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Killer Robot

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Skull Leader's Lackey

Skull Leader's Lackey (5/15)

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  1. If you mean what I think, that "which girl is in that wedding dress?" image that got leaked was a great fakeout, since it was just Sheryl's concert in the movie opening.
  2. I'll add onto that, the rank and file NUNS in VF-171s even did better than any nameless VF-11 pilots did in 7, and even comparably to all the cannon fodder pilots that kept blowing up in the original. When someone watching Frontier complains that faceless extras representing the traditionalist military aren't accomplishing much, or worse, that they let teenagers be pilots, I have to wonder what shows they've been watching all these years, or if they just found out there's an anime to go with all those transforming toy planes.
  3. I actually really appreciated this. Macross has always had to work to really intermix mecha action with personal involvement beyond just pilots, and it's especially challenging in the theme of "a ship out in space" such that the VFs have to be outside of their intended environment to even be where the people are. Apart from the usual bridge conversations and girl in VF hand rescues, giant sized Zentradi give a great way of interacting mecha and people directly, and now Ex-Gears approach that another way, and seem natural enough in the setting besides.
  4. I can't really fault Basara (or his writers) so much for that. Almost any teenage/young adult anime character shown as a child in a flashback is either going to be "exactly how they are now only smaller" or "exactly how they are now only more carefree and/or with simpler hair." Sheryl's more the exception there, I guess.
  5. I found DYRL to have a disjointed and surreal plot, with relatively flat characters. It was okay though, since it was written expecting you to be familiar with the TV series and so be able to fill in the blanks with your love of the characters and plot there. Also the animation and designs were top notch throughout, though I was never a fan of the more monstrous-looking Zentradi, and it played up a massive sense of scale. Macross II followed DYRL in having a disjointed and surreal plot with relatively flat characters, and even in having an ambitious sense of scale. But its animation wasn't all there, and it importantly was standalone with no TV series to fill in the mental blanks when characters or plot flagged. For a series that's very much DYRL's sequel, it carries all of its predecessor's weaknesses while lacking most of its strengths, so while it was watchable it didn't grab me. As for the mecha designs, eh. I don't dislike them, but I don't see why others find them so awesome. The other sequels all felt like they had more imagination put in.
  6. He could have laid off the womanizing and solved them with music instead. He just needed to actually be convincing as a motivator, and ideally been more portrayed as driving mentor than as protagonist and savior.
  7. I hadn't really thought of it that way, but you're right: Kamina was a much better realized and more effective presentation of the character Basara was supposed to be. He was driven to impossible convictions, which he then met. He was straightforward and open but never standoffish or mysterious: people around him might have thought he was insane at first, but it was easy to tell exactly what he stood for. He was genuinely pulling people out of fatalistic inaction, and he drove them to find their dreams. He was the bearer of a grand ideal, the guy who had things down from the start, and was the face of the show, but he wasn't presented as the protagonist: he was the mentor to the rest. If Basara was written with that competence, even in such silly and over the top style, he'd just be a better character than what we got.
  8. I didn't even recognize it at first. It's a song so much faster and more heavily accompanied than Diamond Crevasse that this was a huge change by comparison.
  9. I thought that was the best thing about Grace, and one of the better points of the series plot in general. Long-suffering manager to someone like Sheryl, Belldandy's voice, so nice and sympathetic and perfect for lulling the audience into thinking she's the last person that will end up the main villain. In a franchise where antagonists usually march in with badge on sleeves, it set a fine tone for being a show that wanted to play with fan expectations.
  10. It's still easy to see her that way. It's just gotten a lot easier to see her otherwise.
  11. Really I thought that was the whole point of why Leon was presented as a villain in both movie and TV series. He wasn't after finding a new home or a just war: he wanted domination and personal glory, and was willing to trick the entire fleet into it. And no one knew the full extent in the TV series. Even those who found out about his coup didn't know the full truth of the Vajra not actually being hostile by nature, not until the end. The Quarter left knowing Leon was evil, but as far as the Vajra goes they were on a fact-finding mission. So was Ranka, even: she was guessing that peace could be made, but didn't know for sure, and definitely didn't know the full story (or else she wouldn't have walked into that trap quite how she did.) In the end, Frontier settled on the Vajra planet, while most of the Vajra themselves took off. But that's not because people still saw the war as a good thing: it had more to do with the fleet being crippled and unable to maintain life support for further travel. Thanks to the manipulation of Leon and Galaxy, at the end it was a "land or die trying" scenario which thankfully ended without either side being annihilated.
  12. "Deconstruction" is a term that's been also applied to the writing of genre fiction in particular since before Macross 7 was even made. That said, Macross 7 was very much played straight, and Basara was expected to be taken as an straight-up hero if of an unusual mold, rather than written to call the traditional foundations of the heroic archetype into question.
  13. I agree, it's not just the fact that Ranka had the looks to be literally cast as an 11 year old in the movie episode despite actually being older than Minmay or Mylene, it's that in the TV series Sheryl came out as considerably more mature in feel to start, and beyond that grew more over the course of the series. In the movies this contrast is less pronounced, but there still was an "older woman/younger girl" feel to Alto's choices there.
  14. I don't really know that it's important. Compared even to DYRL, the general events of 2059 as history will see them are pretty much the same for both TV and movies, with the differences being in the fine points of political intrigue and the survival of a few characters that won't be seen in future series and won't be household names of future decades or anything. With the level of detail most Macross series give to their predecessors, there's just no discrepancies to rank up with the setting differences between SDFM and DYRL.
  15. For that matter, how much did the Vajra even know that humans were intelligent? They don't construct technology like humans, so might not recognize that. They don't communicate the same ways humans do, so they might not recognize human communications traffic even as being such. Humans are small organisms with no fold communications: could they really have more than animal level intelligence? Or if they do have some unknown link, if you don't kill any queens it's nothing unforgivable, right? To go with the most obvious sci-fi parallel, this isn't Ender's Game exactly, but it sure is similar. Without communication neither species had any certainty that the other was one with which peace could ever exist, and in this case maybe even that they were actual intelligence. At least in this story, peace came before total destruction.
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