Macross Δ (Delta) Movie Gekijō no Walkūre (Passionate Walkure)

[no3Ljm]

29 minutes ago, Zx31 said:

Agreed. Though there's so many different factors in how that stuff is presented that everyone can have wildly different opinions on it from show to show.

Or maybe I'm just getting too old for that kind of stuff.

I wonder if I should just cut and edit all the Valkyrie stuff and have it played over and over again and call it Macross Delta: Walküre Free. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

40 minutes ago, no3Ljm said:

Or maybe I'm just getting too old for that kind of stuff.

I dunno... I'm a pretty enthusiastic supporter of all things Macross and even I find the substance-less fanservice in Delta annoyingly gratuitous.

 

40 minutes ago, no3Ljm said:

I wonder if I should just cut and edit all the Valkyrie stuff and have it played over and over again and call it Macross Delta: Walküre Free. 

... after the fuss over fan edits of The Last Jedi, I'm not so sure that's a good idea.

It'd probably end up being pretty short and dull, considering how much of Delta is basically a commercial for Walkure.

[no3Ljm]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I dunno... I'm a pretty enthusiastic supporter of all things Macross and even I find the substance-less fanservice in Delta annoyingly gratuitous.

... after the fuss over fan edits of The Last Jedi, I'm not so sure that's a good idea.

It'd probably end up being pretty short and dull, considering how much of Delta is basically a commercial for Walkure.

You know what and to be honest, I don't mind watching Makina in action.  But for my overall taste, like what you said, it's too much of a commercial for Walküre. I'm just probably looking for a more balance show. I'm pretty sure that once I cut and edit all the Valkyrie action for my viewing, I think it will just end up as a 8-minute clip. Or less. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

I like to think of Delta as Macross's version of Interstella 5555.

[kajnrig]

11 hours ago, no3Ljm said:

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Felt like there's a lot of fondling for a Macross series. 

 

The amount of Reina/Makina petting in the series was distracting enough (not in the sense of titillating, just generally) that I remember it was a notable point of conversation at some points. And while some of it felt contextually appropriate, you could tell a lot of it was there for "titillation's" sake, not for the sake of informing anyone's characters or otherwise adding anything of actual substance to the show. The way I hear it,

the movie mostly front-ends a lot of the fanservice during a shower/hot springs/similar scene?

which is... better...? I guess? But like Seto said,

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Macross Delta is leaning VERY heavily on the fanservice to make Walkure appeal to the audience as characters in lieu of all of the characterization the writers of the series couldn't be arsed to give them.

...which is complicated by what he also points out:

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Knowledge of Mikumo's true nature causes it to frequently veer into intensely creepy territory

Like, it's hard to emphasize just how creeped out I am by the way they handled Mikumo. She is literally designed to be sexy (even though her design does absolutely nothing for me but anyway) without any understanding of actual sex. She has the confidently sexy smile and swagger of Sheryl Nome, but none of her intention. Instead of sex appeal being something she exploits, it is literally the only way she knows how to express herself. And all that is creepy enough, but it's great fodder for a story about her; what really gets me is that the writers completely ignore it and instead just keep ogling her and even invite us to do the same.

10 hours ago, Zx31 said:

I don't get the impression that Walkure is any more fan service than they did with Ranka, Sheryl, or Mylene.

Aside from Mikumo, I think this sentiment holds true enough.

Philosophical question of the day: If each time they "service" the "fans" and the fans sigh in exasperation instead, can it really be considered fanservice?

9 hours ago, Marzan said:

The writing is meh at best. But then again Satelight has simply not delivered something with good writing in ages.

I remember while the show was airing some folks were talking about the character animation quality as well, and while I thought it was fine during the series, the spoiler videos that... seem to have been removed now... had some really spotty facial animations. I wonder what's happened to the talent pool at Satelight in the time since Frontier that the writing and animation have gone downhill like this.

5 hours ago, no3Ljm said:

You know what and to be honest, I don't mind watching Makina in action.

*thinks about your Makina gainax gif*

Gee, coulda fooled me...

5 hours ago, no3Ljm said:

I'm pretty sure that once I cut and edit all the Valkyrie action for my viewing, I think it will just end up as a 8-minute clip. Or less. 

Hot Valk scissoring action. You sure you're not in it for the fanservice?

[no3Ljm]

17 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

Hot Valk scissoring action. You sure you're not in it for the fanservice?

Hahaha! No. For me, it's Valkyries first. Dogfight second. Story third. And if necessary, Fanservice fourth. Since there's a lot of singing girls in Delta, then yes, it's necessary. 

Now that you mentioned the scissoring action, I guess my planned 8-minute clip will just end up being 5.  

 

[Shawn]

Friendly reminder, please do not rip and upload and link any copyrighted material here, we've been 'mostly' good for almost 20 years now.

Thank you!

Shawn

[Marzan]

1 hour ago, kajnrig said:

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

the movie mostly front-ends a lot of the fanservice during a shower/hot springs/similar scene?

 

 

I remember while the show was airing some folks were talking about the character animation quality as well, and while I thought it was fine during the series, the spoiler videos that... seem to have been removed now... had some really spotty facial animations. I wonder what's happened to the talent pool at Satelight in the time since Frontier that the writing and animation have gone downhill like this.

?

To be honest the only things that Satelight has done that have blown me away were Macross Frontier and their work on Hellsing Ultimate. The animation in Macross Zero was mindblowingly  good though. And stuff like White Album 2 and Log Horizon was ok I suppose. Aquarion was funny in a camp sort of way. But the rest of their catalogue is littered with  M3, Nobunaga the Fool, Caligula, Ragnastrike Angels and the like. They're not in the same league as Madhouse, Kyo Ani, Bones and even relative newcomers like MAPPA and Trigger are putting out more interesting content. I don't know if it's a talent pool question, but maybe their budgets are not very high to begin with?

Fingers crossed for Satelight bringing their A- game for the new series.

On another note, a lot of people seem to have taken issue with the fanservice. I didn't think it was particularly bad. Maybe I watch too much anime, but it was pretty standard otaku bait fare and lets face it, with Makina's non- existing depth and characterization, we know she's there to sell body pillows and other assorted merchandise.

Edited September 5, 2018 by Marzan

[JB0]

1 hour ago, kajnrig said:

The amount of Reina/Makina petting in the series was distracting enough (not in the sense of titillating, just generally) that I remember it was a notable point of conversation at some points.

Yeah, they seemed to draw every scene those two were in with an eye towards reminding people they were lesbians. Just in case we managed to forget in the last ten minutes.

[kajnrig]

17 minutes ago, Marzan said:

On another note, a lot of people seem to have taken issue with the fanservice. I didn't think it was particularly bad. Maybe I watch too much anime, but it was pretty standard otaku bait fare and lets face it, with Makina's non- existing depth and characterization, we know she's there to sell body pillows and other assorted merchandise.

I think it's the fact that there's so very little else there, of substance or otherwise. I can't tell if there's so little story because they were so focused on the fanservice or they focused so much on the fanservice because they had no story.

[Sildani]

6 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Philosophical question of the day: If each time they "service" the "fans" and the fans sigh in exasperation instead, can it really be considered fanservice?

Well, allow me to retort: do we here represent all the fans and their reactions?

As for the writers wanting to remind us of Reina’s and Makina’s lesbianism: were they the first openly Sapphic couple in a mainstream anime? 

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Instead of sex appeal being something she exploits, it is literally the only way she knows how to express herself. And all that is creepy enough, but it's great fodder for a story about her; what really gets me is that the writers completely ignore it and instead just keep ogling her and even invite us to do the same.

When you combine it with her one piece of actual character development - being a 3 year old clone whose implanted programming doesn't include social graces - it crosses the line straight into being downright skin-crawlingly creepy.  She doesn't have the social awareness to eat with other people... there is no bloody way she understands what she's doing vis-a-vis the sex appeal.  Whatever writer came up with that plot twist needs to seriously reconsider his or her life choices.

 

 

8 hours ago, Marzan said:

On another note, a lot of people seem to have taken issue with the fanservice. I didn't think it was particularly bad. Maybe I watch too much anime, but it was pretty standard otaku bait fare and lets face it, with Makina's non- existing depth and characterization, we know she's there to sell body pillows and other assorted merchandise.

Oh, I agree it's not particularly bad or an uncommon thing to find in the anime industry.  The reason it stands out as much as it does in Macross Delta is that Macross has rarely, if ever, been so crass and unsubtle about it.

We've had fanservice of a sexual nature before and characters who were obviously designed around that kind of fanservice appeal, but Macross Delta was the first time it became an end in its own right (to the show and movie's detriment).

 

 

8 hours ago, JB0 said:

Yeah, they seemed to draw every scene those two were in with an eye towards reminding people they were lesbians. Just in case we managed to forget in the last ten minutes.

Well, that and Makina was wheeled from background to background to show off her cleavage and occasionally gainax for the camera.

I suspect I may be more annoyed by it than most, since one of my favorite things about Macross's writing has always been that it's never been shy about putting the women in its cast on an equal or greater footing than the men.  Having a series where the women on the cast are largely, or entirely, decorative and the boys do all the heavy lifting just doesn't feel right to me.  (I had such high hopes for Mirage, but it all came to nothing.)

 

 

7 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I think it's the fact that there's so very little else there, of substance or otherwise. I can't tell if there's so little story because they were so focused on the fanservice or they focused so much on the fanservice because they had no story.

It's the second one... the story took a powder in favor of promoting Walkure.

 

 

3 hours ago, Sildani said:

Well, allow me to retort: do we here represent all the fans and their reactions?

How many "Delta fans" are actually fans of Macross Delta and how many are just fans of Walkure?  If I had to guess based on merchandise and media sales, I'd guess most are the latter.

 

 

Quote

As for the writers wanting to remind us of Reina’s and Makina’s lesbianism: were they the first openly Sapphic couple in a mainstream anime? 

Oh my, no... they aren't even close.

The oldest example I can think of was the original 90's Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon series, which had at least one openly lesbian couple in it (among the outer senshi IIRC) and a fair amount of ho yay in other places.  I'm 99% certain there are examples older than that as well.

Edited September 5, 2018 by Seto Kaiba

[no3Ljm]

9 hours ago, Shawn said:

Friendly reminder, please do not rip and upload and link any copyrighted material here, we've been 'mostly' good for almost 20 years now.

Thank you!

Shawn

No worries Shawn. I'm not planning on posting it online if ever I did one. It's just for my personal viewing so I don't need to scrub every episodes just to watch some VSA (Valkyrie Scissoring Actions).

Thank you however for the reminder. 

 

[Focslain]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

When you combine it with her one piece of actual character development - being a 3 year old clone whose implanted programming doesn't include social graces - it crosses the line straight into being downright skin-crawlingly creepy.  She doesn't have the social awareness to eat with other people... there is no bloody way she understands what she's doing vis-a-vis the sex appeal.  Whatever writer came up with that plot twist needs to seriously reconsider his or her life choices.

 

The more I'm hearing about this, the more I'm seeing a case of 'the blinders being on'

Honestly the fact that Mikumo is three years old is a moot point since she is an artifical being. At that point the age of the body has nothing to do with anything and her lack of social grace just proves that her creators see her as a tool and not a living sentient being.

Mikumo has a only one main purpose, to be a fold singer. She's no different then the clone troopers in star wars.

[kajnrig]

53 minutes ago, Focslain said:

Honestly the fact that Mikumo is three years old is a moot point since she is an artifical being. At that point the age of the body has nothing to do with anything and her lack of social grace just proves that her creators see her as a tool and not a living sentient being.

Mikumo has a only one main purpose, to be a fold singer. She's no different then the clone troopers in star wars.

All of that is great fodder for a story to be told. Even if she were, say, created 20 years ago and thus is 20 years old with 20 years' worth of idol experience, she still lacks any other knowledge of interacting with people in any other meaningful way. If she's just a weapon or a tool, then what happens when her creators don't need to use her? Turn her off? Confine her to an isolation chamber? Evidently Lady M chose to allow her some measure of freedom and socialization, at which point, what does she do? What happens if/when she finds herself in an unfamiliar scenario? Why is she allowed out at all? Do Lady M and co. see some benefit to her living, in both a literal and metaphorical sense? If so, do they cross an ethical boundary by continuing to treat her solely as a weapon/tool? If so or if not, what does that say about the Macross universe's ethical stances? Sure, they may ultimately "see her as a tool and not a living sentient being," but so much of her role is tied into being, or at least accurately mimicking, a living sentient being. And again, they ALLOW her to be a living sentient being. So... there's some major disconnect there.

And not to belabor the point, but her age DOES factor into this, because if she IS allowed some sort of socialization as it seems she is, even minor socialization spread across 3 years of existence is very different from minor socialization spread across 20 years. Or if she is isolated for any significant amount of time, 3 years' worth of isolation is very different than 20 years' worth. And so on and so forth.

I mean, at the end of the day, you're right, her "age" doesn't matter because she's a fictional character. But what does it say about the real-world creators that they ignore all of that and instead just treat her as tits and ass and a great singing voice? It says that they employ Incompetent writers, sure, but also it reinforces the notion that their sole priority in this endeavor was to make a vehicle for the introduction of an idol group, all else be damned. And they've done serious damage to the Macross... legacy? I guess?... in the process. It's nothing that can't be fixed by the next entry, but... well, it just feels like a cheap cash grab, and that's not a level that Macross had stooped to before.

Edited September 5, 2018 by kajnrig

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Focslain said:

The more I'm hearing about this, the more I'm seeing a case of 'the blinders being on'

Honestly the fact that Mikumo is three years old is a moot point since she is an artifical being. At that point the age of the body has nothing to do with anything and her lack of social grace just proves that her creators see her as a tool and not a living sentient being.

You missed the point with distressing completeness... Mikumo's actual age is just the cherry on the sundae of creepy-as-f*ck.  The real substance of the problem is that Mikumo's inbuilt knowledge is narrowly focused to the point that her social and emotional development is way WAY behind for a person of her apparent biological age.  

Xaos's entertainment division is, for all practical intents and purposes, exploiting a developmentally disabled girl who has no legal guardian and isn't equipped to understand the social context and/or implications of the things she's being instructed to do so they can use her as a child soldier and to produce sexually-charged material.  That's dodgy as f*ck and horrifying as it is... and then there's a nagging question of whether she's mentally capable of refusing an order or even allowed to do so, regardless of whether or not she can give informed consent.  The best-case scenario here is they're sexually exploiting and endangering a minor.  The worst is actual goddamn slavery.

Macross Delta's creators obviously didn't consider the implications of attaching this bit of backstory to their Sheryl Nome knockoff.  It's not often a fictional universe as upbeat as Macross's opens such an ugly can of worms... and it's an odd thing for the story to ignore since her clone status is literally her only real character trait.

 

 

1 hour ago, kajnrig said:

All of that is great fodder for a story to be told. Even if she were, say, created 20 years ago and thus is 20 years old with 20 years' worth of idol experience, she still lacks any other knowledge of interacting with people in any other meaningful way. If she's just a weapon or a tool, then what happens when her creators don't need to use her? Turn her off?

If the Macross Delta TV series is any indication, at least part of her time off the clock is spent floating unconscious in a big clear-glass tank like so many Rei Ayanamis.  (That's what she was doing for the entire span of time that the other members of Walkure were looking for her, culminating in breaking into the hospital ship she was on.)

 

 

Quote

Evidently Lady M chose to allow her some measure of freedom and socialization, at which point, what does she do? What happens if/when she finds herself in an unfamiliar scenario? Why is she allowed out at all? Do Lady M and co. see some benefit to her living, in both a literal and metaphorical sense? If so, do they not cross an ethical boundary by continuing to treat her solely as a weapon/tool? If so or if not, what does that say about the Macross universe's ethical stances?

There are several more interesting ethical, regulatory, and governmental questions surrounding her existence... 

How many people actually know that Mikumo Guynemer is really a 3 year old artificial life form and not the 17 year old girl she appears/claims to be?  Is creating a clone like that even legal?  Is adding unknown DNA from a Protoculture ruin to a clone legal?  Is Mikumo the first and only one or is she simply the latest/most successful clone?  If there are others, what became of them?  Were they just destroyed, or are they being held somewhere?  Who is the donor of the original DNA that the new Protoculture DNA was spliced into to create her, and does she know what her DNA was used for?  She's clearly been programmed with basic knowledge, but what else is in that program?  Did Xaos implant mind control in the knowledge they installed in her to make her easier to manipulate and stage-manage?  Does she even have free will?  Did Xaos appropriate an existing person's identity for her to use as a cover or did they weave an entirely-false identity from scratch?

If the New UN Government doesn't know Mikumo's true nature, that makes it a near-certainty that what Xaos is doing is profoundly illegal since clones have full rights under the law.

IMO that'd be a story worth delving into at least as much as the Aerial Knights backstory that never did make it into any incarnation of Macross Delta.

Edited September 5, 2018 by Seto Kaiba

[Sanity is Optional]

Honestly, I think Mikumo's character (personality, appearance) was just designed before her backstory, and nobody bothered to change it when someone decided she was a clone.

Frankly a lot of the characters feel like they were low-effort design, without too much thought going in, and without any thought for how they would fit into the story.

[Focslain]

So basically since the writers just didn't bother exploring, their creeps. Not surprising from a franchise that has a race of child soldiers (zentradi), but that is can of worms another series tends to take on (Gundam).

1 minute ago, Sanity is Optional said:

Honestly, I think Mikumo's character (personality, appearance) was just designed before her backstory, and nobody bothered to change it when someone decided she was a clone.

Frankly a lot of the characters feel like they were low-effort design, without too much thought going in, and without any thought for how they would fit into the story.

Most were designed via committee to check off boxes to attract new fans, but that's been known for a while.

On a side note as a thought experiment: What if Mikumo was not a clone but an android. Do the cloning laws and rights still apply?

 

[Zx31]

4 hours ago, no3Ljm said:

No worries Shawn.

Pretty sure that was in reference a certain video posted earlier, which has been removed from existence both here and the source. (Not that I would know anything about that)

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Sanity is Optional said:

Honestly, I think Mikumo's character (personality, appearance) was just designed before her backstory, and nobody bothered to change it when someone decided she was a clone.

Frankly a lot of the characters feel like they were low-effort design, without too much thought going in, and without any thought for how they would fit into the story.

TBH, it's pretty obvious that many of the characters were intended to be expies of ones in Macross Frontier in the hopes that the similarity would be enough to sell them.  Mikumo was clearly a quick and dirty knockoff of Sheryl, Arad's written as a copy of Ozma right down to his "reason I quit the military" backstory, Keith is trying pretty hard to be emotionless prettyboy Brera, and out here we've been calling Roid "Man-Grace" for so long I'm not convinced most of my friends remember what his name actually is.

Without the excellent characterization that went into the Macross Frontier characters, the similarity alone really isn't enough to appeal.

That's a big part of why Passionate Walkure's faster pace is an immeasurable help to Delta's story... you're not really given enough time to properly grasp how underdeveloped it all is before it speeds along to its conclusion.  (Well, that and a lack of proper development is considered an acceptable sin in compilation movies.)

 

 

1 hour ago, Focslain said:

So basically since the writers just didn't bother exploring, their creeps. Not surprising from a franchise that has a race of child soldiers (zentradi), but that is can of worms another series tends to take on (Gundam).

Mikumo's situation has way, WAY more unfortunate implications than anything the Zentradi could muster.  The Zentradi may have been treated as disposable tools by the Protoculture, but they still have far more actual living under their belts than Mikumo.  They're emotionally mature beings, but stunted socially by their creators.

Gundam... well... the franchise of everything is awful forever certainly doesn't shy away from all of the horrors of that kind of thing.  "It can always get worse" might as well be the official UC motto... I've not forgotten that timeline ends in at least one historical era where there was state-sanctioned and widely-practiced cannibalism.

 

 

1 hour ago, Focslain said:

On a side note as a thought experiment: What if Mikumo was not a clone but an android. Do the cloning laws and rights still apply?

That'd be an interesting conundrum... does a self-aware bio-android count as a sentient flesh-and-blood person or as a sentient artificial intelligence?

IIRC, a purely technological android would be illegal in and of itself under the New UN Government since the technology needed to produce the self-aware AI is inherently unstable and prone to your standard self-preservationist AI insanity (e.g. Sharon Apple, whose incipient madness wasn't helped one bit by inheriting neuroses beyond the dreams of psychiatric analysts from the computer model of Myung Fang Lone's mind).

Based on the very limited incidence of bio-androids and suspected bio-androids in Macross, I'd be inclined to guess that they would probably consider them a sentient being with all the rights which come with it.  (Of course, since the only exemplars were the Protodeviln and that Mina Forte was briefly suspected of being one, it's not certain.)

[Chronocidal]

Honestly.. for all intents and purposes, Mikumo may as well be a sex-bot AI transplanted into a physical clone body.  Nothing about her existence is right in the slightest, but maybe that's the point.  Her backstory would honstly make a good horror genre series, but that entire concept is drowned in the backwash of "we need a fanservicey idol-singer to be the figurehead for our plot group!"

From a story perspective, one of the most annoying things to me about that is that they do write her as a particular type of character, but the cues we get to her motivations and personality are at complete odds with anything we know about the character's origins.  It doesn't make the slightest sense for a mental three-year-old to act the way she does.  The assumption I'm tempted to make is that whoever cloned her managed to make a complete physical and personality duplicate of an ancient member of the Protoculture, while simultaneously managing to tailor her psyche to forget anything about her past. 

On the creepazoid scale, making a 1-for-1 copy of a completely mature living being and then giving them laser-guided amnesia is probably less heinous than a lot of the other assumed atrocities you could apply to Mikumo's character.  But then the really fun question to ask.. where did her override command come from?  Clearly that was supposed to be some sort of screwy ancient knowledge that Roid acquired, but that would imply that the override command was something the Protoculture had implanted in the original Star Singer.

Not to excuse the humans in this mess, but knowing how the Protoculture loved their genetic engineering, I'm not sure it's much of a stretch to assume that Mikumo might be a modern copy of a mass-produced, ready-made command and control node for a fold-receptor network.  The fact that she turned out nominally human might be due to the fact that she didn't get the standard initial training and indoctrination the Protoculture would have given her.

The implications there are pretty far reaching, and could point to a lot of particulars of how the Protoculture operated.  The fact that Mikumo flat out begins belting out "Ai Oboete Imasu Ka", but only the first line (and, inexplicably, in Japanese ), makes me think that the entire reason the song worked in DYRL was because hearing that first line was some sort of "ATTENTION: ORDERS INCOMING" command line.  

I could be remembering entirely bass-ackwards though.  I know the lyrics were found and translated by Misa (and I'm starting to wonder how accurate or complete that translation was), but was the music itself composed by humans, or did they find a snippet of the tune to put the lyrics to in the SDF-1's databanks? 

Edit: Scratch that, I forgot, the scene in DYRL where the SDF-1 flies in with the Zentradi fleet at their backs has Minmay singing just the first line of the tune.  It still doesn't make sense that Mikumo used the Japanese lyrics for that line, but it might have just been coincidence that the document Misa found matched the tune.

Edited September 5, 2018 by Chronocidal

[Seto Kaiba]

2 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

I know the lyrics were found and translated by Misa (and I'm starting to wonder how accurate or complete that translation was), but was the music itself composed by humans, or did they find a snippet of the tune to put the lyrics to in the SDF-1's databanks? 

Misa and Hikaru found the lyrics in the abandoned Protoculture colony ship on Earth.  At around the same time, Minmay obtained the sheet music for the song that the Boddole Zer main fleet had kept as a "fragment of culture".  When Boddole Zer's mobile fortress comes over the horizon to propose the truce, Minmay is singing the tune without the lyrics.

If the scenes of prepping the performance are any indication, the tune may have been arranged for Earth instruments by Lynn Kaifun while Misa provided the lyrics.

[kajnrig]

1 hour ago, Focslain said:

So basically since the writers just didn't bother exploring, their creeps.

If there's a writing equivalent to criminal negligence, I'd say they're at least guilty of that.

1 hour ago, Focslain said:

On a side note as a thought experiment: What if Mikumo was not a clone but an android. Do the cloning laws and rights still apply?

Are androids human/machine hybrids, or was that cyborgs? In the case she's fully synthetic, I'd say she fits squarely in the Sharon Apple category, just with a different, more immediately identifiable as "human," body. And in that case, I'd be with Seto that her very existence would be against the law. Now, perhaps AI tech has advanced in the intervening years (how many years is it? Plus is 2040, Delta is... 2068? So some 30 years or so?) that there are legitimate existential questions to be answered. Maybe even talk of Ghosts? You know, in some sort of Shells? (But speaking of Ghosts, judging by the behavior of the Ghost drones once Luca unlocked their AI systems, I would say they're still a long way off from approaching anything even remotely resembling "AI civil rights" territory.)

9 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I've not forgotten that timeline ends in at least one historical era where there was state-sanctioned and widely-practiced cannibalism.

Say what, now?

7 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

*basically everything, but especially:*

The implications there are pretty far reaching, and could point to a lot of particulars of how the Protoculture operated.  The fact that Mikumo flat out begins belting out "Ai Oboete Imasu Ka" ¹, but only the first line (and, inexplicably, in Japanese ), makes me think that the entire reason the song worked in DYRL was because hearing that first line was some sort of "ATTENTION: ORDERS INCOMING" command line.

See, this is why I hate the Protoculture stuff. I seem to remember the original SDFM and even DYRL? worked music into the story as a metaphor for cultural exchange. The reason song was so powerful wasn't because of ancient Protoculture engineering, but because it symbolized the exchange of ideas across language and cultural divides.

A love song being one of R Lee Protoculture's drill instructor jingles is much less romantic.

[Seto Kaiba]

7 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

If there's a writing equivalent to criminal negligence, I'd say they're at least guilty of that.

Like the software engineers say, "garbage in, garbage out".

If you hire writers of indifferent quality to do your screenplay, you'll get a screenplay of indifferent quality out of it.  The filmographies of the writers who worked on Macross Delta are uninspiring to say the least.  Ukyo Kodachi's is arguably the highest profile, and that's only from working on that horrid Naruto spinoff Boruto.

Frontier had a writer of a much higher caliber with more experience in series composition, so that paid huge dividends.

 

7 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

Now, perhaps AI tech has advanced in the intervening years (how many years is it? Plus is 2040, Delta is... 2068? So some 30 years or so?) that there are legitimate existential questions to be answered. Maybe even talk of Ghosts? You know, in some sort of Shells?

So far, nothing on that front... the closest we've come is Macross the Musiculture, where one of the main cast finds an old Sharon Apple-era virtuoid that'd been junked.

The Macross Frontier TV and Movie novelizations do suggest the Galaxy Executives were advanced enough to potentially Ghost in the Shell themselves and exist as disembodied minds.  That said, in there only one of them had apparently done so... Manfred, a copy of the mind and intellect of the deceased Macross VF-X2 antagonist and fold quartz technology pioneer Manfred Brando.  Still, it comes with the old Moravec-level philosophical problem of whether disembodied consciousness counts as human even if it's operating on a strictly artificial platform.  Is a perfect digital copy of a human mind an AI or is it still a human being?

 

7 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

Say what, now?

Mobile Suit Gundam: Reconguista in G.  Part of its backstory is that in the final centuries of the UC era before it was abolished and replaced by the Reguild Century, the cumulative damage to Earth was so severe that it caused famines bad enough for humanity to turn to institutionalized cannibalism.  That is what "Kuntala" refers to in the series, the caste of people who were designated emergency rations (and continue to be discriminated against even a millennium after the practice was abolished).  The show's resident Char clone, Luin Lee ("Captain Mask") is one... as are several other characters. 

 

7 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

The reason song was so powerful wasn't because of ancient Protoculture engineering, but because it symbolized the exchange of ideas across language and cultural divides.

A love song being one of R Lee Protoculture's drill instructor jingles is much less romantic.

It was still cultural communication in DYRL?, that prompted the Zentradi and Meltandi to muse on what'd been lost in their war to destroy each other.  (There may have been an element of a genetic or racial memory there too, but still...)

[Chronocidal]

1 hour ago, kajnrig said:

See, this is why I hate the Protoculture stuff. I seem to remember the original SDFM and even DYRL? worked music into the story as a metaphor for cultural exchange. The reason song was so powerful wasn't because of ancient Protoculture engineering, but because it symbolized the exchange of ideas across language and cultural divides.

A love song being one of R Lee Protoculture's drill instructor jingles is much less romantic.

I wouldn't say the ideas are mutually exclusive though.  Music itself can be considered a language all its own, able to convey emotions and ideas without even necessarily needing lyrics in any particular language. 

The bulk of available Protoculture information all points to the idea that the primary form of communication for them may have been musical.  If words and language are a good carrier for simple data, putting them to music adds an entirely different dimension to the communication.  The analogy my brain wants to make is to the way electro-magnetic radiation carries both electrical and magnetic signals on different axes of an electro-magnetic waveform.  If you take the concept of fold waves and spiritia as a whole, it's like the whole thing rolls up sound, emotion, and language into one big carrier wave for information of multiple types, affecting recipients on both a conscious and subconscious level.

That thought's probably a whole lot more sciencey than necessary, but it basically points to the idea that the Protoculture's standard means of communication were of a different nature, and on an entirely different level than spoken word.

You're right though, having R. Lee Ermy belting out a love song doesn't quite jive, but it's also a great example of how varied music is as a communication medium, and illustrates my point even better.  There's no explicit evidence that the lyrics found in the Protoculture city and the snippet of music in the Zentraedi databanks were meant to go together.

In fact... See, I can't honestly believe that this may have been intentional, but think about the effect that song had on the Zentraedi and Meltrandi.  What if they were hearing love song lyrics broadcast along the carrier wave meant to give battlefield commands?  You'd be confused too.  You can mashup all kinds of songs to give you horrible messes of dissonant moods and lyrics.  For instance, the lyrics for "Amazing Grace" fit the music for both "House of the Rising Sun" and the theme song from Gilligans Island.  One set of words, but the music adds an entirely different dimension to how they're received.

Like I said, I can't imagine it was actually intentional, but the song in DYRL may have been the Protoculture equivalent of a Niel Cicierega mashup.

Deculture, indeed.

Edited September 5, 2018 by Chronocidal

[JB0]

6 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

On the creepazoid scale, making a 1-for-1 copy of a completely mature living being and then giving them laser-guided amnesia is probably less heinous than a lot of the other assumed atrocities you could apply to Mikumo's character.  But then the really fun question to ask.. where did her override command come from?  Clearly that was supposed to be some sort of screwy ancient knowledge that Roid acquired, but that would imply that the override command was something the Protoculture had implanted in the original Star Singer.

Not to excuse the humans in this mess, but knowing how the Protoculture loved their genetic engineering, I'm not sure it's much of a stretch to assume that Mikumo might be a modern copy of a mass-produced, ready-made command and control node for a fold-receptor network.  The fact that she turned out nominally human might be due to the fact that she didn't get the standard initial training and indoctrination the Protoculture would have given her.

Having never actually finished Delta, and having bailed right around the point Mikumo's back story started to come out...

I'm starting to think that Star Singer is a synonym for "emulator", which makes  Mikumo basically an Ishtar bootleg. So... Macross 2 did it better?

[Master Dex]

17 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Having never actually finished Delta, and having bailed right around the point Mikumo's back story started to come out...

I'm starting to think that Star Singer is a synonym for "emulator", which makes  Mikumo basically an Ishtar bootleg. So... Macross 2 did it better?

There are a lot of M2 similarities there it almost seemed like SK was intentionally going for that actually. The joke almost being that Delta finally made people respect Macross II (Seto is happy at least), lol.

[chyll2]

Finally watched it. I expected way less, I got a bit more. It is an overall okay. If people want to check out Delta, I would say check out the movie and ignore the TV series.

 

I felt really bad about the showcase of the Armor Parts though, whats more, there is very little appearance of the 31A with it.

[Focslain]

10 hours ago, Master Dex said:

There are a lot of M2 similarities there it almost seemed like SK was intentionally going for that actually. The joke almost being that Delta finally made people respect Macross II (Seto is happy at least), lol.

My head canon is that delta is pulling the franchise to make M2 canon and with it in the 2090s it still is a possiblity.

Also I find the sheryl Nome/Mikumo connection incorrect. Mikumo is more of a Sharon Apple knockoff, just with a physical form. Also in my recent rewatch of the series I noticed Mikumo is a bit of a bitch. Plus since most of her actions seems to me to make her other-worldly I never got the creep factor. With her being an artifical being the age thing was just to make her the youngest of the group in character (as Junna is irl the youngest of Walkure) as well as a possible flip on the 900 year old loli trope.

Granted her existance is illegal, but if Lady M has half the pull shown that will be made an exception as time moves on.

I'm not sure if any of this is really brotched in the movie, once my copy arrives (left Japan yesterday finally) I'll give it a watch. 

As for the movie I'm expecting Interstellar 5555: Macross edition, if I get that I happy.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, JB0 said:

I'm starting to think that Star Singer is a synonym for "emulator", which makes  Mikumo basically an Ishtar bootleg. So... Macross 2 did it better?

Granted, there are a fair number of superficial similarities between the Star Singer and Emulators... 

The biggest difference, offhand, would be that the Star Singers appear to be creations of the ancient Protoculture where the Mardook and their Emulators in Macross II are strongly implied by the OVA's creators to be a surviving offshoot of the Protoculture itself.  The precise role of the Star Singers was not made clear, but the Emulators were priestesses in the Mardook religion.

The Mardook Emulators controlled their Zentradi troops through songs that acted on those Zentradi like a battle drug due to mental conditioning, cybernetics, etc.  It doesn't work on bystanders like the internally-inconsistent Var syndrome in Macross Delta does though.

(Funnily enough, Mikumo's teal highlights look to be the same color as Ishtar's hair...)

 

 

10 hours ago, Master Dex said:

The joke almost being that Delta finally made people respect Macross II (Seto is happy at least), lol.

Nah, I was content back when Kawamori came out and utterly sank the argument that the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA wasn't a legitimate entry in the Macross franchise ten years ago.  That alone killed upwards of 90% of the Macross II-bashing, which was coming mainly from Macross 7 fans who held the opinion that Macross II wasn't a "real" Macross series.  To their credit, the vast majority of those critics revised their positions based on that new information and are now a lot kinder to the OVA.

On the other hand, the suggestion that it took a half-assed mess like Delta to make people properly appreciate Macross II annoys me...

 

 

29 minutes ago, chyll2 said:

I felt really bad about the showcase of the Armor Parts though, whats more, there is very little appearance of the 31A with it.

To be fair, there's very little of the VF-31A at all in Macross Delta even though it, and not the VF-31 Custom Siegfried, is set to become the next main fighter of the Brisingr globular cluster's New UN Government members.

 

 

8 minutes ago, Focslain said:

Also I find the sheryl Nome/Mikumo connection incorrect. Mikumo is more of a Sharon Apple knockoff, just with a physical form. Also in my recent rewatch of the series I noticed Mikumo is a bit of a bitch.

... you undermined your first sentence with your second.

Right down to her outfit, Mikumo is an attempted Sheryl knockoff.  Her bitchy attitude and her total obsession with her status as a "pro" is stolen almost whole cloth from Sheryl in the first few Macross Frontier episodes.  Because she's only a supporting character, her ice queen side never defrosts like Sheryl's did starting in Frontier's fifth episode.

(Seriously.  Watch Sheryl's "pro" speech to Alto in Frontier's first episode and then Mikumo's one to Freyja in Delta... they weren't even TRYING to hide Mikumo's imitation-brand Sheryl status.)

[Focslain]

37 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

... you undermined your first sentence with your second.

Right down to her outfit, Mikumo is an attempted Sheryl knockoff.  Her bitchy attitude and her total obsession with her status as a "pro" is stolen almost whole cloth from Sheryl in the first few Macross Frontier episodes.  Because she's only a supporting character, her ice queen side never defrosts like Sheryl's did starting in Frontier's fifth episode.

(Seriously.  Watch Sheryl's "pro" speech to Alto in Frontier's first episode and then Mikumo's one to Freyja in Delta... they weren't even TRYING to hide Mikumo's imitation-brand Sheryl status.)

Well it is a bit of a coincidence concerning my view of Sheryl. I only saw her in the movies as I stopped watching the series at episode 5. Something was urking me about the series proper so I opted to skip to the films, which in the films she seemed much nicer and more human then Mikumo.

On that note if you can direct me to a way to watch the series that isn't the STD filled pirate site or poor youtube videos I'll give the frontier series a full go. Also looking for Zero as I wasn't able to see that before the outbreak hit my comp.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Focslain said:

Well it is a bit of a coincidence concerning my view of Sheryl. I only saw her in the movies as I stopped watching the series at episode 5. Something was urking me about the series proper so I opted to skip to the films, which in the films she seemed much nicer and more human then Mikumo.

Ah, you missed out.  Macross Frontier really hit its stride starting in the fifth episode.

Mikumo's basically modeled on Sheryl from the first four episodes, when she was busy being Queen Bitch half the time.  Mikumo's professional interest in Freyja closely mirrors the advice Sheryl gave to Ranka when they met near the Macross Quarter's dock and had to wait out a hull breach repair in an emergency shelter.  

It was actually really frustrating how blatant they were about it.  Really, almost the entire Delta cast came with shades of it... Xaos being a low-rent SMS knockoff complete with an off-brand Macross Quarter and Roid's entire master plan being nicked from Grace's in the Macross Frontier TV series.  It was kind of weird how committed they were to it, with Xaos having the same "we're testing the next-gen VF for the military" excuse SMS had for having better gear than the NUNS and the VF-31 even sharing a majority of its systems with the VF-25.

 

1 hour ago, Focslain said:

On that note if you can direct me to a way to watch the series that isn't the STD filled pirate site or poor youtube videos I'll give the frontier series a full go. Also looking for Zero as I wasn't able to see that before the outbreak hit my comp.

Rules being rules, that kind of direction has to be done under the proverbial radar... don't wanna step on any administrative toes, y'know?

[kajnrig]

23 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Rules being rules, that kind of direction has to be done under the proverbial radar... don't wanna step on any administrative toes, y'know?

Didn't the series box set include English subtitles? Or am I thinking of Delta?

[Focslain]

3 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

Didn't the series box set include English subtitles? Or am I thinking of Delta?

That be Delta only (which I do own), Frontier only got one, maybe both movies officially subbed?

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

Didn't the series box set include English subtitles? Or am I thinking of Delta?

That's Delta.  There were one or two Macross Frontier movie releases that had English subs (the combo packs and one other, IIRC), but nothing for the series.

I'd like to see official subs for the remainder tho.