magnuskn

Just copying over this post from Westlo from the AnimeSuki forums, because I am so happy that Macross Frontier seems to be doing so well. :

I´m not really comfortable with continuing to be OT here. I´ll try to be concise. Firefly was cancelled out under Whedons arse after a half-season, partly because Fox had some axe to grind against him. The Serenity movie was not much a comercial success ( although a very good film ). As far as TV goes Whedon basically dropped off the map from 2004 to 2008 and IMO that is largely due to him having tanked BtVS. As for Dollhouse... well, we´ll have to wait and see if it is a success, don´t we? Since you are not interested in the complaints of the "raging fanbase", I wonder how I should rank your perceptions of said fanbases complaints in that era. I was quite active in BtVS fandom back then, and remember the flamewars well.

Yeah, the "amorphous blob" called fans also is necessary to maintain a show. But to be more serious, if you piss off one section of your fandom, fine. If you piss off several factions of your fandom, that´s trouble. If you manage to piss off *all* sections of your fandom ( like Whedon pretty much managed with season 6 + 7 of BtVS, if the boards at the time we any indication ), that´s career suicide. Did you notice that Whedon has pretty much dropped off the TV radar lately?

Maybe with the lightsaber duels... but if anybody told you the fans wanted whiny Vader and whatever else nonsense you were told, you are wrong. As for Kawamori not being influenced by the fans opinion ( that they want a concluded romance ), this, again, pointedly reminds me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Joss Whedon around mid of season six said the writers were giving the fans what they needed, not what they wanted. Yeah, well... the fans hated the second half of season six and the complete season seven. So sometimes the fans are right, it turns out. Not that the drawn-out process of BtVS long dead is else comparable to one crucial episode which ended on an inconclusive note, but a definitive ending would have satisfied more people in the long run than the wishy-washy cop-out we got. Maybe SK got *that* message.

The problem with that strategy is that it creates pissed off fans on both sides of the triangle. Hell, Joss Whedon did that with Spike/Buffy/Angel and to this day a lot of fans get completely irate when talking about him. Lots of other shows manage to give a satisfactory resolution to love triangles ( Escaflowne, for example ) and in the end, people are more satisfied with a true resolution than this cowardly way out.

Huh, how did we arrive at that particular topic? Well, by this time she would have known that there was an anti-serum for her disease, which works if applied early enough. So there would be no real obstacle to sleeping with Alto ( besides angsty discussions and the like. ). I think we better drop this, before we wake up some people here.

Well, we are back to the point where I´d need to point all the things I ( and the other Sheryl X Alto fans ) did see which pointed to Alto having chosen Sheryl. If you are in the mood, read the releveant parts of Crusaders entries here, here and here, they explain very well what we Sheryl shippers saw as a conclusion. Just tell him that you think polygamy is the bestest thing ever, and you´ll have a leg up over the rest of us.

While I am not a writer myself, I´ve read enough entries by very talented people on LJ about this very phenomenon, so that, yes, I can see it happening. I just don´t see it happening in the MF series in a way which should make the writers have Alto *not* pick Sheryl. Well, I did see them. Brrrr.... no thanks. Harem animes are generally crap, as far as I am concerned.

Sure, for the general trajectory a character can prove more popular with the audience ( and the writers ), so his story gets changed. By the writers, of course, because the script for a character still doesn´t magically appear by itself. ^^ As for the conclusion of the love triangle, Altos decision should be weighed by the writers by how Altos character arc and his interactions with the other two girls have developed. But in the end, it´s just a writer putting down his pen and writing the concluding sentences. For the series, the end should have been Sheryl X Alto ( IMO, etc... don´t jump down my throat, people, we had this discussion before and some people are close to getting aneurysms over it ). For the movie.... well, the movie hasn´t happened yet, we may even get a love quadrangle ( leaving poor Michael out in the cold ^^ ), so we´ll see how the characters come off there. TV Minmay and DYRL Minmay were totally different characters, after all.

Well, Alto is a character written by Kawamori. So in the end it falls to SK to settle it. Saying "the character can´t do it!" is a cop-out.

Disputed by Tak on the AnimeSuki boards. I´ll quote:

Yeah, or maybe some people were obnoxious with their exaggerated anti-shipperness. Oh, well.

I´d much prefer to know what the Macross Frontier manga will be about. And who will be scanning and translating it.

If there is any sort of continuation, I am sure that they will wait until after the movie is released to announce it.

I´d rather know if the romance will be properly resolved.

A surprising number of completely fanatical Ranka shippers seem to have dislexia. Well, two of the four super-fanatics I´ve seen on Suki and RC.

Now that is a nice philosophical reply. As someone who likes to discuss analytically, if possible, I mostly prefer the "head" style of discussion, but I have at least one friend with whom I share a understanding of things on an deeper spiritual level. So I can relate to both sides of view.

Quite honestly, I find most parts of your replies to be unnecessarily baiting. And, y'know, since some people were annoyed and you got that ( a bit hypocritical ) signature, I try to limit my shipping tendencies. And I find the topic of "Did they sleep together" to be a bit different from my question "How exactly was the triangle reset?". Not to mention that I did respond to Gubaba and VF-25 Messiah, who were, besides Final Vegeta, the only ones who even tried to get into my point. Final Vegeta is another guy with whom I don´t get along so well, so I concentrated on the parts of his post which I supposed weren´t going to descend into a finger-pointing match.

Tak, from the Suki boards, who is active on the Japanese BBS. And, honestly, let´s drop it, I don´t want to get yelled at again by random people. I gots my opinion of it, you gots yours, everybody can be happy.

Actually, I meant that a lot of the Japanese fans thought that they made love. ^^

That´s a lot of delusional Japanese fans, then.

I´ll happily concede that the creators of the show made Alto hard to read. They handled his build-up more subtle than with Sheryl, but IMO it definitely was there. Well, there is an antidote for it, if it is in the early stages... Sheryls infection was just too advanced to be treated that way. And I still don´t completely buy the V-Type = AIDS analogy. It was never outright stated that it is transmitted by sexual contact. Let´s just agree to disagree here.

Well, actually I think Alto advanced tons more than Ranka. At the end, Ranka had changed in exactly one aspect: She gained some self-confidence. She *still* has her crush on Alto, she *still* depended on being saved by Alto yet once again. Getting sudden magic hax out of nowhere doesn´t count as character development. Alto, OTOH, has advanced from the angry, self-doubting young man he was, into a self-confident, mellowed out fellow. He conciliated himself with his actors past ( and his father apparently with his choice to become a pilot ), advanced into being a squadron leader, he accepted Frontier as his home and ( attention, shipping goggles on ) decided to go with one of the girls. Or at least that last should have happened, but SK trolled us hard at the end. I still think that made Michaels death all kinds of pointless... I´ll refrain from commenting on the stuff from the other posters, seeing how the last argument turned out.

Well, I prefer sticking up for yourself and others, so haragei ain´t my cup of tea. I am not even sure that SK is praising that concept as something admirable, it rather seems that he just presents it as a valid alternative to individualism. At first glance at least, I cannot see praise towards the Vajra as a better alternative to how we live. And I proudly ship Sheryl X Alto. Compared to the other two mains, she still stayed rather stagnant. Yes, more self-confident, but I can´t see that she reached any insights into herself beyond that.

As a non-Japanese speaker, I can of course only go by the fansubs. Both of them I have seen omit the "home", and they went by the closed captioning. So it´s a matter of interpretation, I´d say. In any case ( puts on shipper goggles ), after that he surely did stay with her.