Saruta

Just because you guys keep repeating this isn't going to make it true. The holographic costume changes we've seen before in Macross were natural and realistic. What we see in Delta is straight up magical girl transformation. They are definitely NOT the same.

This is the problem with the first episode of Delta: so much in it is not plausible. It's outside of my ability to suspend my disbelief. It's not grounded at all. Frontier largely avoided this problem (with a few notable exceptions).

Excluding Mikumo for the moment, what is unplausible? The girls strike a pose and have a sparkly costume change creep through their body. They are presumably wearing holo-suits, so the only question is where the holographic projectors are, given that this is open space and not a specially prepared stage. A couple of drones could manage that, though? They can also do the shiny W thing by joining hands - something hidden in their sleeves, presumably. And they are trained in height jumping, so was movie!Sheryl.

Mikumo, yes, she pushes the boundaries. A lot. She can control a lot of drones with barely a move of the hand. She can withstand a direct massive rocket hit, protected only by a small force field, and not even get knocked out. I would expect an in-universe explanation. She might even be a robot, and anime robot girls were doing things like that back in 80s.

Girls jumping out of valkyries and having sailor moon transformations, floating around the battlefield and doing ridiculous things like riding on valkyries by simply holding onto a cord just kills the whole thing for me.

I failed to notice that particilar moment with the cord. Could you hint at the timing and, importantly. the identity of the girl?

I mean, if it's Mikumo, it's fair game at this point. She seems established as, at the very least. an enhanced human. (Besides, there was Breetai and his open space feats back in 1982 - also a case of a "commander type" Zentradi or something, so not something every human or Zentradi would be able to do).

I still can't get over the Sailor Moon transformation...

Actually, I can live with those now. A careful viewing with many freeze-frames showed that all the actual "superhuman" feats are performed by Mikumo alone. The other girls do pretty much what Sheryl and Ranka could already do by Frontier movies, except now they do it in the open. Oh, and they play to a magical girl image in the process, but so did movie!Ranka.

Mikumo can well be enhanced. Cybord, android, whatnot. Or just a product of years of mad training, think a Jackie Chan character.

Is it known when Valkyries acquired their own independent fold capability?

Humanity experienced birth defects after a while, but I am not sure the Zentradi did.

Where's the source for the birth defects? I seem to have missed something.

I finally got to see an English sub of this. Let me say straight off that I am a huge fan of Macross 7. Delta, though...? It's difficult for me to contain my dislike of this. Whoever thought that infusing Sailor Moon into Macross was a good idea needs to never have anything to do with anime ever again. With what little I've seen, I just can't even take this series seriously. For as dedicated a Macross fan as I have been for years, this may truly be the curtain call for me.

I don't think the infusion was necessarily Sailor Moon itself, and I suspect it was Madoka, at least to the point of the idea of deconstructing magical girls.

Or at least I hope that the deconstruction, which has already started with freeze-frame mech implements, is going to proceed apace. Im not sure it will get AS "hardcore" as Madoka; this is Kawamori and the most light-hearted post-apocalypse franchise ever...

Sure...but they're also a century past those artists and, more importantly, beyond a huge upheaval that made them matter even less. Especially compared to an Idol that kinda saved humanity!

Ya gotta wonder how much of that stuff was actually saved from destruction aboard the Macross, right?

Sure, it wouldn't be surprising for a substantial amount of really popular music to be saved simply by coincidence of it being on some dude's harddrive as an MP3, so I give that a bit of a pass.

But the cultural destruction of the bombardment would have been astonishing. It would have very nearly been a complete reset on popular culture.

The Earth was destroyed in 2010, and we can assume that technology was generally at real life 2010 levels, correcting for bits of Overtechnology and impact of the global war raging 2000 to 2008. If anything, these changes would do more, not less, for durable data storage, at the cost of "flashiness" that is used for marketing at peace time.

I would expect that a lot of data, basically everything in serious storage, survived or was recoverable. Data is much sturdier than humans. So everything from music records to automobile blueprints (not to mention photos) is available all right, even if the automobile stock preserved on the Macross was of older types (and there is no guarantee of that either, the fact that it was like that animated in 1982 does NOT make it canon in Kawamori-world).

There would certainly be a reset of popular culture, but not so much of the classics. Compare lingering popularity of Strauss, originaly a popular artist, following two world wars that Austria lost, in one of them being subjected to considerable bombardment.

We know that, whatever DYRL shows, there were more survivors than just the Macross - because we know, at least, of Mao Nome and of the Saotome family. (What would a Kabuki school be doing on a remote "science-town" island? And who would place a schoolgirl from a war-ravaged remote archipelago there?). So, in the heads of botn Macross people and other survivors, Minmay would certainly be the "big idol of the time" following her role in the war, but the classics would remain classics. Not so for Zentradi, of course.

Then by Frontier times, Minmay herself joins the ranks of the classics. The majority of people alive have never seen her perform live. Records abound, name recognition abounds, Minmay herself is missing, presumed dead (not universally). So I think that for the young music fan she is a part of a line starting up there with Elvis - both exist, for the fan, only as records. The same line includes Fire Bomber - everyone is likely alive but the band is long gone and now a classic (compare present status of ABBA in our world).

So my understanding of Grace's PR trick in the concert is "see a new classic born right now".

I would expect any reset Sharon Apple NOT to exist at the time because otherwise Grace would be in all sorts of trademark trouble.

Sorry - I seemed to have seen this somewhere in some source, but I can't find it now, so I guess it was my mistake.

(That's about them getting hitched. Isamu in SMS is in the movies - though I do wonder how this plays out in M30 where there is apparently a past version of Isamu - does any of the SMS people recognize him as their brother-in-arms?)

If Lady M is Myung, and her husband Isamu is known to work for SMS (Wings of Goodbye), this would mean there is probably some link between SMS and the Walkure?

I'm liking everything I'm reading here.

Me too - it took so many years but the meaning of the word Valkyrie is finally getting expanded upon. I think this started at the end of Wings of Goodbye, though at the time I somewhat disliked the lack of a *musical* Wagner reference to match the lyrics reference... one might well turn up in Delta, though obviously not so far.

You know there's a big difference between beer can missile or an Arcadia cameo easter egg and a main character in a worker destroid doing roller boogie electric boogaloo while super fun happy magical girls prance and sing.

All this while civilians are dying from an old foe driven insane from music in addition to some random 18th century aristocrats in varible fighter show up unannounced looking for a runaway bride deciding "diplomacy is for dweebs" and start annihiliating the planets defense force.

Did I miss anything?

I'm joining the "lots of assumptions there" team. There is no hint these guys are even aware Freya exists. Yeah, she's from the same planet. But they still appear to be after the Walkure.

(Which is all to the better, because if Freya got that Itano Circus it would likely be the end of her, and we're not even started yet, and she's the neo-Ranka or something).

MiragexMikumo one true pairing

Well, I guess a Jenius can be just strong enough when Mikumo inevitably gets killed off. She might even get to cook some pineapple salad.

There probably WILL be yuri. Not even a war, a near certainty.

Oh, and Mikumo is best waifu.

Noooo. She's basically superhuman (if not cyborg). And while sometimes robot waifus do rock I get the feeling this is not the time.

Gimme "Regult-chan-KYAA!"-chan, aka Makina Nakajima, any day Also, her being named, in part, for the *voice* of Ranka is kinda cool.

(Just doing it to start The Inevitable Waifu War Of All Internets, which, I hope, can be mocked on here even before it actually happens)

Speaking of, was anyone else weirded out by... I think it was in the first Frontier movie... when they listed Sharon Apple among the likes of Minmay and Fire Bomber? What the heck happened to THAT in the canon? Like, what's the "in-universe movie" version of M+? Did Sharon Apple team up with Guld and Isamu to take on Producer-san, who had hacked into the Macross's computers and was using a Ver. 2.0 of Sharon's evil AI chip to take over Earth? Is THAT why she's talked about as a savior idol instead of literally the universe's most dangerous computer virus?

I read that as" most famous idols ever".

Fire Bomber are not widely known inworld as "saviour idols", the PD war is not really publicized. But they are very popular as a music band. I assume that Sharon Apple's popularity also lingers.

Basically, I think Grace would have put Elvis and the Beatles in there before Minmay if she could, but because of Doylist (real-world) considerations, she could not.

What does Makina say at 08:35? Apparently it is meant to be "１０４式リガード" (Regult 104?) but I don't know what reading she is using for the "104" part? Is she saying the digits individually?

As far as I understand, the consensus is she is saying "Regult-chan". Followed by "kyaaa". As in, she's fangirling them.

DISCLAIMER - I don't understand Japanese and this is just what I gatherewd froma few sources.

I like the name. Starlight is totally a name a Macross fleet would use.

Yay! I made up this name See previous pages of this thread.

As for the work itself, I do see how VD responded to criticism here by adding a lot of dialogue to chapters 2 and 3. There are style issues but nothing a good edit can't fix; a draft is a draft - I could lend a hand with the editing. But honestly I think there is a bigger problem.

It's been three chapters but all we see is a slice of life in the Starlight fleet. Chapter 3 gets action but it's an ordinary fight on the surface. I don't notice the kind of tension, the "unknown enemy or danger lurking" thing, that is characteristic of many "things Macross".

I think that, to get readers to stay reading, one needs some sort of teaser early on. Something that shows the "special treat awaiting them". This does not have to take long; you can have a paragraph of "there is this big unknown problem" and 20 paragraps of chaacter introduction and development.

Also, re previous discussion - VD, I think you wanted to do a setup where, unlike M7, dedicated pilots fly while dedicated musicians perform in their Valks? Well, Kawamori seems to have beaten you to it

Kawamori being brought in to design anything for RT would tell me that RT would pretty much be unable to stand on its own. If they brought in any of the original mecha designers to RT, it would tell me RT doesn't have a leg to stand on. It would further weaken any statement from RT's current "creative group". I've stood by my statement that if RT want's to be it's own IP, then it has to create something. Calling in Kawamori, Aramaki, or any of the original creators is waving a white flag. It says HG's property is worthless without the original creators. In light of the article's byline and source (Forbes, a business publication), I'm reminded of a business man by the name of Steve Jobs and something he said, "Good artists copy; great artists steal."

The original creator (insofar as there was one) of Robotech is dead. Most of those he worked with are, as far as I understand, no longer on the project. What leg is there to stand upon?

Kawamori's olive branch is worthy of the true artist he is.

Thanks a lot for all the recent updates! There are so many references and names there that I did not know. I knew it had to be full of references, but the ones I ciuld see are mostly Western, while you describe the Japanese ones, obviously more prominent for the intended viewer. Also, Itano

We'll have none of that here...

Too late. Singing androids (the synth body type, not just the Sharon Apple holo-projected image type) are canon if Musicalture is canon. Robotech or not, here they come.

She's actually Sharon Apple resurgent.

Unlikely, but if true, I WOULD SO LOVE THAT. The poor girl never had a chance.

I think he was joking.

I was basically half joking. The idea is, the thing appears to be so busy referencing everything that one starts seeing references everywhere. And that's just the pilot episode. But this is one of the parts I liked from the start.

I'm mellowing to it once it turned out that all of the magic-stuff has blink-and-you-miss-it tech explanations. Perhaps except Mikuno's emerging without a scratch from a multiple rocket hit while all she had was two small force field generators, but that might be explained later. (And we don't even *know* if she was really unharmed - all we know is she can move and sing in an emergency situation, her holographic device would probably mask any wounds or bruises. Or she might indeed be a Grace-style cyborg. Or even, though improbably, an outright android; an android singer existed in Macross 29 Musicalture so they are "canon").

They fly using verniers hidden under their skirts similar to what Sheryl used in one of her concerts and you need to re-watch that scene where Mikumo is hit by those missiles because she guards the explosion using those Multi-Drones at the last second. Nothing magical about that so far.

Aha - rewatched and found it now - a frame-freeze bonus.

Looks like it's far more Kawamoriesque than I initially thought. Intentionally made to look like magic with quick bits to show it's actually technology (well Macross technology - like a quckly-set-up a force field leaving one totally intact from a direct rocket hit) and left for the fans to find. Still wonder what kind of tech Mikumo uses to manage the force field so quickly - she can set it up in time for the expllosion, then pushes it out to get free of the rubble. But this has to be explained somewhere

And every rewatch brings more quotes from everything, the latest finds are My Little Pony (big apple farming family) and Death Note or Bleach ("shinigami?!").

P.S. I do wonder who of the seven Jenuis girls is the mother of Mirage Farina Genius. And if it's Mylene, who the father is. Unlikely to be Basara...

A friend has pointed out that the name of the original ace was Max Immelmann.

So apparently he has the distinction of being referenced in the Macross univerce twice.

And I am still wondering how (and if) they are going to explain how Mikumo survived the rocket hit. She did sing after it!

Though I have my suspicions about her prospects of subsequent survival - thanks to the observation on this thread about aces. Georges Guynemer was shot down in 1917 and did not survive.

On the "artsy" side, I did love the endless stream of references to everything.

The animation is mixed - battles gorgeous, Freyja a bit overdone on comic side - but this is a pilot episode, fair play.

What really has me worried, though, are the superpowers of the Walkure. For the entire Macross series, singers, well *human* singers, did not come with magical superpowers, and that was a part of what made them great. Minmay, Ranka, Sheryl - they were human, they were fragile, anything else was either stage image or "invulnerability by lack of shooting" - nobody WANTS to shoot at her. Basara was a tough man and good pilot in addition to a good singer but he was still vulnerable, though, as of Dynamite, would recover surprisingly quickly.

And here, they can actually fly and *survive direct rocket hits without armour* ?

I still hope Kawamori will deconstruct this part to smithereens. To start with, we might see the girl who was hit by rockets in hospital or outright dead. Or we might have an explanation of what shielded her that does not involve magical superpowers, but rather works in the "soft sci fi" way typical of Macross (someone using a device to generatre a force field around her, for example).

It looks like they are staying true to "commentary on trends in Japanese pop music". An idol group this time.

Wonder if they will let explicit yuri in this time. ( I mean "explicit" as in "clearly yuri" not as in "sexually explicit", of course).

Where can I learn more about the health situation/operation she had? I mean it's mentioned here but I could not find the original bit of news.