Seto Kaiba

Oh yes... I solemnly detest their casual practice of simply publishing their assumptions and speculation as though it were fact instead of doing any research. It set the trend for the decades to come, with crazy, ignorant Robotech fans who don't want to be arsed to actually watch the show (or any show) simply asserting "this is how it is, and it's no use telling me otherwise".

I can't imagine whoever told you it was a collection of "short stories and vignettes" had ever actually seen a copy of the Fate/hollow ataraxia visual novel... because that's not what it is. It's a nominal sequel to Fate/stay night, that involves a magically-induced stable time loop created by Avenger (Angra Mainyu) after the 5th Holy Grail War. It's a bit messy, story-wise, but it is supposed to be canon.

Not entirely accurate... they establish in Fate/stay night and Fate/hollow ataraxia they establish that the reason the Holy Grail isn't "as advertised" in the 4th and 5th Holy Grail Wars (depicted in Fate/zero and Fate/stay night respectively) is because it was tainted during the 3rd Holy Grail War when the Einzbern family accidentally summoned the only known instance of an "Avenger" servant, Angra Mainyu. Having the embodiment of all worldly evils and seething hate dumped unceremoniously into the holy grail at the war's conclusion is what screwed it up in the first place... both allowing magi to summon servants with an evil alignment and turning the grail from an impartial wish-granting engine into a fairly malevolent object that interprets all wishes in the context of destruction.

You'll probably find the magic in Fate/stay night tends to be relatively unobtrusive on the whole, with most of the magic being simple low-key stuff like Shiro's habit of using the only kind of magic he doesn't suck at to fix things, and Rin's occasional ineffectual projectiles. The only showy magic is the magical macguffin they're fighting over (called the holy grail, but is for all practical purposes just a magical wish-granting machine) and the battle magic employed by the "servants", who are themselves magical constructs created in the image of and bearing the souls of well-known ancient heroes and the like, created to do battle to both fuel the holy grail and determine who gets to actually use it for a wish. Odds are if the sort of shonen manga stuff you saw in Bleach didn't mortally offend you, the battle magic used in Fate/stay night won't either. Well, you won't have any issues with Fate/stay night on that front, as the whole thing is set in modern-day Japan. Agreed, though the "knight outfit" is for... well... combat purposes. Eh... personality like Asuka from Evangelion... and tsundere as the day is long. Probably because it's licensed in the west... I forget who holds the license, but it's out on slimpack DVD for like thirty bucks. I think there're torrents of the high-def version on BxT too.

Actually yeah... he claims he just doesn't like reading and that he prefers "visual media" instead. (Basically, he's an illiterate couch potato) All the same... funny stuff. Poor bastard's living in a fantasy world. He's REALLY butthurt about a number of things where I'm concerned, and is making all kinds of wild accusations.

Oh god... I got e-mails from a lurker on Bendo's show telling me to take a listen to his latest offering, which is apparently a two-hour attempt to get under my skin because I dared to offer to devote some space on my server to a RT site for the good people who've been displaced from RT.com and RTX by MEMO and Maverick's serial idiocy. Amusing enough he's accusing me of being in it only for personal gain (he literally accuses me of trying to reshape Robotech in its entirety) while he does what he does for impartial, honest motives (if your bullshit meter isn't pegged by now, it should be). He also accuses us all of being "dumbass liberal white people" elitists who think all Robotech fans are retarded and need to be educated... All that and I'm not even twenty minutes in... to paraphrase Megatron/Galvatron: "Podcast, Bendo? This is bad comedy." EDIT: Oh, and he categorically denies that he is Orguss_Prime, even though it's obvious to everyone and their dog that he is.

Well they had to get around the Fate scenario's obligatory hanky-panky somehow... and that way seems as good as any other. It did lend itself to some truly bizarre/funny comics once the fansubs started hitting the net.

No... no they don't. The topmost picture in post #51 of the thread in question is Nora Polyansky's SV-51γ from Macross Zero. It looks nothing like the red fighter from that Astro Plan promo... the color's wrong, the wings are wrong... I could go on...

Eh, it's because it's really a simplified version of the Fate scenario from the game... in the trimming-down it lost a fair bit of backstory and setting to get the show down to a manageable size. No... not even close I'm afraid. Even the original h-game's doesn't fit that particular mold. It's a reasonably well-executed visual novel with a largely shonen manga-style action/romance plot, and a surprisingly well thought-out "classical fantasy elements in the modern day"-type setting. In truth, there's precious little "h" material in the h-game, usually consisting of one brief sex scene hastily jammed in about two-thirds of the way through each story track with a weak rationalization. If not for those obligatory one or two brief hentai scenes, the game would've been an exemplary shonen fantasy story, and the developers did actually see the potential of the story to stand on its own, and released an all-ages version of the game as well. Likewise, the Fate/stay night anime series sells itself pretty much entirely on the basis of the story. To put it bluntly, everybody's clothes stay firmly on, and don't disintegrate in mid-combat like in Ikkitousen. In fact, I'd say it's far lighter on the fanservice than even Macross Frontier.

It's really funny how deep in denial Robotech fans are about it too... I was accused of lying when some twerp asked "how popular is Robotech these days?" on Robotech.com and I gave an honest answer. Spot on... Robotech might've "introduced" the few people who watched it to anime back in '85, but by no means did it set the world on fire. It'd pretty much been forgotten by '87, since it spent pretty much its entire televised run being neatly eclipsed by the "Generation 1" Transformers series. Far from being the groundbreaking release Harmony Gold wants to make it out to have been, it was pretty much just a flash in the pan show that exposed its viewers to anime as a serious storytelling medium instead of just a venue for stuff relatively silly stuff like Voltron. If any one title could reasonably be credited with the achievements Harmony Gold is trying to credit to Robotech, building awareness of anime and giving the genre wider appeal in America, it would probably have to be Dragonball Z.

It wasn't Kawamori who mentioned it... it was the interviewer who asked if the reorganization of the government was no longer the result of a coup, and Kawamori said that it no longer fit within the present reality of the universe. Lemme dig up the link. Here you go... the interview in question was printed in issue 9 of Otona Anime and the English translation gleaned from Akiba Station by Zinjo. The relevant text is near the bottom of the first post, just search in-text for "coup" and it'll come right up: http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?...amori+interview

Actually, didn't Kawamori touch on that in one of the interviews that was posted here a while back? I don't remember all of the particulars, but I distinctly recall Kawamori acknowledging that Macross VF-X2's coup had been the original reason for the U.N. Gov't and U.N. Spacy being reorganized into the New U.N. Gov't and New U.N. Spacy, and that he'd replaced it with a gradual, natural decentralization of the government that necessitated its reorganization and the reorganization of its military because the old explanation "no longer fit with the present reality" or words to that effect. I'd be inclined to say Kawamori's new rationale for it doesn't entirely rule out the events of VF-X2... and that rather than being the sole cause for the reorganization, the coup was just the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were. The interview was posted here on MW, someone just has to dig out the link... I summarized my recollection of it above. Prior to Macross Frontier, the general impression given by what we see of long-range colony operations is that the U.N. Government is a strong supranational governing body and that its territories and colonization fleets are subordinate to that central government. After the reorganization, it's explicitly provided that the New U.N. Government is more in line with our modern United Nations, and that it's a weak supranational governing body of which all its territories and colony fleets are members (the colony fleets being literal city-states until such time as they set up shop on a planet). Each colony is responsible for the maintenance of its own defense force, but can call on reinforcements from Earth (and presumably other member states).

Just goes to show... virtually none of the information provided by Harmony Gold is in any way reliable and should always be treated as extremely suspect until validated by other, more trustworthy sources. It's actually kind of funny that you should mention Robotech being a nonentity in the UK, when a year or two ago they were making a HUGE deal out of the show being briefly mentioned in some allegedly prominent British sci-fi magazine. I guess it comes as no surprise that once again Harmony Gold (and MEMO in particular) blew something minor completely out of proportion to produce the illusion that RT isn't a completely forgotten clusterfart of poor decisions. Actually, it's kind of a messy situation on that front. While Tommy did effectively make all the old comics, novels, and whathaveyou non-canon when he rebooted the continuity in 2001, he used some weasel words to get around actually saying that he'd declared fifteen years of Robotech a dead loss. I guess the best analogy to describe it would be "Schrodinger's narrative". All the stuff apart from the "original 85" and Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles are the "Secondary Continuity" sources, which can fit into the story so long as they don't contradict anything. Of course, this's just a roundabout way of saying everything but the new comics is non-canon, but the awkward wording leaves it open to all kinds of abuses... like the frequent attempts to force material from the McKinney novels onto the continuity. In practice, they really can't make the licensed merchandise from the late 80s and 90s its own continuity because it's so unorganized and so internally contradictory that there's no way to form it into a single, coherent whole. The license just changed hands too often and the licensees took too many drastically different directions with it for it to ever become one universe. About the only licensed products internally consistent enough to constitute their own timeline are the novels, the rest is pretty much a dead loss and would have to be split into at least half a dozen different universes just to keep things consistent (bear in mind that's a lower bound estimate).

Yeah, it does... 's one of the few new titles I'm looking forward to. I'm hoping they'll follow this up with a movie version of the realta nua version of the Heaven's Feel scenario next... the original version'd be a bit too graphic for them to get away with it.

For his sake, I really hope MEMO's one of those people who has trouble distinguishing between "laughing with" and "laughing at". Since it's a fan project with involvement from MEMO, we can safely assume that Blake and Dartallion'll be doing all the actual work, and MEMO'll be taking all the credit in hopes that he'll finally land a job at Harmony Gold... just like he's done with everything else. It's also a safe bet that what little they do produce before giving up is going to be a bad joke. At times like this I'm reminded of an old H.L. Mencken quote: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Oh, people are learning all right... but at the core of the Robotech fanbase is a collection of people who're simply too stupid or too blinded by ignorance and nostalgia to realize that Harmony Gold's been playing them for suckers for twenty five years and counting.

Honestly, I really don't think it matters one way or the other where Australia's concerned. It's such a small market, even compared to the anime industry in America, that in terms of the potential profits involved, it really isn't worth it for Australian distributors to license, translate, and dub shows directly from Japan. It's considerably cheaper and easier for distributors in Australia to obtain the regional distribution rights to the American distributor's finished product. It's why the Australian anime industry releases lag up to several years behind the American industry, and why there's such a preponderance of imported American TV on Australian networks... it's cheaper that way. So really, even if Harmony Gold doesn't have the legal wherewithal to trademark the name "Macross" in Australia, it really doesn't matter because almost all of your anime is coming secondhand from American distributors and is just being filtered by your regional distributors. EDIT: As the above concerns the entertainment industry in Oz, we wish to remind you that it in no way reflects the opinions, views, or beliefs of the Lollipop Guild. (I know, I know, reaching for the low-hanging fruit)

To say nothing of the fact that you're even newer to Macross than you are to web forums... Saraphys hit the nail on the head... there's so much drama and rampant stupidity coming from fans of the Robotech franchise and, to a lesser extent, Harmony Gold itself, that this thread will probably never find itself short of topics for discussion or targets for a well-deserved verbal thrashing.

About three minutes of silence... why? Well, compared to many of the seemingly nonsensical decisions made by Harmony Gold's creative staff in the past few years, the decision to shed the confused mess of licensed merchandise that accumulated while they weren't paying attention to what their licensees were doing with a continuity reboot is a fairly logical decision. It might not have gone over well with the fans who'd spent a fair bit of money collecting those comics, but it was done for sound reasons... issues of low quality aside, the vast majority of those comics contradict each other and the core continuity of the series. It'd be one thing if they could fit those stories into a coherent whole, but with few exceptions they're independent one-off stories, none of which jive with each other. Most of them are just cheap, low-quality comics churned out to squeeze a bit more cash from a dying property.

There are five songs: "Stage Fright", "The Man in My Life", "To Be in Love", "We Will Win", and "It's You". There's also a partial song that crops up in episode 28 called "The Right Move".

Nah, the gold standard for overdue is definitely Five Star Stories... we've been waiting for Book XIII for how long? Five years? More? Still, as interesting as Macross: the First is, I can definitely see why people're impatient for more of it... I'm eagerly awaiting translations beyond the first chapter.

Oh joy, let's see where this goes... with a location like "Tirol" in your profile I'm almost afraid this'll be the next Captain Christopher Donovan. Okay... that's really more a statement of opinion than anything else... and not a commonly-held opinion either. Even Robotech fans generally think the voice acting in Robotech is kind of weak, rife with poor casting decisions and awkward, heavily dated dialogue. My own rebuttal would consist of just three names... "Rebecca Forstadt", "Greg Finley", and "Cam Clarke". Awkward, stilted, borderline bad Trek fanfic dialogue aside, Rebecca Forstadt's portrayal of Minmei was painful on the ears even when she wasn't singing, Greg Finley's horrible faux-Russian accent was every bit as obnoxiously stereotypical as Star Trek's Pavel Chekhov, and Cam Clarke's kind of reedy nerd voice was just totally at odds with Max's reputation as a hotshot. Of course, when you put it in context against the American sci-fi/action cartoons of the day, they weren't exactly great either, so it might be said to compare favorably. Still, even by 1990s standards, the RT dub was atrocious. Again, I disagree. To a minor extent, Roy did fulfill some of the stereotypical aspects of the loudmouth American hotshot, but there were also a number of instances where that stereotype was subverted in Roy's case in Macross. Robotech's Roy is the very picture of the two-dimensional American hotshot pilot, especially outside the TV series. Macross takes an approach rather like Star Trek: the Next Generation, where most of the cast has an established ethnic background, but they never really play anyone off as the token foreigner or force anyone to stick out as the result of not being from "around here". The Robotech adaptation follows an approach more like the original Star Trek series, where most of the cast fits the comfortable white American mold, with a few highly visible stereotypical foreigners thrown in to make the cast sound multicultural... like Henry Gloval and Dr. Lang. Robotech's Minmei has five songs, two of which are repeated endlessly and the other three which are almost never used. Macross's Minmay had about eight songs, which affords them far greater variety. Was the new song good? Survey says "no". In the six years I was on Robotech.com only twice did I ever see anyone attempt to defend Minmei's singing as something other than an experience in auditory torture more fit for the ATF to use to break standoffs than as a form of entertainment. Generally speaking, even veteran Robotech fans reach for the mute button when Rebecca Forstadt starts crooning. She freely admits that she knows she's a lousy singer too, and claims they had to loosen her up with liquor before they could get her to sing. Factor in the fact that Robotech uses the same Minmei songs over and over again across three sagas and a movie, whereas Macross has a continual influx of new music, and the numbers get far, FAR less favorable for Robotech...

It's not just that they're trying to suppress debate and the free expression of opinion among fans of Robotech, the real problem is their obvious ulterior motives for doing so. Given his behavior in the various legal threads on RT.com, Maverick reacts so violently to his assertions being questioned because he wants to be seen as a well-connected fan with inside knowledge and to exert his authority over others because his wife wears the pants at home. It's pretty much common knowledge that MEMO does because he's hoping if he sucks up to Harmony Gold enough he'll be the next fan to be offered a job by Harmony Gold. Doug Bendo does it because he's eager to stir up as much drama as possible to entice/goad people onto his podcast and try to validate his claim that he's the #1 Robotech fan and #1 authority on the Robotech universe. Pizza's motivations are unclear, but I'm relatively sure he's doing it because he knows that so long as he toadies up to MEMO he can do whatever he likes without being banned. Wait, you've found a Robotech fan with a cogent, well-reasoned argument in Robotech's favor? DON'T KEEP IT TO YOURSELF MAN! That's the holy grail we've been chasing for years! It's unheard of... like an honest politician or a client-friendly HMO. It's not just those, but I'm glad you see where I'm coming from here... You're correct... to a point. If our controversial friend Carl Macek had simply stuck to the facts instead of trying to exaggerate his role in the production process and make it appear as though he were the show's visionary creator (ala Gene Roddenberry) instead of just a moderately competent editor, Robotech would probably be held in higher regard than it is today. It can be excused to some extent while America remained largely ignorant of anime, but once the anime industry took off and the show's origins came to light, they should've let go of the pretense that they'd created the show. Instead, they made a relatively minor change of tack, maintaining that the story was entirely their creation, but that it was used to drastically improve three unrelated, inferior Japanese shows that would otherwise not be worth paying any heed to. This is the same strategy they're still using today... "Yes, we acknowledge that Robotech was made from Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada, but the story's all us and it's much much better than those crappy Japanese shows. You can look into them if you want, but Robotechs much better." I was an invited guest on his podcast when he discussed Gundam's various alternate universe shows (badly, with frequent errors)... he never even mentioned Flay's nudity, or the fact that Kira farts her later on in the series... which is shown on screen BTW.

If the next couple of issues turned out to be a Macross II binge to get the last couple of articles out of the way, I would just be thrilled... at this pace I'm almost afraid they're not going to finish Macross II because they wasted all that time dicking around with the VF-0, VF-1, and Sound Force garbage. Well, the footage seems to hint that the operator is a brainwashed Zentradi soldier, and the torso block looks a lot like the cockpit of a conventional Zentradi Army Regult. *shrug* I would've been astonished if it had gotten even half a sheet, since there's virtually no art for the mecha except a few diagrams of its armaments (the pop-out missile launchers in the leg, and the weird funnel-like missiles in the arm).

Even the simple fact that Robotech is a niche title that exists at the expense of a legitimate franchise isn't really necessary to demolish the majority of the arguments in Robotech's favor since they all usually boil down to one or more of the following: nostalgia-induced rose-tinted glasses, ignorance of the originals and real anime in general, and a xenophobic or lazy desire to avoid having to learn something about another culture. You should go back and read some of Carl Macek's old interviews sometime... on several occasions he tries to claim that the animation was made specifically for Robotech, and/or that the series is entirely his creation. Ignoring them doesn't fly anymore now that the existence of the originals is common knowledge... it wasn't thus back in the earlier years of Robotech. Now they try to handwave aside the originals as either utterly unimportant, nowhere near as good as the adaptation, or generally not worth watching. Especially when they pump Carl Macek for remarks on how he thinks he did a much better job with the story than the Japanese creators did, and remarks taken out of context to make it sound like Studio Nue thought Robotech was a superior story. See my clarification above.

Well, there's that... but by that extension there ought to be four or five more U.N. Spacy mechanic sheets in Chronicle's Macross II section. As of yet, they haven't covered the VF-2SS w/ Super Armed Packs, the VF-2JA, the Metal Siren, the VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie (except in passing), the GERWALKroid, the Gloria, the standard battleship, the light carrier/rescue ship, and the little background mecha. My guess would be: UNS 01A VF-2SS UNS 01B VF-2SS w/ Super Armed Pack UNS 02A VF-2JA UNS 03A VA-1SS UNS 04A Destroids UNS 05A U.N. Spacy Weapons (background mecha) UNS 06A Macross Cannon & Heracles UNS 07A Gloria, Battleship & Rescue Ship Well, unsatisfying name or no... it's lumped in with the Zentradi-use mecha of the Mardook forces, which means the debate over exactly what scale the pilot must be is effectively solved. Must be a VERY cramped cockpit in there... my guess would be Regult-style.