Seto Kaiba

Yeah, they've made noises about wanting to do it, but it's highly doubtful that they'll actually get their act together in time to save any of those sites. Hell, attempting to explain away all of inconsistencies, plot holes, and stuff that just doesn't make sense is one of the most popular Robotech fan projects. Harmony Gold's been making it work for them for years. Just look at their statements about what's canon... they deliberately worded it such that it throws the door open to all kinds of crazy theories about how all of the non-canon McKinney novels, comic books, and whatnot can still potentially fit into the universe so long as they don't conflict (much) with the so-called "original 85". You want to talk about the cyclical nature of Robotech... look at its message boards. It's been nothing but the same tired, circular arguments over and over again, often with people presenting unfounded claims from past arguments as though they were facts in the new arguments on the same damn topics. It just goes to show how completely out of touch with reality Pizza really is. He's deluded himself into thinking that we give a damn whether or not Harmony Gold manages to squirt out another feeble movie in an attempt to make Robotech relevant to an industry and an audience that haven't given a damn about it in 23 years. He's not a complete idiot though, he's on the ball enough to fully appreciate that the only part of Robotech that actually matters to most of the fans is Macross, and that without Macross tie-ins any future Robotech productions will have little-to-no appeal for all but the most devoted of Robotech fans. Eh, it's no biggie. I'm used to attracting the attention of the crazy ones. I just wish that more of the crazy ones were cute women in their 20's like that one girl who kept trying to get me to look at Ishtar h-doujin and Feff x Nexx yaoi doujin she drew.

Get a good look now, that site's being deleted in a few days when Yahoo! closes Geocities permanently. Every time I see that site, I have the uncontrollable urge to vomit. It's offensive enough that the authors are pilfering stuff from Macross's main timeline for Robotech, they're freely mixing it with stuff from the Macross alternate universe continuity, Gundam, and a bunch of other shows.

Eh, isn't that still the same as saying that you're projecting your desire for sophisticated themes that weren't part of the author's intent onto the show? People with a good, firm grip on reality who find his behavior genuinely obnoxious? Of course, one could make a good case for other Robotech fans stepping up to stop him on the grounds that he's giving Robotech an even worse reputation than it already has, and damaging their credibility by association. Well yeah... that much was obvious from the beginning. We ARE talking about someone who actually believes that load of tripe MEMO thinks is a cogent argument in favor of Harmony Gold having full rights to Macross. It'd be a lot easier to take him seriously if he took the time to fix his spelling and grammar. The quality of his writing seems to be directly proportional to how angry his is, and since he seems to always be about an inch from raging so hard that he vomits blood, he usually writes like a goddamn loon. Unfortunately for the few decent Robotech fans left, MEMO1DOMINION and Maverick_LSC seem to find the behavior Pizza has been displaying a desirable trait in the fanbase. They've been steadily eliminating the decent contributors over the past few months. Give it a year, two at the outside, and people like Pizza the Hutt will be all that's left over on RT.com. It'll be the next RDF HQ/DoZ message board... a hiding place for a few frothy-mouthed fanatics to howl their outrage at the rest of us in relative obscurity.

Ah, I've received another wonderful private message from our mutual friend Pizza the Hutt / Ghost Maker. It seems he really has deluded himself into thinking we care what name he's supposedly lurking under over here. This guy really is a sterling example of the sort of fans who've given Robotech such a dire reputation. He openly professes to not be a Macross fan, yet he claims he's been lurking and posting here pretending to be one for months just to spy on us, as though what we did here was some clandestine operation.

Eh... most Macross fans take a dim view of people trying to pillage material from Macross and other shows to beef up the Robotech universe... the reason why should be fairly obvious. That it happens a lot certainly does nothing to improve people's opinions of such behavior.

Isn't this just a fairly weak justification for "I want to believe it, therefore it's true"? Again... ALIEN TECHNOLOGY. It's one of those specific terms that passed into general usage to describe a whole family of things. Kind of like how most people refer to generic tissues as Kleenex. Originally the term "Valkyrie" only applied to the VF-1 Valkyrie, VF-1R Valkyrie Kai, VF-2 Valkyrie II, and VF-2SS Valkyrie II but it sort of became the common term for a variable fighter along the way. Both, actually. When Kawamori originally drew the concept for his Advanced Valkyrie design series, he called it the VA-X-3. When he later built on the design for his Air Cavalry Chronicles series, he called it the AF-49 (since Air Cavalry Chronicles is not strictly Macross, but just him dicking around with new design ideas). Um, no.

Actually, I think it's really the other way around, that you're reading a lot into the story that frankly wasn't the intent of the Japanese creators or the American rewriters/editors. Yes, the futility and pointlessness of war is a recurring theme, mainly because that was a common theme in many shows of that period, but this isn't Star Trek, these are three unrelated shows smashed together with a hasty rewrite... not a single unified vision, and certainly not a platform for social commentary. It was, after all, a heavily dumbed-down version of the originals marketed to young children. What cure? EoTC establishes that the whole thing is a stable time loop, sending the SDF-3 back in time and making them the root cause of all of the genocide, hatred, and oppression in the galaxy. They don't solve anything. It's not a question of accepting things a face value, it's a matter of the intent of the show's creators, and willing suspension of disbelief. Macross's creators have repeatedly, and on no uncertain terms, established the SDF-1 Macross's length to be 1,210m. That's really not open to debate. That's what the official publications say, and what the animation shows. Yes, the city layout in the original series is slightly unfeasible, but that's what willing suspension of disbelief is for. You're a self-professed gearhead, do you have similar beefs with other sci-fi ships and technologies like this? More often than not, set design for the interior spaces of a ship clashes with the ship's exterior. Star Trek was particularly bad about it, often having large, plot-critical rooms with large windows that were clearly not present on the physical model of the ship. You just sort of have to take the creators at their word. They've done a pretty good job sticking to the 1,200m size in the subsequent animation whenever a Macross-class SDF has appeared... incl. DYRL, Macross II: Lovers Again, Macross Plus, and Macross Frontier. I'm not seeing a problem. Yes, the 58,000-strong civilian population is a bit excessive, but it's something that was undertaken in extraordinary circumstances. The actual mass-production colony ships didn't even carry HALF that, which is far, FAR more feasible in the long term. What's to conclude, there's literally hundreds of sources that give the 1,200m-1,210m figure, and they've done a damn good job of sticking to it in the higher-quality animation that followed the original series. It doesn't really seem to be a debate-worthy subject to me. If you think THAT'S bad, you should let me explain the differences between the two universes sometime... that'll make your eyes cross so hard they'll switch sides. Well, you're not dealing with conventional rocket booster technology, you're dealing with an impulse system cluster, which is essentially a mix of a nuclear pulse rocket and ion thruster. It doesn't have to be very big, and there's no denying that that nozzle cluster is BIG. Just eyeballing it, I'd say the meat of the engines is that large block of space immediately under the city part of the leg... y'know, the mess that's a good 50m or more thick down there. Plenty of space for a large engine system. Ion thrusters aren't the most hardware-intensive of propulsion systems after all. Well, not to split hairs, but the proper term is "Variable Fighter" or "Valkyrie", not "veritech"... that's a Robotech-only term. There are two different models of variable fighter that bear a strong resemblance to the F-117A Nighthawk... both from the main Macross continuity. There's Macross 7's VF-17D/S Nightmare, a special forces VF (see here), and a simplified general-use version that became the main VF of the U.N. forces in the early 2050s... the VF-171 Nightmare Plus (see here). Not sure what the B-2 Spirit-looking thing could be... perhaps this, or this, or perhaps this, from Kawamori's Air Cavalry Chronicles original design series? I assure you there's nothing passive-aggressive about it. This is a simple illustration of the sort of behavior that warrants individual criticism in this thread. Unfortunately, there are a fair few people who behave exactly the same way, and they are those rare Robotech fans who DO get directly criticized for their behavior here. The reason why they warrant criticism is because their... well, crazy... behavior doesn't just reflect poorly on them. These people typically profess to speak for the Robotech fanbase as a whole, and thus shame every Robotech fan with their actions. I think that definitely warrants harsh criticism. It's not a shot at Robotech fans in general. Their unusual devotion aside, most of them are decent-enough people. It's only the most exceptional troublemakers... the ones who give Robotech fans a bad name by association... who ever warrant a mention in this thread.

Speaking of hate mail, I received another delightful private message from our good friend Pizza the Hutt/Wraith_Knight/Ghost Maker/we don't know what he calls himself here because he's never worked up the courage to post. It seems he took considerable umbridge over my description of his recent behavior, and took it upon himself to convey the severity of his displeasure in the same comical fashion he used to badmouth so many others on RobotechX. For Capt Christopher Donovan's benefit, I'll remind everyone that he's been sending hostile messages like this to people for ages, usually with no provocation. Pizza's one of those aforementioned Robotech die-hards who has an inexplicable axe to grind where Macross is concerned, and feels that anyone who criticizes Harmony Gold and/or Robotech is 1.) not a real Robotech fan, and 2.) a "Macross purist troll" engaged in some grand and pointless conspiracy to ruin the fun of the "real" Robotech fans (the people who think Shadow Chronicles is perfect and Harmony Gold is staffed by people who are all more wonderful than Mary Poppins). And now, the lulzy message itself:

Eh, six of one, half a dozen of the other... Scott still died and went to another place full of bright white light to be with his dead Invid girlfriend. Most people would sum that up as "Invid heaven", but whatever floats your boat. Which is funny, because Robotech's storytelling is typically follows the model of "humanity vs the evil aliens", and the aliens invariably end up either being wiped out to the last man, or are liberated from a more evil alien race only to end up subordinate to the human forces. Since Prelude pretty much recanonized big chunks of the Sentinels comics, that really kind of brings it full circle to the McKinneyist outcome where humanity is ultimately the source of all the universe's evils. (which is lulzy for several reasons) You might not like his tone, but he raises a good point. The attitude that the differences between Robotech and Macross don't matter might fly with Robotech fans (who are used to excusing large discontinuities and total disconnects because of the nature of their favorite show), but it usually does not fly with Macross fans and in chats about Macross, because like as not, they are different universes. The only thing they have in common is the animation. You also have to remember that unlike Robotech, which cannot use the SDF-1 in anything except the Macross Saga and comic books, Macross has been able to bring the ship back (or others of its class) again and again... which really helps pin down things like size. Let's be honest here... the original Macross was not the highest quality production, even for its time. This is all hand-drawn animation, and so of course there are bound to be some inconsistencies... and not just in terms of goofs on the part of the animators, but also perspective. Subsequent productions have had much higher quality, which solves a lot of the problems like that. But the fact remains that Macross's creators have never once backed down from the 1,210/1,200m numbers they came up with for the size of the SDF-1 Macross pre- and post-refit. Frankly, in terms of scale to other objects of known size, the 1,210m number used in the TV series fits just fine. Yeah, it's a little unfeasible to cram 20,000 crew and 58,000 refugees into a ship that size, but hey, this is willing suspension of disbelief here. So long as the story is compelling and the characters are deep, who gives a damn if the ship theoretically should be shown to be a lot more crowded than it is? The canonicity of Macross: Do You Remember Love? is... complicated. I'm going to do my best to explain it, but I might get a bit wordy, so please bear with me. Macross: Do You Remember Love? isn't a retcon, per-se... it's an alternate depiction of the events of Space War 1 which were originally shown in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series. Strictly speaking, Macross's creators maintain that the "true account of Space War 1" is somewhere between the different depictions of the war. Over the years, Macross's creators have used DYRL designs and TV designs side by side, depending on which version of the particular character or mecha they happen to prefer, though in some cases both versions of a mecha are canon, such as the SDF-1 w/ and w/o ARMDs... the former being the post-2012 refit version and mass-production model, or the VF-1's different hands and cockpit being a block upgrade. DYRL also has an odd status as an in-universe movie that came out in 2031 and inspired many of the characters in later shows to pursue careers in music, though there is some indication that the in-universe version differs somewhat, including the wedding of Max and Milia, which isn't actually in DYRL. On the other hand, the alternate universe continuity of Macross II: Lovers Again treats DYRL as the 100% accurate depiction of Space War 1, and the TV series as non-canon. Much less confusing that way. If you're still with me after that, Mr. March's website, the Macross Mecha Manual, has a section devoted to DYRL which includes a page devoted to the DYRL-variant SDF-1 Macross. Among the lineart entries is one particular piece which is printed in a few artbooks, and shows the orientation of part of the city inside the engine blocks ("legs") of the Macross. You can find the DYRL SDF-1 variant here, the city section art is at the very bottom of the "line art" part of the article. If you want to see the movie itself, there's a fan-dub available on YouTube, and most reputable torrent sites have one or more releases of the movie. EDIT: Because that third-to-last paragraph was a MESS!

No... unless that something is the status of Zen's RT.com and RTX member accounts.

I just finished reading the leaked material you sent me, and I find myself unable to find words strong enough to properly convey just how awful it really is. In a mere six pages, it opened my mind to a level of incompetence that I didn't even know was possible. This goes WAY beyond the allegations of fanwankery and a creative staff incapable of creating quality material. This is truly filmmaking on a level not seen since the passing of Ed Wood. If the plot of the so-called "Shadow Saga" has not changed materially since this leak, then we will almost certainly be forced to concede that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was the high point of the Shadow trilogy. Maybe Harmony Gold should just go for broke and hire Rob Liefeld as their creative director and attach Uwe Boll to direct. At least then it could stand a chance of hitting that hard-to-reach "so bad it's good" zone. Eh, the powers that be in both franchises said 1,200m give or take 10m... I'm not seeing the problem. How did my ass get dragged into this conversation? Believe me, if the plot is still based on the concepts in that leaked draft, not moving forward with Shadow Rising is probably the nicest thing Harmony Gold has ever done for Robotech fans.

Many thanks, I'll go have a look at that right now.

I would go further, and suggest he read the rest of this thread before trying to pass judgment on all of us. If he wasn't constantly telling us that the criticisms we've voiced are not legitimate, that our opinions are not valid, and if he was not completely dismissive of what others have to say most of the time, I could possibly see that as being true. He needs to take a breather, read the rest of the thread, and accept that other people are entitled to their opinions too. Once he stops having a go at us for having opinions, everything will be fine. Holy crap, really? I approve of them killing off the pre-existing cast (if only because it'll force them to stop relying almost exclusively on characters from the OSM), but damn if most of that doesn't sound like a bad fanfic.

There's a world of difference between building on what's been previously established, and simply COPYING something that's already been made, changing the appearance a little bit and presenting it as new material. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles falls into the latter category, as anyone who's even remotely familiar with the last few McKinney novels and the last few books of the old Sentinels comics could tell you. So yes, the criticism that the Shadow Chronicles was unoriginal, and that much of its material was pilfered wholesale from previous Robotech features is entirely valid.

You'd be surprised how often they actually voice that as though it were a legitimate counterargument whenever they make claims that run counter to what's published in the official stats on Robotech.com. I don't think ShadowLogan was able to go more than half a page without saying that the stats from the OSM shouldn't be applied to Robotech. So speaketh someone who's wasted how much of our time by bitching about behavior that he only THINKS goes on here on a regular basis. Do us all a favor. Go back and read the rest of the thread. Yes, what we have to say IS legitimate criticism. It might not be nice, polite, constructive criticism, but that doesn't rob it of its legitimacy. Naturally, but as we've said repeatedly, if all you're here to do is defend Robotech from legitimate criticism, then you're here for all the wrong reasons. Also, there's nothing elitist about our "bashing", it's legitimate criticism and our personal observations about the state of Robotech, Harmony Gold, and the people who prop up both. Considering this is a Macross site, wouldn't that make you a pro-Robotech troll, rather than making the people telling you this isn't a Robotech site anti-Robotech trolls. You came here in "attack mode", trying to tell us that we were out of line for making legitimate criticisms, comments, and observations about Harmony Gold, Robotech, and the Robotech fanbase. You're getting flak from the people you're attacking BECAUSE YOU'RE ATTACKING. Pull the stick out of your ass, take a five minute breather, and realize that people are entitled to their opinions, and no amount of pissing and moaning from you is going to change that. You think he cares? So far, he's shown us that the only opinions he considers valid are pro-Robotech ones.

No, I think that, despite everything, Donovan is well aware that it's a lot safer here than it will ever be on Robotech.com or RobotechX. Well, Doug Bendo opened the debate again because he finds something objectionable about using printed sources for the official stats. In HIS opinion, they should be based solely on observation of the footage, and what the fans think, not what the show's creators intended.

Glad I could help.

Really? I'd always assumed I was more of a villain than a "bad cop"... but whatever floats your boat. Y'know, the funny thing is that despite the three or four websites where various Robotech die-hards published my e-mail address and implored people to send me hate-mail, I don't think I've ever actually received any hate-mail as the direct result of their efforts. Bingo! Give the man a prize! You're absolutely correct! It's easy enough to shift aside the opinions of someone who isn't familiar with the subject as so much ignorant bleating (like, for example, Donovan). It's a hell of a lot harder to write off the criticisms of someone who has intimate knowledge of the subject matter... and that means that more often than not, they have no choice but to acknowledge and try to refute what I have to say. Of course, that's an uphill battle most of the time, because most of them don't have a goddamn clue. Just look at Pizza the Hutt. Originally, he was on my case for saying Macross had been a far more successful and prolific than Robotech because he didn't know about any Macross shows other than the original series, DYRL, and Flashback 2012. Eh, it wouldn't work very well these days... not with MEMO1DOMINION and Maverick_LSC banning anyone who dares to express an opinion different from their own. That reminds me... gotta work on raising my girlfriend's evil quotient. The last one was evil enough, but my current one is so innocent that it's kind of scary. It's not my fault, it followed me home! Which is what I've been saying since the beginning... he CLAIMS he came here to talk mecha, but so far all he's shown is that he's suffering from some bizarre compulsion to try to defend Robotech from perfectly legitimate criticism. Well, to be 100% accurate, MEMO and Maverick have the power to arbitrarily remove the posting permissions and chat access of anyone who looks at them funny, provided they refer those people to the admins. Of course, since Steve has mysteriously gone silent, that really means that Maverick and MEMO can ban whoever they please with no retribution. A permanent ban is usually the deletion of a user's account, which only the admins can do. Nah, Pizza the Hutt is your typical, modern Robotech die-hard... he's got his head lodged so far up his ass that he can see the back of his own teeth. He's got it into his head that if he kisses the asses of the moderators and persecutes enough Macross fans for Harmony Gold, they'll give him authority over his fellow fans by making him a moderator. He's the perfect little goose-stepping minion for MEMO1DOMINION and Kevin McKeever, on a mission to cleanse the web of Macross fans to make way for the glorious Robotech master race. You kidding? MEMO's probably the one who put him up to it. MEMO's another one of the goose-stepping Robotech fascists who can't stand to hear anyone say anything that isn't praise for Robotech. If you DARE to step into his domain and say you like Macross, you can bet he'll be looking for a way to get rid of you.

Ah, I see... if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go tie a young lady to the railroad tracks.

Kickass... gotta get me one of those. Eh... it ceased to be a horse (or mule) a good time ago... at this point it's more like beating the shattered, sun-bleached bones that were left after the horse cadaver was beaten into giblets and left out in the desert. The way some Robotech fans describe me, you'd think I was one of those over-the-top villains from the old black and white sci-fi serials. The sort of guy who talks in an overly dramatic manner, busts out in maniacal laughter over the least little thing, wears a big black cloak, and lives in a doom fortress with a legion of witless minions. As much as I'd like the doom fortress, I don't think I could afford the upkeep on the legion of witless minions with my salary. I'm pretty sure it couldn't have been anything I said over on Robotech.com... after all, it's been over a month since I was banned over there. Most folks don't really bother questioning the 1,200m length of the ship. Yeah, the habitat blocks would have to have a population density approaching or possibly even exceeding that of downtown Tokyo, but most of us just accept that as artistic license. Odds are they didn't salvage the ENTIRE island, just the buildings, some soil, and some other debris. It's also odds-on that the soldiers were living on the Daedalus, Prometheus, and in barracks elsewhere in the ship, which can let you fit rather a lot of people into not a lot of space. It's also likely that some of the citizenry were offered similar accommodations. The DYRL version definitely downplayed the "wasted space" aspect by having the city sections taking up a sizable amount of the ship's interior, including almost all of the interior space in both of the ship's engine blocks. According to Macross Chronicle, the first purpose-built colony ship (which was about 1.5x the size of the SDF-1 at 1,770m) was only carrying 25,000 people.

No, an "adaptation" is a composition that's been translated into a new form... like making a movie from a book, or a video game from a TV series. Robotech is not an adaptation in the strictest sense... all it is a fairly shoddy dub made for the express purpose of making Macross long enough to syndicate. It was never a "multi-generational epic", it was a fly-by-night attempt to make a good show longer by tacking two mediocre shows onto the end and pretending they were related. Again you betray your ignorance... it's one thing to build on the work of a previous title, it's quite another to baldfacedly take previously created material (in this case, from the Sentinels TV series, comics, and novels) and present it as though it were new, never-before-seen material. The vast majority of the material in the Prelude comic was nothing more than redrawn material from the old Sentinels comics... panel for panel, page for page... the same events, scenes, the same dialogue even... the only thing that changed was the artist. Shadow Chronicles was no different. The next time you think I'm saying something offensive... do two things before you get your panties in a bunch and start telling me I'm being a big meanie... 1.) Stop and think 2.) Do your research Wow, really? I had no idea I was so popular.

If you don't like that analogy, I'm sure I can work a holocaust joke in there somehow. You ran your heavily biased side of things by a friend on IM... and what he offered in return was a response that reflected only the biased information you offered him. Wait, so you can smoke it now too? Damn... it's a power source, chemical catalyst, explosive, medium for high-level genetic engineering, you can get high and mutate from eating it or inhaling its spores, and now you can smoke it too? Is there anything that stuff CAN'T do? I wonder if I can clean my oven with it.

You say one thing, then you reverse yourself by painting any opinion you don't like as "rude and condescending". How many times have you told us now that we should limit our criticisms only to Harmony Gold's business ethics, and not criticize their "creative" staff, Robotech itself, and the fans? It's gotta be at least half a dozen. You wouldn't have any factual grounds to do so... I, on the other hand, have a strong factual basis for saying that there is precious little originality in the "original 85", and can easily point out where and how elements of Sentinels were shamelessly pilfered for reuse in Shadow Chronicles. What you're interpreting as spite and bile is in fact my opinion based on a solid footing of hard evidence. Probably not the best fit coming here then, have you tried MechaTalk? That might be a little more your speed. What did you expect? This isn't a Robotech fansite. Why would you come to a site devoted to a show that has be seen in fansubs because Harmony Gold can't stand the thought of actual competition expecting to find Robotech being held in high regard? Are you familiar with an old robot saying... "Does not compute"? Thank you. Really, I don't think you're ever going to find takers... I've extended this same challenge to many fans over the last six years, and I've never once had someone produce an answer that didn't boil down to either nostalgia or ignorance of what else was out there in the anime industry. I can honestly say that I used to love Robotech. I have all three Robotech Art books, the Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles book, most of the old comics, all of the McKinney novels, and every animated feature except the Robotech 3000 trailer. It was great so long as I was ignorant of what else was out there in the industry. Once I took a long, hard look at what Robotech really was... all the magic went out of it. It was a case of the editor taking credit for the author's hard work... a hasty collection of rewrites and recycled ideas passed off as something new... the anime industry's equivalent of a blacksploitation film. Lately, the increasingly asinine behavior of the people I once called my fellow Robotech fans, and the determined censorship and lackluster offerings of Harmony Gold has gone a not-inconsiderable distance towards eroding what little affection I still have for Robotech. I respect the show for the role it played in introducing anime to the west, and for introducing me to Macross, but I have no love left for Robotech and its "creators".

On what grounds are you claiming that the criticism is undeserved? As I have said many times before, there's plenty of things objectionable about Harmony Gold's business practices and the way they treat the fans of their products. We really can't hold the fans blameless, because they're WILLINGLY supporting their abusers by continuing to buy their products. There's more than a few things to criticize about the products (including the animation), both from a quality standpoint and an artistic standpoint. Can we really hold up Robotech as being an artistically sound work when it's nothing more than a hastily-assembled, completely unoriginal product made by combining three unrelated shows using a highly unfaithful dub? Can we honestly say Shadow Chronicles is an original work when it's nothing more than a low-budget fan-wank made from set pieces pilfered from a previous, failed project? Should a woman who's in love with her boyfriend stay with him even if he hits her, lies to her, and makes promises he can't keep?

It's not JUST that we have a lot of talented people here... there's a lot more solidarity to be found here than I've ever encountered on a Robotech website. I don't say that lightly either... I was an extremely active contributor over on Robotech.com for six years before I got banned for daring to disagree with a moderator's crackpot theory, and I'm still somewhat active on RobotechX. On most Robotech sites, if you DARE to express the feeling that Robotech is anything less than the best show ever made, and Harmony Gold is staffed by wonderful people who set the gold standard for creativity, they'll run you out of town as a "Macross purist troll", even if you've never even SEEN Macross before. Heaven forbid you should actually MENTION that you like Macross or prefer it to Robotech... then they REALLY go to town on you. Look at the two biggest Robotech websites... Robotech.com and RobotechX. One is the official corporate site, where you can be banned for asking the wrong question or even saying you didn't like Shadow Chronicles, and the fans are constantly reporting each other over the tiniest infractions in hopes of currying favor with the powers that be in hopes of gaining moderator powers. The other is more of same, just run by one of the kiss-asses instead of the soulless corporate goons (who at least have an excuse for being jerks), where lies are news and the truth is obsolete. Anyone who's even halfway decent gets hounded off the site for not thinking Shadow Chronicles deserves an academy award, or not believing MEMO's provably-wrong crackpot theories about the Macross legal situation. You come over to a Macross site like this one, and the difference is like night and day. Over here, there's a lot more respect for people's opinions. We joke around a lot. Intellectual debate and criticism are not just welcomed, they're heartily encouraged. If you don't agree with what someone is saying, it's usually no big deal. But the most important thing of all is that Macross fans support each other. If you're looking for information, ask and it will almost certainly be provided. If you're trying to find something, you can bet that there'll be at least a few helpful souls who'll point you in the right direction or even help you look. If you want tips on translation or help with a model kit, there's always a helpful soul around. Even if you hate one or more of the Macross shows, odds are you'll have at least one show you like in common with anyone you're disagreeing with. Honestly, I think part of the reason there's a strong spirit of unity in the Macross fanbase is because so much of what we have is literally "by the fans, for the fans" as a matter of necessity. Our fanbase is sustained by the work of people who do what they do to share their love of Macross with other anime fans, and that's created a fan culture that puts a lot of importance on helping others. Look who the most respected members of the fan community are... it's not the people who've gained positions of authority by kissing ass like it is in the Robotech fanbase, it's the people who've done the most for their fellow fans. And you know what, that's the way it SHOULD be. EDIT: In hindsight, this is very likely the sappiest thing I've ever written... just pretend you never read it and we'll all go about our business.