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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    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. 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.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    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. 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. 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.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... 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.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    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. 🤣
  8. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Some parts of that story are likely too unremarkable/mundane/boring to bother putting into a series too. For instance, the theft of the shuttle is probably a nonevent. Rebels steal Imperial shuttles so often in Star Wars shows that how easily and how often they're stolen has become a bit of an in-story running joke across multiple series. "How is it the Empire lets us keep stealing these things?" - Kanan Jarrus
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... I'm one of those people. I think we talked a brief bit about it during SDCon back before the COVID lockdowns. My translation of the Special Edition book is about 80% complete. I'd hoped to be done with it inside of a year, but free time became a rather scarce commodity a few weeks after that first lockdown and hasn't really recovered. 😅
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I've only ever seen copies of Special Edition and Vol.4 in person. I've managed to score a couple copies of Special Edition over the years on YJA and Mandarake and so on. Just a fantastic book, IMO. You can really feel the team's love for the series in the massive attention to detail they put into it.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Adapting a popular property with an extremely vague or borderline non-existent story just means the probability that the film's story will be harshly criticized by the game's fans for "getting it wrong" is almost 100%.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Just cast Jack Black as Let Me Solo Her and make the whole thing a comedy. It'll save a lot of trouble in the long run.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The Too-Perfect Saint's latest episode is really... eech... let's just say it's stretching the limits of suspension of disbelief enough to resemble a slinky.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The Gyan hasn't actually changed that much... they've stylized it a bit, but it looks like all they really did was round off the sharp corners on the MS-15B Gyan from [i]Twilight of Zeon[/i], lose the skirt, and sweep back the top of the conical head. It still has a lot of the original Gyan's odder design choics like the flared ankles, the scuba tank-style backpack, etc. It even has a similarly-designed spear and shield. Which is nice, IMO the 15B is probably the best looking version on the Gyan. This looks like it could be out of an episode of [i]Gundam Evolve[/i] instead of the incredibly overdesigned hot nonsense going on with the Gundams and Zakus that just look like someone said "How busy can we make this, visually?". Kind of says a lot that that this is one of the show's best looking designs thus far, and it also seems to be one of the ones their designer screwed with the least.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I kind of figured the opposite... that they were bothering to show the fight in the trailer, so there was probably a lot more of it since it was being shown as a centerpeice of the next episode. My mistake, I suppose. That's not quite what I'm getting at. There's not really a sense of how much time has passed since the first episode, but Machu and Nyan have spent very little time with Shuji in the series thus far. What little they've had in terms of interactions has mostly been Shuji talking to/about the Red Gundam or watching him graffiti everything that isn't nailed down. It'd be one thing for them to both be so attached to him if the series had actually shown a developing relationship between them, but Machu and Nyan seem to jump straight from being strangers to a dangerous level of obsessed with him. Machu basically goes from treating him like a stranger to suddenly having a massive emotional breakdown over Nyan having seen the "kira kira" because it was just for her and him, to robbing the Pomeranians and threatening to shoot the team's sponsor to protect him... all in what's implied to be maybe a couple of weeks at most. It all seems to revolve around the "kira kira" too, which kind of suggests that this isn't natural... they're being brainwashed somehow.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Caught today's episode of GQuuuuuuX over lunch... it was pretty disappointing. Last episode sold us the idea that there was going to be a big, climactic confrontation between the Twelve Olympians and Pomeranians for first place in Clan Battle and a possible double assassination attempt on Kycilia Zabi. We get none of that. The Gundams don't even fight. The writing in this episode is back to being a hot mess... particularly when it comes to the two main girls weird obsession with Shuji, a personality-less character they've spent almost no onscreen time with. Their sudden devotion to him and willingness to both fight over him and kill for him comes off as downright psychotic. The new designs being introduced are getting progressively less fugly. However, that appears to be a function of Studio Khara's ham-handed designer having to divide their limited time across multiple machines and therefore not having enough time to ruin each classic machine to the same extent as the Gundam and Zaku. The Psycho Gundam Mark II looks fine and almost UC-like until it starts dropping its armor and becomes an off-brand Evangelion in a maroon banana hammock for some reason, but the Gyan and Hambrabi made it past Khara's designer seemingly without more than a very minor aesthetic overhaul.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Must be my apparent youthfulness talking (😅), but I'm not sure "kids" and "young" are words I'd use to describe the Star Wars: the Clone Wars fandom. Unless, of course, it were in a sentence like "they probably have young kids by now". Tales of the Underworld is aimed at people who were tweens and teens when The Clone Wars came out... almost 17 years ago. Musings on whether 30 really is the new 20 aside, the Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld series is very much a Star Wars series by and for the most die-hard of Star Wars fans. It doesn't really have anything for the casual audience because its stories are so heavily dependent on fanservice. Both stories feel like they were written more to pad out the Wiki pages for their respective characters than because there was anything worthwhile to do with the characters. Worse even than the usual Filoni fanservice-first halfassery.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That "young crowd" is strictly imaginary. This is a spin-off from a 2008 TV series. Anyone familiar with these characters in their original context is likely at least in their mid-20s.🤣
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Watched Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld today. If I had to pick two words to describe it, those words would be "unremarkable" and "unnecessary". It's another Dave Filoni Star Wars animated title marked by all his usual creative excesses and his "fanservice first" writing style. Raspy-voiced Sith assassin Asajj Ventress and walking Western movie reference Cad Bane were clearly chosen becaue they were fan favorite minor characters in The Clone Wars and not because Dave Filoni and Matt Michnovetz had any story about either of them that was worth telling.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Supervisor Meero almost certainly believed the same was true of herself. That she was surely too loyal to the Empire to ever be arrested and sent to a space gulag. I can only imagine the vast numbers of people who might begin dreaming up false charges in order to free themselves from Senator Binks's company.🤣 Most of the Empire's prisons were Republic and/or Separatist prisons first... and probably went right back to being Republic prisons after the war. The only thing more horrible than that hypothesis is the cursed knowledge imparted to me by The Clone Wars... the terrible, forbidden knowledge that...
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe Director Krennic will arrange for Dedra to have an appropriately entertaining bunk mate to help the time pass more easily during her stay on Narkina 5. I can think of a few people in the Star Wars universe who would make ideal companions for her...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl has finally decided to veer into romance... which I guess is a nice change of pace from the main girl bashfully shoving the main guy through the nearest wall with her super-strength every time he gets close.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the power of dogsh*t-tier writing is a pathway to many plot developments some consider to be unnatural. That said, in Star Wars, I think we've only seen one person actually return from death and that was just recently. Emperor Palpatine and Mother Talzin both tried to avoid dying for real by using the dark side to turn themselves into the undead. Palpatine used the dark side to anchor his mind to his dead-and-rotting corpse like a classic voodoo zombie or a lich. Talzin used the dark side to turn herself into the galaxy's nastiest lingering fart, existing as a vampiric mist made of "magical ichor". Both of them needed to feed on the life energy of other people to regain a functional body and avoid dying for real. Boba Fett just pulls a "reports of my death-by-felching in a giant anus monster in the desert were greatly exaggerated" since he suffers a classic Disney villain "death" offscreen during Return of the Jedi. Dedra Meero... well... her ticket is likely to get punched in a less survivable, more verifiable manner.
  25. Seto Kaiba
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