I'm watching Macross Delta and after 33 years they finally added catboys

holy shit this RULES

yall this is the new bar for hacking scenes

just go home if your hacking scene doesn't feature at LEAST:
- lesbians
- hacking a planetary blockade
- while singing
- the hacking is itself a music video for the singing
- which is about being hacker lesbians

So it took until 2016 but Macross Delta finally made the mech shields interesting

like from a game-mechanics standpoint lol

instead of being magical plot armor they're basically halo shields now. Basically impenetrable but they break after very few hits, then recharge quickly

Also the pilots have to physically react fast enough to actually get the shields into position

This is in contrast to Macross 7, where the protagonists were basically just immune to damage at all times unless the plot specifically required them to get hit lmao

I realize that no one actually cares about this but uhhhhh

I have been dealing with the pandemic by watching Literally All of Macross

I am no longer capable of not thinking about these things

tbh the whole show has an extremely Triple-A Videogame aesthetic going on

one really consistent aspect of all the macrosses is that the military command ONLY ever makes decisions that range from "incompetent" to "pure evil"

but it's always handled with this weird ambivalence like "ehh, the brass sucks, what can you do. We're still the good guys tho"

it gets particularly jarring in the later shows because there IS no interplanetary government apart from the military. The New U.N. Spacy is literally just the Space Navy and they control dozens of colonized planets. Most of them seem to have no particular local governance

Also the humans are very explicitly COLONISTS. Like they just drop out of space onto already-populated planets and go WHAT'S UP YALL WE LIVE HERE NOW

and they're ruled by a military force that is at best incompetent and at worst evil

all of this is textual but never questioned?

the original 80s macross was clearly heavily influenced by star trek

it's like Kawamori watched trek and missed the whole "post-scarcity humanist utopia" part and was just like "wouldn't it kick ass if the JSDF owned planets"

yeah also this lol

Delta's villains are an anticolonial rebellion, and they're portrayed kinda sympathetically so far

buuuuut it's kinda doing the Killmonger thing where like they have a legitimate grievance and their goals are honorable but also they just fuckin love doing murders lmao

Anyway none of this is particularly central to any of the shows individually. They're really mostly just about character drama and Wow Cool Robot action scenes set to rad music

it's just a weirdly consistent throughline that becomes apparent if you watch all of them at once lol

cool evil spaceship

very funny aspect of the later macrosses: Every time somebody talks about music they like, or plays a CD or something, it's always a reference to the previous shows

this ends up basically implying that, in the entire history of human space colonization, there are four (4) bands

it should really be five bands but apparently no one is a fan of the yandere vocaloid that enslaved everyone in macross plus

which is a shame honestly because her songs were all Yoko Kanno bangers

so this is the only macross show where the singers are explicitly part of the actual military

this is leading to some absolutely hilarious levels of Anime, such as attacking the enemy fleet by "performing a blitz concert"

MASS
[HUGE]

So originally Macross was about the U.N Spacy, as in like, Space Navy, which is extremely funny

It's later superseded by the New UN Spacy

At some point the writers noticed "spacy" sounds silly so they switched to acronyms

but this means the spaceships all just say NUNS on them

re: earlier tweets about bad macross politics:

holy shit this is maybe the most cursed dialogue in all ~40 years of macross lol

[context: they just found out that NUNS covered up the fact that it space-nuked Windermere, a small planet that resisted colonization]

"I mean sure, they maybe genocided a planet, but they've got a lot on their plates man. My planet got colonized too but the important thing is that we all Give Peace a Chance"

my dude you HAD peace before they parachuted onto your house what the hell is wrong with you lmao

getting around to finishing Macross Delta

after six entire animes about jpop idols winning wars by singing at fighter jets, mr Villainous Racist Caricature here drops this revelation like WHAT IF...... MUSIC........ COULD BE A WEAPON

The protagonists, who live on an aircraft carrier and perform Tactical Concerts alongside fighter jets in various warzones, are like "No, you're wrong! Music is pure!"

hilariously, every macross show actually uses a DIFFERENT sci-fi explanation for why jpop makes fighter pilots go super saiyan

Delta is now heroically trying to unify them somehow, which is extremely funny. Result is basically now there's a seventh explanation lmao

lmaoooooooo the villains are literally just trying to do Instrumentality

yall this came out in *2016* you can't just keep doing instrumentality plots forever man evangelion was literally 20 years old

also macross already DID an instrumentality plot before this series lmao

the Read Another Book thing but it's evangelion and I'm just yelling
WATCH
ANOTHER
VHS

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

extremely rad Lore detail: The vehicles get more high-tech as the series progresses, but this giant chonky artillery mech has remained completely unchanged since the original show. It's like 60 years old at this point in the timeline. It kicks so much ass they never upgraded it

None of the main characters ever pilot one. I don't think it's ever even named in actual dialog. It just appears in big battle scenes and blows up something gigantic at least once in every show

oh okay they actually use its name in Frontier

Here depicted with interlacing and hardsubs and horribly compressed audio, for maximum 2000s authenticity

man Frontier rules

space truck

I finished Macross Delta a few days ago and I keep randomly remembering different plot threads that never got resolved or turned out to be totally irrelevant

this is not really the impression you want your story to leave on people lol

Delta isn't really BAD; it's got some great moments but generally the writing is just too weak and unfocused to keep things engaging

the art's super pretty though, and the main characters are all really likeable (which is not at all true of most other macrosses lol)

I like the character designs a lot. The eyes have this cool thing going on where there's like Lines Everywhere so they almost look sketchy, but they're all drawn with intent and stay consistent between shots

also: canon gay

in closing, rather than actually watch Macross Delta, my recommendation is you just watch this clip and imagine a hypothetical show that's always this good: