Finally got to watch Macross Zero!!!!

[Valkyrie Griffon]

So I have wanted to see Zero forever.....saw the first episode fansubbed years ago but couldn't find the others. Finally had a chance to watch it this past week and liked some things about it and disliked somethings about it. Shin kinda sucks as a main character, his motivations are hard to understand and he seems to waffle from episode to episode as to what his focus is. Zero Roy is a very interesting take and not what I expected based on his (Robotech) persona. Still thought he was probably the best character in the show. The show itself almost seemed like two separate series; it's basically kick-a**-tropical-Valkyrie-battle-show and then this almost separate "Macross-Island-Adventure", which makes me think of Evangelion for some reason. It's almost like the two aspects of the show don't really connect, at least not in the same way that they do in the original Macross, Plus, or Frontier.

That said the Valkyrie battles were excellent. In fact while the show falls far below Plus the dogfights were actually much better in my opinion. The valks move in a much more believable manner than Plus where Isamu routinely flew his valk around in a manner that looked like a child playing with a toy. Also the more gritty, realistic, pre-SDF Macross designs and combat was really well done and that final face off between Shin/Nora and Roy/Ivanov was friggin awesome. I also liked that the series presented both the UN and Anti-UN forces in equally unfavorable light as things unfold. The original Macross tells us that the alien ship crashed and all humanity united; this version presents a slightly more realistic view of a more tumultuous transition prior to the Zentradi arrival.

Overall a cool series though nowhere near as good as Plus or what I have seen thus far of Frontier which I also just started. That said some of my favorite mechs from the franchise now come from Zero after having finally seen it. In fact I was planning to clear out my Zero Valks but now they are probably my favorites.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Valkyrie Griffon said:

Shin kinda sucks as a main character, his motivations are hard to understand and he seems to waffle from episode to episode as to what his focus is.

Shin's pretty straightforward as Macross characters go.  Like Nora, the Unification Wars wrecked his life to the point that he defines himself by the conflict.  The series is mostly him finding something else for his life to be about besides fighting.

 

3 hours ago, Valkyrie Griffon said:

The show itself almost seemed like two separate series; it's basically kick-a**-tropical-Valkyrie-battle-show and then this almost separate "Macross-Island-Adventure", which makes me think of Evangelion for some reason. It's almost like the two aspects of the show don't really connect, at least not in the same way that they do in the original Macross, Plus, or Frontier.

Macross Zero's plot isn't a self-contained, stand-alone story the way most Macross titles are.  Its story depends on the audience being familiar with the revelations Macross 7 made about the Protoculture's civil war and collapse, and some of the related supplemental materials.  All the same it doesn't really come full circle and actually mean something until Macross Frontier.  

 

3 hours ago, Valkyrie Griffon said:

That said the Valkyrie battles were excellent. In fact while the show falls far below Plus the dogfights were actually much better in my opinion. The valks move in a much more believable manner than Plus where Isamu routinely flew his valk around in a manner that looked like a child playing with a toy. 

The VF-0 and Sv-51 are completely different animals from the YF-19... we're talking four full generations worth of technological advancement there.  They move much more like a modern fighter aircraft because they ARE much more like modern fighters.  They're both using overtuned conventional jet engines, and the VF-0 is literally a derivative of the F-14.  The distance between them and the YF-19, developmentally, is just about the same as the difference between the first jet prototypes in World War II and an F/A-18.

 

3 hours ago, Valkyrie Griffon said:

The original Macross tells us that the alien ship crashed and all humanity united; this version presents a slightly more realistic view of a more tumultuous transition prior to the Zentradi arrival.

No it doesn't.  This is not new... this is right out of the opening narration from the very first episode of Super Dimension Fortress Macross.  The alien starship crashes on South Ataria island, the formation of the Unification Government is proposed, and in response wars started breaking out as various groups opposed to a one-world government emerged and it took the better part of the next decade to restore order.  Several of the characters in the original series elaborate on their exploits during the conflict during the series.  Some of the details given in the official chronology make it pretty clear the Mayan Island incident in Zero was pretty tame compared to some of the other conflicts in the Unification Wars.  (No major population centers get nuked, for instance.)

[jenius]

Yeah... the SDF-1 crashing and uniting humanity is from Robotech, not Macross.

I have a few problems with Zero. Did the episode count get changed during production? One of my bigger problems is the pacing of the last couple episodes. IIRC, there's a fairly significant jump between episode 4 and 5. My biggest issues stem around the flying rocks... just never liked how all that go handled. 

[Mommar]

23 minutes ago, jenius said:

Yeah... the SDF-1 crashing and uniting humanity is from Robotech, not Macross.

I have a few problems with Zero. Did the episode count get changed during production? One of my bigger problems is the pacing of the last couple episodes. IIRC, there's a fairly significant jump between episode 4 and 5. My biggest issues stem around the flying rocks... just never liked how all that go handled. 

Rocks?  What about the idiotic flying log?

[anime52k8]

24 minutes ago, jenius said:

Yeah... the SDF-1 crashing and uniting humanity is from Robotech, not Macross.

I have a few problems with Zero. Did the episode count get changed during production? One of my bigger problems is the pacing of the last couple episodes. IIRC, there's a fairly significant jump between episode 4 and 5. My biggest issues stem around the flying rocks... just never liked how all that go handled. 

The first time I watched zero I legitimately thought that I was missing an episode when I got to 5.

[treatment]

1 hour ago, jenius said:

Yeah... the SDF-1 crashing and uniting humanity is from Robotech, not Macross.

I have a few problems with Zero. Did the episode count get changed during production? One of my bigger problems is the pacing of the last couple episodes. IIRC, there's a fairly significant jump between episode 4 and 5. My biggest issues stem around the flying rocks... just never liked how all that go handled. 

I don't believe the episode-count got changed during production.

However, I do believe Kawamori smoked some really really bad weed around after ep-3 to be adding his bizarro Arjuna-trip into a Macross series...

 

 

[Sir Galahad®]

I think the flying rocks thing would specify the songstress has that kind of power when she sings, which was disappointing that Sheryl didn't have any. It would be nice that she would get cured from the Vajra disease because she held some power being a descendant (I mean Mao telepathically communicated with Shin) instead of Ranka commanding the bacteria to move out of her brain in the TV series or via blood transfusion in the Movie. 

[Seto Kaiba]

20 hours ago, Mommar said:

Rocks?  What about the idiotic flying log?

Sufficiently advanced wood.

[Zx31]

I think Zero is perfectly serviceable as a stand-alone series. My only real issue with it is that unless everyone on the SDF-1 has memory loss, nobody at that time should know as much about Protoculture as they do.

[Seto Kaiba]

11 minutes ago, Zx31 said:

I think Zero is perfectly serviceable as a stand-alone series. My only real issue with it is that unless everyone on the SDF-1 has memory loss, nobody at that time should know as much about Protoculture as they do.

Nah, remember it's explained in series that the "humans were created by ancient aliens" thing is considered a crackpot theory only really taken seriously by a handful of anthropologists and researchers like Dr. Hasford and Dr. Turner.  Even if the Birdhuman incident hadn't been classified top secret, having an alien ambassador tell you point-blank that that particular crackpot theory was gospel truth would've been a profound shock for the UN Government.

[Zx31]

Sure, but that doesn't explain Focker knowing as much as he does in Zero, then being completely silent about it in SDF

[RealJayDee]

Its a great series. The leap between last gen fighters to the first prototype valk.

Though the story is in many ways vague, it let us to have a little taste of how "old" valks originated, performed, with earth's "physics".

To me the point of zero wanst telling a story, but explaining the origin of the vf's.

Whatever the vf 31 is, it owes itself to the vf0.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, RealJayDee said:

Its a great series. The leap between last gen fighters to the first prototype valk.

It doesn't really show that, though... the VF-1 was already completed at the time Macross Zero is set.

 

3 hours ago, RealJayDee said:

Though the story is in many ways vague, it let us to have a little taste of how "old" valks originated, performed, with earth's "physics".

To me the point of zero wanst telling a story, but explaining the origin of the vf's.

The story's not really all that vague, it's just not a stand-alone story.  You need to have seen Macross 7 to make sense of some of the Protoculture-relevant plot points in the OVA... and it had basically nothing to do with the origin of VFs.  In fact, at the point the OVA is set the VF-1 design had already been frozen for protection and the VF-0s had been removed from testing for use as training planes while manufacturers were tooling up to begin mass production.

 

3 hours ago, RealJayDee said:

Whatever the vf 31 is, it owes itself to the vf0.

Not really... most of the technologies that went into the VF-31 were developed after the VF-0.

[arbit]

I'll take the flying rocks, but what I never understood was the need for severely anatomically detailed nudity. Macross nudity is usually not so "in your face".

[Master Dex]

See "Do You Remember Love?'s" Minmay shower scene, and Macross Plus: Movie Addition Lucy topless scene. Both are short, but basically to the same level of what we saw in Macross Zero. Movies and OVAs can get away with that unlike shows.

More importantly, it's a cultural thing too. Japanese aren't as prudish about nudity as Americans (especially when it comes to female breasts). Sure they don't go around in everyday locations showing off, and your standard TV shows (or anime such as the primary Macross shows) won't have it but it's not uncommon in late evening broadcasted stuff. This is even true in Tokusatsu genre shows (the same genre as Super Sentai, aka the source material for Power Rangers) where more adult themed shows won't shy away from one episode or two of nudity (see the Garo franchise for an example).

[MacrossDynamite7]

Anyone have a link to where I could watch Macross Zero?

Edited October 3, 2017 by MacrossDynamite7

[Seto Kaiba]

6 hours ago, MacrossDynamite7 said:

Anyone have a link to where I could watch Macross Zero?

Not a legal one, no... and we try not to link to pirated content here.

[Valkyrie Driver]

19 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not a legal one, no... and we try not to link to pirated content here.

With Harmony Gold out there, do we really have much choice?

Anyway... I liked Macross Zero when I first saw it. I still do. The VF's were great, and I really liked them. The whole thing made a lot more sense after I saw M7 though, as many others have said. It does rely a lot on earlier productions. It's a puzzle piece that doesn't make total sense until you watch M7 and MF, to truly understand the implications of the events for the macross universe. 

 

[Checkmate]

I finally finished watching it last night. THank God for this thread! I was so confused after watching the OVA.

 

[Jeff J]

I finally finished this series. I downloaded episodes as they became available on Kazaa (LOL) starting in 2002. I lost interest and never bothered finishing, but since I'm visiting family in Korea right now, I elected to watch the whole series on D+.

Well, nothing about my opinion really changed. To the creators's credit, I understand the desire to avoid making lazy sequels. They did well not to churn out more of the same, and as such, every Macross property feels distinct and introduces something new to the lore and world-building.

That said, I don't think Zero works particularly well as a prequel, and it gets kind of frustrating when a small subset of fans insist that people introduce themselves to the franchise starting with this series. Yikes. Some specific complaints I have include the rampant use of the word "Protoculture" and the circulating theory that alien civilizations influenced life on earth. Doesn't really jive with how the heroes in OG SDFM slowly uncovered the myster of Protoculture. Also, with all the craziness the UN military witnessed on Mayan Island, it seems ridiculous that military leaders in OG would be super skeptical about the size and power of the Zentradi forces. 

I think what turned me off from the series 20+ years ago was the floating rocks and other ethereal/supernatural stuff. I'm probably stuck in 80s/90s Macross, so I generally don't like seeing that too much (Frontier being kind of the exception; you could say I enjoyed Frontier in spite of some of the weird stuff).

Just a reminder that Macross continuity shouldn't be taken too seriously. The less seriously you take it, the more you can enjoy series that radically change things.

[Seto Kaiba]

Need one of those Spongebob title cards "6 YEARS LATER"...

  

2 hours ago, Jeff J said:

That said, I don't think Zero works particularly well as a prequel, and it gets kind of frustrating when a small subset of fans insist that people introduce themselves to the franchise starting with this series. Yikes.

Yeah, Zero's not much of a prequel if you think about it.  It doesn't do anything to set up the events of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series.

It's really more of a side story.  Its dependence on the audience being familiar with Macross 7 really makes it a terrible choice to start new fans on.  Chronological order isn't always the best order, esp. since Macross installments are not always in chronological order themselves.

 

2 hours ago, Jeff J said:

Some specific complaints I have include the rampant use of the word "Protoculture" and the circulating theory that alien civilizations influenced life on earth. Doesn't really jive with how the heroes in OG SDFM slowly uncovered the myster of Protoculture.

In fairness to Macross Zero's writers, the idea that aliens visited Earth in the distant past and interfered with humanity's development has been a thing in popular fiction since at least 1898 and a (profoundly racist) pseudoscientific theory in its own right since 1954.  

In Macross, having hard evidence of alien life literally fall out of the sky in 1999 seems to have allowed the "ancient astronaut" theory to graduate from pseudoscience to actual science.  Thankfully, apparently without the incredible racism that the pseudoscientific theory was largely built on if Dr. Hasford and Dr. Turner's work is any indication.

"Protoculture" is also a real anthropological term that is not entirely inappropriate for Hasford's hypothesis that Earth's civilization was originated by alien interference.  It is a very odd coincidence that it happens to coincide with what the Zentradi call their creators.

 

2 hours ago, Jeff J said:

Also, with all the craziness the UN military witnessed on Mayan Island, it seems ridiculous that military leaders in OG would be super skeptical about the size and power of the Zentradi forces.

The incident on Mayan was classified top secret, so the entire military brass wouldn't necessarily know.  Records weren't unsealed until 50 years later.

That said, the main thing they were incredulous about was the sheer size of the Boddole Zer main fleet.  Up to that point, they had only seen the ship that became the Macross, the one Birdhuman, and a few branch fleets of a few hundred to ~1,200 ships.  The biggest fleet they'd seen was only 10 times the size of the Spacy's fleet.  It's onyl natural that they'd find "the enemy really has millions of ships" hard to swallow.  What they understood of the Birdhuman's abilities was not that far outside what they were already reproducing from OTM, sometimes on a far bigger scale.

 

2 hours ago, Jeff J said:

I think what turned me off from the series 20+ years ago was the floating rocks and other ethereal/supernatural stuff. I'm probably stuck in 80s/90s Macross, so I generally don't like seeing that too much (Frontier being kind of the exception; you could say I enjoyed Frontier in spite of some of the weird stuff).

Just a reminder that Macross continuity shouldn't be taken too seriously. The less seriously you take it, the more you can enjoy series that radically change things.

That's one reason that Zero really has to be watched after Macross 7.  Macross 7 was the point where the ancient Protoculture crossed the boundary of Clarke's Third Law into the realm of "Sufficiently Advanced" aliens whose technology was indistinguishable from magic.  They've stayed camped out in "Sufficiently Advanced" territory ever since.

[Jeff J]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Need one of those Spongebob title cards "6 YEARS LATER"...

 

Yeah, my bad. Was looking for an existing thread and this was the only one I could find within the first however many minutes or so.

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

In fairness to Macross Zero's writers, the idea that aliens visited Earth in the distant past and interfered with humanity's development has been a thing in popular fiction since at least 1898 and a (profoundly racist) pseudoscientific theory in its own right since 1954.  

I think even if Zero were more of a conventional prequel, it still would've been completely in bounds to have a scientist character talk about the aliens-visiting-earth theory. It's 100% reasonable for some scientist to ask out loud, "Maybe ASS-1 wasn't Earth's first contact with alien life..." But using the buzzword "Protoculture," with all the baggage it carries in the franchise, is pretty continuity-shredding. Acknowledged, though, that seamless continuity hasn't really been a Macross priority since the get-go, but if you like that sort of thing, it's something you're going to miss out on.

8 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The incident on Mayan was classified top secret, so the entire military brass wouldn't necessarily know.  Records weren't unsealed until 50 years later.

That said, the main thing they were incredulous about was the sheer size of the Boddole Zer main fleet.  Up to that point, they had only seen the ship that became the Macross, the one Birdhuman, and a few branch fleets of a few hundred to ~1,200 ships.  The biggest fleet they'd seen was only 10 times the size of the Spacy's fleet.  It's onyl natural that they'd find "the enemy really has millions of ships" hard to swallow.  What they understood of the Birdhuman's abilities was not that far outside what they were already reproducing from OTM, sometimes on a far bigger scale.

That's one of the small handful of contrivances from the OG series that still kind of bothers me. Don't get me wrong, I like the antagonistic nature of the UN military high command, but their utter skepticism that the Zentradi fleet could be that large just seemed like something in the plot to 1) create conflict for our heroes to overcome and 2) set up humanity for disaster when at least some of it could've been abated.

Also, I get that someone like Capt. Global wouldn't be in the know about the Mayan Island incident, but someone as high up as Admiral Hayase and his cohort should've known, and IMO the highest level of command should be on high alert for any extinction-level threat instead of being all like, "Well, we got the Grand Cannon, so we're good!"

[Bolt]

The Grand Canon projects were surely what they thought as an appropriate response to the incident of M0. They just didn't have a clue how massive the enemy forces would be. Or that they wouldn't care to wage a ground war. 
As far as M0 being a worthy prequel, it may frustrate or bore some. But when it first came out, the animation action was so awesome.  Ahem, gritty mecha action, yes! And it still holds up well. It certainly boosted and rekindled my love for Macross at a time when i was focused on other things. Another thing i appreciate about it is that they were going for something different while delving deeper into the lore of Macross. Even the music style.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Jeff J said:

It's 100% reasonable for some scientist to ask out loud, "Maybe ASS-1 wasn't Earth's first contact with alien life..." But using the buzzword "Protoculture," with all the baggage it carries in the franchise, is pretty continuity-shredding.

There is nothing continuity-shredding about it.  If anything, it's a reasonable usage of a real world term AND an in-joke to how Macross's creators came up with the name.

"Protoculture" is not a made-up sci-fi buzzword.  It's a real scientific term used in anthropology that was coined decades before the original Macross series was made.  Its meaning is "the origins or rudiments of culture", and is normally used to refer to passing down learned behaviors from one generation to the next.  

Macross's creators deliberately used that real-world term to refer to the extinct ancient alien species who created the Zentradi and Humanity for its literal meaning: the origin of culture.  The ancient Protoculture created the Zentradi and their wholly military culture, and also uplifted pre-modern Humans and guided their development.  Macross Zero is set on a remote island populated by an isolated tribe whose entire culture is built around things the Protoculture taught them to do and mythologized history of their encounters with the Protoculture.  They are evidence of the Protoculture species literally acting as the origin of a culture (protoculture the scientific term).

Dr. Hasford and Dr. Turner are researchers - probably anthropologists - employing techniques from cultural and molecular anthropology in an attempt to prove a hypothesis about advanced aliens visiting Earth in prehistory and guided/accelerated Humanity's development.  It's perfectly reasonable that they would use a well-precedented existing term from anthropology to refer to the ancient aliens they theorized were the origins of modern Humanity.  (They dubbed the ancient aliens "Protoculture" for exactly the same reasons that the show's creators did.)

 

4 hours ago, Jeff J said:

That's one of the small handful of contrivances from the OG series that still kind of bothers me. Don't get me wrong, I like the antagonistic nature of the UN military high command, but their utter skepticism that the Zentradi fleet could be that large just seemed like something in the plot to 1) create conflict for our heroes to overcome and 2) set up humanity for disaster when at least some of it could've been abated.

Also, I get that someone like Capt. Global wouldn't be in the know about the Mayan Island incident, but someone as high up as Admiral Hayase and his cohort should've known, and IMO the highest level of command should be on high alert for any extinction-level threat instead of being all like, "Well, we got the Grand Cannon, so we're good!"

The Earth UN Forces skepticism over Misa's claims about the Boddole Zer main fleet's size are perfectly understandable, given that they'd only seen fleets of at most a thousand or so ships and Misa had no actual evidence (due to having dropped the camera she'd been using).  They had expected, and prepared for, a classic "alien invasion" scenario and were completely unaware that EVERYONE had massively underestimated the scale on which the Zentradi and their creators operated.  Given the state of Earth's infrastructure, it wasn't unreasonable to assume a planet could support a few hundred to a few thousand ships, but millions would require infrastructure on a scale Humanity hadn't even begun to think about.

As for the Birdhuman, well... it wasn't that impressive.  It would've been an apocalyptic and potentially unstoppable threat to a less developed civilization, but Humanity had already obtained the overtechnology of Alien Starship 1 and begun to reproduce it nearly a decade earlier.  A lot of its technology was cause for scientific curiosity, since it was clearly a lot more advanced than Alien Starship 1, but at the same time its systems were still recognizable and many were just different or more advanced versions of systems Humanity were already reproducing.  The one weapon it demonstrated that would've been cause for significant concern was the heavy quantum reaction beam gun it used to destroy the Alliance fleet, but even that appeared to be significantly less powerful than the ones Humanity had in its possession.  That the Birdhuman was ultimately "defeated" by the detonation of a handful of low-yield reaction weapons wouldn't have made it out to be an especially powerful foe either.  

[JB0]

7 hours ago, Jeff J said:

2) set up humanity for disaster when at least some of it could've been abated.

It really couldn't have been abated to any appreciable degree. The show presents the argument as "opening negotiations before or after demonstrating our military might", but the zentradi didn't want to talk regardless. Evacuation of the Earth was completely beyond humanity's capabilities at the time.

[Jeff J]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

There is nothing continuity-shredding about it.  If anything, it's a reasonable usage of a real world term AND an in-joke to how Macross's creators came up with the name.

"Protoculture" is not a made-up sci-fi buzzword.  It's a real scientific term used in anthropology that was coined decades before the original Macross series was made.  Its meaning is "the origins or rudiments of culture", and is normally used to refer to passing down learned behaviors from one generation to the next.  

Yeah, the Macross guys didn't make it up, but the term is, IMO, too loaded to use in such a generic, lowercase-p, manner in the series. I would've preferred if they expanded the Macross lexicon and came up with a synonymous term.

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Earth UN Forces skepticism over Misa's claims about the Boddole Zer main fleet's size are perfectly understandable, given that they'd only seen fleets of at most a thousand or so ships and Misa had no actual evidence (due to having dropped the camera she'd been using).  They had expected, and prepared for, a classic "alien invasion" scenario and were completely unaware that EVERYONE had massively underestimated the scale on which the Zentradi and their creators operated.  Given the state of Earth's infrastructure, it wasn't unreasonable to assume a planet could support a few hundred to a few thousand ships, but millions would require infrastructure on a scale Humanity hadn't even begun to think about.

Plausible, sure, but IMO their responses were unlikely. The first bunch of leaders (sans Global) even laughed at the suggestion. I think high command gave Misa more credibility, but overall I felt like the general level of skepticism was a bit much, there mostly in place to make the specific plot happen. 

That said, Global believed them, so it's not like nobody took Misa's report seriously. 

 

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

As for the Birdhuman, well... it wasn't that impressive.  It would've been an apocalyptic and potentially unstoppable threat to a less developed civilization, but Humanity had already obtained the overtechnology of Alien Starship 1 and begun to reproduce it nearly a decade earlier.  A lot of its technology was cause for scientific curiosity, since it was clearly a lot more advanced than Alien Starship 1, but at the same time its systems were still recognizable and many were just different or more advanced versions of systems Humanity were already reproducing.  The one weapon it demonstrated that would've been cause for significant concern was the heavy quantum reaction beam gun it used to destroy the Alliance fleet, but even that appeared to be significantly less powerful than the ones Humanity had in its possession.  That the Birdhuman was ultimately "defeated" by the detonation of a handful of low-yield reaction weapons wouldn't have made it out to be an especially powerful foe either.  

Nutouk says, "Mankind will be extinguished," and Hasford says, "Behold, the end of the world." Now, neither man might've been right, but the final episode expressed a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Even though this display of power was more or less in line with the Macross canon, and potentially less potent, that's not really the message being conveyed.

Speaking of reaction warheads, I enjoyed 1) that they were enough to take out the target and 2) Shin talked about the fallout. In the original series, they are a big deal, enough to keep the Zentradi both interested but at bay, but by Macross 7, they kind of get poo poo'd as part of standard escalation of the power of new threats. Zero was right to re-elevate them to being the nuclear (no pun intended) option.

Edited December 30, 2024 by Jeff J

[sketchley]

40 minutes ago, Jeff J said:

Yeah, the Macross guys didn't make it up, but the term is, IMO, too loaded to use in such a generic, lowercase-p, manner in the series. I would've preferred if they expanded the Macross lexicon and came up with a synonymous term.

The problem—at least for us who translate Japanese into English—is that the Macross creators use the exact same term as the scientific (lower case) protoculture [プロトカルチャー] for the in-universe (upper case) Protoculture [プロトカルチャー].

If the show's creators had used kanji for the (upper case) Protoculture, then we would have some wiggle room to use a synonym of some kind—à la the kana and kanji versions of baseball [ベースボール (baseball) vs 野球 (lit. field ball)].  Alas, the confusing use of terminology is hard-baked into Macross at the source...

Edited December 30, 2024 by sketchley

[Seto Kaiba]

19 minutes ago, Jeff J said:

Yeah, the Macross guys didn't make it up, but the term is, IMO, too loaded to use in such a generic, lowercase-p, manner in the series.

Honestly, I think using it that way was the point... to make the connection explicit (and also to highlight the connection to the real world term).

I don't think it poses any problem for the story itself, esp. since Macross Chronicle et. al. indicate that Hasford and Turner's theories were neither widely known nor taken seriously in the academic community at the time.  

 

19 minutes ago, Jeff J said:

Plausible, sure, but IMO their responses were unlikely. The first bunch of leaders (sans Global) even laughed at the suggestion. I think high command gave Misa more credibility, but overall I felt like the general level of skepticism was a bit much, there mostly in place to make the specific plot happen. 

That said, Global believed them, so it's not like nobody took Misa's report seriously.

Their reactions are pretty understandable.  Misa telling them that the Zentradi have millions of ships is the very picture of hyperbole or even hysterical fear.  The UN Forces brass were thinking of things on a planetary scale, which would make the logistics of operating a fleet of that size completely ridiculous if you haven't actually seen it.  The US Navy is Power Overwhelming at 470 ships... and the Zentradi are supposed to have a fleet ten thousand times the size?  No wonder they balked.

General Global believing the report wasn't likely to lend it any credibility, since he has a well-known personal connection to the officer making the report.

 

19 minutes ago, Jeff J said:

Nutouk says, "Mankind will be extinguished," and Hasford says, "Behold, the end of the world." Now, neither man might've been right, but the final episode expressed a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Even though this display of power was more or less in line with the Macross canon, and potentially less potent, that's not really the message being conveyed.

Nutuk and Dr. Hasford believing that is only to be expected.  After all, neither man was a soldier and both were referencing the Mayan mytho-historical account of what the ancient Protoculture told them would happen if the Birdhuman was activated.  Even the Birdhuman mentions its mission is to exterminate Humanity if they failed its Test of Character.

It probably would've been an apocalyptic scenario if Humanity hadn't acquired alien overtechnology from a crashed Supervision Army gunship nine years earlier.  The Protoculture who left the Birdhuman on Earth to Kill All Humans™️ almost certainly did not expect Humanity to have advanced far enough to be able to actually fight the Birdhuman never mind severely damage it.

 

19 minutes ago, Jeff J said:

Speaking of reaction warheads, I enjoyed 1) that they were enough to take out the target and 2) Shin talked about the fallout. In the original series, they are a big deal, enough to keep the Zentradi both interested but at bay, but by Macross 7, they kind of get poo poo'd as part of standard escalation of the power of new threats. Zero was right to re-elevate them to being the nuclear (no pun intended) option.

They definitely handled the use of thermonuclear reaction weapons with more gravitas than usual.  Of course, they're new technology there.

Macross 7 was, IMO, pretty serious about them too.  They were only shown being used in Operation Stargazer as part of the mission to destroy the Protodeviln and their usage was a serious godzilla threshold for the series which had up to that point avoided large-scale destruction.  The only Macross title to be really cavalier about them is DYRL?, where they're spammed against the Zentradi from the very start.

 

Macross Zero did one strange thing with them though, and that was treating them like conventional nuclear bombs.

Shin's statement about fallout is actually pretty weird in context because of the key attributes of thermonuclear reaction weapons is that they don't produce lingering radiological hazards like fallout.  Reaction weapons are "pure fusion" bombs that use the intense gravity produced by heavy quantum as a trigger instead of a small fission bomb.  The lack of any radioisotopes in the warhead means the detonation doesn't scatter radioactive material and the aneutronic nature of the reaction means that debris exposed to the blast isn't being made radioactive by neutron activation.

His statement is so weird and inconsistent that Macross Chronicle had to explicitly hedge around it.

[Jeff J]

6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Honestly, I think using it that way was the point... to make the connection explicit (and also to highlight the connection to the real world term).

I don't think it poses any problem for the story itself, esp. since Macross Chronicle et. al. indicate that Hasford and Turner's theories were neither widely known nor taken seriously in the academic community at the time.  

I don't think it breaks the story. It works to bridge series together, and the franchise isn't about precise continuity, but it's just not what I would've preferred from a prequel.

6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Their reactions are pretty understandable.  Misa telling them that the Zentradi have millions of ships is the very picture of hyperbole or even hysterical fear.  The UN Forces brass were thinking of things on a planetary scale, which would make the logistics of operating a fleet of that size completely ridiculous if you haven't actually seen it.  The US Navy is Power Overwhelming at 470 ships... and the Zentradi are supposed to have a fleet ten thousand times the size?  No wonder they balked.

General Global believing the report wasn't likely to lend it any credibility, since he has a well-known personal connection to the officer making the report.

Yeah, I left out the part of my prior response that Global believed his crew because 1) he's closer to them, particularly Misa and 2) from the real world perspective, he's one of the protagonists, so of course he's aligned with them. 

I don't think it's implausible they were skeptical, but the part of the skeptics's laughing was too much for me. To be fair, once Global and Misa made their report in person, it seemed as though they didn't rule out the validity of the report, but weren't going to budge on future course of action, which unfortunately included having too much confidence in the Grand Cannon.

6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

They definitely handled the use of thermonuclear reaction weapons with more gravitas than usual.  Of course, they're new technology there.

Macross 7 was, IMO, pretty serious about them too.  They were only shown being used in Operation Stargazer as part of the mission to destroy the Protodeviln and their usage was a serious godzilla threshold for the series which had up to that point avoided large-scale destruction.  The only Macross title to be really cavalier about them is DYRL?, where they're spammed against the Zentradi from the very start.

I didn't mean they were cavalier about reaction warheads, it's just that they go from being the big scary monsters in SDF and even Plus (though only through reference instead of visual display) to being hyped-up-but-ineffectual weapons in 7. It's kind of like the Crane Kick in Karate Kid, Part 2. 

6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

His statement is so weird and inconsistent that Macross Chronicle had to explicitly hedge around it.

Neat to know.

[JB0]

25 minutes ago, Jeff J said:

hyped-up-but-ineffectual weapons in 7.

In fairness, Operation Stargazer did show reaction weapons to be extremely powerful. It just... also showed them to be susceptable to teleportation.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Jeff J said:

I didn't mean they were cavalier about reaction warheads, it's just that they go from being the big scary monsters in SDF and even Plus (though only through reference instead of visual display) to being hyped-up-but-ineffectual weapons in 7. It's kind of like the Crane Kick in Karate Kid, Part 2. 

I'm not sure I'd agree that they were treated as Serious Business in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series.  Vrlitwhai and Exsedol were caught off-guard by Earth's use of reaction weaponry, but that owes far more to it being a technology the Zentradi had believed lost for hundreds of thousands of years.  Earth spammed them pretty heavily without much comment in the actual fighting via the ship-mounted ones carried by the Oberth and ARMD classes, and the SF-3A space fighters and VF-1s as well.

Macross 7 treated them quite seriously, though they ended up being ineffective because the Protodeviln used their innate space fold ability to teleport the high-yield reaction missile Max intended to kill them with back to the Stargazer in orbit.

Macross Zero treats them with a lot more gravitas, though the stated reason for doing so doesn't actually make sense as noted previously.  (Everyone involved probably should've been a lot more concerned about four reaction bombs with a maximum combined yield of 200 kilotons going off just a couple kilometers away.  The shockwave would probably not have done great things to the Asuka II, which was a largely conventional aircraft carrier.) 

[Jeff J]

16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm not sure I'd agree that they were treated as Serious Business in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series.  Vrlitwhai and Exsedol were caught off-guard by Earth's use of reaction weaponry, but that owes far more to it being a technology the Zentradi had believed lost for hundreds of thousands of years.  Earth spammed them pretty heavily without much comment in the actual fighting via the ship-mounted ones carried by the Oberth and ARMD classes, and the SF-3A space fighters and VF-1s as well.

Reaction warheads certainly weren't powerful enough, by themselves, to swing the balance of the war. They also weren't these super important MacGuffins for the story, either. But when they got specific mention, there's at least some emphasis that they pack quite the wallop.

I'd say the biggest argument against them as these big bad weapons was that the omidirectional barrier surrounding the Macross itself was able to withstand several thousand reaction warheads detonating in the near vicinity, but the Boddole Zer flagship itself wasn't able to, and that thing was millions (if not billions) of times more massive than the Macross.

16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Macross 7 treated them quite seriously, though they ended up being ineffective because the Protodeviln used their innate space fold ability to teleport the high-yield reaction missile Max intended to kill them with back to the Stargazer in orbit.

Macross Zero treats them with a lot more gravitas, though the stated reason for doing so doesn't actually make sense as noted previously.  (Everyone involved probably should've been a lot more concerned about four reaction bombs with a maximum combined yield of 200 kilotons going off just a couple kilometers away.  The shockwave would probably not have done great things to the Asuka II, which was a largely conventional aircraft carrier.) 

The Destroid Monster scene was easily my favorite action sequence in Zero.