Seto Kaiba

1 hour ago, Scopedog said:

I really appreciate your responses.  What do you think about mind-controlled aircraft with advanced variable geometry (not swing-wing but actual shape-shifting materials, which the Chinese have supposedly accomplished)?

Rudimentary flight control using dry electroencephalographic sensors is technically quite possible. There were a number of gimmicky children's toys based on the idea of using an EEG headset to control a simple motorized toy back in the 2000s.. Star Wars even got in on it in 2009 with a toy called the force trainer, which used an EEG headset to control the PWM of a fan that would levitate a plastic ball. The fad didn't last very long, in part due to those very basic sensors not being capable of complex control, but it's proof of concept at the very least. 

As in Macross, it would be an absolutely terrible way to try to control an aircraft. The YF-21 brain direct interface had realistically unforgiving design tolerances when it came to keeping the sensors aligned with the pilot's head. Even a few millimeters of slip in that sensor hood was enough to greatly reduce the system's accuracy. As such, the YF-21 ended up needing a pilot seat that almost totally immobilized the pilot to prevent that sensor hood from shifting. (This is why, in real EEG testing, they stick the sensors directly to your scalp with gel and even that encourage you not to move.) Supplemental technical publications also suggest that, in a realistic turn, the BDI system would also need hundreds of hours of training and data collection in order to build up a translation database to allow it to convert the pilot's brainwave data into usable machine instructions. Even then, a sharp shock or strong emotion may result in a loss of control over the system due to creating noise in the recorded brainwave, much like we see happen in the OVA.  The system was ultimately much too finicky and unreliable to be practical in combat and was scrapped. 

Attitude control via wing warping is technology that goes all the way back to the earliest powered aircraft. The modern version of the concept is called the adaptive compliant wing. It's something the US was testing back in the mid '80s. Testing using a modified F-111 revealed that the concept has durability issues, and it is rather more expensive than conventional wing surfaces. Flaws that are echoed in the Macross universe's YF-21. There is an EU funded research group called flexop which is currently looking at ways to apply the technology to jet airliners as a way to save fuel through drag reduction.

1 hour ago, Big s said:

It only took a few years to go from a computer the size of a room to be outshined by a personal computer and for that to be outshined by the smartphone. Depending on the necessity, technology moves fairly quickly and world conflicts supported by super powers tend to move technology faster than most catalysts 

Eh... while is partially correct, the actual amount of time it took is quite a bit longer than just "a few years" and owes a lot to the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors to your modern integrated circuits.  The pace of advancement has also slowed down quite a bit in recent years because we have effectively hit the limits of what we can reasonably do with silicon in terms of improving packaging density and clock rate.  (That's actually why high-end chips like Intel's 13th and 14th gen have been burning out.  The push for ever-faster clock rates while nearing the limits of silicon's performance led to simply overclocking the chips until they started burning up.)

1 hour ago, Scopedog said:

I didn't know about this background info.  I'm not generally conspiracy-minded, but I find it very hard to believe that the US government isn't working on this exact type of subversive AI technology.

Some of it is mentioned in passing in Macross Plus... the Macross Concern is also the party who provided the bio-neural chip to the Venus Sound Factory team working on Sharon, and the same group who also developed the Ghost X-9 around the same AI technology.  The project's goal was to produce a next-generation unmanned fighter that could operate more flexibly on the battlefield and exhibit humanlike levels of unpredictability in combat maneuvers.

That same research is still ongoing in Macross Frontier's drama CDs, with LAI working on a next-generation Ghost that complies with the post-Sharon Apple Incident regulations on AI but can nevertheless still exhibit humanlike responses due to personality modeling AI.  (Luca's questionable judgement led him to model the prototypes on his crush and his two best friends from school.)

If the government were working on something like Sharon, we would know about it.  That kind of development involves hundreds of thousands of people and billions if not trillions of dollars in investment... and the government is absolute rubbish at keeping secrets at the best of times.  These are NOT the best of times when it comes to secrecy. 🤣  We know that what they are doing with AI is trying to make unmanned wingmen for manned 5th and 6th Generation fighters like what we see with Luca's Ghosts in Macross Frontier and the Lilldrakens and Super Ghosts in Macross Delta.  It's not going great, but it could be going a lot worse.  They're kind of at the "well at least it's not cartwheeling across the sky like a SpaceX rocket" phase.

(I can only assume conspiracy theorists are kids who never had to do group projects in school... and therefore have a very exaggerated and beautifully optimistic belief in how well people work together in groups. 🤣)

56 minutes ago, Scopedog said:

It occurs to me, the anime doesn't make it quite clear whether Sharon Apple is operating the Ghost herself or if she just designated targets and it operated autonomously.  I think she was probably operating it herself.  She's shown to be able to multitask, like being a different version of herself when she seduces Yang at the end while controlling the SDF-1 and also bantering with Myung all at the same time.  If she was just designating targets, it would have been the YF-19 so the Ghost had no reason to face off with the YF-21 (after 30 years, the YF-21 is still so ******** cool).

She's probably operating the Ghost herself.

According to her Macross Chronicle Character Sheet, the Sharon-type AI was developed for the military by the Macross Concern's Palo Alto II Research Institute.  It was designed to be a fleet supervisory support AI for use in emigrant fleets.  Its job was twofold: to assist with managing stress among the populations of early emigrant ships (which were on the spartan side in terms of living conditions) with entertainment and subliminal audiovisual hypnosis where necessary, and to take over control of the fleet on its own should its human commanders be incapacitated during an emergency.  The career of the virtuoid idol singer "Sharon Apple" was essentially a covert test of the incomplete Sharon-type AI's entertainment and population management systems disguised as a music company's avant garde tech demo.

When Sharon Apple went crazy rampage nuts as a result of being rushed to completion with an illegal and dangerous bio-neural processor and having her emotion data sampled from a woman with more baggage than Delta Airlines, she used the command and control functions she was designed with to seize control of the Macross, the Ghost X-9, and all networked defenses on Earth.

She wasn't able to break into the YF-21's systems the way she broke into the YF-19's because, as noted earlier in the OVA, half of the YF-21's computer is the pilot's brain.

2 hours ago, Superelello said:

Hello, how are you?

Question if someone knows how to answer me 

I didn't know this illustration by Makoto Kobayashi. 

Do you know which magazine or artbook it belongs to?

It looks like it came out of one of these because in the photo you can clearly see that it was cut irregularly. 

The image was taken from Yahoo Auctions.

https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/r1186211970

Thank you very much.

As far as I know, Makoto Kobayashi's only involvement with Macross was supporting development of Arii's plamodel line.

Given the rough print quality, I'd assume it's from one of his self-published works.

12 hours ago, Big s said:

[...] but we do have self driving vehicles and a lot of the tech is coming along fairly quickly.

Eh... as someone who works on vehicular autonomy systems professionally, we emphatically do not have self-driving vehicles yet.

It's actually a long way off, in terms of technological capability.  Much as with every other "AI" technology, the main stumbling block is processing power.  You need a very powerful computer to manage all the sensor and vehicle inputs needed to safely drive even at low speeds on city streets.  So much so that the few experimental cars certified with SAE Lv4 limited/partial autonomy have computers so large they have to be mounted on the top of larger cars like minivans or SUVs.  Those systems are only really capable of navigating a limited area on well-mapped city streets in good weather, and still require human intervention when they encounter an unsafe situation.  Those computers draw so much power in normal operation that the cars have to be fitted with auxiliary power systems just for the computer and suffer reduced range from the extra weight and electrical demand.  A true auotnomous vehicle would be SAE Level 5, which nobody has reached yet because it requires the car to be able to essentially function totally independently in any conditions and on any roads.  A computer advanced enough to do this would be prohibitively large and heavy, and draw too much power to actually put on a car.

About the best you can get in a commercially-available car is SAE Level 2 or Level 2+ autonomy, which is "Advanced Driver Assistance".  Features like lane stay or adaptive cruise control.  The car is not actually capable of driving itself.  Tesla's "full self-driving" is actually a Level 2 system that is falsely advertised as autonomous, which is why Tesla's been sued many times for false advertising and wrongful death on the part of customers who believed their fraudulent claims and died as a result of their "autonomous" car carshing into stationary objects or other cars.  (Their impressive demonstrations of autonomous capability were found to actually be staged with cars driven by remote control.)

3 hours ago, Scopedog said:

It sounds ridiculous but I feel we're not that far away from this scenario in real life.  Artificial intelligence is advancing daily and AI pop stars already exist.  China, and probably the USA, are working on variable geometry.

We are many decades, if not centuries, from having to worry about something like that.

When people think about the term AI, what they're thinking about is more often than not is what's called Artificial General Intelligence.  A computer that can think and reason like a human being.  That technology is purely science fiction for a bunch of reasons. Mainly hardware and software limitations on the computer's side.  The low end estimate of exactly how much computational power is trapped in the average human's noggin is about 1 exaflop.  That's 1 times 10 to the 18th power floating point operations per second.  And that's done on about 20 watts of power.  Exaflop-scale supercomputers became a thing for the first time in 2022, but they're about a square kilometer in size, made up of around 5,000 separate high-end processors joined by hundreds of kilometers of cabling and coolant piping, draw over 30 million watts of power to operate (nuclear power station level energy demands), and still have all the limits of a machine processing linear operations in binary.  They're not capable of fuzzy logic, abstract reasoning, or any of the other insane stuff that your squishy human brain does on a minute-by-minute basis.  This is the kind of thing that might become possible when we have quantum supercomputers... but we're still trying to figure out how to reliably store single qbits.

The AI technology that the news is fussing over is massively oversold.  LLMs like Google's Gemini, Apple's Apple Intelligence, OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, etc. are nothing more than extremely inefficient upscalings of the same kind of text autocomplete in your phone's onscreen keyboard app.  They possess no reasoning capability.  All they're capable of doing is probability-based pattern-matching.  Instead of just guessing the next word you might type based on probabilities from sample text, they're taking keywords and stringing together vast strings of text based purely on the probability of those words appearing in that order based on the gargantuan amount of raw text they've been fed from books and websites and so on.  Which is why they "hallucinate".  They have no capacity to actually understand the material you're exchanging with them.  It's almost an "infinite monkeys" situation, with an extremely powerful server essentially guessing wildly based purely on next word probability until it comes up with a plausible sounding string of words that it vomits up.  The art-based ones are no different.  They break sample data down into mathematical models and then string those models together based on keywords from your prompt.  Because their function is purely probability analysis-based, they can be "poisoned" with junk data that messes up those probability tables and makes them draw or talk even more nonsense than they normally do.

Those "AI" pop stars are, variously, just people in mo-cap suits with autotune steering rigged 3D models like a Vtuber or a combination of existing text, speech synthesis, and video synthesis AI software that's just running preprogrammed and vetted prompts to avoid the system spazzing out.

Will there be "AI"-powered drone weapons in the near future?  Absolutely.  Not weapons that can think for themselves, but weapons that use image recognition software to identify people or military vehicles connected to basic fire control systems.  Something broadly analogous to the QF-2200 Ghost from Macross Zero, essentially.  Something like the Ghost X-9, Sharon Apple, the Siren Delta System, Skynet, Commander Data, etc. is a sci-fi pipe dream with even the foreseeable future's technology.

9 minutes ago, Big s said:

Basically that description of X shows that it was cancelled. They at least let them try and finish up somewhat. 

Not as such, no.  The network didn't drop the series, though they did move it to a different time slot.  What happened was the show's sponsor withdrew funding for the fourth cour because the series wasn't performing up to expectations, though production of the third cour was allowed to go ahead as normal.

9 minutes ago, Big s said:

and I don’t think advent of the red comet really counts since it was just the origin ova and not really a tv show, kinda similar to the tv version of unicorn.

It did air in broadcast as a TV edit, same as Re:0096.

9 minutes ago, Big s said:

I really wasn’t too certain on reco though, but that and witch are definitely on the shorter side and I’m pretty sure this new one will be short as well, but really not sure if it will just end at 12 or go on for another season, but at this point I don’t expect an almost 50 episode series 

Yeah, it seems unlikely that the GQuuuuuuX will go for longer than two cours.  The way it's been paced makes it feel like it's one-and-done, but we'll have no way of knowing until it happens.

38 minutes ago, Duke Togo said:

Essentially, "too many women involved in Star Wars."

He didn't say that either.

The implication I read in it was that Disney LucasFilm has become a fan of the often unintentionally sexist trope Designated Girl Fight as a way to not-so-subtly highlight the more equitable gender balance in newer Star Wars stories.  

With newer Star Wars titles depicting more women in positions of leadership and in combat roles, it's inevitable we're going to see more conflicts between female characters in the franchise.  The writers are naturally going to be a bit gunshy about conflicts involving female characters because it's a delicate balancing act.  If it's not handled well and they show a male character overpowering a female one, they leave themselves open to accusations of sexism and endorsing violence against women.  If they show the female character overpowering the man, then they're accused of character shilling or man-hating.  It's kind of a no-win scenario, especially since there's still a social taboo against a man fighting/hitting a woman even if they're on an equal footing.  The Designated Girl Fight is a kind of narrative safe space and workaround for that.

35 minutes ago, Big s said:

Kleya making a return seems more likely than a lot of other characters.

As far as my goofy Deedra returns theory, it would almost play into a story where post war Kleya tries to bring imperials to justice for their roles in the many massacres that happened. It could be very easy for people to be lost in the shuffle after the power shifts hands and quite a few imperials could try and blend in or like we’ve seen in other cases have gone into hiding 

Kleya making a return would make more sense than most alternatives, but I still think it's a terrible idea unless it's handled by the Andor showrunners who know how to handle the more mature and sophisticated characters.

Filoni's people write fanfic-tier fanservice, plain and simple.  They would not be able to do justice to any Andor character.

Given that the political leaders of the Rebel Alliance seem to intensely distrust Kleya on principle simply because she worked with Luthen, a far more effective rebel leader than any of them, I can't really see her returning for any further stories.  The only place she really feels like she'd fit would be a sequel trilogy-era story about the Resistance, but if they did it would mean burying her in heavy makeup to age her 30 years and that would probably adversely affect Elizabeth Dulau's performance.

3 hours ago, tekering said:

I wouldn't be surprised to see Kleya make a return appearance as an agent of the New Republic... probably as a character foil for Elia Kane. 

Two strong female characters in conflict is a trope Disney Star Wars favors nowadays.

1 hour ago, Duke Togo said:

That's not even remotely true. And don't bring that sort of nonsense here. Go back to X or YouTube or wherever else your kind of fan hangs out.

28 minutes ago, Duke Togo said:

Oh look, two examples that aren't anywhere close to being the primary conflicts in their respective series. That's because the primary conflicts in every Star Wars series has been men to men, or men to women.

To be fair, he didn't say two strong female characters as the primary conflict... just "in conflict".

We do see quite a bit more of strong and/or powerful women in conflict with each other in Disney Star Wars stories.  Whether that's authorial intent or simply a consequence of the more equitable gender distribution among main characters in more recent Star Wars titles is anyone's guess.  Most of these conflicts are ideological rather than martial.

For instance, in The Clone Wars there was the ideological conflict between the by-the-book padawan Barriss Offee and the unorthodox Ahsoka Tano which did actually lead to them having an actual fight as Barriss was gradually radicalized by the Clone Wars.  It also had something of an ideological/cultural conflict between the actual pacifist Duchess Satine Kryze and her Death Watch-aligned sister Bo-Katan.  Rebels had a few minor ones here and there like Ahsoka Tano and the Seventh Sister, Hera and Mon Mothma squaring off on the subject of proactive vs. cautious responses to the situation on Lothal, and Sabina vs. her mother Ursa over whether Mandalore should side with the Empire or Rebellion.  The Mandalorian set up a fairly prominent ideological conflict between the religious traditionalist Armorer and the more modern Bo-Katan Kryze, as well as Ahsoka Tano vs. Morgan Elsbeth.  Ahsoka has a repeat of the conflict between Hera and Mon Mothma and also implicitly the same conflict between Leia and Mon Mothma.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

1 hour ago, Big s said:

Unlikely, but not impossible 

Well, yes... in the same sense that it's merely very unlikely, not strictly impossible, that any randomly selected person will be trampled to death by a cow or struck by lightning on any given day.

It could theoretically happen, and there are some people it's more likely to happen to than others, but the odds against it are so long that it almost certainly won't.

After all, most Star Wars stories would not benefit from bringing back a character like Dedra Meero.  She's a villain, sure... but she's a villainous bureaucrat.  Former bureaucrat, as of the end of Andor.  There's no end of those in Star Wars already.  She lacks the adventure hooks of someone like a Sith assassin (Asajj Ventress), a Sith apprentice turned Crime Lord (Maul), a legendary bounty hunter, or a famously brilliant Imperial admiral (Thrawn) that would fit into a more conventional Star Wars story.  

Dedra Meero's relevance to the story and setting is mostly wrapped up in her connections to the other characters in Andor.  What makes her important is her hunt for Cassian, her self-destructive determination to capture the mysterious rebel organizer Axis/Luthen Rael, and the obsession with justice she shared with Syril Karn.  Those people are dead and gone now.  Even if she weren't rotting in an Imperial prison for mishandling classified materials, a post-Andor Meero would be just another interchangeable sadistic evil Imperial bureaucrat like Minister Tua or Governor Price from Rebels.  The only reason to bring her back would be for the New Republic to put her on trial for the Ghorman Massacre... and war crimes trials aren't exactly the thing Star Wars stories are usually made of.

3 hours ago, Big s said:

X was cancelled due to low viewership, and I thought I heard the same for Reco. Might be wrong on the latter. Wtch might be the only one so far that was actually intended to be shorter, although not sure on the intentions for this one yet and don’t really know if it’s a success or not.

After War Gundam X wasn't out-and-out cancelled, per se.  Its broadcast run was reduced by one cour partway through production due to lower-than-expected ratings and sales of plastic model kits and a move to a different time slot at several networks.

Gundam: Reconguista in G was always a 26 episode series from the earliest stages of its development.  Director Yoshiyuki Tomino deliberately restricted the length of the series to two cours, as he felt that was the limit to what he could do at his age and with the current state of the industry at the time.  The series was poorly received, though not so much so that its run was affected.

The Witch from Mercury, for all its many flaws, was also always planned to be a two cour series and was reportedly reasonably well-recieved in Japan.

How long GQuuuuuuX will end up being, I have no idea.  The last UC TV anime, Advent of the Red Comet, was just one cour... but like its predecessor Re:0096 it was a re-edit of a pre-existing OVA.  I think I'd be pretty OK with GQuuuuuuX ending as a one cour series.  Studio Khara has made such a mess of it that I don't think there's any saving the story... it would probably be better to tie off the bloody stump of the story and move on.

3 hours ago, Big s said:

Just because something was done in Andor or Rogue one doesn’t mean that someone else won’t do something horrible later on. It is still Disney owned and they have shown that they have the power to ruin anything they can

Disney is just LucasFilm's parent company.  Their only involvement in its day-to-day operations is appointing the members of its Board of Directors.

The development and production of new Star Wars stories is managed within LucasFilm itself by its Chief Creative Officer (Dave Filoni) and the various producers working under him.

Dave Filoni has brought characters back past their use-by date, as noted previously, but that's effectively a fate reserved for Filoni's personal stable of action-friendly Creator's Pet characters that he used heavily in his Star Wars: the Clone Wars series and its spinoffs.  As a non-action girl and a non-Filoni original character, Dedra Meero is profoundly unlikely to make a comeback at any point. 🤣

3 hours ago, Big s said:

Witch was about 24 and most, if not all the other stuff were ova and Netflix streaming series. I know IBO was about 50ish and can’t recall anything between that and which that were just tv shows. 
 

either way, I don’t think this will be a longer format show, but it might get to that 24ish number. I just don’t think it will be a 50ish one. I guess we’ll find out if it has a major cliffhanger in a few weeks 

The era of Gundam titles being ~50 episodes as standard has been over for a while now.  We've only had two Gundam titles longer than two cours in the last fifteen years: Mobile Suit Gundam AGE (2011) and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans (2015).  IIRC, only three mainline Gundam titles have been shorter than four cours, those being After War Gundam X (3), Reconguista in G (2), and The Witch from Mercury (2).  

The pacing in Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX is so awful that it's honestly hard to tell if the series is meant to be just one cour like the last proper UC series (Advent of the Red Comet) or if it's meant to be two.

8 hours ago, Big s said:

That’s what they said about a lot of characters from the franchise. Somehow Palpatine and Maul got stapled back together, Vader and Qui Gon came back as ghosts and Boba got barfed out. I wouldn’t doubt Jaba will return somehow one day in a random comic or cartoon episode or something. Cereal might’ve only been stunned, who knows these days.

Have they, though? 🤔

As far as I can find, they actually haven't.  Normally when a character's ticket is explicitly punched they stay down.

Andor (and Rogue One) just isn't that kind of story... and Dedra Meero's not that kind of character.  She is done. 

54 minutes ago, Hikuro said:

Do we even know how many episodes are in this series? With the pacing of things lately some of them range from 12-48 and split into segments a year apart. So maybe all this really slow bad pacing and awkwardness is because the show will eventually be split into two segments and just doing really crummy character development. 

AFAIK, no... but recent Gundam titles have stopped at 24 or less.

37 minutes ago, Big s said:

Not really, since she was listed as a rebel spy.

At no point does the series actually say that she was sent to prison as a rebel spy.

Meero's off-the-record interrogation by Director Krennic has Krennic suggest she was initially detained on suspicion of being a rebel spy.  However, by the time she's interrogated Krennic seems to already be aware that the late Supervisor Jung was the rebel spy and Krennic makes it very clear that she's in much deeper trouble for other reasons.  Namely:

1. Her interference in Supervisor Heert's investigation and planned arrest of Luthen Rael/Axis, which she bungled so thoroughly in her eagerness that she cost the ISB their chance to interrogate a key rebel organizer they'd been chasing for almost five years.
2. Her personal files were found to contain a huge amount of classified information about the Death Star program that she wasn't cleared to have, and which she confessed she had deliberately failed to report receiving in error.  Information that was believed to have been compromised by Lonni Jung's intrusion into her files.

Even if she were, on paper, sent to Narkina as a suspected rebel spy... the Rebel Alliance knows that she wasn't one.  

37 minutes ago, Big s said:

She also didn’t seem like a high profile person. Most of the time she was out of view and rarely named.

Within the hierarchy of the Empire's anti-rebel efforts, she was pretty darn high-profile.

She was a relatively humble newly-promoted Supervisor at the start of the series, but partway through season one she ended up in charge of the ISB's counterintelligence hunt for rebel organizers like Luthen.  Director Krennic himself actively seeks her advice on how to deal with Ghorman, and makes her his point man for the operation... and he's high enough up the Imperial hierarchy that he can beef with the Emperor's inner circle of trusted governors without fear.

37 minutes ago, Big s said:

As far as being worked to death, there’s also a pretty good chance that her somewhat robotic mentality might work fairly well to get her through a work camp environment till a breakout occurs 

Maybe.  Then again, the fact that her entire life has been destroyed by her own hand would make her a likely-seeming candidate for the hot floor.

Not to mention that the Narkina prison factories are set up to prevent breakouts and prison riots by simply killing everyone.  The only reason Cassian is able to escape the way he does is because he found a way to short out the floor in 52D.

21 minutes ago, Big s said:

That’s if she found out. With a mass breakout, it would be easy for ex prisoners to get away fairly easy. Seems pretty common after the rebels took over.

She'd almost certainly be found out fairly easily if she's still alive when the Rebel Alliance/New Republic finally takes control of the prison she's been left to rot in.

After all, Dedra Meero was/is the Imperial officer responsible for orchestrating one of the Empire's first really overt and undisguised atrocities.  She is a high profile war criminal in the eyes of the Rebel Alliance.  The kind of person they're likely to want to bring to justice one way or the other.  Whether that justice takes the form of a shoot-on-sight order or an order to arrest them and bring them to trial to be either re-imprisoned or executed depends on when and who finds her.  (I'd assume the Rebels likely have some kind of card deck for high-profile Imperial officers and war criminals the way the US does to help troops identify enemy leaders.)

Of course, this all presumes that she would still be alive at the time the Rebel Alliance either located and took control of the prison complex or the New Republic took over from the Empire.  There is a very strong argument that she would not be alive by the time that happens.

1. Unlike a regular Narkina inmate, ex-ISB supervisor Dedra Meero knows full bloody well that she's been handed a death sentence.  Nobody is ever actually released from the prison.  They just get shuffled around until they're worked to death or kill themselves.
2. With her entire life and career now destroyed and being well aware that she is there to be worked to death, it's likely she will opt to step onto a hot floor and fry herself as we saw inmates do in season one rather than suffer for years.
3. If her identity as a former ISB supervisor becomes known to her fellow inmates, she's likely to find herself being killed by her fellow prisoners.
4. If she at any point lets slip that there is no actual release from the Narkina prisons, she's likely to find herself and everyone else on her floor being killed by the guards to keep the information a secret as we saw happen in season one.
5. If the Empire decides to withdraw from or shut down the prisons because they are either not needed or at risk of falling into Rebel hands, the most likely outcome is that the Empire will simply activate ALL the floors and kill every inmate in the prison so that none of them will join the fight against them.

Ultimately, the odds of Meero still being alive to be found by the Rebel Alliance or New Republic are very very slim.  It's vastly more likely that she would be dead, either at her own hand or that of the prison guards, by the time the prisons come under Rebel or New Republic control.

2 hours ago, Big s said:

I don’t remember Mon knowing specifically about her. Either way, she definitely wouldn’t do a break out job

Mon is not specifically mentioned to be involved with Meero, but Ghorman had been her particular issue in the Senate for literal years before the massacre and her denunciation of the Emperor in the Senate. She first mentions it all the way back in season 1, around 3 years before the actual massacre. It's a fairly safe bet she knows most of the information about what happened there. If not upfront, then at least after the fact. It was her key wedge issue that led to the creation of the Rebel Alliance.

She absolutely would not break Meero out of prison though. She would probably put her on trial and send her back to prison rather than execute her though.

6 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

I can recall a certain character that that was a complete monster that killed children, carried out multiple genocides, executed, and tortured prisoners that somehow got a redemption arc. 😆

If you're thinking of Darth Vader, he didn't have a redemption arc... he had a last second change of heart after his boss spent like 30 minutes interviewing his replacement right in front of him, then immediately f***ing died.  He never had to work with anyone to prove he had changed or try to earn forgiveness from anyone.  That he gets to come back as a "good" ghost owes a lot to his worst atrocities being retcons from the prequel trilogy, the Force's BS moral absolutes (and apparently only saving his last known moral alignment), and his status as The Chosen One and former violent offender apparently making him ideal to do the Force version of a "scared straight" PSA in Ahsoka. 🤣 

(I'm told that, in the EU, the few people he tries to speak to as a ghost tell him to F off because his last-second change of heart doesn't absolve him of all the horrible sh*t he did.)

If you're thinking of Kylo Ren, he also didn't really have a redemption arc... he had a last second change of heart after his new boss started creeping on his crush and his mom died, then he almost immediately f***ing died.

6 hours ago, Big s said:

Basically everyone you listed died and the rebels don’t seem to trust information from other factions easily. Kleya might end up the only one and she probably wouldn’t have been the one to break her or other prisoners out. Not only that, but who knows if Kleya survived much past this point. They could just as easily write her as KIA or just quit and ended up a death stick addict.

Only a few of them (e.g. Cassian, Melshi, K-2SO) and only years after the massacre, leaving them lots of time to share intel.  It's not said that the Ghorman Front survivors who joined the Alliance in Rebels were wiped out.  We know that there is one person for whom the Ghorman Massacre was a very personal subject who is absolutely still around decades later too... Mon Mothma.  

Your whole line of reasoning does not work.  

55 minutes ago, Big s said:

Unfortunately, everyone that knew of her crimes is pretty much dead. All they have on record is that she was a rebel spy that leaked information about the Deathstar, making her a rebel hero by mistake.

That's demonstrably untrue... even just within the context of Andor itself.

Dedra Meero was an ISB supervisor who was in charge of multiple sectors and a major conflict zone (Ghorman).  She wasn't quite a public figure, but she was someone that was under scrutiny by the Ghorman Front, by Luthen's agents, and by other rebel groups.  As we know from multiple stories, most of those groups shared intelligence.

There's also two years between the Ghorman Massacre and the events of Rogue One in which survivors of the Ghorman Front, Cassian Andor, and possibly K-2SO could share all their intelligence with the newly formed Rebel Alliance.  Plus the Alliance also has Kleya, who knows all about Dedra Meero and many other top-ranking ISB operatives.  Not only that, but the Ghorman Massacre was one of the Empire's worst public atrocities and individuals involved in it would naturally have been marked as war criminals that the Rebel Alliance (and New Republic) would wantt o bring to trial.  (The briefing room scene where Cassian relays Kleya's message suggests the Alliance is well aware of who the ISB's supervisors are and what they've done.)

So no... it's not like all information on Dedra Meero and her war crimes magically disappeared and she can be mistaken for a rebel spy.  The very idea is ridiculous.

51 minutes ago, renegadeleader1 said:

You're not really making a solid argument why it isn't a good idea. As you stated Dedra is a morally ambiguous character [...]

Uh, no... no I did not.

In fact, what I stated was the opposite.  That Dedra Meero is a True Believer in the Empire and the ISB's vision of Imperial Justice.  There is nothing morally ambiguous about her.  She is full-on Lawful Evil.  Two entire seasons of the series clearly show that she is not in any way conflicted about her role in the ISB.  She's blase about mass arrest quotas and the detainees being worked to death in prison labor camps.  She quite calmly advocates that a captured rebel pilot be murdered to avoid tipping off his compatriots that he had been captured.  On Ferrix, she's shown to be enjoying herself watching Dr. Gorse torture suspected Rebel agents like Bix and Salman Paak to the brink of insanity with audio recordings of a genocide as a way of collecting intelligence and has no problem with the local prefect executing Salman by hanging afterward.  She not only proposes a Final Solution to the "Ghorman problem" at Krennic's conference, she personally creates the conditions for the Ghorman Massacre to occur and then gives the order to start the massacre herself.  She justifies the massacre to her boyfriend as necessary to advance their careers.

The only time she's ever shown to be in any way bothered by what she does is when her boyfriend attempts to wring her neck after learning that she's actively trying to make the situation on Ghorman worse, and he ends up dead as a result.

Her role in season two is a very overt echo of a real world war criminal responsible for a genocide.  That's not moral ambiguity, that's genuine evil.  Not the cackling melodramatic kind embodied by Emperor Palpatine, but unambiguous evil nonetheless.

51 minutes ago, renegadeleader1 said:

[...] with a massive taint from her past actions who has had her entire world view shattered, lost her love, lost her freedom, and has been literally tossed aside like garbage by the entire thing she dedicated her life to. An unhinged thirst for revenge is a hell of a motivation, and lets face it Dedra is the type that would sacrifice a whole planet worth of Bothans to accomplish a mission especially if it means getting retribution against the establishment that she feels discarded her.

What makes you assume her thirst for revenge would be focused on the Empire?

Remember, the Empire is what she believes in.  What she has devoted her entire life to.  What literally raised her, according to her own account of her past to Eedy.  Her service to the ISB and the Empire is practically her entire identity and her faith in the Empire is practically absolute.  The Rebels utterly disgust her, as we see on many occasions in the series.

And remember, when Director Krennic confronts her in the ISB interrogation room on Coruscant, we see her put two and two together VERY quickly and realize that the person who stole her credentials and accessed the files about the Death Star that had been mistakenly sent to her was a Rebel agent and the person responsible for the leak.  As far as Dedra's concerned, she's in that prison because a rebel spy broke into her files and destroyed her career.  That's not likely to endear the Rebellion to her.

Not to mention, of course, that a "redemption" arc would be a boneheaded reversal of her entire character arc across both seasons of the show.  It's like proposing a redemption arc for Tarkin... he's a Complete Monster, those don't get redeemed they get destroyed.

5 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

Dedra redemption arc. Her getting inadvertently getting busted out of prison during a rebel prison break and joining the rebellion where her knowledge of imperial security procedures would be invaluable. Her losing everything as she has would give her a new understanding and value of Luthen's talk of freedom to her.

Oh please no.  That's so dumb and it would ruin her entire character arc.

Meero's role in the story, like Karn's, is to show that the Empire emphatically does not care about anyone.  The Empire's authoritarian desire for total control means that deviation from its edicts is seen as a challenge to its authority and punished without mercy, no matter how loyal or well-intentioned that person is.  It's only ever a matter of time before the regime turns on and destroys even its most mindlessly loyal lackeys for some perceived or actual failure, mistake, or misstep. 

Dedra Meero was a true believer in the Empire and the ISB's particularly draconian idea of "justice".  She all but unflinchingly ordered a genocide for the Empire's benefit.  Neither her lifelong loyalty nor her professional achievements in the Empire's service mattered a damn once she finally made a mistake that affected the Empire's objectives.  She wound up sent to be worked to death in the very same prison labor camps she spent her days shipping people to.  That irony is the perfect end to her story.

A redemption arc would be absolutely ridiculous... not only is Meero someone who absolutely loathes the Rebellion, there's no way the Rebels are going to overlook what she's done.  Not only did she likely send many thousands of people to prison labor camps like Narkina to be worked to death, she literally orchestrated a genocide.  The very genocide that directly led to the formation of the Rebel Alliance. 

There's already a better character for that role from the same period too... ISB Agent Kallus.

Caught the latest episode last night... another frustrating disappointment from a series that seems to specialize in them.

Eight episodes in, and the series really still has not done anything worthwhile with its main characters, its premise, or its setting.  GQuuuuuuX's writers seem content to do the bare minimum with the main cast of Machu, Shuji, and Nyan.  They seem to be far more interested in Steamed Hams-ing this other, vastly more relevant, interesting, and consequential story going on in parallel with GQuuuuuuX's story.  No, we're not allowed to see it for ourselves... but they'll happily take anywhere from two to ten minutes out of every episode to have the Zeon secondary characters tell each other about it for the audience's benefit.

A cynical person might get the impression that Machu, Shuji, and Nyan's story is an unnecessary addition because Studio Khara couldn't get Bandai Namco to agree to finance an anime based on a straight Gihren's Greed scenario.

On 5/25/2025 at 3:37 PM, Hiriyu said:

It could have been worse... F. Etienne Ornette?

... that one took me a second.  Nicely done.👍 

It definitely could've been worse.  He could've been Val Kyrie or some such.

I'm definitely curious to get into the part after that, since most of that section introducing Tom Kato is about his US Navy and later UN Forces service, but he mentions a testing accident that occurred during his brief stint working as an engine tester for OTEC where a 150m area of London was apparently compressed into a singularity.

14 hours ago, Shawn said:

I'm personally most interested in page 69 - 85...the Testing Days entries...is that possibly where the 81% kicks in? LOL

I haven't done the whole section, but I greatly appreciated the lengths they went to for a single absolutely dreadful dad joke.

Y'see... that section is presented as a collection of anecdotes from its in-story author who participated in the VF-X test flights.  He takes a moment in that section part, titled "The Right Stuff", to properly introduce himself.  He's a Japanese-American from the great state of California, a CalTech graduate with a BS in Aerospace Engineering, a US Navy F-14D Tomcat pilot who served alongside Roy Focker in the Unification Wars, and later a member of the in-story Multiconfiguration Analysis Team under Col. Chiba.  His family claims to descend from the legendary 16th century ninja master Kato Danzo AKA "Flying Kato".

The name of this amazing Tomcat fighter ace?  Tom Kato.  UGH. 🤣

9 hours ago, Big s said:

But they will probably still show up for the film more than likely in just enough numbers to get a profit. The budget will probably also be fairly low in comparison to other studios and even though I feel that they are kinda 50/50 on their good to bad ratio, A24 has built up a sorta fandom all of its own and more than likely will make up the majority of the ticket sales. It may not be as big a thing as Minecraft or Super Mario, but it probably won’t need to be 

Eh... the obvious counterargument there is Borderlands.

That too was an adaptation of a popular video game with a barely-there plot beloved for its visual aesthetic and gameplay in the hands of a respected production company with a somewhat uneven track record and an average (for an action movie) budget of about $113M.  It should have been able to break even and turn a profit without breaking a sweat as long as it didn't lose the fans.

A couple questionable creative decisions and dubious casting choices later... and the studio found itself $80M in the red as the not-so-proud owner of the third biggest box office bomb of 2024.