Seto Kaiba

Well, if the Compendium, The Two Lost Years, and the various other sources around are anything to go by, there ought to be plenty of half-breeds running around. One would expect, by 2059 or so, that pure humans would be a minority among the general population due to two generations worth of interbreeding. Between Perfect Memory and the Compendium, the situation after the war looks to have been a population of ~1 million humans and ~8 million Zentradi. At that point, it's all down to "how many Zentradi had kids with humans", and how many all-Zentradi families there were.

Okay, since this line of reasoning is apparently a mystery to you, I'll go ahead and explain AGAIN... Let's examine the actual substance of your argument here... you've consistently asserted, on the grounds that most of Robotech is "out there" on the internet, that making information about this material accessible on a reference site would be a waste because it's "work people really should be doing themselves". You have quite literally suggested that, rather than having a readily-accessible reference site where Robotech fans and casual viewers could find answers for their questions and learn more about the universe(s), each and every fan or casual viewer with a question ought to just download each and every title in the expanded universe, read them all, and figure out the answer on their own. To be frank, you've spent four or five posts telling us that reference sites are a waste of time and a bad idea, and that all fans ought to seek out the information on their own and decide what's what for themselves. That's just STUPID. Tell me, is a site like Memory Alpha, Wookiepedia, or the Macross Compendium also a waste because that information is "out there" in one form or another? You're clearly saying in this most recent post that such sites are a good thing for the fandom and the casual viewer... yet you've objected to the idea of a Robotech Wiki in this thread no less than three times in forty-eight hours. What you're saying now seems like a 180 from your previous position. Y'see, this is the whole goddamn point that's somehow not getting across. For example, if a fan is curious about some aspect of the novels, the comics, etc. and they just want a quick answer to their question, then it's incredibly stupid to expect them to download and sift through a sizable body of material they have no interest in just to get their question answered when you could have a Wiki or something along those lines where they can find their answer in seconds and with minimal hassle. With the information accessible to everyone, and not just those determined or devoted enough to build a private collection of this crap, you cut down on a lot of idiot repeat questions and crackpot theories, the fans can learn more about the various aspects of the franchise and decide whether or not they want to explore those parts for themselves, and casual observers can explore the universe and learn about it without having to register on a BBS and get frothed at by delusional fruitcakes like Rhade, Sanman, Maverick, and MEMO. The reason I used Wookiepedia as an example was, as should have been immediately obvious, it's the same goddamn principle in action. Same damn thing, just for a different sci-fi franchise. I'm not sure where you ran away with the idea that it wasn't going to be expansive, since I never said that. What I did say was that, rather than write the damn thing myself, I'm gonna provide a set of guidelines for the project and leave a good portion of the actual writing to fans who are experts on particular parts of Robotech. It covers not just the core stuff from the movies, but the expanded universe too, and it does so in a way that is still accessible to the non-fan or the casual fan. That's the goal here... Really, I'm not seeing what you're doing as analytical or realistic... if you were being analytical or realistic, it wouldn't have taken three verbal bludgeonings from me to figure out that reference sites are a good thing and that expecting the fans who just want a simple answer to a simple question to read the entire expanded universe to get it is unreasonable in the extreme.

So what's stopping you from taking a few Japanese courses at your local community college and doing the translations for yourself you lazy loafer? Seriously though, I realize it's somewhat unreasonable, but the point stands. Even if the stuff gets translated, by your logic we should just scatter the translations to the four winds and let you lot search for them on your own rather than collecting the information in a few convenient locations for easy reference. We could also approach this from an angle like that of Wookiepedia, where the expanded universe is just so massive, and so much of it is obscure, that only the most obsessive of Star Wars fans would be able to track all the relevant information they wanted without having someone condense it first. The average fan just DOES NOT have that much patience... that's why reference sites like Wikia have become so popular. It's a great way for the devoted fans to condense the vast quantities of material into references that make the series accessible to Joe Average. Sure, the same can be said for the materials of a bunch of franchises... but you're still missing the goddamn point. Who the fart has the time to wade through all that crap when they just want a quick answer to their question? Relying on the experts to answer questions on a BBS is a fatally flawed system because inevitably you end up answering the same few questions over and over again because it's a lot harder to search a BBS for answers than a Wiki, if only because in most cases you end up having to wade through torrents of worthless verbiage to get to the answer. Wading through all of the source materials looking for the answer is far too tedious and time consuming for most fans to bother with... for starters you have to actually have the material on hand, and then you have to thumb/scan through a few hundred comic books, or thousands of pages worth of novels looking for the specific fact you want. Tell me, which is faster? Trolling through a dozen novels looking for the fate of a particular character, or loading up a Wiki about the series and searching for that character's name? (Free hint, unless you're ASTONISHINGLY lucky, the Wiki is going to win the race every time). Okay, I see where you're coming from now... bitterness. Again, the point that you fail to grasp with laudable consistency is the simple fact that the average fan who doesn't know much (or anything) about the old comics, novels, etc. isn't even going to know where to start if they're looking to get an answer for their particular question about those sources. This latest pathetic line of yours that they ought to just Google for and download EVERYTHING to get the answer to one specific question is so incredibly asinine that I'm not even sure whether to take it seriously or not. Honestly, are you shitting me? If someone wants to know what the symptoms of the flu are, you don't tell them "Go to medical school and spend four years studying viral pathology", you look it up quickly online or hand the poor sod a medical dictionary where the answer is already distilled down to a level that a non-expert can easily grasp. If someone wants the answer to a specific question about a specific topic, telling them to go study the entire subject matter in depth and figure it out for themselves is just being the sort of unhelpful douche nobody wants to have around. Having an easily-accessible comprehensive resource like a Wiki or a reference site goes a LONG way towards cutting down on repeats of the same tired questions, and allows fans to find a common frame of reference for discussing the subject matter. Robotech fans often come off as ignorant because that's exactly what they DON'T HAVE. All they can do is draw their own conclusions because Harmony Gold can't be arsed to cover 99% of Robotech on their Infopedia. Seriously, the outpatients are out in force tonight... what the hell guys? The problem with your assertion is that Tommy plainly didn't think about it at all when it comes to defining what is and isn't in the continuity. His response to the question was essentially that he can't be arsed to sort it all out, and leaving everything completely ambiguous. I hardly think it unreasonable to include a title in the continuity if an unambiguously canon title recaps it and continues the story right where the reference being recapped left off. What you're arguing is something very much akin to saying Star Trek III was not related in any way to Star Trek II, despite ST3 following directly on from the events of ST2 and referencing it ad nauseam. Insofar as Prelude and the Sentinels comics, saying that tying the two together is fanfiction falls apart on the grounds that about the first two issues of the Prelude comic is material taken whole cloth with only minor cosmetic alterations from the final issue of the Sentinels comics. I think part of the reason I'm running into so much carping from the peanut gallery over this is that people here are so used to the idea of just slagging Robotech as a disorganized mess that they they never bothered to stop and look for any underlying logic in any of it. So, of course, the idea that there might actually be some (if possibly unintentional or the result of laziness) seems to have come as something of a shock... Since you asked, the target audience is not only the RT.com crowd, but also the casual fans and people who are just plain curious about this weird piece of anime esoterica that Harmony Gold refuses to just let go of. The general motivations are the same as those of the people who put together something like the Macross Compendium, Memory Alpha, Wookiepeida, etc.... making detailed information about the universe accessible to everyone and not just the die-hards who follow all of the expanded universe stuff.

Really, that much could be done with a simple FAQ on the Macross side of things... which is something we've been doing since the very earliest days of the project, back in ~2003 when it was a simple RPG site hell-bent on fixing all of Palladium's well-intentioned and/or ignorant misrepresentations in Palladium's Macross II RPG. Eh? Now there's an idea for an astonishingly short Robotech fan project... the only period in Robotech history that could be called the "glory days" with a straight face would be the original broadcast that started in March 1985 and ended four months later in June. Everything that came after was part of the franchise's embarrassingly long, slow slide into oblivion. Um... you say this as though it's a revelation, and I'm wondering why? Perchance, are you deliberately being thick? Yes, the information that could go into a project like this is available out there in one form or another. The same can easily be said for ANY fan site publication. After all, what are the Macross Compendium and Macross Mecha Manual but condensed versions of the printed materials? Why do the work people like you really should be doing for yourselves by providing all the information in those books in a condensed, easy-to-reference format? Are you saying that those of us who make the fan-subs and translate the artbooks should hang the rest of you out to dry because you're unwilling or unable to track down each and every rare art book from the 80s, or import every issue of Chronicle? Now, if we all adhered to your astonishingly poor logic, none of the Macross reference sites you take for granted would exist. Nor, for that matter, would Wikipedia and the multitude of Wikias. (Of course, I could carry this to a rather illogical extreme and point out that if everyone had this attitude about doing things for other people, we wouldn't have dictionaries, and the doctor at the emergency room would tell you to stop bitching and do your own damn stitches.) HONOES! Some Robotech fascist fanboys might not visit or contribute to a project created by someone they don't like! How could I have missed such an important, Earth-shaking revelation?! Surely the project is doomed because a handful of mentally-deficient internet tough guys don't think I'm Mr. Fred F***ING Rogers! How will any fan project or online community survive without a legion of gunmen holding high-caliber firearms to everyone's skulls, forcing them under threat of death to visit this and other sites?! Okay dude, now that I've listened to this appallingly lame reasoning of yours, I want you to do me a favor. Get a good firm grip on your hair, and pull your head out of your arse. It honestly sounds like you're afraid this goddamn Wiki will trigger some kind of Robotech fandom revival or some poo like that. Look... even Mark Hamill couldn't polish that turd, so I've got no chance of causing a Robotech comeback. Is the idea of me providing Robotech fans with their own equivalent of the Macross Compendium really THAT offensive to you? Was your entire family murdered by a Robotech box set or something? I can't imagine why you think I give a poo about the penis-puffing poppycock of three or four jackasses who see Robotech and Harmony Gold as a ticket to self-advancement, or that what they have to say would have ANY impact on the project whatsoever. In case you haven't noticed, not only are they not the entirety of the fandom, they don't even represent the opinions of the majority. The majority of Robotech fans are NOT the frothy-mouthed fascists who preach "Death to Macross Purists". There are a fair few good people in the Robotech fandom who would benefit from and enjoy a comprehensive Robotech reference site untainted by fan-fiction or Harmony Gold kiss-assery, and those are the people that the project is for. Um... at the risk of pointing out a potential flaw in your reasoning here... Tommy Yune directly referenced the old Waltrip Sentinels series in Prelude (picked up right where it left off, in fact), so we do have some reliable details about the life and crimes of Zor... who was, by all accounts, an astonishing dick with a penchant for putting off any thinking until a few decades after he acted. Is Harmony Gold helpful? Of course not. They're apefaces. Tommy Yune couldn't write his way out of a damp paper sack, and the rest of that crowd is no better. The last person they had who had a goddamn clue was Tom Bateman, and we all know what happened to him. They won't even update their official reference section or put together a coherent timeline based on their own work. Embarrassing for them, since in practice it's ASTONISHINGLY easy if you look at it logically.

Okay, nobody with half a brain would deny that Robotech is in extremely dire straits... but really, this isn't about any kind of support for the brand. Is the brand circling the drain? Definitely. Is that any reason to hang the good people in the fandom out to dry? No. I personally think Robotech's franchise needs to just die already... the magic is gone, and has been for the better part of 24 years now. It should be looked back on fondly as a reminder of the days when we weren't quite as sophisticated as we are now... like replaying a Duke Nukem game. It's tasteless and campy and horrible, but it maintains a sense of ironic retro camp that's weirdly compelling. Oh, of course it's not NECESSARY... but is anything fandom-related necessary? One of the main reasons that the Robotech fandom is as belligerent and ignorant as it is is because they DON'T have the kind of resources and the kind of solidarity we have in the Macross fandom. Most of them don't even have the wherewithal to figure out how to facilitate that kind of environment. Is giving them a chance to help curtail their ignorant behavior and do something nice for their fellow fans really that offensive to you? It's not like I'm taking time away from my work on Macross for this... the setup is like two hours tops, and then it's largely out of my hands. It's not pointless... if they enjoy it and get some use out of it, then it was worthwhile for those people. Like as not, Robotech IS a part of Macross history... it might be a part we're deeply ashamed of, and a part that breeds idiots like no other, but pretending it doesn't exist won't help matters either. The more they know, the less likely they are to act like idiots in the future. Now what MEMO's doing with his "Robotech Codex" is just stupid... he just doesn't have the pattern recognition skills to realize he's blundering blindly into the same situation Brian Mcafee's been stuck in for years.

I am... that's the main purpose of the new server we're migrating to. This Robotech business is far and away the smallest and lowest priority part of what we have planned. The main focus of the site will be what we're semi-seriously calling the Macross Galaxy Guide... a two-part reference providing general coverage of both Macross continuities. My focus on characters and settings should provide a nice complement to Mr March's exhaustive coverage of the mechanical designs, which will also be hosted on our servers just as it is now. If only it were that easy... so long as Harmony Gold thinks there's money to be made from milking the nostalgia Robotech fans have for their mangled version of Macross, Robotech will never simply vanish.

Which is why I, being the clever chap that I am, am essentially handing over the bulk of the tedious work on the Robotech expanded universe to those who are care enough about it to provide decent coverage for it... ;-) Eh... that would be an issue if my aim was to provide a comprehensive mechanical design reference for the Robotech universe(s) similar to what the Macross Mecha Manual does for Macross. In practice, no Robotech reference would be able to pull off that level of coverage, because few official sources simply don't provide that level of detail. The goal here isn't to bludgeon the reader with in-depth technical coverage about the mecha, but rather to provide balanced coverage of all aspects of Robotech. There aren't any obstacles like that to providing story summaries, production and publication information, and character bios, since that material is all readily available and just needs to be condensed into a manageable format. Insofar as mechanical details, it's a matter of taking what little official information exists (RT.com Infopedia, AoTSC) and building on it a bit based on what's shown in the animation and RTSC production materials. For the few designs which have no official coverage, that can be remedied easily enough using the same practices the writers of the few official Robotech publications used (basically, take the hard specs from the OSM and state the obvious for a paragraph or two).

Well COME ON... all I've seen of it so far is a single thumbnail image that, on my colossal monitor, is about the size of a postage stamp.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, opportunities to give Harmony Gold the verbal thrashing they so richly deserve are fairly common, as are venues in which to do so. What I'm doing is something else entirely. You've probably never had any cause to notice, but the official reference section of Robotech.com (the "Infopedia") is downright pathetic. The comic books and novelizations aren't mentioned at all apart from a tiny blurb and tinier cover scan in the bibliography (one of the more recent additions). The Robotech TV series is barely covered at all, with a fair few characters and mecha having no entry at all, and the rest barely getting a picture and a paragraph. The Shadow Chronicles movie section is perhaps most embarrassing of all... it consists of a one-sentence-long timeline entry for September 2044 and some recolored ships on the mecha size comparison. To compound the idiocy, the class-names of the two original ship designs were wrong for a good long time. I'm sure you can see, given the lamentable state of the official reference materials, why Robotech fans are often ignorant of fairly simple facts about their own fandom. To be rather blunt, there is a sizable body of information that just isn't available to what remains of the fanbase, and Harmony Gold doesn't give a toss because that would entail actual work or finding someone qualified who'll work for free... and their usual batch of lackeys who would gleefully work for free aren't up to the task. Overall, it's not a terribly complicated operation I'm planning here. I'm going to give them some space on my server and some bandwidth, hook them up with a Wiki and a BBS, tie the two together so they can control who can and can't edit the Wiki side through a specific usergroup on the BBS that they can control themselves, set up a couple of nice-looking basic article templates, and wade in every now and again to clear up grammar and spelling. The implementation is quite easy, and is more or less ready to roll. The only logistical hurdle left to be sorted out is finding enough people who know a fair bit about the Robotech universe(s) and are willing to work within the boundaries of canonicity I've defined for them. The main stumbling block of any Robotech project like this is defining what is and is not canon, thanks to Tommy's incredibly asinine attempt to avoid saying that all the old crap is non-canon by calling it "secondary continuity". So for my project's purposes, I've defined three particular continuities in a much more practical way than most: 1.) Current Animated Continuity (Yune-iverse) The part that the fans care about the most, the official continuity... composed of the 85 episode Robotech TV series, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, and those supplementary materials directly and explicitly included or referenced in that continuity: the Wildstorm comics (incl. Prelude), the Robotech II: the Sentinels "movie", and the Robotech II: the Sentinels comic book adaptation/continuation. 2.) Robotech Novelizations (McKinneyverse) Despite their many, MANY departures from the animated series, the novelizations are self-contained enough to meet the practical definition of an alternate universe, so this one's self-explanatory... everything from the novels. 3.) Robotech Comics & Games (Apocryphaverse) Of course, defining the other two universes leaves you with a big heap of poo that doesn't fit anywhere... stuff that just doesn't line up with either of the other continuities. In particular, this includes all of the pre-Wildstorm comics excluding the Waltrip bros. Sentinels series, the semi-recent Robotech video games (Battlecry, Invasion), the old and new Palladium RPGs, and the aborted/disowned Robotech animated properties... Robotech: the Untold Story and Robotech 3000... etc. It's basically a dumping ground for the inconsistent mess that makes up the majority of the Robotech expanded universe.

Okay, now this merits interest on my part... though I don't expect much more than has already been said on the People of the Mardook character sheet. If they delve into (or even build on) the material from the Kenichi Yatagai interview in B-Club 79 I'll consider it a rousing success. Either way, the art's pretty and you get points in my book for romanizing "Mardook" correctly. Even Google Translate mangles it into the name of the Babylonian god Marduk, which is not how it's supposed to be read.

Which part are you asking about? There's more than one project mentioned in that paragraph.

Oh, no kidding... even now, over half a year after getting banned from Robotech.com, I'm still getting a fair few e-mailed questions to the effect of "How does <Macross show> fit into Robotech?". If my time over on Robotech.com taught me one thing, it would be that while common sense is by no means common in the general population, it's a completely foreign concept to many Robotech fans... particularly those in Tommy Yune's corner. The Robotech universe and franchise is such a mess that it's no surprise that the fans are largely clueless. Plans for the addition of a Robotech reference section to my new servers (to which M3 will also be migrating in the near future, along with my ongoing Macross project) proceed apace, but hit a snag when I realized that there's virtually nobody qualified to write for it in the Robotech fandom anymore. Thanks to the concerted efforts of Maverick and MEMO, the few people who aspire to be knowledgeable are mainly concerned with trying to impose their own twisted moon logic on the universe and pretending to be moderators. The people outside RT.com who profess to be experts are even more clueless than the average fan, and spend most of their time talking out of their asses when they're not slandering anyone who looks at them funny. *sigh* Logistics... (Seriously, anyone got recommendations? Know anyone who's part of the exodus who might wanna contribute? I've got two or three, but I'm looking for like... eight) Yep.

On a side note, said fan was extremely offended that I had to ask him several times if he was joking before I believed he was serious about thinking Astro Plan was slated to be the next installment of Robotech. It looks like at least one person has asked the exact same question on Robotech.com's Series & Stories board. To be fair, this is probably an obscenely generous assessment... Given the current state of affairs on Robotech.com and RobotechX.com, it's looking rather like the average Robotech fan active in the fandom today barely knows anything about Robotech... to say nothing of real anime. An alarming number of them can barely be called literate...

Oddly, I got an e-mail about these videos just the other day from some confused mook on Robotech.com who was honestly taken in... he thought that Harmony Gold had (or was planning to) license Astro Plan as the next installment in the animated Robotech continuity.

Yeah, that's a good place to start. Where on Earth did you come up with "60 million"? That certainly isn't what I said, nor is it in the Compendium. The total number of survivors has pretty consistently been identified as being between a few hundred thousand and 1 million, who survived the orbital bombardment in Grand Cannon III, Grand Cannon V, the moon colony, space colonies, and inside the Macross itself.

Eh... more like a fifth of the fleet (~795,122 ships), but the principle is the same and I don't think every ship would have been taking part in the bombardment, just those with heavy anti-battleship armaments and bow-firing converging beam cannons. I get the feeling they'd probably leave the carriers and fleet pickets out of it. As Gubaba said, it's confirmed in plenty of publications on the subject. Contrary to the popular objection, they weren't working with an aggressively limited gene pool either... they had ~1 million people to choose from who survived by the simple expedient of being somewhere other than Earth's surface when it all came down. The implications of mass cloning are discussed as well... proliferation of hereditary diseases was what killed the cloning program in 2030.

Like I said, even if you were just going by the animation you'd find it pretty self-evident that you're only seeing a tiny, artificially-cultivated part of the planet... hell, the most heavily wooded part of the planet we see is Culture Park, and that place couldn't get any more obviously artificial, what with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Great Wall of China, and the Flavian Amphitheatre being within eyeshot of each other. Eh... that might be a bit extreme... the blasted landscape in DYRL was indeed genuine Earth, albeit about twenty-one years after the fact according to Chronicle. The depopulation bit might've been for drama's sake, or Hikaru and Misa didn't know where the other Grand Cannons were, since that's where most of the refugees were. ('course in context, they wouldn't have gone to Alaska since there was a fairly large city there at the time the movie was filmed) ;-) Welcome to light sci-fi... kindly check your real-world physics at the door. Seriously though, since it's exotic energy harvested from another dimension it might not need to play by the same rules things native to our own dimension do. Mr March and I had a discussion on that note, and one of the theories proposed was that the super dimension energy cannons were a sort of focused "eruption" of super dimension space into normal space. Any way you shake it, the big ones occupy the same class of destructive potential as nukes. We can always do the Treknobabble thing and assign it some exotic extradimensional particle too if need be. It's all good so long as we differentiate between them and normal particle beam guns like those of the VF-4, Tomahawk, etc. True... but after a little while Eden was launching colony fleets too, one of which was Macross Galaxy. (While the colonization graphic in the Macross Frontier series might not be entirely accurate, it does list Macross-6, -9, -11, -14, -15, -17, -20, -21, and -23 as being launched from Eden, and according to the Macross Generation drama CD, the Eden-developed Macross-9 was also the pioneer of the bioplant system)

Well... that was faster than I anticipated. I know I wasn't the only one who figured it was only a matter of time before HG tried to exploit Macek's death to cover their ineptitude or promote the brand, but I didn't think that even they would stoop that low that quickly. For pity's sake, the man wasn't even dead a week before Harmony Gold started exploiting his death to promote their crappy movie. That whole "memorial" is just in appallingly bad taste... the plug for the movie is more than twice the length of Carl's "accomplishments".

Actually, the terminology used would seem to suggest that, like the U.N. Spacy's shipboard beam turrets, the Zentradi's shipboard turrets are scaled-down versions of the heavy converging beam cannon (AKA a super dimension energy cannon, like the Macross's main gun). If this is the case, they're shooting beams of super dimension energy rather than charged particles. The result is the same insofar as leaving behind radiation. I do agree that, given what Bodolza says when he shows that video of an orbital bombardment to Hikaru and company, that the intent was probably to sterilize the entire planet in short order, and they just didn't get that far.

Eh... it's possible the Earth's environment could eventually recover from the damage caused by the orbital bombardment during Space War 1. If left to its own devices it could hundreds of thousands, or millions, of years to sort itself out, but as humanity is giving it a helping hand, it could whittle that down to mere centuries. I don't think the radiation is a big issue, since they don't play it up as though it's at a harmful level in DYRL. Sterilization of the soil by the heat and radiation was probably a bigger issue for the reclamation effort. If the planet was completely unrecoverable, the U.N. would probably have ordered the ~1,000,000 survivors of the war to evacuate offworld to Apollo Base and the space colony clusters. So, in short... your "evidence" that the Earth's environment has recovered by the events of Macross II is that the OVA doesn't depict any of the blasted wasteland seen in DYRL? I hate to break it to you, but true to form your assertion is nothing more than speculation with no basis in fact. In both Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song, those areas of the planet seen in the game fall into two categories: "city" and "blasted wasteland". The city is shown as having plenty of artificially-cultivated plant life, but outside of that the planet seems to be no better off than it was back around 2010. Barring the few seconds of dogfight over the ocean, all of Macross II's Earth-side events occur in an area barely 100km in diameter. You never see any other part of the planet except that tiny area containing the city, the artificial island housing U.N. Spacy headquarters, and Culture Park. To put it in perspective for you, that little parcel of land you're claiming is proof that the planet's environment recovered is less than 10,000 square kilometers... less than 0.002% of the Earth's total surface area. No, the problem here is that you present your theories as though they were facts, and don't bother to check to see if the conclusions you've arrived at are accurate. The published material and animation are two sides of the same coin, and I don't ignore either one. In this case, you're jumping to a conclusion that isn't supported by the animation or the printed materials.

Now, if memory serves (and Sketchley, correct me if I'm misremembering here) Chronicle suggested that the Earth seen during DYRL was what Earth looked like circa 2031, so it seems that the planet wasn't exactly recovering swiftly. It jives with the landscapes we see in Macross Plus... a barren, cratered desert. Of course, we don't really get a full picture of the postwar landscape in any of the Macross shows, so we don't know whether or not the planet is entirely barren, or whether, as in the TV series, there were areas of forest and such that were largely undamaged. Um... your basis for this assertion is what? Just as in the main continuity, we only see a narrow slice of Earth's surface in Macross II... just the city, which was built from salvaged Zentradi warships, the artificial island serving as U.N. Forces HQ, and Culture Park... all artificially cultivated areas.

Rather a different kettle of particularly stupid fish. It'd be particularly unwise to lump them in with the ordinary fan rabble and convention-goers, as their particular ailment isn't simple ignorance... it's an unthinking faith in Tommy Yune and the belief that lying to their fellow fans, threatening fans who question the lies, harassing the fans who criticize their jackass behavior, and slandering people who out them as liars are all justified in the name of defending Tommy Yune, Harmony Gold, and Robotech from anyone who doesn't think they're wonderful. Because Harmony Gold holds the trademark on the Super Dimension Fortress Macross name and logo in the US and a few other places. Bandai Visual would have to obtain permission from, and presumably pay royalties to, Harmony Gold for use of the trademarked name and logo if they were to release Macross: Do You Remember Love? in any region where Harmony Gold's trademarks are enforceable.

Of course... if Harmony Gold actually had the distribution rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love? they would've gotten it out there ASAP as both a slam dunk sales-wise and a means of appeasing the Macross fans who were busy verbally tearing them several new orifices of indeterminate purpose and usefulness. The whole "we can release X as a product" business is a skillful way of muddying the waters by picking a vague way of saying "we can make toys, comic books, and other merchandise based on X" that sounds like "we have control of, and can release, X in any way we see fit".

For Tommy Yune, it's a thoroughly typical convention panel Q&A response... it doesn't actually answer the question being asked and the vague, awkward wording makes it easy for die-hard Robotech fans and imbecilic panel attendees to interpret it to mean something other than what he literally said. The die-hard Robotech fans are so easy to mislead and so willing to be misled that deflecting questions of licensing in derivative works by talking about merchandising rights has become Tommy's standard tactic for dealing with any questions about their inability to use Macross.

You definitely should have gone with "But I don't want any pineapple salad" for your original #1. It would have been funnier. I'm sure some people found it offensive, but these days it's a virtual guarantee that if you're going to speak you'll offend someone... no matter what you say. Carl was a public figure, and as a public figure you're not exempt from parody, no matter what your circumstances are. I thought it was a spectacular dig at Harmony Gold as a whole, their endorsement of fanatical hate in the Robotech fanbase, and Carl's own refusal to admit that the practices which created Robotech didn't stand the test of time. To be fair... considering the things you've done in the name of antagonizing dougbendo, I think you've long since forfeited the right to complain about anyone else's off-color humor.