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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    History is nothing if not replete with examples of frankly awful things being done to achieve great and noble ends... many of which have had long-term benefits for humanity as a whole. The history of modern medicine is especially horrific in that regard but that doesn't stop people from reaping the benefits gleaned from that past awfulness. Mind you, it's not merely the means that make a monster... it's the motive. Good people can and will do horrible things if there's no alternative available or they simply don't know any better. A monster chooses horribleness in spite of the alternatives available. There are no monsters in the Macross setting. Misguided people, sure, but no Stefan Amarises or Sheev Palpatines cackling with villainous glee as they overthrow governments and commit all manner of atrocities for funsies. Only actually true for the Macross Galaxy side... and that was limited to the soldiers in their corporate army in a last ditch effort to protect the Vajra Queen, on which their entire plan to save humanity from being destroyed by its internal conflicts hinged. It was not done out of malice, but out of necessity. There is some other stuff they did along the way (e.g. in Wired Warrior) that is questionable in terms of medical ethics... but at least theoretically non-evil given that it was done to avoid risking the lives of living people. Havamal used Sharon Apple's unique flavor of manipulation, which is more making people incredibly chill with mild hypnosis. Not exactly "I have no mouth and I must scream" territory, but also done in order to defend their plan to alter history and retroactively save the entire population of Earth and its many cultures. Pretty understandable, especially considering the plan was motivated by the trauma and survivor's guilt of its ringleaders not any kind of actual malice. That was pretty awful, granted, but the stakes were (in the minds of the Galaxy fleet) the preservation of the entire human species. Mind you, it is explicitly indicated in both the audio dramas and movies that Grace truly does care about Sheryl in a parental manner. In the audio dramas, Grace can't bring herself to betray and abandon Sheryl until she uses her implants to edit her own personality for the sake of the mission. You could say movie Grace was proposing a radical method to save her adoptive daughter from a premature death out of familial love as much as out of being manipulated. That's... untrue on almost all counts. Nobody really dwells on the fate of the Galaxy Executives in the movie version because there's no time to... and they disappear with the Queen Frontier when it folds away, so from the perspective of the Frontier government their deaths are unconfirmed. Grace, well, same reason more or less... but it's a safe bet that people were actually bothered by it since she was close with several people including Sheryl, Ranka, and Nanase. Even Leon was probably upset by it, though for his own more selfish reasons... but he did seem to have a good working relationship with her to the extent that some of the more fun albums have them singing duets together and playing card games. Boddole Zer, for his part, is similarly not portrayed as evil or destroying Earth out of malice. We know after Macross 7 that his real motive was probably fear that he was seeing his troops fall victim to something akin to a Protodeviln attack. Something so horrible that it instilled almost Lovecraftian levels of instant fear in the Zentradi themselves half a million years after the Protodeviln were defeated. In the movie version, it's an honest mistake where he destroyed the planet thinking it was a Meltrandi Army base. The only reason the UN Forces had to kill him was purely strategic. Standard operating practice for Zentradi fleets is to retreat when their flagship is sunk. The UN Forces had no chance of defeating his Main Fleet as a whole, but by sinking his flagship they could force his unbeatably vast force to quit the field entirely and en masse. Keith and Roid... well... that's a very poorly executed scene that doesn't actually make a ton of sense in-context or out. Keith could have just disconnected Roid from the shrine and kept him alive, but for whatever reason he decided he'd really rather they died together.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    What's weird is that they somehow missed having that one additional meeting for nearly twenty years running. After the New UN Forces revised its decision to adopt the VF-19A as its next main fighter and basically asked the defense industry "What else ya got?", Shinsei Industry seemingly just surrendered the field to General Galaxy and let them run off with the 4th Generation main fighter contract rather than scale back the excessive performance of the VF-19 to a more manageable level. Even in 2058, seventeen years after the NUNS took a hard pass on the VF-19, they're still pushing the performance envelope rather than trying to make it actually flyable. It took an original development of the Frontier Government's fleet arsenal, LAI, and the Frontier branch of Shinsei to sit down and come up with a local variant of the VF-19 that actually prioritized handling.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    "Toned down" and "more controllable" are relative statements, to be sure. It probably didn't help matters any that Shinsei Industry seemed to be working at cross purposes with itself when it came to improving the VF-19. Efforts to improve stability and ease of control via aerodynamic refinements and flight control program updates for the airframe control AI were deployed to models that were adopting new, more powerful engines which almost certainly exacerbated the very g-load problem they were trying to fix. Somehow, it seems like it never occurred to Shinsei Industry's engineers to dial the engine power back to make the VF-19 more controllable. (And as a result, General Galaxy were able to steal a march on them with the VF-171 in the mid-2040s by rolling out a much less extreme 4th Generation VF that didn't have a thrust-to-weight ratio of over 10 and therefore lacked the control issues plaguing the VF-19 and VF-22.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Infrared would be a much bigger challenge to mask than protecting the cockpit from excessive g-forces, since you'd have to worry about the entire aircraft and the exhaust flow that will naturally be VERY hot because it's fusion plasma. There is currently no infrared active stealth system in the setting. Infrared detectors in Macross have the same limitations as real world systems, so it's not as big a problem as you would think for Valkyries except at short ranges thanks to VFs being relatively small in spacecraft terms. The few times the subject has been broached, the answer given has been that VFs employ heat sequestration techniques to reduce their infrared emissions in combat. Their fuel is a cryogenic material so it's also used as a coolant in space operations. Waste heat is captured in the coolant and stored in the insulated fuel tanks throughout the airframe until it's either cycled into the reactor or combat ends and the Valkyrie switches to radiative cooling. This approach is described on the VF-25, which makes use of its wing tanks for heat sequestration during combat and then uses its wing surface as a radiator for radiative cooling after combat ends. EDIT: Of course, the difficulties in hiding the heat emissions of a Valkyrie at short range are the reason that infrared is the dominant guidance technology used in micro missiles... In-universe, it's something that goes back and forth like a pendulum. Radar and active stealth technology are competing technologies. When radar technology is outpacing active stealth, you see an emphasis on passively stealthy designs. When active stealth is outpacing radar technology, you see less passively stealthy designs. Macross Plus was set at a point in history where 2nd Generation active stealth technology was losing ground to radar technology, so the VFs of the 2030s were designed around a passively stealthy profile and that carried over to the new designs of the 2040s. The 3rd Generation active stealth that was prototyped for the YF-19 and YF-21 one-upped current generation radar technology and the increasing generator power of the late 4th and early 5th Generation VFs enabled active stealth to have an edge over radar systems. There is some evidence in the VF-31's shift back towards internally carried weapons and low observable stealth design that suggests radar might be catching up to 3rd Generation active stealth in the 2060s. Of course, active stealth has its own problems in that it's active cancellation based using destructive interference to zero the amplitude of enemy radar pulses and thus requires a LOT of power.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It did... though you could say it's a further evolution of the movable seat that was installed in the YF-19. The YF-19 had a movable seat that could rotate a bit to help pilots cope with lateral g-forces. The EX-Gear on 5th Gen VFs adjusts the pilot's posture to optimize blood flow during high g-force loads to prevent blood from pooling in the extremities and reduce the risk of G-LOC. The 5th Gen VFs main anti-g mechanism is the Inertia Store Converter that takes inertial forces and displaces them into higher dimensional space temporarily.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    When you think about it logically, you're probably right. All of the other deal-breakers in the Project Super Nova VFs are only deal-breakers if the aircraft is actually flyable. If (almost) nobody can actually fly it, the other roadblocks like its high initial and operating costs, arms export restrictions, etc. mean very little. (Though it was the ISC, moreso than EX-Gear, that was the "fix" for the excessive g-load problem.) As we've already done solo jpop idols, idol groups, and more than one rock band if you count the manga side stories, I think the next logical port of call is probably metal. Japan's got its own local flavor of metal (Kawaiicore) and a few past anime titles like Detroit Metal City have explored metal as a musical genre. That said, it'd really depend on what the balance of action vs. music was going to be. Kawaiicore metal would be better for a more music-focused series, where I'd say something like power metal would work better for more of an action focus. If you were willing to let the music take a back seat or do another virtuoid idol, you could go with something more action-friendly like eurobeat. Swing might work too, if it were really uptempo. There was a time I would have said jazz, but Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt was so incredibly pretentious about it that it ruined the idea for me forever. An idea that probably wouldn't work that I'd love to see attempted anyway would be someone doing a series or side story with musical comedy... a space-future version of Weird Al, Tom Lehrer, or Spike Jones.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It can't. Pre-Mor's security force was disbanded by the ISB back in the fourth episode when the Empire revoked the corporation's governing authority. Admittedly, I was so sure that gun was going to turn out to be the Chekhov's Gun that would link Andor to Aldhani... but it seems to have been a fakeout. If Melshi does get arrested, it might accidentally convince the Empire he's Cassian Andor if they notice it's a stolen Pre-Mor security-issue weapon.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Considering that the YF-19/YF-21 and VF-19/VF-22 were developed at a time when operation by emigrant governments and emigrant fleets was expected to be the norm, it seems unlikely that that the New UN Forces would have tolerated having a main fighter that was dependent on specialized contractors for maintenance. We do know about one hard-to-source part that is unique to the VF-22. The ultra-high purity fold carbon in its Inertia Vector Control System. This was noted to even have been an obstacle to the widespread adoption of the Queadluun-Rau the system was borrowed from. Of course, what ultimately killed both the VF-19 and VF-22 was a combination of revised arms export restrictions prompted by a rise in anti-government activity and the Sharon Apple incident, the high initial and operating costs of both aircraft, and the loss of control accidents in early model conversion training exercises due to the excessive g-loads the fighters imposed on their pilots.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Oh. Well, I'd question a few choices of words given that all the characters in it are at least as old as Minmay was at the start of SDF Macross. Bear in mind, because that series involves an idol group it amplifies the real world demand for members of such a group to have diverse individual appeal to their (predominantly male) audience by giving them diverse appearances and builds to appeal to the largest possible audience. There'll usually be at least one member who appeals to that particular widespread male preference. I'm with ya on the gratuitousness of that, but they are trying to move character goods and that's one way to appeal. (Just not in that video, which is mostly mecha goods for Macross.) Don't let my snark convince you it's bad... it's actually quite a fun show once it gets moving, it just drags heavily in the first half.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The video has Macross content, but it is not exclusively for Macross. There's very little Macross in it, it's promoting many different Tamashii Nations product lines. That's Takanori Nishikawa AKA T.M. Revolution, the singer/songwriter/producer/actor and cultural ambassador of Shiga Prefecture. He's on the show in that costume to promote a S.H. Figuarts figure of himself in that same costume (at ~19:00), which I would assume is probably something he wore in one of his music videos. ... what? There's nothing like that in that YouTube video. The closest to sexualized that video gets is Nishikawa singing in that ridiculous pleather getup. The second performance with the virtual idols is not Macross either, that's a promotion for Idolmaster. 98% of the video isn't Macross. Macross Delta is Macross 7 but with an idol group instead of a rock band and nationalistic aliens using a hate plague for mind control instead of space kaiju. You're basically seeing the equivalent of Basara going out, spraying off a quick burst of speaker pods, and then singing Planet Dance for the 11 billionth time. That said, Macross Delta does kind of bear the hallmarks of being a comparatively low-effort and rather derivative (of Frontier and AKB0048) production intended more to promote the real idol group Walkure than a series intended to stand on its own merits. Passionate Walkure is a compilation movie, so it skips a lot of the expositing that was done in the series. There are many threads for the series and one for each movie where one can cantankerously complain about the content if one wishes to do so.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That would be why, as part of the process of transitioning from one model of fighter to another, the mechanics go in for retraining the same way the pilots do.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The transformation is not, AFAIK, one of the factors listed that led to the New UN Forces deciding to adopt the YF-19. There were many cost-related concerns involving the initial cost and maintenance cost of various aspects of the design like the high purity fold carbon used in the IVCS, the wing's special deformable material, and the costs involved in many high-performance systems like the new engines, the pinpoint barrier, etc. There were also the stability and reliability concerns involving the BDI system, which were likely the bigger factor since the YF-19's design also shared many of those expensive systems and materials.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Not completely empty... the room Cassian was staying in has a new occupant who is fast asleep in the bed when Cassian breaks in to recover his belongings from the lockbox he hid in the WC. It appears to be early morning, so the guests at the resort may simply be asleep after a hard day/night's partying.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    OK... "Daughter of Ferrix". Up front, this feels like we're telegraphing that... Anyway... let's have a look-see. All in all, this episode feels like it has a few too many moving parts. It's hard to really take any of it in, because it's so scattered and most of it has no significance in and of itself... it's pieces of a bigger picture that's scattered all over hell's half-acre right now. The last episode's going to have a hell of a job tying up these loose ends.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Not the best two-parter in TNG by a long run... though it was fun that Futurama of all shows decided to lampoon the ending.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the decision to make generic hull textures instead of individually numbering each ship was probably for the sake of the production crew's sanity, and becuase they've gotten a fair amount of ribbing over how many times CV-404 got sunk during Macross 7. There's always those glamour shots where they spend a little more on the detail because they know they're going to be using it in commercials, product packaging, eyecatches, etc. Well, that's probably got a lot to do with the protagonists being from a PMC rather than the New UN Forces. Like Movie!SMS, Movie!Xaos seems to exist at this weird intersection of resources and personnel levels where they have just enough people to properly man one medium-sized ship but so much money that they can afford to make that one ship a Macross instead of hiring more people and operating more flexibly from two or more smaller and less costly ships. So when the cavalry arrives at the end to help save the day, it's literally a bunch of that one class of ship because that's all they have because they spent beyond their means to get that one big ship as their headquarters. So much so in the Delta TV series that Xaos ran out of money almost immediately when Ragna was captured and removing all the Epsilon Foundation tech from the Elysion would've taken more than the company's yearly operating budget. (Made even weirder by the fact that, in the Macross Frontier TV series, the Macross Quarter didn't even belong to SMS. It was a Frontier NUNS prototype on loan to SMS the same as the VF-25s.) This is why it's so important to get treated for anxiety disorders... otherwise you end up worrying about things that have no realistic chance of ever happening.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The film's liner notes confirm that the Macross Elysion is immobilized by the damage it sustained in the previous film, so that's probably not the Elysion. They probably reused the Macross Elysion CG model for one (or more) of the other ships of the same class in the background, expecting it would be too indistinct for the audience to notice. The same way fans were probably not supposed to notice the Battle Astraea appears to be a modification of the Battle Galaxy CG model that didn't change its hull number or any number of other subtle reuses of CG models and textures for same like that poor VF-0A pilot Tim Baker who gets killed three or four times in Macross Zero.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's not quite accurate. Macross never really addressed the topic in any specific terms until 1992-1994. Macross II: Lovers Again's creators chose to make Macross: Do You Remember Love? the "correct" version of the First Space War and then built their setting and story on top of that. Then you had Macross Plus and Macross 7 coming along two years later along with the official statement that Macross II: Lovers Again was now a "parallel world" story and that Macross: Do You Remember Love? was really an in-universe historical drama from 2031 that had been filmed with real ships and mecha. A fair amount of ink was then spent explaining how the various new designs in DYRL? actually fit into the setting. The point really didn't end up in the spotlight until around 2008 and the launch of Macross Frontier for the 25th anniversary. There were publications asking Kawamori about how the new series fit with events from works like Macross 7, Macross VF-X2, etc., and also fan questions at events that inquired about things like the status of Macross II. That was around the time the "everything is a dramatization of a true history" thing really gained traction. Of course, since Big West wants to sell artbooks and light novels and tech manuals and the like they're kind of having it both ways on the understanding that broad strokes is in full effect. That's just the problem with Expanded Universes in general. As TV Tropes likes to say, "The Main Characters Do Everything". That's the initial difficulties in localizing the sequels plus twenty years of the now-terminated Harmony Gold embargo. The fanmade RPG supplement writers have had a field day, but the regular fic writers haven't quite caught up to it since Frontier and Delta only did the rounds via fansub.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    When it comes to successful, or at least well-publicized, revolutions, rebellions, and general insurrections the journalists and the early historians tend to whitewash or overlook the character flaws in the rebel leadership in order to make them into larger-than-life heroic figures. People don't join armed rebellions and revolutionary armies because they're full of noble, high-minded principles like Mon Mothma. People take up arms against the government because they're afraid, they're angry, they want change, the politicians aren't getting the job done, and the people are done asking. Revolutions happen because there's one or more agitators like Luthen Rael out there whipping that anger into outrage and directing that outrage to specific targets. When those agitators are people of relatively high social standing who are nevertheless willing to get their hands dirty and lead from the front, they becomes the "heroes" of that revolution and inspire others to join the cause even if their actions are kind of horrific. People aren't put off by it because they're hurting "the bad guys". Once the revolution ends and the new regime takes power, people look back at the revolutionary leaders without emotions running high and often realize they were not only not paragons of virtue but also often deeply flawed or even outright terrible people. People like Luthen Rael or Leia Organa are the kind of people who cause an armed resistance to form around them through that natural charisma and because they lead from the front. Highly principled but fundamentally passive people like Mon Mothma don't inspire people to join armed revolutions. When they're charismatic, they inspire people to nonviolent resistance like Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., Valclav Havel, etc. When they're not (like Mon Mothma), they tend to either end up against the wall with the members of the ousted government or at best kept as a powerless useful idiot the new government can use to lend itself an air of legitimacy during the transfer of power. That would be less a plot development and more a plot hole, since Mon Mothma has been utterly uninvolved in the actual business of the Rebellion and even in Rogue One the very kindest interpretation is that she's an indeceisive figurehead that nobody answers to or listens to.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps... but then again, many Macross fans find Kawamori's take frustrating and ask questions like the above about the existence of an objective value of "truth" for the series. Other franchises have run into outright fan rejection when attempting something similar. Like when Star Wars's new owners declared the old EU apocryphal or when the Star Trek: Enterprise series ended its run with an episode that was actually a holodeck program, leaving the door open to hint that the entire series had been a holodeck recreation and not a true history. It's an approach that tends to be found slightly frustrating whenever someone attempts it because people are hardwired to look for patterns. That's the intended approach. Though Big West, at least, seems to recognize that fans are often in the market for something a bit more connected and make the effort to join up the dots anyway for the people who care.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    More importantly and fundamentally, trying to find the "real story" is an exercise in futility because there is no such thing and there never has been. Anything beyond that very basic reason is overthinking it. Macross runs on broad strokes continuity becuase Kawamori's not about to let continuity get in the way of telling a story the way he wants to tell it. That "it's all dramatizations" thing is just a clumsy way of telling fans to stop expecting every little detail to join up neatly.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Fair enough, though the reason Mon Mothma's subplot stands out from the others in Andor is that it just feels directionless. Luthen's raid on Aldhani essentially invalidated Mon Mothma's relevance to the story and her entire subplot thus far. She started out a critical player in the story because Luthen's rebel network needed funding badly and she needed to bypass Imperial scrutiny of her finances in order to provide it. The big win on Aldhani erased any need for Mon Mothma in the rebel big picture and left her subplot cartwheeling off towards irrelevance to the rest of the series as her focus drifts to covering up her previous involvement and then to that shady banker she dislikes. Mon Mothma's subplot needs a good kick back in the direction of the main series before it becomes a Canto Bight level plot tumor.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    In all likelihood, it was either animated for the film and cut for some reason or animated for the original theatrical trailer.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    We - the viewers - have no real insight into the so-called "real" Macross continuity. Nobody does, really. Why? Because it doesn't actually exist in any sense. The notion that all Macross works are fictionalized dramatizations of a "true" Macross history is Kawamori's chosen/favorite metaphor for explaining to fans that Macross runs on broad strokes continuity. "Broad strokes continuity" is, of course, an author's polite way of expressing to his or her audience that "It's my story and I'll do what I want". The past, in any given Macross series, is whatever Kawamori wants it to be. He has no qualms about completely changing the significance of events from past Macross works to suit his new story.* He'll leave stuff out, add new stuff in, some characters get forgotten and others get the "remember this new guy who was definitely with us all along" treatment. The metaphorical waters are further muddied by the existence of fictionalized dramatizations of past events within the context of individual Macross shows as well (e.g. the 2031 film Do You Remember Love?, the 2045 TV serial Lynn Minmay Story, the 2058 movie Birdhuman) that are all presumably taking their own liberties with history in general terms and specifically to the version of the backstory in that Macross series.** Characters in-universe have their perceptions of history colored by these fantastic dramatizations of history's events, including Basara Nekki, Mylene Jenius, etc. Really, the closest you're going to get to an actual yes or no answer is the official series chronology maintained by Big West in official publications like Macross Chronicle. For that specific purpose, the answer to your question is "No" because that official chronology bases its First Space War history on the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series and the events of Macross: Do You Remember Love? are an in-universe dramatization that debuted in in-universe theaters in 2031. * As seen with the significance of Macross VF-X2's events changing in Macross Frontier and Macross the Ride and the story of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! implying several technologies were banned that demonstrably were not so in previous works. ** For instance, the version of Do You Remember Love? seen in Macross 7 contains scenes not present in the real world film Macross: Do You Remember Love? including Max and Milia's wedding.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Oh god, Inner Light. That was one fantastic performance by Patrick Stewart. Just absolutely amazing, and impactful enough that they kept calling back to it in little ways as the series went on.
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