This has the Central Anime fansubs, the color-coded ones, that made this series what it is in the West and paved the way for the production of Die Neue Thesis, the translation and release of the light novels, and all those wonderful memes.
Why say so? Because Hi-Dive won't have it forever, others are unlikely to pick it up, and some don't care for either the subtitle aesthetics or the translation used, but the Archive is a hardier beast- and not just because you can download everything to run locally. It will be there, ready to stream, and you don't need to give some jackass that hates you a penny.
Let's put this past week's posts together in a related context: campaiging in an established IP.
Let's say that you've got a club full of devotees to Uncle George's Space Fantasy, and they want to do this as a tabletop RPG campaign. Let's go a step further and say that they're willing to play a proper campaign. How can you handle the long-running complaint of (a) delivering on both the promise of a satisfying RPG campaign and (b) delivering on the promise of a satisfying fantasy adventure experience in Uncle George's Space Fantasy?
Go back earlier this week, and you'll see what the answer is going to be.
Open Up That Notepad App
You're going to pick a date. You'll get out the timeline and the campaign map and plot who did what where up to that date, focusing on prior events of immediate relevance to the campaign's launch date.
After that date, things are not written in stone. Rather they acquire the same conditionality that using all those White Elephants on your shelf does; it is presumed that, barring intervention by player actions, what is recorded goes down as recorded. You'll want to keep notes on post-launch date events like this for about five years out, adding more as necessary.
When this is complete, and you have the campaign map and calendar prepared, move on to the next step.
So You Want To Conquer The Galaxy...
By the time you have done this, you will also have all of the Factions mapped out and identified their leadership; you can recruit Faction players to run them at this time.
You should also, if necessary, have recruited your assistant Referees and got them working with you as a team to run this grand campaign. They will help you get all this put together for the players faster than you alone would do.
The Faction players should be briefed as soon as you and your team are ready. Let them play two or three rounds of action before you bring the adventurers into the fold to set the wheels in motion and give the ground level of the campaign some context and direction to work with.
I Am But A Humble Freighter Captain Plying My Trade
Faction action should have already pointed out early hotspots for action, attracting the hopeful, the ambitious, the concerned, and the desperate (i.e. typical characters in Uncle George's Space Fantasy). Let them go through Character Generation, sort into the starting areas, and get on with making fantasy space adventures happen while big galaxy-spanning wars go down all around them.
Mandatory downtime, uninterrupted events from the official (or "official") timeline going down disrupting things, players (at either level of play) forcing other players to cope with having to adapt their plans to account for changed situations, and hopefully some princesses get saved somewhere along the way while Evil Rebels get put to the sword by Heroic Action Men as the climax of a massive fleet battle where Dashing Space Aces and Brilliant Fleet Commanders pull off gambits every bit as clever and amazing as the sword duels.
Lather, rinse, repeat until someone wins or everyone loses some years down the road.
Hey, This Seems Familiar
Distinctions of "genre" are irrelevant in RPGs, because they are wargames at their root and thus all that changes are the trappings and the field of battle. Sometimes you have Space Knights and laser swords, sometimes you have giant robots and laser swords, sometimes you have just wizards and warriors. It's still the same fantastic adventure wargame, still filled with evil to smite, dragons to slay, and princesses to rescue. TORG made this explicit in 1990.
In every age, in every place, the deeds of men remain the same.
Don't be surprised to find this pattern repeating regardless of what "genre" you're supposedly dealing it. Gaming is gaming. Genre is for storytelling.
Geek Gab returns today at 1pm Central Time. Daddy Warpig and Dorrinal will be talking about the latest RPG gaming experiences that they've had, some superhero movie stuff, and more. I'll be in the chat. See you there and then.
Scale in film and television, and how to communicate it.
Die Neue These, like its predecessor, makes very good use of background to show just how massive the scope and scale of a given navel battle is. This video, taken from the first two episodes, depicts the Battle of Astarte. The Imperial side has about 25000 capital ships, and the Alliance side combined is the same size; however, as they are split three ways the Empire exploits this to gain a decisive advantage and win.
If this was Mouse Wars, or Star Wars, or Trek (Real or Fake), or anything BBC you'd never know without exposition just how huge this battle was. DNT shows this to you; hit Pause and take a quick scan of the ships on screen- and every single blip is a ship, that's how spread out these fleets are.
Now the original for comparison.
This is from a later battle, where the full Alliance invasion fleet faces off against just what Reinhard personally commands. (Yes, that's right, the Empire's space fleet is even larger that what was fielded.)
Again, every single blip is a capital ship. This is not including escorts and strike craft. There is nothing even close in Western film and television, live action or animated, that communicates this; furthermore, the corporate stewards of those Western properties don't even try. They seriously try to sell you on the idea that, for example, the Empire of Mouse Wars had a peak strength of 25000 Star Destroyers.
Preposterous, especially for a setting where star-faring states--with the economics to match--have been a fact of life for millenia. Meanwhile, both classic written Space Opera in the West (e.g. Lensman) and Space Opera in the East across all media have no problems say "Yeah, we have interstellar states with militaries of appropriate size. Deal with it."
The only attempt was the last Mouse Wars mainline film, and that's roundly criticized as being just as much a slapdash job as the rest of the film- and rightly so. Credit for trying, but only in the the way that spamming Copy & Paste without regard for verisimilitude or narrative or anything counts.
It's not that hard. The original Legend of the Galactic Heroes did it on a budget that was a fraction of what Deep Space 9 or Babylon 5 had at that time, and DNT's budget isn't substantially greater, yet both version succeed where Western competitors fail. You have to go to games like Homeworld or Stellaris to get close.
If you want to beat the Death Cult, learn to strike where they are weak- and things like this do count.
The (Very Normie) Anime Man asked his girlfriend, his podcast cohosts, and all of their collected friends and contacts a question: "What's your favorite anime?"
Let this video--and for the love of God, play it at double-speed--show you that the taste of these people, all of whom have sizable audiences of their own (although none apparoach Pewdiepie), is as normie in distribution as one would expect of "AnimeTube & Adjacents".
Take note of the patterns in the testimonies. Either they are referencing something that they enjoyed as a child, or they reference a current or former favorite of Reddit's r/anime, approximately 80% of the time. This is the old "golden age of science fiction" in action: the best was what you enjoyed when you were 12. The titles offered were what was available on local cable television then, on streaming services of the last decade or so, or they live in Japan and so have direct access. In short, we're looking at most of these responses being those that liked what was put before them- not the response of those deliberately seeking out the best possible material.
This lack of curiosity informs their views in their responses. This is exactly the sort of responses you'd hear worldwide from people talking about live-action film or television, responses that also demonstrate a lack of curiosity in their experiences and a lack of competency in qualifying their response's validity.
That last part is key. Put in schoolboy terms, "Show Your Work". Facile responses, at best, about character or narrative demonstrate a lack of comprehension of what makes such things good or bad- not unexpected as none them are competent authors. They cannot reason; they give only excuses for their feelings. Given the short reponses, and how many of these respondants are busy folks, the odds of them having the time to compose a response better than what we see is unlikely.
There's some good choices given--EVA (as much as I dislike it), Bebop, Arjuna, TTGL--but almost none of them were titles that they had to go out of their way to find due to being in normie-tier media distribution at that time. Had I seen The Five Star Stories, Appleseed (the 80s OVA), or my own response (which will surprise no one), I'd be more inclined to take the respondant seriously. Had I seen more competent responses, likewise. Instead, I saw a pile of (borderline) NPCs talking about what was The Current Thing.
By comparison, my response:
Legend of the Galactic Heroes is a 110 episode Space Opera writen for a literate adult audience that discusses what makes for the best possible government for Mankind, the influence of power on the corruptable, and the fact that reality is not a narrative experience- as shown by when typical narrative plots are short-circuited for dramatic effect just to make certain this point gets across.
You will not miss the lack of supernatural powers or alien beings in this series that grounds its narrative in historical examples, and makes deft use of flashbacks and filler episodes to tell the stories of those whose influence shape events in the primary narrative. This beautiful series will leave you reaching for the history books as you seek to fill the gaps in your knowledge so as to be appreciate what you witnessed, and any work that inspires such autodidactic improvement like this is clearly the best anime ever made.
(By the way, I recommend this being used by parents to watch with teenaged children specifically to prompt discussion on these things and get those youths operating in an adult manner sooner.)
If you want to know what truly epic space opera looks like in action, watch this.
Hundreds of thousands of capital ships, involving millions of men per side, spread across a stellar frontier until culminating in a single system dominated by a giant red star. That is the stage; the admirals are the star players, with a few secondary characters getting attention here and there to emphasize specific themes that recur throughout the story, and theirs are the actions that shape the narrative. By word and deed you can see each character demostrate their qualities and make themselves memorable in manners that too many in OldPub and the Hellmouth cannot execute even if they can comprehend it.
You will not find a Western mainstream in film or televsion that gets close to this. Uncle George's Evil Empire had a "grand fleet" of 25,000 Ships of the Lines for an entire galaxy, and neither its predecessors nor its successors were any better. Only classics like E.E. Smith's Lensman series meet or surpass this grand scale and scope, fully embracing what "epic" means and showing the withered wretches of today how poor they are by comparison.
In Japan, you don't have this problem. While no one's reached the fleet sizes of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, you'll still find Space Battleship Yamato showing scope and scale that makes Western alternatives look tame and various Macross series demonstrating that the Pulp spirit lives on across the Pacific- especially its roots in Romanticism. While this video focuses on fleet action, other clips around YouTube show the Romanticism at the heart of the story- that soundtrack wasn't chosen for nothing.
Compare this against what passes for Space Opera in the West, and you see just how badly we've been screwed by the Futurians and their successors when they murdered the Pulps almost a century ago. No wonder it's such a pain in the ass to get eyeballs back on what was once lost, and is now being rebuilt; generations have hardly any idea what "epic" is, or "space opera" other than what Uncle George accidentally created in 1977.
But it can be done, it is being done, and therefore it is only a matter of time before it is done. We just need to hold out until we breakthrough.
For Sunday I thought I'd share some music playlists regarding Legend of the Galacitic Heroes. Most of the classic series uses Classical music as its score, so that stuff is in the Public Domain and easy to find. It stands to reason that someone would have identified all of the pieces used and collected them into a playlist, which has been done.
As for the original music used, most of that is limited to a few key leitmotif image songs and the usual Opening and Ending theme songs.
As the second video--collecting all of the original music together--shows, the musicians hired to do the original themes (not the pop songs, the leitmotifs) really are good enough to stand with the masters they used to score most of the series. (I cannot get enough of "Valkyries Love They Bravery", the Galactic Empire leitmotif.)
And I'm sharing all of this because we could all use more music to stir the soul, especially if you're like me and rely heavy on imagery to drive your creative efforts; music is imagery in audio form, painting with sound by using number in time, so it isn't surprising to think that some of us would rather put on the headphones to listening to music that fits the mood of whatever we're creating when we do so.
And it's bombastic enough to drive out the crap that passes for music in Clown World.
Things got you wound up? Need something stupid to laugh at? Eckhart's Ladder--the most fanboyish of fan channel for Space Wizard Fun Time--has you covered.
Of the complaints made here, only one doesn't play: "there are too many superweapons".
We're talking a galaxy-sized setting. Space Is Big. There are too few superweapons, not too many, and the galaxy is stupidly under-populated even for the agranian worlds. A galaxy-spanning civilization, even one riven by competing states, will nontheless be measured in the hundreds of trillions in population and should be expected to field Death Stars as if they were Star Destroyers (and Star Destroyers as if they were actual destroyers and not battleship/carrier hybrids).
This sort of thing is what E.E. Smith--the father of Space Opera--got right with the Lensmen series, and man did the super-weapons in that series get crazy: trans-galactic railguns using dead planets as ammo, weaponizing entire stars as super-lasers, planet-sized webs that disintegrated what they touched, and so on. Compared to what he wrote, the super-weapons of both Western and Eastern Space Opera in comics, film, and television is often pathetic.
(Note: You have to start thinking in terms of Getter Emperor, Mazinger Zero, Ideon, the Third Impact, fully-powered Zeorymer, Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann/Super Anti-Spiral, etc. to get on Smith's level. Iserlohn and Geiserberg from Legend of the Galactic Heroes are entry-level efforts by any galaxy-spanning civilization worth a damn.)
And that's before we start talking biological weapons. That's when things really get nasty.
Tucker went after Jared Kurshner by name last night on his Fox News show. Tucker, like other media bros like the folks at VDare, think Jared runs Trump like Cheney ran Bush 43, denying Trump his agency while crediting him with successes in a bizarre round of double-think.
In short, they think Jared is Grimma Wormtongue whispering poison into Trump's ears.
He's not. Jared is Paul von Oberstein.
Oberstein is the character whose focus on Realpolitik and relentless discipline thereupon acts as a counterbalance to the Romanticism of the rest of the Imperial cast in Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and as such his role as majordomo and chief advisor is to voice and argue for the necessary politics that guarantee the success of his master and the security of the state Reinhard builds- even if it costs the lives of supporters (and, in the end, that includes himself to his own approval).
The necessary consequence of this role, which Oberstein embraces, is to be the face of each and every Bad Optic decision ever made. "Blame me. I did it, not him." is something Oberstein actually does when a man who lost family over a necessary decision by Reinhard confronts him about it. (And like all good lies, it's half-true; Oberstein did do it, but leaves out that Reinhard did nothing to stop him.)
That's Jared's role, and Rightie media bros fall for like suckers every single time. That Jared is a Jew makes it into irresistible bait. The reality is that Trump, knowing he's fighting a war, accepts that wars inevitably result in casualties. He does what he can to reduce them, but knows that there is an irreducible number above zero and he's just got to live with it. Jared tanks the heat those moves inevitably make, saving Trump face so he can do what needs to be done. It's an unenviable role, but a necessary one, and better to volunteer for it than be drafted; at least volunteers can prepare for the hits and recover faster after the fact, whereas draftees often cannot.
This, of course, is why I don't take many Rightie media bros that seriously. They have, for honest actors, a very narrow range of competency and too often exceed that niche; within it, worth heeding and without it you might as well mute. This includes folks who ought to know better (Cernovich), which is disappointing but unfortunately not unexpected.
And then there are the grifting faggot liars. That's for another post, but Razorfist cut a good video on Ann Coulter the other day; she's to be ignored entirely.
Thanks to the Trumpbux, I got something I otherwise would not have been able to get.
That's the limited edition premium boxed set for Legend of the Galactic Heroes offered by Sentai Filmworks. Yes, that price is equal to what you spend for a decent AR-15 or high-end revolver, but (a) you aren't charged for shipping and (b) no sales tax collected either. (Don't tell the government.) It arrived two days earlier than their email notifications or USPS's tracking indicated, which is great, and they put in a hand-written Thank You card for making the order.
Great experience. Would buy direct again.
Also, it's Thursday. That means a new Sabaton History episode. Yang Wen-li would approve.
So, you want to get started watching the classic OVA version of Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Where to start?
Your best bet is to watch these two films, with a combined run time of about 2.5 hours, and then skip to Episode 3 of the OVA. The second film is a far superior remake of Episode 1 & 2, and the first is a fine stand-alone introduction to the series. Between the two you get a very good sense of what to expect going into the OVA series, and when you feel like it you can watch the other side stories.
From there you'll either have to shell out big bucks for the Blu-Rays, sub to HIDIVE, or find a gray site to watch the OVA series. The effort is worth it because this is one of the best science fiction series that Japan ever produced, and until someone somehow gets sensibly-priced discs on the market in the West (either the new series or the classic one) these are your options.
Massive space fleets, larger-than-life characters, manly men (even the boys) and womanly women (even the tomboys), and intrigues in every network of power as well as across those nodes of power. That's Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and it's a big influence on #StarKnight. If there's one self-contained part that I can use as an example, it's the remake of the first two OVA episodes into a stand-alone film leading into the OVA series: Overture To A New War.
Just add mecha, lightsabers, and a real Church and you have a good mockup of #StarKnight. You're missing quite a bit, but this is enough to get your imagination going.
(Side Note: BlizzCon 2018 begins today, so tomorrow's post will be the roundup of relevant release information from that convention.)
If you still think Mouse Wars can be saved, allow me to demotivate you.
Here's your horror story, folks. Mouse Wars has successfully murdered something you loved, skinned and gutted it, and now goes about pretending to be it while wearing its skin as a grotesque costume.
Ever since Uncle George sold out to the Mouse, we've had some trepidation. Despite its flaws, The Force Awakens wasn't that bad; it was as safe a film as it got, being a remake of the original, but it was on the margins that the real nature of what went down first appeared and that corruptions exploded when The Last Jedi shat up the screen. It's only gotten worse since with all the media bullshit and SJW virtue-signalling.
The prequels were flawed, but earnestly so; the originals remain fantastic (but not perfect). We can just disavow Mouse Wars and be fine, so that's what I do; in the meantime, there's plenty of #StarWarsNotStarWars out there that focuses on something you love about Uncle George's love-letter to the pulps. Loved the grunt-focused episodes in Clone Wars? Galaxy's Edge is there for you. Fleet action and court intrigues? Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Tyrania await. The last best hope to save the galaxy? Yamato, Babylon 5, et. al.
And if you really want it all done better, go to the source: the Lensman books by E.E. "Doc" Smith. Better Jedi than the Jedi. Better superweapons than anything George or the Mouse allowed. Better action, better romance, powered armor (the origin for it and mecha generally), and so much more. Skip the anime and manga adaptations; they're trash.
And then there's my own upcoming #StarKnight series as well as Brian Niemeier's Combat Frame Xseed. Despair not over the loss of Star Wars; what it came from endures, and what came of it already surpasses it. Go forth and enjoy the diaspora born from Uncle George's accidental masterpiece.
Anime informed #StarKnight. There's no disputing this. There's a lot to account for, and I've written about many of them previously. You have the Leijiverse, especially its most famous part (Space Battleship Yamato), and of course the best Space Opera out of Japan: Legend of the Galactic Heroes. There's many more, and I've also talked about them previously.
Collectively, these are the shows where the fleet actions and hero ships of #StarKnight come from. Other influences include Dairugger XV (Vehicle Voltron for some of you.), with the bonus of the Super Robot angle, and Tytania. Each of the groups and players in these works have aesthetically and practical distinction that makes audience engagement easy to achieve; the Cosmo Force looks this way, the Free Planets Alliance looks that way, and so on.
It informed Reavers by having the Red Eyes pirates use either stolen ships or very simple original designs, reflecting their outsider status, and then the contrast comes easy by having House Ireton and the Solar Guard have aesthetically pleasing designs as well as superior discipline and coordination in their actions.
While we're not talking in terms of tens of thousands of warships (LoGH), we are talking about small fleet engagements; if you've seen Yamato's 2202 arc, you'll see some of the fleet actions between the Comet Empire and the Earth/Gamillas allied fleets. For hero ships, clearly that's Harlock and Yamato itself. Not that the Gundam guys have been slacking; it just takes time to make quality work, but it pays off when you get stuff like this. (From Origin 6.)
And that? That's a rough approximation of how the relationship between mecha and warships goes, in general; specifics will vary from book to book because each book covers different situations in different locations with different circumstances. (e.g. Macross Frontier's first fleet battle for comparison) Why? Among other things, it's because Super Robots and Real Robots relate differently to the same environment; Kotetsu Shin Jeeg gets into this.
Now combine these influences with the best of the West: Lensman, Star Wars, and others. That's how these influences mix together to create what you're going to see in #StarKnight.
Since some of these are available commercially in the United States, links:
Ladies and Gentleman, Sentai Filmworks has released an unboxing video for their ultra-premium boxed set of the entire Legend of the Galactic Heroes OVA releases. That's the original 110 episode series, all of the Gaiden series (52 episodes), and all three movies in addition to a 200 page hardcover book with more information. Yes, you're paying $800, but it's a limited quantity of 1000 and a bunch are already taken. (Yes, I want one; my birthday is just over a month away in October.)
The license contract is why this is what we're getting this for a domestic (North American) physical release. Maybe, just maybe, a future release will have more sensible (for anime) offerings but I think that will be dependent on physical sales of Die Neue Thesis so budget accordingly.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes is my favorite anime, and therefore has a big influence on #StarKnight- something that will become more apparent in later books in the series. I'd been having to watch fansubs for years, and I'm buying the light novels (in translation) as I can to show that there is an audience for a commercial release. $800 is more than I can spare for this, and I'm not hearing about any other options coming, so if this is it then I can only hope that I am surprised one morning for a signature (as that too is required; you have to sign for delivery).
If you do decide to order a copy, at least your shipping is free. I hope that this sells out, whether I get a copy or no, because the more that LoGH merch sells here the more likely it becomes that I can buy a set at Amazon for $100 or less down the road. I'd not bother dealing with the Straw Hats if I had a better option, and a full HD remaster like this but in the sort of packaging the Japanese releases had would find far more purchases than this ultra-premium set would ever get.
And, as much as I love Yang's Gang, my loyalty is to Mein Kaiser- much like my namesake. If you haven't watch this before, now's your chance to get a physical release--legally--and share it with others.
If you haven't seen this, then here's the teaser for the upcoming remake of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, subtitled "The New Thesis" (in gratuitous German).
If you haven't seen the existing series, get on that right now. 110 episodes of the best Space Opera after Lensman doesn't watch itself. This new series, like the now-classic OVA series, is a direct adaptation of the original Light Novels (that you can get at Amazon, in English, in print and Kindle, legally). The first series is 12 episodes, followed by a second series that will be released initially in theaters as three four-episode movies. (This means it's following the release scheme of Space Battleship Yamato 2199 and its follow-up, 2202.)
And all I can say is "Do NOT fuck this up!"
The last thing I need is a shallow, heartless, soulless, artless (and yes, being pretty is not sufficient) violation of the original's brilliance and sublime quality. (For that matter, where is the official English-language release that should have been done by now, Sentaiworks? If you waste all that money on a North American license and do sweet fuck-all with it, then may you join with such infamous companies as Electronic Arts in the Hell of Shithole Companies That Fucked Up Sure Things.)
I would hope for simultaneous subtitling, but that's not likely. (If I really wanted to dream, a competent dub airing on Adult Swim within a week of the Japanese release would be it.) You all know what that means now, don't you?
While I wait on the Midnight's Edge roundtable podcast to happen and get uploaded, it's time to check in on the Geek Gab guys and see what they had to see about Mouse Wars' latest assault on decency, good taste, and proper storytelling. While not the only thing talked about today, it was the dominant presence, and you should expect what went down by now.
I will go in depth about the decisions behind this galactic-scale fraud of a film tomorrow at Empire Must Fall. For now, I say only this: this is not accidental, because nothing about movie-making is accidental; if it's in frame and on film then they want you to see it and that is deliberation made plain and simple.
And given the multiple levels of sign-off that have to happen in big-budget films, if you get pure shit like this Mouse Wars film,
then you know that the head office approves of all that you see and hear. They can also predict likely reactions, which is why the SJWs in the media are out in force shilling and shaming to shore up the damaged goods they willfully put on the shelf.
And deliberation is a tell that something done wrong is not mere incompetence, but actually malevolence.
Fuck this. Go watch some good stuff instead. Japan still has corporations that understand the need to tell a good story if they want the merchandise to sell- and no, Mouse Wars merch does not.
Now that's a Space Opera with an Empire I can believe in.
Japan has a lot of good Space Opera works out there. Most of them originate as Light Novels or Manga before adaptation into a film or television series, and Tytania is no different.
This makes the novel, and the anime series that came of it, more like Dune than anything else. Expect good and evil characters on both sides, and lots of bastards doing bastard deeds, with a side of commentary- the sort that his other works are notable for. It doesn't have the fandom of The Heroic Legend of Arslan or Legend of the Galactic Heroes, yet, but even so it's still a solid Space Opera that you can watch and enjoy. Just remember that it's a Japanese Space Opera, so expect some cultural differences.
The novel series is not in English yet, so learn Japanese or hope for a fan translation until an official ones is released, but one way to make that happen is to buy the officialreleases for the English versions of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes light novels.
This video from one of the Star Wars fan channels at YouTube, Eckhart's Ladder, gets into something that's a bit of a pet peeve with me: fleet actions with a decided lack of actual capital ship combat for no good reason.
He's not wrong to find the lack of ship-on-ship action bothersome, and it's not hard to see the real reasons behind why this lack exists: (a) that's not where Our Heroes are, so it's dramatically secondary in importance; (b) they blew most of the budget on the dogfighting, so that's what gets screentime. It's that way in all of the films, and in Rebels, with (to date) only Clone Wars really offering any relief for Star Wars fans craving hot space fleet action.
It's not just a Star Wars thing. SF in film and television tend to focus on one or the other for those very same reasons: they put the budget where the cast is, and the cast is where the important action in the story goes. Even the ones that seem to satisfy this itch do so by spreading out the important characters; this is what Legend of the Galactic Heroes does, as well as the Gundam and Macross franchises do.
Look, for all the folks who on about "big ideas", what actually sells science fiction in film, television and comics to the audience is the action and adventure. It's no accident that dogfighting, fleet actions, firefights, chases, duels, etc. are commonly associated with science fiction and have been for generations. That's as old as the pulps, and you're a fool to skimp on it, even if you're doing Men With Screwdrivers. (Or do you need to watch Wrath of Khan again?)
So, Rian, while you're in the editing booth: deliver on that hot fleet action.
Japan has a lot of good Space Opera works out there. Most of them originate as