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Nekko Basara

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Everything posted by Nekko Basara

  1. Yeah, it's funny that after so many episodes without more than a glimpse of any Windemerean women who aren't Freyja, the best look we get is at "fakes." Mikumo and Makina were sporting single hearts, but Mirage had a single rune that was shaped like a soft teardrop or bean (maybe a magatama?). Kaname's appeared to be the same shape as Mirage's, while Reina's was just a disc or blob (it's possible it was the second shape drawn imprecisely). At any rate, no explanation given, but the ladies all had single runes and some clearly weren't hearts.
  2. Escaflowne was the first anime series my wife (to be) and I got into together, back in the days when you had to buy it a few episodes at a time on DVD. I still have a real soft spot for the show, even though the pacing goes all to hell towards the end (I gather that it was initially planned to be much longer). The movie is jarringly different, but so damn pretty. And, oh, such soundtracks! I would love to see Arcadia take another pass at the Escaflowne Guymelef. The Yamato version was an ambitious attempt, but it's such a floppy and nerve-wracking mess to transform that I ended up buying two and just leaving one in each mode (its low aftermarket price is further evidence of its flaws). I think that only magic could create a perfect cape-to-wings transformation, though.
  3. I don't think the show supports that idea. Among the aerial knights, Bogue and Quasim probably have the longest runes with their braids, while Keith's are only moderately long (even if you average the two runes for make characters), yet Keith is clearly the most connected to the "wind." Her short rune would also suggest Freyja's connection was fairly weak, which doesn't match what we've seen. On the question of lifespan, King Gramia seemed very advanced in age despite having some of the longest runes. The only character I can think of who has very long runes paired with a high fold connection but a shortened life is Heinz, and he's called out as an exceptional case. What really puzzles me is whether Windermereans can lengthen and shorten their runes to match certain hair styles. It's hard to imagine how that would work, if the runes are connected by a stalk or tentacle. Maybe the length of an individual's runes are decided by genetics, and they each just adopt a hairstyle to suit that.
  4. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Episode 23 provided a lot of support for the theory that boys have two runes and girls have one. It also seems like boy runes are always stars - but girls definitely are not always hearts.
  5. I could tell you, but it wouldn't make any more sense if I did.
  6. Legends speak of a prophet to be born one day as "Oops, all runes!"
  7. Continuing my obliviousness, I only just realized that all of the boys have the same rune shape (a four-pointed star where one point is the base, sort of a hilted spearhead). Freyja's single rune is, of course, heart-shaped, so in the absence of other evidence, I'll assume all female Windemereans have a similar rune. I think the reason it took so long for me to pick up on this was that I thought the first set of ending credits were showing us a variety of possible rune shapes. But in retrospect, I guess those were just fanciful shapes, one of which resembled Freyja's rune.
  8. Forgive me if I missed something obvious, but has it been explained why Freyja has only one rune, while the other Windemereans have two (although some hide them pretty well)? Is it a boy/girl thing? We never seem to see other Windemerean ladies for more than a moment (except maybe Heinz's two attendants, but I can't tell their gender).
  9. I haven't been following the show threads to know if this is commonplace or not, but around my household we refer to active runes as "hair boners."
  10. 41 and long since dead. No more hair-boners for me :-(
  11. A recent Google search for Chie Kajiura turned up something I'd never seen before - the apparent identity of her daughter (as well as the daughter's father). 18-year-old Hana Sugisaki seems to be a an up-and-coming young actress who was already fairly successful as a child, using her mother's surname at that time. Is this news to anyone else? All I'd ever encountered previously was that, following M7, Chie largely dropped off the radar for a decade while she focused on raising a child.
  12. So, she really made a "Mess" of him? ;-) I'm not sure it was a cockpit hit, though. Is this clip on Youtube definitive, or are there different edits/versions? It shows Kakizaki talking on the display in Hikaru's cockpit when there is an explosion behind him, causing his chest and helmet to burst (and his left arm weirdly comes up from the bottom of the view, apparently severed at the shoulder?). Hikaru then glances to his right, and see's Kakizaki's valk exploding from the middle - the cause isn't apparent to me - and the canopy is clear and intact (which seems like a minor continuity error, given what we saw on the display). Then Milia appears, leading her flight of Q-Raus, and launches her missiles. Not trying to be argumentative - I really appreciate the response - I just want to illustrate how puzzling this looks. Maybe it's just the clip - I don't have a good copy of DYRL at hand.
  13. I always assumed in DYRL that Milia was personally and directly responsible for killing Kakizaki right before her amazing duel with Max. But watching the clip for the umpteenth time, I realized it wasn't that clear-cut. Is there an official take or fan consensus on this?
  14. Hey, don't sell yourself short. I've built a "normal" 1/72 VF-25 and the "itasha" 1/100 VF-25s, and the thought of doing both combined like you did gives me nightmares! Although that Klan-version VF-25G always did tempt me. And I don't have anything like the presence Mike does on these boards, but rest assured there's at least one more person here hoping to see each VF-31 covered with pictures of its respective idol.
  15. I love that the GERWALK mode doesn't have most of a fighter hanging out aft of the legs the way that so many valks do. That's one area that I think the VF-1/VF-0 handle better than most of their progeny. On the other hand, those reversed wings really bother me. I enjoy the absurd idea that GERWALKs fly aerodynamically, rather than just through sheer thrust, but it's a tough fantasy to maintain when the lifting surfaces are upside down and backwards.
  16. Yeah, Bobby's portrayal was often cringe-inducing, but at the same time none of the other characters ever disrespected him. And, yeah, 100% badass pilot.What I'd really like to see is another character like Canaria. Doctor, working mother, and pilot of the baddest mech in the whole show. On top of which, she appeared to be of African descent but wasn't caricatured (although Macross has a better record than most anime in that regard), she was married and her husband did most of the childcare, and her portrayal was never overtly sexualized. Canaria seemed to me as if the creators identified all of the worst things in anime and made one character to be their opposite. Pity she didn't get more screen time.
  17. I can't get into Mikumo until the show gives us more info about what her deal is. She's a superhuman diva who talks into her hands and likes naked moonlight strolls. I feel like that's most of what we've gotten so far. The "mysterious" angle is already getting old - give me a reason to care about what I don't know.
  18. Were the pods really the source of the projections? The projections seemed to all face in one direction and didn't react in any way to where the Delta valks were. My impression was that the source must have been the ship with Walkure onboard (or they were just the product of artistic license). I was a bit disappointed that when Hayate briefly landed on one of the projections, his valk cast a dark shadow but the projection didn't appear on the valk's surface. I suppose that might be evidence that the valk was the source, but it looked more like it was just too difficult a visual effect for the show to manage.
  19. That's a good point, and there's good reason to avoid using it. As great as the range on he GAU-8 is, an A-10 making a gun pass is going to be far more vulnerable to ground defenses than one relying on standoff weapons or even mid-altitude bombing. The gun is a weapon for low-threat environments, and its main virtues are that it is versatile and cheap; it's not as if it allows the A-10 to engage any target type more effectively or safely than another aircraft with the proper ordinance.
  20. I also appreciate that the show is portraying them as a "couple," albeit not overtly. That is so much better than the shy and possibly closeted lesbian and the oblivious "best friend" that we got with Nanase and Ranka.
  21. Hahaha! Now I need to go watch the full MST3K again. The "sex talk" during the refueling is classic.
  22. I didn't mean to spark another conflagration over the fluid nature of Macross canon. I love the way new stories appear in the spaces around and between the old ones, and where they overlap it's just like two tellings of the same tale. What specifically tripped me up here was a mistake on my part: I thought that the "anti-Vajra" YF-29 was developed in response to the Frontier fleet's Vajra encounters. This gave it an impossibly rapid development time, but I hand-waved this away with the "rule of cool" and the need to get new valks into the movies. On that flawed premise, there was just no way the YF-29 could have contributed to the VF-27 (even in movie, now that I think about it), and that's why I thought there was a problem. Understanding that YF-29 development was triggered by the Galia 4 incident, and was a sister program to the VF-25 rather than a derivative of it, fixes everything for me regarding the VF-27. As far as "canon" goes, the TV series can just be seen as a version of the Frontier story where the fleet was not sent the YF-29, and the movie tells a version where it was.
  23. Good catch! I think you are exactly right. Kinda neat to think that just as Kawamori draws on in real-world aviation for inspiration, maybe he or someone else on the staff is drawing on real paleontology. The idea of a four-winged stage in bird evolution has been around for about a century, but it seems to have gotten a lot of recent attention due to recent fossil discoveries and the use of computer-modeling in bio-mechanics. Anyhow, sorry for the digression!
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