spent 20 minutes trying to will myself into doing something Creative this evening and failed completely and I am going to start watching Macross 7 instead

omg macross 7 is Dad Rock Macross

maximum 90s anime

wow the whole tone of macross 7 is incredibly goofy lol

SDF Macross and Plus both had comedy but were generally pretty self-serious hard sci-fi

7 is just like... yeah so this teen owns a mech for some reason, he operates it by playing sick guitar solos, just roll with it lol

im not joking he literally pilots a mech using a guitar

the guy with the mech is this like standard angsty brooding anime boy who refuses to articulate his feelings, and is therefore just kind of an ass to everyone

the main girl just absolutely has no time for his shit lmao

extremely cool shot

zooming in on distant anime characters is always rewarded

There was a scene where a computer had a big scary countdown clock. They couldn't stop it in time so Guitar Mech Teen heroically smashed the computer. This... did not solve the problem and in fact made everything worse lmao

The writing in this show is mostly pretty bad honestly, but props to the writers for that one lol

MYLENE 🤖 GOT 🤖 IN 🤖 THE 🤖 ROBOT

This show SEEMS to be aiming for a "War is Bad/Getting in The Robot is Bad" kind of angle, which I'd normally fully support, except the plot is so slow and boring that I'm just like FUCK YEAH FINALLY THE CUTE GIRL KICKS SOME SPACE ASS

So an interesting conceit of this show is that all the music is essentially "diagetic"

As in there's no disembodied background music; it's always BEING PLAYED by the band members who are present in the scene

this would be cool as hell, except... the band only has two songs lmao

also it was aired at the same time the Macross Plus OVAs were being released, which is... unfortunate

7 has the same two okayish dad-rock songs every single episode, MEANWHILE Plus is over here with *Yoko Kanno* launching her career and blowing absolutely everyone's minds lol

there's a bit at about 1:07 in the ending theme that sounds almost exactly like Roundabout by Yes and I can only assume that was 100% intentional lol

this certainly is a character design

YEAH UH THAT WAS GOING TO BE MY FIRST QUESTION TOO

there was literally zero leadup to this. they've been hanging out in space doing unrelated plot stuff for like the last ten episodes and then this one just opens with OH BY THE WAY WE JUST NOTICED WE'RE THIRTY FEET AWAY FROM A STAR

i wonder which robot the girl drives

Mylene getting in the robot is cool but to be honest what I REALLY want to see is Mylene getting in the miclone machine to become nine meters tall and then kicking everyone's ass in a fucking Queadluun-Rau battle suit

I have watched enough macross to have opinions about this sort of thing now

okay Speaker Pod Gamma was.... maybe rad enough to make the preceding 26 episodes of mediocre anime worthwhile

lmaoo

90'S FANSUBS HELL YEAH

if you want to watch one minute of Macross 7 spoilers: this is probably the hardest I've laughed at anything in months

leaving my apartment to buy groceries like

oh man this rules apparently the way you read the news in 2045 is by slotting your ipad into a vending machine to download it

one of my favorite details of pretty much any sci-fi written before like 2005 is that no one ever imagined cameras would become small

Civilian deaths in excess of two million as Nintendo Corporation DMCA's a colony ship

The first like two minutes of every episode are a recap via voiceover. You would think this means you could skip them, except...... occasionally they AREN'T strictly recaps and contain actually new information that was never explained in the actual episodes lmao

The connecting thread between SDF Macross and Macross Plus and Macross 7 is that they're all about shitty boys who refuse to articulate their feelings and instead bottle everything up and then lash out, and somehow it's the GIRLS' responsibility to understand Men's Complexity

forcing everyone around you to adapt to the fact that you have the emotional maturity of a sulking toddler doesn't make you Deep my dude it just makes you an asshole

SDF had some real postwar misogyny energy going on, but I dunno why Plus and 7 are ALSO like this

At least Frontier didn't have this problem; the main dude's kind of a dumbass but his character flaws are actually treated AS flaws

Haven't seen Zero or Delta yet; really hoping they're better in this regard at least

WAIT THIS WAS FROM MACROSS????

I cannot begin to describe how much I was absolutely blindsided by the Anime Guy Eats Leaf gif suddenly manifesting in 1080P Bluray High Definition

also it doesn't even make any sense in context!!!

Macross 7 has a subplot where the military realizes that music effects the enemies, and attempts to weaponize this by conscripting a bunch of people to sing at the aliens

they're very bad, but the specific way in which the show depicts this is hilarious

they have like 10 people singing in fighter jets, which isn't really unusual for macross, except: they can't sing parts. It's like 10 people all singing the same pitch in unison. It sounds like a church youth group lmao

it sounds awful, but like, the specific way IN WHICH it sounds awful is great. They can sing in tune, but they've clearly had no actual musical instruction of any kind, because it's the military being incompetent lol

good music joke, macross

Macross 7 is both Bad and Way Too Long but this is also true of The Pandemic so it's not like I have anything better to be doing right now

So, the main character's somewhat strained relationship with her parents is a major plot point in this show. Except it's also established that she's the youngest of seven siblings and *literally none of them have ever been named or even so much as mentioned*

She just lives alone with her mom lol. Where is the rest of her family in this story that is about family drama??

honestly the whole show is kind of... weirdly uncurious about its own premises like this

Literally every single episode of this anime: A guy named Basara sings dad-rock at aliens, and the aliens respond by screaming ANIMA SPIRITIA!!! and running away

Literally episode *46*: "it seems this anima spiritia is connected to Basara's singing"

yeah cut him some slack

I finished Macross 7 and wow that ending sure carried zero narrative or emotional weight of any kind whatsoever huh

49 consecutive episodes of singing dad rock at aliens until they leave, and then on the last episode he just sings the same dad rock harder and they leave forever

this is now a Mylene Jenius fashion appreciation thread

I started taking screenshots of her outfits early on and then realized she changes every single episode. Sometimes multiple times! I'm picking the better ones here but there's like 50+

A lot of them kinda need multiple shots because she usually looks great from the shoulders up, but any time you can see her pants she's drawn like a noodleperson because blurry CRT broadcasts lol

all the other characters wear the same things in pretty much every episode lol; for some reason mylene is the only band member with fashion sense

no idea wtf is going on with this one but it does kinda rule

The artists on this show are... honestly not particularly good at drawing complex transforming mecha combat, but fortunately they are INCREDIBLY good at drawing kickass 90s rock fashion

(also the color schemes are consistently great)

anyway this is my review of Macross 7