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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a d*ck-measuring contest. Your impression is very mistaken. I'll chalk this ad hominem up to the fact that you're simply not familiar with the community. You've created a lot of problems for yourself here by making inaccurate statements and trying to dismiss valid criticism of the film as "hate". Nobody's going to take you seriously like that. (The hilarious irony is that when all is said and done, I've been one of Delta's more vocal defenders in the English-speaking fan community.) One unusual aspect I have noticed in Macross Delta is that it seems to have polarized its viewer base in Japan and abroad into two groups: fans of the real idol group Walkure, and fans of the Macross series. There is some crossover between those two groups, but they have very different priorities and views of the series. The fans with the most positive view are Walkure's fans, who are mainly interested in the new songs and the portion of the story that involves Walkure directly. Fans who are there more for the Macross aspect of it are much more likely to find the series and movies disappointing because of their weak writing, the lack of development for many characters, the very poor dogfight choreography that dominated the TV anime, and it being so heavily derivative of Macross Frontier. In that last point, you could say a lot of people are dissatisfied with Delta because it is a very UC-like sequel that stays so close to the story of the previous series. Because this is a Macross fan community, you're going to find a lot of fans here who are here more for the story than for the music, and therefore find Macross Delta disappointing. Nobody here arbitrarily hates it because it's Delta. People are criticizing the many areas where the movie's execution is problematic, inconsistent, or simply incoherent. Those are two completely different things. Macross Frontier's two movies are two parts of a single story, adapting and modifying the story of the TV anime. Everyone already knew about Grace and the Cyber Nobles from the TV anime, so nothing was spoiled. Macross Delta's first movie was a condensed adaptation of the TV anime, but the second was an original story separate from the TV anime. Having it spoil its own ending barely 30 minutes in and then reminding the audience about it every ten minutes until the movie's over is a VERY big problem with its writing. Um... did you miss that characters in this movie on the protagonist side make the same observation about Lady M being the same kind of villain as Cromwell? One of the major problems with the writing in this film is that it's heavily dependent on protagonist centered morality. That Cromwell and Heimdall are "bad" is left almost entirely to the say-so of the film's main characters, and even the protagonists are unable to refute any of Cromwell's actual arguments when they're brought up. It crosses the line into being a pretty silly argument if you're familiar with previous material. That cloning and cybernetics can significantly improve quality of life for people with life-altering injuries was already a proven fact in Frontier-era materials, and that extensive use of unmanned weapons can save lives is a truism with the Frontier fleet using Ghosts extensively as first-response units and for high-risk recon missions and some emigrant fleets being established to use all-Ghost air forces. Not only are Cromwell's arguments reasonable on the face of it, but several previous Macross works have already established that he's completely and objectively correct. It's to the point where, if you're at all familiar with previous work, that Lady M's positions make NO SENSE and Cromwell sounds like a pretty reasonable dude. I'm not sure how you can kid yourself that Lady M has any kind of high ground when both movies explicitly confirm she's objectively a criminal. She broke the laws she herself forced the New UN Gov't to enact by carrying out illegal cloning experiments, then compounded that crime by falsifying documents to hide the fact that Mikumo is an illegal clone, violating all kinds of human rights laws by keeping Mikumo as a slave and child soldier, etc. Made worse by the fact that she arranged for those laws to exist in the first place. That's not to mention her culpability for Xaos's other criminal activities like their illegal participation in the war between Windermere IV and the New UN Gov't. (That Xaos, as mercenaries, are unlawful combatants gets mentioned when Hayate, Mirage, and Freyja are put on trial and are denied prisoner of war protections guaranteed to soldiers for that reason.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Get real, the writing in Absolute Live!!!!!! engages in such absurdly heavy-handed foreshadowing that it all but completely spoils its own ending within the first half hour. They are "elderly police sergeant the day before retirement" levels of unsubtle about spoiling the ending. Made infinitely worse, IMO, by the way the movie goes to such extraordinary lengths to spoil its own ending. I'm bothered almost as much by how obsessed the writers are with depicting Kaname as a miserable failure. Her own coworkers apparently like her so little that they carry photographic evidence of her failed solo idol career at all times to remind her how much she sucked. Come to that, it's actually kind of worrying how many times this movie stops to remind one (or all) of the characters that they suck. Sure, it's objectively true that Xaos, Walkure, and Delta Flight are all small-time operators at best but there are a few points where it feels like it crosses the line to actual ill-intent on the part of the speaker. Which really just draws a line under how incompetent the staff of Xaos are. Coordinating operations like that is a flight controller's job, not a platoon or flight leader's. Not to mention their Valkyries all have dedicated software specifically for coordinating operations and assisting unit leaders with command and control. There is literally no reason for Mirage (or anyone) to be barking overly-specific directions like that while sitting still making a perfectly vulnerable target of themselves.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, I kind of doubt it. Starfleet has never exactly been shy about doing major, strip-the-ship-down-to-the-frame-and-start-over refits on its starships before. Especially on their largest, most prestigious, multi-mission explorer classes. Given the changes in the Enterprise-E's appearance between movies, we can safely assume she underwent a major refit after First Contact to take out all the Borg hardware and upgrade her firepower and we know she had another after Nemesis to address her battle damage. The latter is four years after the Dominion War's end. Almost all of the ones we see are from the 29th or 32nd centuries. The only legitimate ones to appear in the 23rd or 24th centuries were the USS Enterprise (-A, -B, -C, -D, and -E) and the one-shot Galaxy-class USS Yamato (NCC-1305-E). Other than those two, there's the 29th century USS Relativity (-G) and the 32nd century's Excalibur (-M), Tikhov (-M), and Voyager (-J). The 32nd century USS Discovery (-A) doesn't count because it's the original USS Discovery with a fake registry number to conceal its true identity as an illegal time-traveler from the 23rd century. The USS Dauntless (-A) similarly doesn't count because it wasn't actually a Starfleet ship, but rather an alien one faked up to look like one as a trap.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The Grand Cannon concept didn't really do so great in the First Space War. It fundamentally assumes the enemy's going to achieve orbital supremacy, and at that point you're very likely already hosed, as was the case in its only use.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The ancient Protoculture seem to have tried that in a way, protecting planets like Uroboros and Windermere IV by surrounding them with artificial fold faults. Its viability as a defensive strategy is... questionable.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    To be frank, that's more a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem in Star Trek: Picard is that not that we're seeing a lot of new starship classes. After all, Starfleet had a rough time in the 2370s and the deficiencies in the many older classes of ship leftover from the late 23rd century were thrown into sharp relief in the Klingon War in 2372, the Borg invasion in 2373, and the Dominion War from 2373-2375. The actual problem is more that what we're seeing here in the season three trailer is needless replacements for ships that were still practically new. Destroying the Enterprise was shocking the first time it happened in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock, but it'd already lost practically all of its sting when the Enterprise-D ended her extremely brief service life jobbing in a match against an obsolete Klingon Bird-of-Prey. It deteriorated to a meme when First Contact was incredibly blase about self-destructing a brand-new Enterprise-E. Learning that the Enterprise-E didn't even make to 30 years in service and there's already a new Enterprise-F is just the very definition of anticlimax. That's made worse by the fact that Picard's final season is set on the Titan-A. There was NO REASON to replace the USS Titan design already being used in Lower Decks. NONE. It was incredibly well-received by the fans and the Titan would only have about twenty years of service under her belt at the time of Picard's final season. Starfleet ships are designed to last for a century or more. Riker's USS Titan somehow got blown up very shortly after being launched but somehow also acquitted itself so well that a new ship with a registry suffix was commissioned in her honor. That's a thing reserved for Starfleet's most celebrated, most accomplished starships. So instead of the gorgeous USS Titan design fans waited a literal decade to see onscreen, we have this fugly kitbash that looks a good century older than it allegedly is. Nah, we saw a BUNCH of Inquiry-class ships in the first season. An entire fleet, in fact. But it was such a lulzily awful scene because of bad writing and terrible CG that left the low-poly, low-detail "fleet" looking like exactly what it was: blatantly copy-pasting one ship model and texture fifty times.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! has nothing but scorn for your desire to know anything about the new mechanical designs. The liner notes contain no useful information whatsoever. Based on what little is said and shown in the film proper, I would assume - and I must stress that this is an assumption - that the VF-31AX Kairos Plus is still using the detuned FF-3001/FC2 engines that were originally fitted to those airframes as part of the Siegfried custom specification before the improvised repairs. Expecting sense from Absolute Live!!!!!! is asking too much of it. So's expecting a coherent plot, well-choreographed action, answers of any kind, or really anything satisfying at all beyond Max absolutely clowning on Delta Flight before telling them the many ways they absolutely do not measure up. Plus or minus a few modifications, it's the same basic airframe as the Siegfried and that was already being pushed to its limits with the 1,875kN of the detuned FF-3001/FC2s. I'm not sure they had room to significantly improve the engine output. Their outing in battle suggests they're still nowhere even close to the YF-29's level and might not even actually be a significant improvement on the Siegfried. No indications given about where they even got some of the parts. It's possible they used the facilities of the factory satellite that they made the repairs on to produce the various bits they needed that weren't on-hand hardware.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Not necessarily, because not all Zentradi fleets are equipped the same. This is far more blatant in Macross II's timeline where the Zentradi are more regularly the antagonists and other main fleets are shown with a wide array of mecha and several unique ship classes not found in the Boddole Zer main fleet. However, even in the main Macross timeline there is some evidence that some fleets have equipment or equipment variations that others don't, either due to factory satellites in that fleet's supply chain being lost or breaking down or because it was only ever available to Zentradi in one specific part of the galaxy. Macross Chronicle's coverage of the "enemy battle suit" from Macross Plus posits this as a possible origin, an independent development by some Protoculture colony world or regional government in their Stellar Republic that was not universally adopted.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I don't think it's ever come up. Whether that means Vrlitwhai and Exsedol are extremely odd Zentradi and more normal ones skip right to attacking, that the New UN Forces are much more proactive, something else, or some combination of factors is unclear. If I had to guess, I'd assume that the New UN Forces are likely unwilling to risk allowing a larger Zentradi force to acquire any information about an inhabited planet since they've heard this story before and know how it ends.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    One would assume there are at least some measures taken to minimize the risk of detection once an emigrant fleet settles on a planet. Nothing is mentioned, AFAIK. I'd assume a fair amount of it is simply taking appropriate measures so folding ships entering and leaving the system don't attract unwanted attention and maintaining an early warning picket in the space around the system to detect an approaching Zentradi force. Past a certain point, it's a do-or-die defensive battle and to the New UN Forces credit they do seem to mostly win those when sufficient reinforcements are available. To a certain extent, there is that element of living with the risk that your planet might one day be found and attacked by a Zentradi fleet. It's not something that people can really get away from. It's just kind of the cost of living in the galaxy the Protoculture ruined. All that's really changed is humanity knows about it now. I'm not sure that would necessary be any different than an encounter between the New UN Forces and the Zentradi. The Supervision Army was made up of captured Protoculture and Zentradi, and without cloning facilities for the Protoculture the way there were for the Zentradi it's likely an all-Zentradi force now and using mostly the same equipment which the regular Zentradi forces use. The New UN Forces could conceivably have fought the Supervision Army a few times and not even realized it because they're not checking whatever inter-fleet IFF codes that the Zentradi use.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's Star Trek: Picard... everyone being broken and miserable is this show's one prevailing theme. Everyone apart from Worf, Geordi, and Beverly has already had at least one season of trauma and misery. Very true, though since Star Trek fans have responded very negatively overall to the Kurtzman NuTrek original designs and some of the best-received fan videos are shops which replace the Kurtzman designs with classic ones, you'd think they'd have tried a different tack. Compare the reception to Kurtzman's copypasta armada in season one with the flotilla of updated TNG ships from STO in season two. This is one case where they could literally have done NO new ships and actually gotten praised for it. Instead, replacing the extremely well-received animated USS Titan with this fugly kitbash called the Titan-A and introducing a new Enterprise for no real reason just smacks of laziness. They don't want to put in the effort to get fans invested in a new ship so they're trying to borrow the fanbase's affection for an older one by borrowing the name. Not to Trek proper. Back before NuTrek launched, I know Star Trek Online was at least semi-officially considered to be its own self-contained alternate universe opposite the Relaunch Novelverse. I don't believe that position has changed, or at least if it has I haven't seen any official statement about it. NuTrek has been borrowing starship designs from STO because fans dragged Kurtzman and Chabon hard for the copypasta armada of one badly CG'd ship Riker shows up with at the end of Picard season one.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Indeed. The scale of the threat posed by the remaining Zentradi forces really can't be overstated. Not only are there still approximately 3 million ships of the 4,795,122 ship Boddole Zer main fleet still abroad in the galaxy after retreating from the final battle of humanity's First Space War, there are said to be between 2,000 and 3,000 of the original 5,000+ main fleets still at large. Each of those main fleets has hundreds or thousands of its branch fleets spread across massive areas of space searching for, and engaging, the Supervision Army. The best-equipped (or most excessive) emigrant government New UN Forces have the firepower to defeat a branch fleet on their own... the smallest regular operating unit of the Zentradi forces. Anything much bigger, and the best choice is to tuck tail and run. The mechanics of fold navigation are a double-edged sword that mostly works in humanity's favor at this stage. Because it's essentially a form of teleportation by folding higher dimensional space, the odds of chance encounters with the Zentradi are quite low. Still nonzero, but low enough that humanity is still essentially flying under the radar despite its burgeoning interstellar civilization.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe the new villain is a former events coordinator from that resort Picard stayed in on Risa, determined to take her revenge for his stubborn insistence on doing nothing but reading. Really, they're running out of anyone who has any real reason to even dislike Picard never mind feel murderous rage towards him and the Federation. The Next Generation was too episodic for Jean-Luc Picard or the crew of the Enterprise-D to gather much in the way of recurring nemises (nemesi?) or offend anyone badly enough that they'd come screaming out of nowhere to try to destroy the Federation and murder him. He only really managed a few people who had something against him personally and they're all either dead or in such disgrace that they can't really get at him personally never mind try to destroy the entire Federation. This villain either has to be a "remember the new guy?" or this crazy lady is a Son'a/Ba'ku come for revenge for some reason. Are we looking at Ru'afo's mum or something? That problem ended up getting magically solved offscreen and then never mentioned again. (Voyager's VG warp nacelles were supposed to be the fix, at least initially.) Two in one season... this means that, somewhere along the way, both Will Riker's USS Titan and Worf's USS Enterprise-E were destroyed somehow offscreen. Why do the writers have it in for everyone and everything like this? Everyone MUST be miserable and haunted and broken and nothing familiar from better days is allowed to exist. My question would be more why they didn't use the name of the Odyssey-class ship Picard commanded before retiring... the USS Verity. The tie-in/prequel comic that set Picard up had him commanding the USS Verity as his flagship for the Romulan evacuation. Why not just use THAT one? It's just lazy writing. Destroying the Enterprise once was a sucker-punch to the audience who were certain the writers would never do it. Past that point, it became an expectation that the writers WOULD do it because they went and established that practically every Enterprise ends its service in a violent demise.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming humanity doesn't end up destroying itself first or getting destroyed by the Zentradi... yeah, probably. Emigrant governments are going to need quite a bit of time to build up substantial defense forces that can independently withstand even a Zentradi Branch Fleet's attack. Even in 2060, all but the emigrant governments with the largest and most powerful defense forces have to call upon their neighbors for reinforcements when they come under attack by a Zentradi branch fleet or other sigificant threat. The obligation to answer such calls comes up in Macross Delta: the False Songstress when Macross Galaxy sends a distress call in the face of a Vajra attack and in Macross Delta: The White Knight of the Black Wing when Windermere IV's Aerial Knights take a beating helping to repel a Zentradi fleet attacking one of Windermere IV's neighboring systems. With most emigrant governments being able to muster only a few dozen to at most a few hundred warships, they're badly outclassed by the sheer scale of Zentradi forces. It will take quite a while for humanity to be able to deploy a military force on anywhere close to that insane scale or to develop weapons that can sufficiently level that playing field. (Master File presents a story about a 2030s-era encounter with a very small main fleet of just 120,000 ships that was still time for the brown trousers. Spica III was wiped out, and the New UN Forces had to draw every available ship and fighter from Earth and all the neighboring systems to wipe the main fleet out before it stumbled on any other worlds in the immediate vicinity of Earth.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    If nothing else, I have every confidence Jack Black's performance as Bowser will leave no piece of scenery free of toothmarks... which is 100% on-brand for Bowser. I am just NEVER going to get over the idea of Mario actually having dialog.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    So... that was a thing that I watched. I have no idea what the hell it was, though. If I had to guess based on the content of that trailer, I would say either Patrick Stewart or the rest of the writers room are on a mission to burn what remains of TNG to the ground in a fit of pique after seeing Picard's reviews. Either that or it's a cry for help. There's nothing sane about repeatedly writing yourself in scenarios where everyone hates you and you and your friends are miserable and likely to die horribly. Jean-Luc Picard was a consummate diplomat. Why do so very many people seem to harbor murderous hatred for him now that he's like a hundred and a robot? The cast reunion the showrunners swore Picard wouldn't become aside, are they just grenade-fishing for loose ends to tie up for fanservice's sake? Lore and Moriarty? Those two were done to death back in TNG.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, it does sound logical at first glance... but it's not the safest option on the table. Avoidance is. By the 2030s, emigrant fleets use taskforces of stealth warships to scout ahead of the fleet on its planned course and provide a defensive early warning picket in a wide area of space around the fleet's current position. Nothing's safer for the civilian population than spotting trouble ahead of time before it spots you and getting out of dodge before that trouble in potentia can detect you or at least before trouble can reach you. Nobody wants to be caught in a do-or-die defense of an emigrant fleet against a superior force. That ends poorly way too often, like Macross Galaxy getting wiped out by the Vajra. Variable Fighter Master File adds a few extra details in the VF-25 book. Namely, that emigrant fleets making an emergency fold jump to escape a threat will deploy a fold wave jamming unit to mask their departure and that there is a (thankfully little-used) practice of either self-destructing or otherwise destroying ships that cannot escape and are left in imminent danger of falling into Zentradi hands with information about Humanity.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Really, nothing about "Lady M" makes sense... and to make matters worse, all the information about her is presented as either secondhand or rumor.
  20. Seto Kaiba
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be a hell of a plot twist...
  22. Seto Kaiba
  23. Seto Kaiba
    There may well be. Then again, there may not. Someone has to be brave enough to actually test the hypothesis first before we'll know for sure. Disney's not as confident in the brand as they were when they were before fans tore them a new one over the sequel trilogy and Solo. With Andor handily grabbing most of the attention, I suspect we'll see more efforts towards original storytelling with a minimum of fanservice. Nothing succeeds like success, after all. If they can keep bringing fresh product like Andor that isn't buried in self-indulgent fanservice they can probably undo a lot of the damage the sequel trilogy and Solo did. Yes, novels are adapted to screenplays all the time... but there's a big difference between adapting an already-popular novel that had broad appeal like, say, Jurassic Park or Harry Potter, and adapting a licensed novel intended to cater to a much smaller audience. It's almost exclusively the former. (It can work under the right conditions, but because western audiences are still locked into "animation is for the children" Japan's cheap way of doing it is seen as unattractive to most studios and the production cost of these direct-to-streaming shows is absolutely insane so studios are being very cautious. Mind you, being cautious is not the same thing as exercising good judgement either... it's possible to very cautiously make huge numbers of terrible decisions, like The Rise of Skywalker.) Being a fan of something does not mean you are not able to recognize its flaws. It usually means you love something despite, or even because of, its flaws. If there are writers who are fans of the EU, they're no doubt exercising their professional judgement to separate what they personally enjoy from what's workable for the general audiences. 😉
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they can't all be gems... but talk about a missed opportunity for a prequel meme!
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how many questionable mushrooms he ingests, it's possible he's just having a REALLY bad trip.
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