Seto Kaiba

One remark I found while I was doing a bit of additional checking... apparently their fixation with jellyfish as a snackfood came from Kawamori being on a diet and snacking on dried squid in order to reduce his sugar intake during development.

AFAIK, it hasn't been said who on the show's staff came up with all of the details of the various worlds that Xaos and Windermere visit in the course of the series. Kawamori probably came up with at least a general outline, but the details were probably workshopped by the show's writing team incl. scenario writer Toshizo Nemoto, Ukyo Kodachi, and others. The motif they chose for Ragna and Valette City in general is real world Malta and the Maltese islanders, though the floating shopping district is said to be modeled in part upon Dubai in the UAE. The Protoculture reengineered the local life forms into something resembling their own body plan, as they did on Earth and many other planets. The Brisingr globular cluster is implied, in the series, to have been the Protoculture's last known holdout before slipping into extinction and it seems they created several species in that region either hoping one would inherit their will or at least as some kind of valediction.

It was literal robot horse space fantasy - or, rather, an "in space" version of heavily mythologized history - midway through its development under the title Science Fiction Sengoku Saga. That's the reason for the design of the body armor and the goofy ornate helmets. They're heavily toned-down versions of what was originally a sci-fi take on ou-yoroi. I'm not sure that necessarily connects to the Spartas's lack of any real protection for its driver, though... since that aspect was removed in the transition to a mecha series.

You're assuming they're doing open auditions. There's no guarantee they're doing that... prior to Frontier, the norm was for them to contact the partner label and get a short list of already-signed newbie performers. As of 2060, he's still bumming around the galaxy as he was in Macross Dynamite 7. He sent his guitar tracks for the Fire Bomber reunion album in over the galaxy network.

Yeah, unless you have a dedicated gaming room or something similar 5.1 is a pain to pull off and doesn't really produce noticeably better immersion than a high quality 2.1 setup. My first gaming rig, back in the days of SLI, had a 5.1 audio setup but I always struggled to find a decent placement for the two rear speakers that didn't require taping cords to my carpet... and even then I was defaulting to headphones most of the time to avoid bothering my neighbors. I'm sure someone probably makes a 5.1 setup with wireless rear satellites by now, but I've yet to find a solution that really beats my tacky-as-hell 2.1 Logitech G560 speakers with the lights and my G935 headset. On a quasi-related note... since I've put together a new gaming rig for the first time in quite a few years, how're you all handling cable management?

Currently starting Classroom for Heroes. This... this is pretty awful. The title put me in the mind of a knockoff of My Hero Academia, which would be pretty tedious on its own, but this is another one of those tedious isekai-inspired "school for adventurers" type comedy titles that can't think of a joke better than "Look how quirky we are". It's like the unwanted child of Combatants will be Dispatched! and any of a thousand "reincarnated hero tries to live a normal life and fails" fantasy comedies. Never mind, it IS another tedious "the reincarnated overpowered hero tries to lead a normal life and fails" story... complete with the usual excessive level of fan service.

Undead Girl Murder Farce continues to be an unexpected delight with its latest episode. I am truly, truly hoping this series gets renewed for another season... though it did get rather unexpectedly gory in the most recent episode. In fairness, can it be called unexpected when is one of the principal antagonists? I have to say, I wasn't quite expecting that

Are you used to using on-ear or over-ear headphones there? YMMV, but when I switched to remote work at the start of the pandemic and my gaming PC also became an office workstation, I found over-the-ear headphones with a firm but narrow ear cup made a huge difference in preventing or reducing the frequency of those headaches. The ones I had the best success with in terms of long-term use were the Logitech G935s. They've held up pretty well for me... the only issue I've had with the pair I got back in like '18 or so is diminished battery life, but the battery's replacable. (The one downside is the rigid foam traps a lot more body heat, so it gets a bit sweaty under there after 4-5 hours.)

As both @azrael and I mentioned, we don't have any actual/official timing info. What I described is the approximate timing they've used the last two times (Frontier and Delta)... but there's no guarantee that Big West will stick to the same schedule with Sunrise doing the animation production. If they are, we're looking at another 2-3 months before we get any real information about the series in terms of when and where it's set.

No, it can't aim forward on those models. It's specifically a rear facing weapon meant to cover the fighter's blind spot. Many of them, especially the later models like the 19, 22, 25, and 31 have a fixed forward-facing gun or pair of guns that do the same job.

For Europe, it remains to be seen... HG lost a lot of its trademarks in the EU to challenges from Big West, so it may be possible there. It's a hard "No" for US fans though.

Nothing has been published on that front yet. If we assume that Macross production at Sunrise will follow a similar timeline to what's been done at Satelight, they'll announce the new show's title in September, do a first promo event around the end of October, and run out the teaser version of the first episode in late December prior to a start of broadcast in April of the following year.

's probably just the same loophole that has existed ever since export sellers in Japan first realized there's a market for Macross stuff in the west... and that Big West itself has been exploiting for a few years now. Harmony Gold's exclusive license is only valid outside of Japan. They have no standing in the Japanese domestic market, so as long as seller's in Japan Harmony Gold can't do a damn thing about those sellers carrying out transactions with buyers outside Japan. It would be up to Big West to contact the seller and insist the product not be made available for export. If there were some kind of agreement that Big West would halt export sales, I'd have expected to see a crackdown in other areas like home video already... but sellers based in Japan are still cheerfully offering JDM editions of new and old Macross media for direct export sale as we speak. I'd guess, based on that, that this is just a corner case where the expected volume of direct importers is too low for anyone to really be bothered with since the expectation where games are concerned is that folks'll get it from their FLGS or the console eshop.

The main decisions the Tokyo courts handed down in the Big West v. Tatsunoko copyright confirmation proceedings from the early 2000s essentially upheld the status quo ante... Big West and Studio Nue own the Intellectual Property of Macross's original series and therefore the franchise, the right to produce and exploit derivative works, etc. Tatsunoko Production owns the copyright on the physical animation of the original Macross series that it paid to produce and the rights delegated to it as payment for same (the rest-of-world distribution and merchandising for the original TV series that they licensed to Harmony Gold USA). They didn't touch on the merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love? that Tatsunoko had likewise received as payment from Big West in exchange for bankrolling the animation production for the movie, which are presumably what's in play here WRT the removal of the DYRL? characters from this video game (merchandise) since they licensed those rights to Harmony Gold in 2001. There was one other quasi-related filing and decision that touched on the subject of sequels, but that was Tatsunoko's claim that they were owed royalties from Macross's sequels because of their involvement in the original's production process. That claim was rejected based on the prior finding that Big West and Studio Nue jointly owned the IP, and thus all the rights pertaining to future exploitation of the property. The million dollar question regarding those newer designs based on older ones would have to be how transformative the update is. Older Max is clearly visually different... but is the VF-1EX with its different paintjob? Or the Queadluun-Rhea? It's very difficult to say.

Which is pretty much what we'd concluded earlier... that this restriction on the first Macross's design works could only really apply to the original appearances of those characters and mecha that were within the scope of Harmony Gold's rights-under-license. Aged up versions of the characters that appeared later seem to be just fine, which you'd expect as they're legally distinct from the original designs and outside the scope of HG's license. The real test would be whether Big West could get away with using Flash Back 2012 versions of the first Macross's characters in the game, a new VF-1 variant as long as it has some distinctive paintjob not reminiscent of the originals and/or a new head, or whether the DYRL? version of the Macross-class used in subsequent Macross titles is exempt. Distribution rights wouldn't be the issue here... this is a video game, which is considered merchandise because the original is a film work. We know Harmony Gold has had the merchandising rights to DYRL? since 2001. They picked them up from Tatsunoko at that time to close a loophole in their attempt to block toy imports because their exclusive rights-under-license originally only extended to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series. Had they not done so, toy importers would have been able to continue importing DYRL?-branded VF-1 toys with impunity.

Yeah, that's the most likely outcome... Macross loves to go to new places and tell stories with new people. It leaves the details of inter-series connections and returning characters largely to secondary works like light novels, manga, and video games. (Like how Macross the Ride draws connections to Macross VF-X2, Macross 7, Macross Plus, Macross Frontier, and a few other titles in obsessive detail.)

Considering that it sailed uneventfully for four years and then... ... kinda, yeah. One of the issues with how fold navigation works - which is kind of a blessing in disguise for Humanity as they try to keep their burgeoning interstellar civilization "under the radar" when it comes to the massive and massively destructive Zentradi main fleets and whatever's left of the Supervision Army is that when you're traveling by space fold you can't see what's in the space you're circumventing. With most detection systems being lightspeed or slower (RADAR, LIDAR, etc.), the detection range of individual ships is not high, so the chances of actually running into someone or something out there by accident or coincidence are extremely low. Not zero, but extremely extremely low. (That and the strategy of choice for emigrant fleets dealing with the occasional, very rare, cases of blundering into the vicinity of a potential hostile force is to de-ass the area with the quickness to avoid being spotted. That is to say, "Perhaps it would confuse them if we ran away faster?".)

If they can recreate the macguffin that allowed them to be found in the first place, maybe? But since it's illegal tech, probably not?

When all's said and done, given that nothing exciting has happened to it... I'd expect a story set aboard Megaroad-01 to basically be a Macross version of Red Dwarf. A terminally bored crew trying to find SOMETHING to do to stay sane.

So I did some checking, and it appears that...

As mentioned in a few previous posts, we can be fairly certain that isn't in the cards because... Flash Back 2012 was the epilogue to their story. Per Kawamori, their story is over and they've sailed off into the (metaphorical) sunset aboard Megaroad-01. Not revisiting those characters in future works is apparently a stipulation of the new global distribution agreement with HG. There's really no story to tell... the Megaroad-01 sailed interstellar space uneventfully for four years and then lost contact with the New UN Government...

Not going to lie, that sounds awesome and I want to see it.

Eh... on the one hand, yeah there are characters who have a "happy" ending. On the other, even in the happiest endings in Gundam the world is still ****ed explicitly or implicitly so if it's a happy ending it's one with a very narrow scope. TBH, even as disappointing as I found Delta's writing... I would LOVE to see someone else continue the Immelmann style and be a "dance battler" with their Valkyrie. That was some wild stuff, and made for some really impressive choreography when they actually used it. We're probably stuck with the skinny VFs... just because it makes the transformations more realistic and easier to replicate in toy form. More worldbuilding is always welcome. FWIW, they built an amazing playground for Delta and then just underused it. TBH, when it comes to the Zentradi I kind of like how once they got past the "recovering adrenaline junkie" phase they were just normal folks. It really brings home the "not so different" message in the original series to see them so integrated into human society that nobody bats an eye that their neighbor's cucumber green or has pointed ears. They're not being pigeonholed based on their species like they might be in so many other sci-fi titles and stuck in quasi-military roles... there are Zentradi artists, executives, research scientists, athletes, musicians, doctors, stay-at-home dads, any occupation that a human would have is open to them. I'd like to see more of them in non-military capacities in future stories because they really are just "my green neighbor" by the time of Frontier or Delta. Not really... his motives become clearer in hindsight with Macross 7. Even in the original, he was a concerned commander looking at an enemy who was seemingly causing a large-scale mutiny among his forces and frightened by that. With 7 in mind, we know he was probably quietly terrified looking at what appeared to be his forces succumbing to a mind control attack similar to the Supervision Army's. (Something that frightened even the likes of Exsedol.) Leon... well... he varies by the adaptation from "useful idiot to the Galaxy fleet" to the movie version's capable but (properly) paranoid right-hand man to Howard Glass. Yeah, those are all familiar titles... 😉 (Funnily enough, the Kzinti are in Star Trek too... thanks to Larry Niven scripting an episode of TAS based on "The Soft Weapon". Apparently something similar happened in Trek too, since there are Kzinti in Starfleet as of Lower Decks.) 'course Star Trek is kind of the poster child for "yesterday's enemy is tomorrow's friend" in western sci-fi... if only because, as a TV series, it has broader exposure than many classic sci-fi novels. Every new series tends to feature the previous one's recurring baddies becoming allies.

My good chum, you've missed my point completely... and mischaracterized a bunch of the antagonists in question. The point being made there is that, in Macross, the antagonists are not bad people. Their methods may be questionable, or even abhorrent by regular Human standards in a few cases, but all of them are trying to do what they believe is right and best for their people. They're not cruel or malevolent or causing harm because they like hurting people, they're motivated by a desire to survive, by fear, by past trauma, by perceived injustice, or by a desire to prevent a calamity. They're not evil, just misguided. (Sharp contrast to Gundam, where so many antagonists are motivated by ruthless will-to-power, racism, classism, or other beliefs that make other people in some way "lesser" in comparison to themselves.) Poor shark's probably wondering WTF is going on by this point. It's something I hope Macross continues to do. In much the same way that Strange New Worlds is a breath of fresh air after the relentless depressing darkness of Discovery and Picard, Macross is that much needed optimistic break from the relentless misery of Gundam and so many other titles out there right now that emphasize the negative. With so much emphasis on how polarized things are these days, a story about how people can bridge divides in worldview and find peace together feels like it's needed more than ever.

Well, Undead Girl Murder Farce has turned into a veritable who's who of late 19th century fictional Europeans... ... and two historical domain characters who've gotten quite the glow up in popular fiction... Thanks to their enduring popularity and adaptations featuring their descendants some of them could reasonably be expected to be recognized... but there are a few there that I'm kind of expecting would sail over the heads of some viewers who didn't have to read a lot of late 19th and early 20th century literature in school.