - Hit the deck, don't look up until the loud noises and screaming stop.

Thanks for taking the time to read this little appeal for help... If you've paid any attention at all to the recent goings-on in the Robotech fandom, you're probably at least aware of the drama surrounding the latest spate of bannings handed down for questioning the Harmony Gold company line and the crackpot theories and outright lies some of the Robotech.com moderators are spreading about the planned Robotech live-action movie and the Macross legal situation. Since the only other well-established Robotech online community is run by one of the RT.com moderators responsible for the original problem, and is rapidly turning into a ghost town now that criticizing any aspect of Robotech and/or his crackpot theories is a banning offense, the decent folks in the Robotech fandom don't really have anywhere left to go. Some friends of mine took it upon themselves to meet the demand with a free-hosting board, but like most free sites, it's not really up to the task of handling high volumes of traffic, let alone the fanart and fanfiction and whatnot which the site's supposed to showcase. (if you know me at all, you can probably see where this is going) So, having a surfeit of storage space on my own site and wanting to do something nice for some good people, I offered to host their community on a subdomain. I shopped around a bit for content management systems that'd support what they were looking to do and we settled on Joomla, since that was what they were already familiar with. Unfortunately for me, I found the administrative backend to be painfully unintuitive, and the documentation not terribly helpful. Rather than try to muddle my way through it on my own and sacrificing a few dozen installations of the software to the gods of guess-and-check in the process, I figured the safest thing to do would be to ask someone who's already familiar with the software for help... so to that end: I'm looking for someone familiar with the administrative backend of Joomla 1.5 who's willing to donate a little bit of their time to help me learn the ropes and get the system configured for the features we need/want.

Well, apart from the bits which are in Chinese, the rest of the stuff filters through babelfish nicely enough and comes out in at least recognizable form, so it shouldn't be that difficult to obtain a translation on the fly if you really want one. I did it to the Lachesis monologue to Dr. Morard and it produced passable results.

Under normal circumstances, when an entertainment franchise has been out there long enough for fans to start making their way onto the creative staff, that's generally a sign that everything's about to go to hell. At that point, you end up in a nightmare scenario and one of two things generally happens... either the new creative staff is so eager to show their "respect" for their beloved franchise that any evolution is stifled to preserve the status quo, or they decide the parts of the story that've already been established are too confining and broom the some or all of it to make way for their own take on things. In either event, what you end up with is generally distinguishable from fan fiction only by whether or not the author received a paycheck for his crime against the cinematic arts. When the powers that be at Harmony Gold finally ran out of patience with Carl Macek's uncanny ability to screw up after promising the moon, they brought in Tommy Yune and the rest of the new Robotech staff, most of whom are fans. Clearly Tommy felt that going one way or the other was for pussies, and opted to stagnate the hell out of the narrative with one hand while removing a million tiny things from the continuity with the other... all done with the gleeful abandon of a preschooler fingerpainting for the first time. The end result was that the already-disorganized franchise was kept lurching along with a continuation so nonsensical and so dependent on retcon that it probably fits into that same category of fanfic hell that [ulr=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanFic/MyImmortal?from=Main.MyImmortal]My Immorta[/u] does. In his continuity reboot, Tommy appealed to just about every major fanboy cliche... turning Roy Fokker into a borderline superhero who singlehandedly saves the day, making the apeface commanders from the Masters Saga out to be enemy infiltrators plotting seditious moves, and trying to exonerate their big hero because he ordered scorched Earth (literally) tactics. One could argue that many of Robotech's problems stem from its abysmal lack of organization. The show's "creators" couldn't get their act together and figure out much of anything, so they've relied on the fans to do it for them time and time again, and as a result incorrect assumptions made by the fans spread and eventually become widely held beliefs (witness the protoculture fiasco) which in the minds of many fans become just as good as canon. So when someone in authority comes along and says "this is how it is", it's odds-on that someone in the fanbase'll pitch a fit and say "well you're not a real fan then, are you?". Never mind that what Tommy said didn't contract any official Robotech publication or the show itself, he still got accused of being a Macross fan trying to destroy Robotech from the inside because he ruled out one of the assumptions Robotech fans have made to impose an illusion of order on the terminally disorganized Robotech continuity.

I don't think they are, no... granted, there are sections near the engines that look vaguely like a movie-style ARMD in that they have the claw-like bits on the end and markings that look vaguely like a helipad, but by the look of things they're like twice as long as an ARMD should be (or half as wide, either way the proportions are all screwed up), they look to be built directly into the Megaroad's spaceframe, and they don't have the prow command deck or the amidships tower by the look of things. Neither the Compendium, nor the Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet makes mention of the Megaroad being equipped with ARMDs, so I don't think it does have any.

Yeah, I know... but it's hard to consider the ARMD's TV variant as a proper battleship given that the U.N. Spacy already had a much bigger, more effective ship for that particular role, and the very definition of the acronym ARMD essentially boils down to "bigass hangar deck with engines and a few guns bolted on". Eh? I don't recall seeing the bit in Chronicle about Oberths from Apollo Base surviving Space War 1 anywhere else. Isn't that new information, or is it reiterated from somewhere that I've forgotten? Also, did they actually confirm that those things that looked vaguely Oberth-like in FB2012 were in fact Oberth-class destroyers? As far as I can recall, the earliest example of Oberth-class space destroyers still being in use after Space War 1 is Macross: Eternal Love Song, which came out in 1992. That's a trifle odd... I take it that was gleaned from your not-yet-typed translation of the DYRL ARMD sheet? It seems a bit at odds with the established information about the ARMDs from the TV series (and TV series sheet), where only eight ARMDs were completed and commissioned prior to the end of Space War 1, and all eight of which were supposedly lost during the war, as the fleet disposition after the war mentions only a hundred or so Zentradi capital ships and the two Macross-class super dimension fortresses. I think the problem you're having here stems from trying to combine two accounts of the ARMD's service history which are essentially mutually exclusive, the one from DYRL and the one from the TV series. By all accounts the first known example of the DYRL pattern ARMD in the main continuity are the rebuilt ARMD-I and ARMD-II, which were supposedly built for the SDF-1 Macross during its restoration. It would be consistent with the available facts for any and all ARMDs available after the war to have been built after the war. It would also make sense for the "Combat ARMD" to be the fold-capable ARMD mentioned to accompany early colony fleets, and for the DYRL pattern ARMDs to have been built on an as-needed basis for the mass-produced Macross-class ships, orbital defenses, and the like. Other sources (like the fleet numbers which come from either Perfect Memory or the Gold Book, I've forgotten which) point to all six surviving ARMDs (03-08) being destroyed during the final battle of the war, leaving the U.N. Spacy with just their two Macross-class ships and a hundred or so Zentradi warships. Given how frequently and thoroughly the VF-1 Master File contradicts the canon, I would be inclined to just throw the whole book out as unreliable. Certainly the ARMD sections are entirely unreliable, since they were copied almost whole cloth from the old Sky Angels VF-1 Tech Manual, a non-canon doujin from 1984. It obviously predates Flashback 2012, but given its content I'm fairly sure it predates DYRL as well, which doesn't bode well for its accuracy. Given the sources involved in its creation, I would say it should be common sense that the Variable Fighter VF-1 Master File is entirely unreliable, definitely non-canon, and that nothing from it should be treated as accurate unless it jives with other, more reliable publications like Chronicle, the Gold Book, Perfect Memory, etc.

"It's a Gundam!"

Considering how frequently the books reiterate the point that the Joker galaxy humans have a love of ostentation which borders on the fetishistic, and that said love of ostentation is almost invariably applied to their nation's mortar headds, I very much doubt anyone would bat an eye at a MH with an optional set of strictly ceremonial accouterments. After all, our boy (he IS nominally male) Amaterasu IV is the head of the richest and most powerful nation in the Joker galaxy, and he did already build a completely gold-plated mortar headd at the request of a fatima he happened to like (even though the mere contemplation of the price nearly made him pass out)... so I guess a little more ostentation beyond that would just be pissing into the ocean. Either that or the man has a few friends who do and tapped them for translation help so he could make the universe seem a bit more diverse. In any case, he insisted that the major foreign language sections not be translated into english, so we can only guess at his reasons.

Actually, I'm not just counting the US, but the other markets that would be opened up as well... and factoring in the general antipathy many anime fans have for cut-and-paste translations like Robotech. That is what he was accused of when he announced that the first two generations of RT mecha don't run on protoculture, yeah. Not sure where you are, but hereabouts the mecha anime demographic seems to fall mainly around the 17-21 set, and I tend to end up one of the oldest mecha nuts around, and I'm not even halfway through my 20s yet.

Color me surprised... I didn't think you liked anything from Macross II. Because they have a hardon for the number 25?