Seto Kaiba

Meh, they can milk her for sheets indefinitely, just like they're doing to Mylene. She's up to what, G? There's only VF-1A sheet I really want to see, and I know full well they'll never cover the VF-1AR from Macross 2036.

Eh, the artbooks would have us believe that Mash is very popular with the ladies... though he does make a few leading remarks that give ample cause to suspect that he's bi, rather than straight. Definitely not hard gay though. And now the discussion reaches a whole new level of awkward.

Two things... First, while I agree with you that Bobby fills a similar role in Macross Frontier to Claudia's role in DYRL and Super Dimension Fortress Macross, I don't think we can say the same for Mash, because his role is just too small. Second, Mash isn't gay. Bisexual, maybe, and certainly an effeminate dresser, but they never fail to mention that he's just friends with Hibiki, and attracts lots of women on his own. The dub sort of played it up a bit by giving him a feminine voice, but the original voice cast gives Mash a very masculine tone. Not to mention that when Hibiki calls him at that bar early in the OVA, he's literally surrounded by women...

That's pretty much everyone's assessment, actually. The movie IS billed as a "reimagining". There are some rumors that they're going to have a few familiar names, but all-new designs. Except that the "Rick Hunter" factor is still very much in play, and if that draft is anything else to go by, Rick will NEVER die. He'll be there as the main selling point of whatever Robotech sequels they sell from now until the Robotech franchise finally shrivels up and dies. Y'know, there was a time when I would have agreed that some parts of Robotech were more watchable than Macross 7. After listening to many of the vocal albums, my chief complaint with the series shifted from Basara being a pillock to them NOT using a shitload of good music that would've made the series infinitely more watchable. You're hoping in vain, I'm afraid. From what I've seen a lot of the people who jump ship from Robotech over to Macross are the casual RT fans who hear about more material in the same vein as their favorite saga, and the readers of the novels and comics, who are more open to trying new things. The purist faction of the Robotech fanbase are the ones who are militantly anti-Macross for the most part. I guess you could interpret it that way... though it's a lot easier (and probably more accurate) to write it off either as a psychological clusterfart resulting from combining a persecution complex, an inferiority complex, and some good old fashioned delusions of grandeur.

Actually, according to the few publications that mention him in any detail, Mash is in fact a stylist at that salon (and quite possibly its owner).

*sigh* Still no Macross II-related materials, and yet another VF-1A mechanic sheet and Lynn Minmay character sheet? At least this issue has two articles I can muster some enthusiasm for.

To say that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles stands independent of Macross is probably reaching more than a little bit... after all, one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) selling points of the Prelude comic and the movie itself was the return of the Macross Saga characters who'd left Earth on the Sentinels mission. Hell, "learn the fate of Rick Hunter" was easily the most common part of the pre-release hype. Yes, his appearance was changed such that he's Rick Hunter in name only, but he's still Rick Hunter. Prelude certainly didn't stand independent of Macross... not with Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, Breetai, Exedore, and Dr. Lang all figuring prominently into the story. There's no denying that Shadow Chronicles relies rather heavily on the one major Macross tie-in to sell itself, and that the remainder of the trilogy (as planned) is also driven mainly by Macross tie-ins. As much as they can legally get away with, yeah. Of course, the primary selling point of the Shadow Saga is, as I illustrated above, also Macross. Actually, it was a voice actor (the guy who voices Vince Grant) who leaked that the Shadow Rising movie was on hold as far as he knew, and that none of the actors had, as far as he was aware, been called in to do any recording.

Despite the downright abysmal quality of the art and writing in most of the old Robotech comics, they're probably the Robotech medium most deserving of respect... if only because they contain the most original material of any of the various Robotech adaptations and continuations. Of course, even though the Robotech comics are far and away the medium with the most original material, they still contain a lot less original material than the comics/manga of any respectable, well-run franchise, since flagrant tracing and outright theft of characters, mecha, and even whole plots from other, more successful anime and sci-fi shows seems to have been standard practice for all of the publishers of the old Robotech comics. Well, strictly speaking the TREAD/Beta was created for the express purpose of extending the Legioss/Alpha's range in space and giving it the ability to reach orbit from the planetary surface. The guys claiming otherwise are pretty much throwing a temper tantrum because the powers that be haven't figured out a way to fix the fact that Robotech's technological continuity seems to evolve backwards, with more advanced mecha at the beginning, steadily becoming more and more primitive, blocky, and slow. Seems kind of like the degeneration of human technology in Warhammer 40,000... in the grim darkness of the not-so-far future there is only protoculture? No matter how many times I tell you, you never seem terribly convinced that Wanzerfan is in fact a Macross fan. He was one of the very first contributors to my site project back in 2003 when we were first getting started.

According to relatively recent Robotech convention panels, the Maia Sterling VF/A-6ZX Shadow Fighter MPC is going to be re-released probably early next year, though in a startling case of faulty pattern recognition, it will be produced in the same factory that dropped the ball the first time. That's anybody's guess... they're running out of things to screw up. To be honest, if you go take a good, long look at the current state of affairs on Robotech.com, you'll see that this sort of behavior is pretty much par for the course. The sad part is that it's been that way for years. On more than one occasion, I've been sorely tempted to point psychology majors towards the Robotech fanbase as a classic example of a large-scale persecution complex. Even before the fandom went online in the 90's, Robotech fans had developed an unpleasant habit of lashing out at anyone who didn't like same parts of Robotech that they did, and then proclaiming themselves to be the victims of an elitist clique hell-bent on stopping them from enjoying those parts of the series, as though that somehow justified their crass, and often asinine, behavior. It wasn't just the non-fans who were targets of this, this is what ultimately caused the various fan wars that led to the purist faction of the fanbase (the fans of the "original 85") ostracizing the fans of the novels (McKinneyists) and the comics (Spenglerists). As far as the whole "questioning the official answer" thing goes, that's really the only sort of discussion they have left. In the absence of new material, all they can really do is continually rehash the same tired old topics ad nauseam and question the official stance on parts of the series whenever it clashes with what they personally want to believe. Just to give some examples, there's a ~300 post thread in Series & Stories over there trying to concoct an explanation for the SDF-2 problem (where it was) despite the presence of an official FAQ that completely answers the question in less than 200 words. You could also see the VF-1 vs Alpha thread in Hardcore Robotechnology, where one member continues to bang his head on the wall insisting that his particular application of moon logic to the footage proves that the official tech specs are wrong and the Alpha (Legioss) can reach orbit unassisted.

And what's REALLY odd about that is Haruhiko Mikimoto professes to prefer the movie version. It's certainly possible... though the few artbooks that cover him in any depth insist that he's straight, though his in-series dialogue leans more towards "bisexual but prefers women".

They already did that once... they rebooted the entire continuity to get rid of Sentinels, the novels, the old comics, and all of the other crap. A full reboot would probably kill the Robotech franchise, since ties to the "original 85" are about all that's keeping the rest of the franchise alive.

You're asking if we can make out any other classes of ship in those scenes apart from the Nupetiet-Vergnitzs refit and Megaroad-class colony ship? There's something at the bottom edge of the frame that looks vaguely like an Oberth-class guided missile destroyer, but I don't think the artbooks actually mention any other new types of ship apart from those two. They're just vague blobs in the background for the most part. It looks to me like a low-detail background character with a similar haircut, not a clone of Minmay. It's not exactly uncommon for animators to fill background crowds with simple variations on existing character designs.

It's just goes to show you that nothing gets people's attention faster than controversy and drama. Perhaps as a function of their other, abundant faults, Robotech and its fanbase have never had a shortage of drama and controversy.

If he thinks like that in this day in age, he never had one to begin with.

That's exactly why we have good reason to suspect that he came here spoiling for a fight (or was unwittingly sent here by someone who wanted to start a fight by proxy), rather than being motivated by a desire to talk technology. To be fair, judgments of Robotech's value as a form of entertainment are entirely subjective. You can't really form a cogent argument that a show is "bad" or "good", because those judgments can vary from person to person based on the subjective viewing experience. If you look hard enough, you'll find someone who likes just about anything. If you want to build a strong case against Robotech, you have to go beyond whether the show is "good" or "bad" to actual critique of the material and its production... there's certainly more than enough there to make an exhaustive case for Robotech being inferior to most modern anime titles. You could, for example, point out that Robotech is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a hastily-assembled amalgam of three unrelated shows with post-facto pretensions of epic storytelling and originality. A strong case could also be made that Robotech has little-to-no artistic integrity, as the show is entirely composed of preexisting animation and stories created by other authors, strung together with a few weak excuses for the sole purpose of making Super Dimension Fortress Macross long enough to syndicate. It's also no stretch to say that their first sequel attempt was more of same, and the ones that followed were little more than attempts to continue profiting from someone else's work (specifically, Macross) without even giving the original authors proper credit. It's also no exaggeration to say that the vast majority of modern anime enthusiasts consider Robotech, and rewrites in general, to be largely without any significant redeeming virtues that would justify the disrespect to the original author's work. We could also take the obvious route and point out that unlike Macross, which has thrived and acquired a sizable fan following despite Harmony Gold's attempts to keep it out of the hands of western audiences, Robotech is a largely forgotten, anachronistic piece of 80's esoterica that few recognize and fewer respect. As you can see, it's quite possible (and frankly, easy) to verbally demolish Robotech without having to insult anyone or resort to subjective value judgments.

The picture on Claudia's right (left, from our perspective) is, unless I miss my mark, an image of the SDF-1 Macross. The same image used in a poster seen in Flashback 2012. Looks like... and an XB-70 Valkyrie too.

You're not alone... when he came over here telling us we were out of line for criticizing Robotech and its fans, and then demanded the entire community change to accommodate his wishes, it raised a LOT of eyebrows. It must be nice to be able to be that optimistic. I've long since accepted that genuine coincidences are fairly rare things in this life. For a good while now, I've suspected he either always intended to come here and start a fight, or that whatever friend recommended MacrossWorld to him did so with the intention of putting him on the losing end of a fight. Actually, I think that's probably a function of his poor (or nonexistent) understanding of the divide between Macross and Robotech. He doesn't understand the reasons for the divide, so he doesn't see the need to differentiate between the two, and thus doesn't understand why we don't generally want Robotech over here. If you really wanted to get down to the root of that particular problem, the cause is probably Harmony Gold's frequent attempts to portray Macross as having little-to-no importance except as a part of Robotech.

Well, let's give Pizza a little credit... he's at least responding somewhat favorably to the idea of a cessation of hostilities, so that's progress towards at least a semblance of peace. I've always felt that it was better to be blunt and honest and risk offending someone than to attempt to soften the blow with flowery language or lying to spare their feelings. To this end, I'd like to share one of my very favorite quotes: I guess part of the reason I'm a lightning rod for hostile Robotech fans is because I've made it no secret that I disapprove of what Harmony Gold has done to the Robotech universe, and how they've manged the franchise. Since the various feuds have driven away a lot of the people who were extremely devoted to the franchise and/or who approved of RTSC, they naturally don't take what I have to say very well. They seldom stop to look at it in the context of someone who wants to see Robotech do something different and original, beyond the scope of the "original 85", they just look at it as bashing. Actually, of late Harmony Gold has actually been pretty open about why so many of their licensed products from the late 80's and the 90's were of such poor quality. Kevin McKeever has admitted on several occasions that Harmony Gold just issued licenses and never really bothered to exercise much in the way of oversight over any of the products created by their licensees during that period. Yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you. The mods can ban anyone they want so long as they come up with a reason (however obviously fabricated or weak) to justify it. Then they hand it all off to Steve to sort out. Since Steve's not paying attention, and the site's best contributors are all getting the boot, I guess they might try the "nobody was minding the store" excuse again. Hey! I take offense to that. I've had the position of the supreme evil in the Robotech fanbase sewn up for years!

I realize you're all going to think I've gone out of my cotton pickin' mind here, but I'm writing to Kevin McKeever about the whole legal debate hostilities over on Robotech.com, and even proposing a truce of sorts with Pizza the Hutt right now on RobotechX. I was having a back-and-forth over the PM system with my assistant webmaster and he tossed out a few ideas that could be made to work for all parties involved, so I'm fielding them to Harmony Gold and to the opposing side right now. We'll see if anything comes of it. (even if it doesn't work, at least nobody can fault me for not trying to mend fences with Pizza, this is attempt #3 since I first met him)

Yes, it's IS insulting that Robotech fans think so little of Macross and its universe that they treat it like nothing more than a free expansion for the Robotech RPG, or a Robotech expanded universe series. Are they truly that lacking in originality that the only way they can create new material is to pilfer it from someone else? That's awfully rich of you, considering the first thing you did upon arriving here was to start leveling accusations about the content of this thread without ever having read it. ;-) It's a nausea provoked by a profound lack of originality and respect for other shows on the part of Robotech fans. Of course, since Robotech itself is by nature nothing more than a bunch of unrelated shows hastily slapped together with a few very weak excuses, what they're doing is par for the course. Robotech has always been about treating the work of others with light-fingered contempt, so it comes as no surprise... it's just disappointing to see that even the fans seem to lack originality a lot of the time. It really gets me to thinking about the various groups who've been exiled from Robotech.com over the ages... all of the groups who followed something that went beyond the simple constraints of the "original 85"... and in all cases, it was the stuff that had a far higher percentage of original material than the "original 85" did. Robotech honestly seems to be a franchise that has nothing but scorn for originality. Why yes, yes it is. Amaterasu's original Knight of Gold. I'm stoked for the forthcoming blu-ray edition of the Five Star Stories movie. Just makes me wish they'd animated more than just Destiny Three Fates Lachesis... I would've loved to see the Schpeltor and Auge animated like that.

Nah, even in Genesis Climber MOSPEADA the Inbit mecha were clearly mechanical in nature. Robotech had a nasty habit of describing everything "protoculture"-powered as biotechnology. In the lineart, there is a clearly-defined cockpit in both versions of the Gurab, where the pilot sits/floats in some of that green goop that oozes out whenever the mecha gets shot up. How they're controlled is anybody's guess, since neither version really touches on it. Logically, the Robotech version must have/use physical controls of some kind if Rem was able to pilot one. If logic ain't your bag, you can always handwave the whole thing away by pointing out that Rem is a clone of Zor, the so-called father of "robotechnology" (I hate that term) and therefore the scientist equivalent of Chuck Norris. He can do ANYTHING... he's Zor. Or if you want, you can just blame the whole thing on the assorted plot holes of "protoculture" and call it a day. Protoculture! I dunno, somewhere there's a naked Inbit/Invid running around? If you really want, you can take the easy (and obvious) way out and blame it on the eminently piss-poor writing that permeates every original Robotech production. I guess since Rem is supposed to be a clone of Zor, they wanted to make him more than just an alien fashion victim with a purple mullet.

Yeah, no kidding. I didn't get banned from Robotech.com for that though, but Maverick_LSC made it no secret that he was looking for an excuse to ban me and several other people he considered to be troublemakers. He only recently worked up the courage to actually do it, by accusing everyone he wanted to ban of being "disruptive" when they did things like post facts about Harmony Gold's rights to Macross, and other related topics. Basically, Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION have adopted the ToU provision that says you're not supposed to disrupt the flow of discussion in a thread as their one-size-fits-all excuse for banning anyone who questions their lies and expresses an opinion they don't like. Indeed it is a great time to be a Robotech fan... a time when lies are news, and the truth is obsolete, and the mere suggestion that you don't think everything those in authority do is perfect can get your account terminated. It's like Soviet Russia over there... they even have their own equivalent of Pravda called Space Station Liberty. In Soviet Robotech, show watches you!

Y'know, I didn't think anyone would actually guess it on the first try. You're absolutely right, what got his goat was Tommy Yune's Day Off, though he seemed pretty hacked off about Plan 9 from Harmony Gold too.

Y'know, Maverick_LSC once threatened me with a ban for coming up with a list of derisive nicknames for Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... can you guess the one he took umbrage over? 1.) Robotech III: the Sentinels II (harmony gold 0) 2.) Robotech III: the Search for More Money 3.) Tommy Yune's Day Off 4.) Plan 9 from Harmony Gold

Yep. It's a bigger shame that nothing will come of it, except perhaps JT getting perma-banned as yet another "enemy of the true Robotech fans". They'll just see it as evidence that JT is a "Macross purist troll" and cook up an excuse to ban him like they have so many others. I wouldn't go so far as to call it tragic... it's disgusting, to be sure, but it was probably inevitable. Let's be honest here... the Robotech fanbase has been tearing itself apart for the better part of two decades. What we're witnessing here is just the latest in a long series of internal feuds where the Robotech purists (fans who think the "original 85" is the one true Robotech) ostracize one or more of the other groups in the fandom, and eventually brand them with a label and hound them off of Robotech.com. First to go were the fans of the novels (McKinneyists), then the fans of the comics (Spanglerists), the fans who don't approve of what Tommy Yune has done to Robotech (the Macekists), and most recently the fans who like the Japanese originals too (Macross purists). It seems like the only way that die-hard Robotech die-hards have come up with to express their fandom is to persecute anyone they think isn't a fan just like them. Now that the Robotech purists have effectively banished everyone except themselves and labeled themselves the only "true fans", they have nobody else to turn on to prove their fan-ness. So, of course, they've turned on themselves with an old-fashioned witch hunt to root out anyone who doesn't think exactly like they do. Of course, what drove the vast majority of Robotech fans away from the fanbase was the fact that Harmony Gold never produced a viable sequel in 20 years of trying. Simple frustration with a franchise that has been going nowhere for 25 years has driven away more fans than any other cause. No kidding... it take a certain amount of bloody-minded determination (or maybe good old-fashioned denial) to follow a franchise that went nowhere and did nothing for 20 years, and produced a single sequel whose production quality would have been embarrassingly bad back in 2002 when we were getting Macross Zero. My god, the sarcasm is so thick on this sentence you could cut it into blocks.