HG and Robotech Debates

[VFTF1]

Ok - back again - last comment on Gubaba's brilliant find ....

I have discovered WHY Misa Hayase fell for Ichijo Hikaru.

According to the OFFICIAL stats, Hikaru's FOOT is 14% the length of his ENTIRE body.

his foot is 25cm long...

Well - guess we know why Misa went for him now

Predictable girl...

Of course...this also explains why despite being shorter than Claudia, he weighs more than her...although still just a meager 58 kilo

Pete

[Wanzerfan]

I know I've seen a height chart showing all the (human) characters standing together, but I can't seem to find it right now. Anyway, Focker was a little bit taller than a Womp Rat.

Curses! I am foiled again by your irrefutable logic!

The novels clearly state (in the book Homecoming to be exact) his height is described as 6'4".

Now here's a question that's been nagging me for a while. In the Robotech episode "Space Fold" Captain Gloval orders the battle fortress to execute a space fold at an altitude of 2,000 feet above the island. Is it just me, or is that a little too low comapred to shots in the animation? What is the altitude in the original Macross series?

God, this must be another case of very bad scriptwriting.

My guess is that the real altitude in question is 2 kilometers above the island.

[VFTF1]

This is why I never pay attention to numbers in an anime...

Besides - the numbers in a script (and therefore in a show bible) should just be treated as very rough outlines for animators to know what proportions things need to have viz-a-viz one another...

I mean....EVEN something as detailed as Mr. March's compedium - now...obviously the data there are official/correct but... has anyone checked? CAN any one check?

And by "check" I don't mean that Mr. March might have gotten something wrong. Nope. But rather - what if the data don't hold together - or at least kind of hold together real flimsy like? Kind of like these weights/heights for the characters.

I mean -seriously - Roy is taller than Kakizake, and Kakizake weighs THREE TIMES Hikaru Ichijo, who is himself shorter than Misa and weighs less than Claudia but whose feet are bigger than a micronized Breetai?

This is why we should just stick to the love story in Macross.

I am very happy that Macross fandom in general does not have a tendency to have SERIOUS discussions about these kind of subjects.

Pete

[Seto Kaiba]

I am very happy that Macross fandom in general does not have a tendency to have SERIOUS discussions about these kind of subjects.

Internet... serious business.

Speaking of Robotech and "lol serious business", I received another private message from our esteemed (or rather, steamed off) friend Brooklyn Red Leg expressing his displeasure with my summation of his argument for the Shrewfield's alleged transformation capability. He had the following to say:

Uh, no its based on 3 lines of dialogue not 1. Twice by The Narrator (Southern Cross & Deja Vu) and once by an in-series Air Traffic Controller (Final Nightmare).

Ah, my mistake... instead of just the line from an ambiguous line from a nameless background character this pet theory also has some degree of support from the least reliable character in the entire series... the narrator... whose dialogue is frequently at odds with what is actually being shown on screen. Considering what we know of the writing process which produced these scripts, I suppose it's no surprise that such errors would be made and reiterated when multiple episodes are being worked on at once and nobody's comparing notes with each other. In the interest of completeness, we would do well to note that nobody in the original Southern Cross dialogue ever refers to the Shrewfield as transformable, directly or indirectly.

The key points of circumstantial evidence he cites are:

1.) Its got the vestigial head in the exact place the Valkyrie & Legioss have

Let's start with the obvious... the similarities between the Shrewfield's ventral gun mount and the head turret of a VF-1 are superficial at best. Unlike the Valkyrie and Legioss, which both have head turrets that couldn't possibly be mistaken for just a protrusion from the ventral airframe, there is nothing to suggest that the Shrewfield's gun mount is anything other than a gun bolted to the underside of a fixed fuselage.

2.) It has numerous seams across the fuselage to allow for the nacelles to telescope/shift/rearrange themselves

By this logic, any aircraft with visible panel seams is a robot in disguise... apart from the panel seams which do not line up in any meaningful way with elements which could potentially facilitate transformation (and in fact differ between the Shrewfield's few appearances), the airframe design itself seems designed to confound a transformation, with a lack of any obvious structures which could become the arms or feet, and fixed wings as wide as the aircraft is long (which are connected directly to the side of the engines)... it should come as no surprise that there is no evidence whatsoever that Southern Cross's creators ever intended the Shrewfield to transform in the first place... so the counterarguments that "it looks like it can" and "they might've been planning to have it transform but we'll never know because the show was cut short" don't hold water. Considering that transformable mecha were the exception rather than the rule in the Southern Cross series, the most likely explanation is that the aircraft was simply never intended to transform, given the total lack of evidence to the contrary.

3.) Its body shape is the exact same as that of another transformable mecha: the VTOL Fighter/Delta from Robotech II: The Sentinels.

Okay... are you shitting me? I did a triple-take before I actually believed he was serious about this one. Aside from the fact that the unused VTOL design from Robotech II: the Sentinels bears only a superficial resemblance to the Shrewfield (note the under-wing engines with obvious foot structure, etc.), citing an unused, non-canon design from an aborted TV series as evidence that a vaguely similar-looking background mecha from a canon saga of the original series is transformable is about as inane as it gets.

I also find it highly amusing that people who say they dislike and/or hate Southern Cross, or more specifically The Masters War in Robotech (such as VF5SS) give a flying f*ck what those of us who do think. That's like asking someone who's a member of the Klan how they think Obama is on race relations. His opinion counts for f*ckall as far as I'm concerned. People don't ask me for my opinion on the designs from Macross 7 or Macross Zero cause they know I intensely dislike them.

Considering the tone of this paragraph, it seems like he does care what those of us who don't like Southern Cross think and say about the series... despite claims to the contrary. Of course, since there were only ever a handful of fans who actually liked the Masters Saga, and most of them have pretty much abandoned the fandom altogether, I really do not doubt that the majority don't care what we say... as they're never around to read it.

[Einherjar]

Sounds like ongoing creative interpretations and assumptions to make Robotech, not Southern Cross since following the variable fighter scheme with the Shrewfield was probably not their original intent, appear more consistent between the shows than they really were. I don't blame him, it's HG's fault.

Edited January 20, 2010 by Einherjar

[VF5SS]

I thought I said I liked Southern Cross on several occasions.

I just don't like rabid fanboys who think their own conjecture is fact. Honestly Dave, would you care about this fighter if those bits of dialog didn't exist? Would you have any reason to believe it can?

As I've said before, you can point to a lot of sci-fi plane designs out of Japan that have just as many or more details that you would interpret as "evidence of transformation."

[Seto Kaiba]

Sounds like ongoing creative interpretations and assumptions to make Robotech, not Southern Cross since following the variable fighter scheme with the Shrewfield was probably not their original intent, appear more consistent between the shows than they really were. I don't blame him, it's HG's fault.

Okay, I'm having a bit of trouble untangling your wording there, so if I reach any wrong conclusions about your intended meaning, please don't hesitate to correct me. It's one thing for the powers that be on Harmony Gold's creative staff to be tinkering with the technological continuity of the series in an effort to impose a sense of technological progression on the disparate parts of the Robotech TV series. After all, perpetuating the illusion that all the various stories of RT fit into something that at least resembles a unified whole is their job. When the fans start intruding on it with the sort of logic we normally reserve for recent victims of cranial drill intrusion, latching onto awkwardly structured lines and dialogue errors with the single-minded desire to see a deeper meaning that simply isn't there, and then tout that view as though it were anything other than wild speculation, it really says something about the fandom as a whole. There are so many fans who just don't want to accept that Robotech is a hastily assembled amalgam of three unrelated shows, and that because the amalgamation process was done on the fly it's shot through with errors.

While I do respect Brooklyn Red Leg rather more than the average Robotech fan, I have to say in this instance I'm really finding his logic to be more than a little on the screwball side. The argument he's proposing has the same chain of logic as the following, simpler, example.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical scene in Robotech where Rick Hunter is sitting in his little modular house eating an apple when Minmei calls. The narrator then says that Rick set down the orange he was eating to talk to her. Was Rick eating an apple or an orange? A sensible viewer would say "well, he's clearly shown to be eating an apple, so it must be a dialogue error". Brooklyn Red Leg's argument is that regardless of what's shown on the screen the dialogue overrides it even in the absence of corroborative evidence, so Rick was eating a nice Florida orange that just happened to be hard, red, and oblong instead of soft, orange, and round.

[Freiflug88]

Maybe they're, um...space kilograms...

Yeah for all we know the artifical gravity aboard the SDF-1 is stronger then earth's making everyone heavier according to the scales on board. In reality this would make a great defense against the Zentradi as even under earth's gravity any invading giant would be crushed by their own weight unless they were bones were extrememly lightweight like the dinosaurs, which isn't the case if Kamilla's dense baby bones is apparently the norm.

Or, its just another case of in a long list of messed up weights that were arbiltraily chosen for something imaginary.

[Einherjar]

Okay, I'm having a bit of trouble untangling your wording there, so if I reach any wrong conclusions about your intended meaning, please don't hesitate to correct me. It's one thing for the powers that be on Harmony Gold's creative staff to be tinkering with the technological continuity of the series in an effort to impose a sense of technological progression on the disparate parts of the Robotech TV series. After all, perpetuating the illusion that all the various stories of RT fit into something that at least resembles a unified whole is their job. When the fans start intruding on it with the sort of logic we normally reserve for recent victims of cranial drill intrusion, latching onto awkwardly structured lines and dialogue errors with the single-minded desire to see a deeper meaning that simply isn't there, and then tout that view as though it were anything other than wild speculation, it really says something about the fandom as a whole. There are so many fans who just don't want to accept that Robotech is a hastily assembled amalgam of three unrelated shows, and that because the amalgamation process was done on the fly it's shot through with errors.

I understand where you're going, but does that even matter at this point? HG wins either way, because people who look at it in that way, or any obscure or long winded way that rationalizes fluidity in the Robotech universe, raise it's credibility as something beyond three shows edited together. The difference is that HG doesn't have to do more work filling in the gaps to get audiences to believe it, fans do it for them. The illusion remains and HG maintains an audience to bait into believing, and buying, anything.

As if stuff like integrity, morality, and creativity matter to these people anymore. HG just needs people to believe in their work and the Robotech label, nothing more.

[Keith]

The novels clearly state (in the book Homecoming to be exact) his height is described as 6'4".

Now here's a question that's been nagging me for a while. In the Robotech episode "Space Fold" Captain Gloval orders the battle fortress to execute a space fold at an altitude of 2,000 feet above the island. Is it just me, or is that a little too low comapred to shots in the animation? What is the altitude in the original Macross series?

God, this must be another case of very bad scriptwriting.

My guess is that the real altitude in question is 2 kilometers above the island.

Caling the Macross "Battle Fortress" is a violation of MW TOS. Cease immediately or you will be banned!

[anime52k8]

Yeah for all we know the artifical gravity aboard the SDF-1 is stronger then earth's making everyone heavier according to the scales on board. In reality this would make a great defense against the Zentradi as even under earth's gravity any invading giant would be crushed by their own weight unless they were bones were extrememly lightweight like the dinosaurs, which isn't the case if Kamilla's dense baby bones is apparently the norm.

Or, its just another case of in a long list of messed up weights that were arbiltraily chosen for something imaginary.

kilograms are unit of mass. gravity has no effect on mass, a 100kg weight is 100kg on earth, on the moon and on the surface of the sun.

[Gubaba]

The novels clearly state (in the book Homecoming to be exact) his height is described as 6'4".

And those novels should be used for verification why exactly...?

[VFTF1]

Caling the Macross "Battle Fortress" is a violation of MW TOS. Cease immediately or you will be banned!

Not in this thread

Robotech, Battle Fortress, Protoculture Matrix, La la la! Robotech, Battle Fortress, Protoculture Matrix! La la la!

Hm...

As for the Shrewdildo, or whatever that airplane is called:

I actually think that asking a member of the Ku Klux Klan how Obama is on Race Relations would be a GOOD idea - because the whole IDEA of improving race relations means that you want people who seemed to be stuck in their racist rut "forever" to learn how to get along with other races...so...you know...you kind'a want to reach out to people instead of forever write them off as hopeless.... I mean...what else is the point of efforts at reconcilliation?

So... that analogy is kind of silly.

As for the Shrewdildo -

In Robotech - you can say it transforms or does cartwheels - who cares?

In Southerncross - if it doesn't transform and the creators/official sources don't indicate it transforms - then it doesn't.

Robotech is by definition like a 5 year old taking his imagination to random anime and saying they're all connected that that whatever his whim tells him is so about the anime IS so...today at least...if he changes his mind tomorow - then it retcons today - and so on.

Pete

Edited January 20, 2010 by VFTF1

[Saraphys]

As if stuff like integrity, morality, and creativity matter to these people anymore. HG just needs people to believe in their work and the Robotech label, nothing more.

Well, that explains everything...

Harmony Gold's a fanatical, quasi-religion!

...Next thing we know, they'll be trying to pull-off that Scientology tax-thing that'll keep them afloat even longer...

I guess Steve cant be "Darth" anymore. I guess that make's them Zor Yun, Zor Yune, and Zor McKeever

Edited January 20, 2010 by Saraphys

[Einherjar]

Well, that explains everything...

Harmony Gold's a fanatical, quasi-religion!

...Next thing we know, they'll be trying to pull-off that Scientology tax-thing that'll keep them afloat even longer...

I guess Steve cant be "Darth" anymore. I guess that make's them Zor Yun, Zor Yune, and Zor McKeever

That would be giving them too much credit. They're all just businessmen, after all.

[VFTF1]

That would be giving them too much credit. They're all just businessmen, after all.

Hey man, don't know us for providing the goods and services people actually want!!

Harmony Gold's problem is not that they are "businessmen" - if anything, the problem with the specific people at Harmony Gold who are now responsible for the Robotech franchise is that they put deluded Robotech fanwanky-ness over any business sense. Business sense like mending relations with the Japanese, with Big West, and normalizing things.

I know people have said that BW is probably so pissed at them that they won't do it...but...in business, being pissed only goes so far. I'm sure if HG actually tried something more than maybe a memo or a phonecall then they might make progress.

But they are too busy sitting around debating whether Rick Hunter should be stuck on the left side or the right side of a black hole in whatever Robotech production ISN'T going to get made in the future, while running around like kings of the universe because Tobey Macguire once said something about Robotech a year or two ago which, according to them, translates into Warner Bros. making them famous - that they fail to actually do anything that makes business sense.

Whatever the sales figures are for Robotech and Robotech related merchandise - they aren't good enough. They weren't good enough to even produce a series - which is what Robotech would need to really launch itself - a syndicated television cartoon...a comic book...not a direct to video Movie.

But these guys seems to be, above all else, hardcore dedicated fans. They will keep at this no matter what the numbers.

Fine by me - as long as they stop harrassing other people who happen to be successful in making video games or Macross products etc or selling them...

Pete

[Einherjar]

That would make Tommy Yune their token talented guy then.

[Jasonc]

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical scene in Robotech where Rick Hunter is sitting in his little modular house eating an apple when Minmei calls. The narrator then says that Rick set down the orange he was eating to talk to her. Was Rick eating an apple or an orange? A sensible viewer would say "well, he's clearly shown to be eating an apple, so it must be a dialogue error". Brooklyn Red Leg's argument is that regardless of what's shown on the screen the dialogue overrides it even in the absence of corroborative evidence, so Rick was eating a nice Florida orange that just happened to be hard, red, and oblong instead of soft, orange, and round

Ah, but you know what the rabid fans would say? They'd claim that Hikaru was gonna eat a blood orange, and thus, the red color. Does it make their argument more valid, no, it just makes them more insane to have such a hardon for a non-transformable fighter in Southern Cross. What I don't understand, is why, with all the mecha that Robotech has consumed, do people have to make everything transform? Especially when it clearly shouldn't/doesn't. Look at RTSC, I think in their RPG, they have a f*cking jeep that transfoms...Why? An open cockpit vehicle isn't good enough, so it now gets the "let's make it cool" from someone who has no clue, and turns it into an exposed, unnecessary robot version.

Perhaps Southern Cross should make even the shuttles and ships transform too, since they have panel lines. Alright, gonna go. Gotta drive my car someplace. Maybe I'll transform it while I'm out and about.

[Seto Kaiba]

What I don't understand, is why, with all the mecha that Robotech has consumed, do people have to make everything transform? Especially when it clearly shouldn't/doesn't.

In this and several other cases, it's not really a desire to make every plane, train, and automobile into a giant fighting robot... it's more like a desire to find a way to exonerate Robotech's writers of the guilt for all their poor decisions, imbecilic errors, and inconsistencies. I'd guess that the logic behind it, if it can even be called that, is that they want to figure out ways to explain away the plot errors so they can at least pretend that Robotech isn't the mess everyone says it is. It's the same thing they do when they have those long circular arguments trying to figure out where a second SDF-type ship could be in the last episode of the "Macross Saga".

Look at RTSC, I think in their RPG, they have a f*cking jeep that transfoms...Why? An open cockpit vehicle isn't good enough, so it now gets the "let's make it cool" from someone who has no clue, and turns it into an exposed, unnecessary robot version.

Actually, the "VM-9L Silverback" was created by Tommy Yune for Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles... it's not Palladium's fault.

[Einherjar]

Actually, the "VM-9L Silverback" was created by Tommy Yune for Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles... it's not Palladium's fault.

No one in the Robotech universe is scared of snipers, maybe?

[Keith]

No one in the Robotech universe is scared of snipers, maybe?

MICHEL!!!

[Wanzerfan]

No one in the Robotech universe is scared of snipers, maybe?

As evidenced by the Hovertank's (SPARTAS) Gladiator mode.

God is the pilot ever exposed when the mecha is in that mode.

Edited January 21, 2010 by Wanzerfan

[Funkenstein]

kilograms are unit of mass. gravity has no effect on mass, a 100kg weight is 100kg on earth, on the moon and on the surface of the sun.

An apporpriate measure of weight would be Newtons, which is mass times local gravitational constant.

[VFTF1]

But in Robotech, Protocultures trumps newtons, Jouls, Kg and everything else. The equation for Protocultures is as follows:

(Necessity x infinite depth of ass hole) + (broomstick + random anime - good plot) = 1 Protoculture/plot dilemna

In shorthand that's: Carl Macek

Pete

[Ghost Train]

But in Robotech, Protocultures trumps newtons, Jouls, Kg and everything else. The equation for Protocultures is as follows:

(Necessity x infinite depth of ass hole) + (broomstick + random anime - good plot) = 1 Protoculture/plot dilemna

In shorthand that's: Carl Macek

Pete

See equation 2 below for the formal mathematical definition of Robotech:

Where t is the passage of time, and S1, S2, and S3 are constants corresponding to the awesomeness of the original series. Tb is the Tobey Maguire factor.... this is the RT fanbase perspective anyways. MWF members would flip the denominator and numerator .

As a sidenote, equation 1 is explained here. The popularity of current anime is defined by:

m = moe constant

t = Tsundere modifier

and the integral of the Yuri interaction function Y(t).

... G is just Newton's gravitational constant.

Edited January 21, 2010 by Ghost Train

[VFTF1]

I give up with you guys

This is like Nerd central I love it.

Pete

[Seto Kaiba]

No one in the Robotech universe is scared of snipers, maybe?

Well, it's not like any of their enemies to date have bothered with any tactic other than spraying and praying or charging directly into hand-to-hand combat... I guess they're not terribly worried about the marksmanship of their enemies after three marksmanship-free apocalyptic wars. All the same, one has to wonder exactly what value they put on their troops, especially in later wars where their pilots are either exposed when operating their giant fighting robots, or are wearing what we can only jokingly call a flightsuit that consists of only a handful of pieces of body armor and is about as airtight as a screen door.

[VF5SS]

How do you guys respond to the fact that Robotech sold better than Evangelion and Macross's dub tanked according to Macek?

[Ghost Train]

How do you guys respond to the fact that Robotech sold better than Evangelion and Macross's dub tanked according to Macek?

(Assuming it's true). Things should be judged by their internal quality and whether or not you yourself liked a series - and not by sales figure .

If sales alone were a factor, I would say that in the 1990's Brittney Spears was the most talented artist of the time or that Gundam 00 was the best Gundam AU ever because of the sheer overwhelming number of kits Bandai has pumped out.

[Gubaba]

How do you guys respond to the fact that Robotech sold better than Evangelion and Macross's dub tanked according to Macek?

Ghost Train has a good point (it would also mean that McDonald's is the world's greatest restaurant), but I'd also add that it just shows that the theory that Robotech somehow put anime on the world stage is mere hyperbole.

[Einherjar]

How do you guys respond to the fact that Robotech sold better than Evangelion and Macross's dub tanked according to Macek?

That's believable, considering the time factor. Of course a show that came out 25 years ago would outsell another show that came out in the 90's, especially with the amount of merchandise of varying quality that's been released under the Robotech name (and many duplicates people couldn't get enough of). It also helps when HG openly blocks out access to official Macross products to artificially inflate those numbers. And beyond the quality of the ADV dub, were they really necessary at the time when the Animeigo DVDs came out earlier? That's ADV and HG thinking over saturating the anime market with many versions of Robotech and Macross was a good idea.

Expect more talk like that from him throughout the year.

Edited January 21, 2010 by Einherjar

[VF5SS]

Macek's point was the model Robotech established is more viable than ADV's own sales model of just selling the shows without merchandise to people who are already fans.

[Einherjar]

Macek's point was the model Robotech established is more viable than ADV's own sales model of just selling the shows without merchandise to people who are already fans.

So is he promoting the Four Kids Entertainment mentality for handling anime, for profit?

[VFTF1]

How do you guys respond to the fact that Robotech sold better than Evangelion and Macross's dub tanked according to Macek?

This isn't surprising if true. Evangelion is "wierd" and unorthodox. Macross is not wierd, although it is unorthodox; but Robotech makes it orthodox. The sales figures on a transforming robots show are going to be better in America than the sales figures of a show about a wierd kid and his wierdo dad and their wierdo robots mixed in with psychoanalitical Fruedian "wierdness."

I've grown accustomed over the 30 years of my life to the fact that I am wierd.

I read books which most people don't read, I watch movies which most people don't watch. I buy things most people don't buy. No surprise that the anime I like doesn't sell well compared to things I don't like.

As for the Macross dub tanking - well - I love Macross, but I wouldn't buy a Macross dub because I hate dubs.

So - how many true blue Macross "purist" fans would prefer to buy a dub rather than the original Japanese with subtitles? Show of hands?

My guess is - based on the big thread we had about sub vs. dub - that lots of folks aren't exactly burning for a dub either... In fact - most lovers of foriegn movies don't want the movies dubbed over.

All of that said - and with due disrespect to the notion that majorities make right...

if Robotech sold more - then how come Robotech.com is so dead?

I mean - seriously. Look at seibertron.com. Look at tformers.com. Look at whatever number of Star Wars websites are out there. Look around - fan websites usually are thriving.

This website's doing fairly well too.

Robotech.com looks like a bit of a graveyard....

I don't know of any EVA dedicated forums (forums, not sites) - but I wonder how they look by comparisson?

Of course - it might just be that if Robotech did better amongst the mainstream, the mainstream don't hang out on the net all day... meanwhile EVA-geeks (in general) do...

I dunno...

It might also be due to marketing. Robotech has had more marketing in the USA than Evangelion. And even given whatever marketing EVA had - a lot of it was negative marketing - aka - it's wierdo...

Beats me...

I guess though...I'll be the first to admit that that's bad news IMO.

Sure, sure - we can talk about how sales figures = best would mean Macdonalds was the best restaurant in the world etc ... but on the other hand - it's always a bit sad...

Though - nothing new...

Same reason why Hasbro sold 830 millions USD worth of crap last year while niche products that were higher quality and had better detail ... didn't sell any where near that much.

Pete

[VFTF1]

Macek's point was the model Robotech established is more viable than ADV's own sales model of just selling the shows without merchandise to people who are already fans.

Maybe he's right.

Let him be right.

It doesn't matter what "model" is more viable in the USA.

All that matters is that in Japan, the model for producing anime is viable in Japan.

I am a fan of what the Japanese make in terms of anime and hobby goods. I presume all of the conditions for making these things are unique to Japan and will never be perfectly mirrored in foriegn countries.

I also presume that all around the world there will be niches of fans who like the stuff from Japan just like Japanese fans do.

I don't want - for instance - Macross Frontier to be mangled in the name of some "viable" sales model for the USA or any other region.

I didn't even like the Evangelion dub into english that I saw parts of.

I don't like dubs. I don't like American packaging on hobby goods.

My point is that Macek's argument is totally superfluous.

Let him be right. Let the model be viable.

Am I going to become a Robotech fan because Harmony Gold shows me a pie chart according to which Doug Bendo and his friends love Robotech more than Evangelion and in a market full of Bendos - the HG route is viable?

Nope.

Better get comfortable being in the fringe as an anime fan. That is where you're going to stay IMO.

Pete