Macross Delta Zettai Live!!!!!! - Available on Blu-ray Sept 28, 2022

[TisSweet]

Well...I'm watching Macross 7 again...lol. Is not all that bad, from what I remembered. Even though I said I wouldn't. Lol. Only episodes 1-12 so far. Watch 2-4 episodes a day. I haven't watched it in 10 years. If you are not a true Macross fan you won't like Macross 7. Lol. So I guess I'm a true Macross fan. Lol 😆  

After I finished with Macross 7 series... I'm going to watch Macross movies, Do you remember love, Macross Plus, Frontier, Delta, etc.  After I finished watching everything....it will be the 45th or 50th Anniversary I will watch it again. Lol 

😆

So what's everyone doing to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Macross?

Edited December 28, 2022 by TisSweet

[Bolt]

1 hour ago, TisSweet said:

So what's everyone doing to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Macross?

Watching DYRL while eating Nyan-nyan buns and pineapple salad  

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, TisSweet said:

So what's everyone doing to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Macross?

Launching a new Macross fansite for my translation work and lamenting the lack of any decent information for this ****ing movie.

It's downright depressing how little info there is for Absolute Live!!!!!!.  We're so hard up for data we have to get our info from a Master File book... assuming that doesn't get delayed again. >_<

 

 

[twich]

On 12/28/2022 at 5:58 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Launching a new Macross fansite for my translation work and lamenting the lack of any decent information for this ****ing movie.

It's downright depressing how little info there is for Absolute Live!!!!!!.  We're so hard up for data we have to get our info from a Master File book... assuming that doesn't get delayed again. >_<

 

 

I don’t know about you, but got notification from Amazon Japan that it will ship mid to late January 2023.

Twich

[Seto Kaiba]

5 minutes ago, twich said:

I don’t know about you, but got notification from Amazon Japan that it will ship mid to late January 2023.

I had not, but I ordered mine from CDJapan and they can be a bit slow about sending that kind of notice out.

It looks like CDJapan is showing "early January 2023" for a release there.

On paper, it was a great idea to set the Master File book's release for the same time as the home video release of Absolute Live!!!!!!.  It was probably a real bad idea to depend on the folks at SoftBank/GAGraphic to get it out on time tho.  

[Sandman]

On 12/28/2022 at 5:58 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Launching a new Macross fansite for my translation work and lamenting the lack of any decent information for this ****ing movie.

It's downright depressing how little info there is for Absolute Live!!!!!!.  We're so hard up for data we have to get our info from a Master File book... assuming that doesn't get delayed again. >_<

 

 

Is your site up yet?

[Saruta2]

Microfanfic based on discussion here.

Good evening Lee-san, I hope you liked our concert.

Yeah, not a lot of fans around this cluster but hope dies last, you know! We do have great competition, yes, indeed. That's kinda related to what I wanted to ask you...

Could you please tell me of that time when you suddenly had a baby sister?

Spoiler

The baby is a clone of the Star Singer and that makes the baby Mikumo's sister. Mikumo has zero idea how to handle a little sister. So wouldn't she ask the expert?

 

[Swann]

[Radd]

On 12/28/2022 at 8:58 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Launching a new Macross fansite for my translation work and lamenting the lack of any decent information for this ****ing movie.

It's downright depressing how little info there is for Absolute Live!!!!!!.  We're so hard up for data we have to get our info from a Master File book... assuming that doesn't get delayed again. >_<

 

 

This is one of the reasons I decided to poke my head in here again (Hi everyone, long time no see!) I really wasn't a big fan of Delta, but I heard Max appears in this and that was enough to make me want to check it out. But I can't seem to find it anywhere. Has it not come out on BluRay yet? I would have figured there'd be fansubs by now.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 minutes ago, Radd said:

This is one of the reasons I decided to poke my head in here again (Hi everyone, long time no see!) I really wasn't a big fan of Delta, but I heard Max appears in this and that was enough to make me want to check it out. But I can't seem to find it anywhere. Has it not come out on BluRay yet? I would have figured there'd be fansubs by now.

It's been out on DVD and Blu-ray since last September.

It's not a US localized release, but the Japanese domestic market release has official US/English subtitles on it.  US localized releases are presumably pending now that there's no block on licensing and the main shows have all been licensed.

https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/BCXA-1756

Max does indeed appear in the film.  He was selected as a character to replace the Macross Elysion's captain Ernest Johnson after Johnson's VA Unsho Ishizuka passed away in 2018.  You've probably seen a fair number of posts in the toy section about his new Valk for the movie, which is somewhat contentious since he's a supporting character only but absolutely curb stomps the protagonists despite being a decade on the wrong side of retirement age at this point.

[Radd]

51 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Max does indeed appear in the film.  He was selected as a character to replace the Macross Elysion's captain Ernest Johnson after Johnson's VA Unsho Ishizuka passed away in 2018. 

Aww, that puts a damper on Max's return.

But yeah, that makes sense. Fansubbers staying away since an official release is likely imminent.

[azrael]

50 minutes ago, Radd said:

But yeah, that makes sense. Fansubbers staying away since an official release is likely imminent.

There's no need for fansubs since it comes with English subs already.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Radd said:

Aww, that puts a damper on Max's return.

Without spoilers, Max's return kind of puts a damper on much of the rest of the movie... not just because he's a one-man scene stealing squad, but because he comes in with a dim view of the protagonists, validates that dim view, and then shows them up repeatedly in their own movie.

The fans who thought critically, but not unkindly, about Delta already kind of knew that the protagonists were small-time operators even as mercenaries go and that the war they nearly lost was a bush league conflict at best.  Absolute Live!!!!!! isn't shy about reminding viewers of that... but Max does so slightly less gently than a sledgehammer seating a fencepost.  It honestly felt a little mean-spirited in places.

 

3 hours ago, Radd said:

But yeah, that makes sense. Fansubbers staying away since an official release is likely imminent.

More than that, there's nothing for them to do... the Japanese BDs and DVDs come with official English subs.  Same as the previous film, and the home video release of the Macross Delta series.

Edited July 18, 2023 by Seto Kaiba

[Raikkonen]

I'm still battling to finish the first Delta film, so I can get started on this one to see Max's return.

[MikeRoz]

So I watched this a few weeks ago, and something about the way it ended really bugged me, more for out-of-story reasons than anything else. Spoilers here for Frontier and the Frontier movies too.

Spoiler

So Frontier ends with Ranka making Sheryl better, and the three of them flying off into the sunset with the triangle unresolved.

The Frontier movies end with the triangle resolved, but Alto disappears and Sheryl is in a coma at the end. Purely at face value, it's a tragic ending to a series that didn't end on such a sad note. But, perusing the TVTropes page once a long time ago, I came across this:

Quote

It's less bittersweet if you read Kawamori's latest interview in Animedia. [He] seemed both amused and surprised that people's sadder (and inaccurate) interpretations when he assumed he was "obvious". He confirmed that Alto is alive and Sheryl awoke from the coma at the end of the movie. There was a hint of the characters outcome in the credits... We can "imagine" the rest.

Then, in the same box with this final Delta movie, we get a bit of a fix fic that makes explicit the happy ending that was only implied before. With no explanation as to what Alto has been breathing or eating in the time between his departure and reappearance, he's back, he's fine, and Sheryl wakes up too. And I'm fine with this! I'm not complaining about this part, I'm happy things ended so well for the characters. It made revisiting them worthwhile and fun. But to recap, as an appetizer for the Delta movie, we get something that takes a storyline which previously had a bittersweet ending and caps it off with a happy one.

Then Delta comes out, and ends. Say what you will about the quality of the story by the end, but the series ends on a happy note, with the triangle resolved and Freyja and Hayate flying off into the sunset. Just like Frontier.

And finally we come to this movie. Freyja dies at the end. The door is slammed shut on a potential fix fic by her death and her dissolving into sparkles. True, the show never gave any hint that the fantastic Windmerian fast aging could be cured or mitigated somehow, but that possibility lingered in the back of my mind nonetheless. It's just incredibly jarring to go from a short that turns a bittersweet ending into a happy ending to a movie that turns a happy ending into a tragic one.

They didn't have to do this. But I guess the more snarky among us might say that about the whole rest of the movie, or even the series.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Spoiler

25 minutes ago, MikeRoz said:

The Frontier movies end with the triangle resolved, but Alto disappears and Sheryl is in a coma at the end. Purely at face value, it's a tragic ending to a series that didn't end on such a sad note. But, perusing the TVTropes page once a long time ago, I came across this:

Quote

It's less bittersweet if you read Kawamori's latest interview in Animedia. [He] seemed both amused and surprised that people's sadder (and inaccurate) interpretations when he assumed he was "obvious". He confirmed that Alto is alive and Sheryl awoke from the coma at the end of the movie. There was a hint of the characters outcome in the credits... We can "imagine" the rest.

Then, in the same box with this final Delta movie, we get a bit of a fix fic that makes explicit the happy ending that was only implied before. With no explanation as to what Alto has been breathing or eating in the time between his departure and reappearance, he's back, he's fine, and Sheryl wakes up too. And I'm fine with this! I'm not complaining about this part, I'm happy things ended so well for the characters. It made revisiting them worthwhile and fun. But to recap, as an appetizer for the Delta movie, we get something that takes a storyline which previously had a bittersweet ending and caps it off with a happy one.

So... all in all... that's not quite accurate.  The Labyrinth of Time does make the somewhat bittersweet conclusion of The Wings of Goodbyte happier, but only a little.

Spoiler

The Labyrinth of Time is set several years after the events of The Wings of Goodbye... roughly concurrent with the events of Macross Delta according to Ranka's voice actress Megumi Nakajima.  The Alto and Sheryl you see in the film are, for the most part, phantoms conjured from Ranka's memories as she accesses the Well of Souls on that one alien planet in a bid to reach Alto with the latent fold waves in her songs.  Even at the end of it, Alto is still missing and Sheryl is still in the coma she slipped into at the end of The Wings of Goodbye.  Ranka believes Alto can awaken Sheryl, and she uses the Well of Souls to try and contact him.  Her song actually gets through to the still comatose Sheryl, and her fold waves join with Ranka's to create a transmission that the Well of Souls shoots off into intergalactic space to where Alto is.

It's not really a happy ending yet, but it's the implication that a happy ending might occur in the not-too-distant future.

 

 

45 minutes ago, MikeRoz said:

Spoiler

Then Delta comes out, and ends. Say what you will about the quality of the story by the end, but the series ends on a happy note, with the triangle resolved and Freyja and Hayate flying off into the sunset. Just like Frontier.

And finally we come to this movie. Freyja dies at the end. The door is slammed shut on a potential fix fic by her death and her dissolving into sparkles. True, the show never gave any hint that the fantastic Windmerian fast aging could be cured or mitigated somehow, but that possibility lingered in the back of my mind nonetheless. It's just incredibly jarring to go from a short that turns a bittersweet ending into a happy ending to a movie that turns a happy ending into a tragic one.

They didn't have to do this. But I guess the more snarky among us might say that about the whole rest of the movie, or even the series.

Eh...

Spoiler

Macross Delta didn't really NEED a second movie, but Frontier did it so Delta had to as well.

The film's a mess for a bunch of different reasons, but Freyja's death at the end of the film would've been a lot more impactful and emotional if the entire rest of the film wasn't devoted to foreshadowing it with comical levels of unsubtlety.  In the first thirty minutes, Freyja sets up like a dozen death flags for herself ranging from tragic keepsakes to the promises of a future together to visiting the childhood home only for it to be destroyed.  They might as well have called the movie Macross Delta: Freyja Dies at the End for how unsubtle they were being about it.  They just keep harping on it for almost the entire duration of the film as if they were banking on the audience assuming that they'd never actually DO it.  Like the reverse of how they foreshadowed Ozma's death and he walked away with nothing but some bandages.

It could have been impactful and tragic... but instead she's played like the space idol equivalent of the elderly police sergeant who's two days from retirement in any cop drama, exerting such a gravity of imminent demise that it's practically enough to redirect bullets towards them.

There was always a suggestion of an unhappy ending hanging around Hayate and Freyja's relationship.  Not just because Hayate's the son of the most hated man in her home planet's history, but because the difference in their respective lifespans of Humans and Windermereans put a rather immediate cap on the duration of their Happily Ever After.  Hayate's a kid of 17 who, with the right medical care, could easily live another century.  Freyja's got 15-20 years tops.  The oldest Windermerean we see, who is so infirm due to his old age that he can barely get out of bed, is the 35 year old King Grammier Neirich Windermere VI.  How much longer he might've held on is unclear since he gets murdered during the TV series and is dead at the start of the movie version, but considering the average lifespan is said to be 30 one can assume Freyja would've been around for a good time not a long time and Hayate would've been a widower well before he hit 40.  The first episode of the series actually dispenses some of the same factoids that the people in Freyja's village do in the second movie... she ran away from home at 14 to avoid an arranged marriage because, in Windermerean terms, she was almost too old to get married and have kids.

 

[guyxxed]

On 7/29/2023 at 11:07 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Eh...

  Reveal hidden contents

Macross Delta didn't really NEED a second movie, but Frontier did it so Delta had to as well.

The film's a mess for a bunch of different reasons, but Freyja's death at the end of the film would've been a lot more impactful and emotional if the entire rest of the film wasn't devoted to foreshadowing it with comical levels of unsubtlety.  In the first thirty minutes, Freyja sets up like a dozen death flags for herself ranging from tragic keepsakes to the promises of a future together to visiting the childhood home only for it to be destroyed.  They might as well have called the movie Macross Delta: Freyja Dies at the End for how unsubtle they were being about it.  They just keep harping on it for almost the entire duration of the film as if they were banking on the audience assuming that they'd never actually DO it.  Like the reverse of how they foreshadowed Ozma's death and he walked away with nothing but some bandages.

It could have been impactful and tragic... but instead she's played like the space idol equivalent of the elderly police sergeant who's two days from retirement in any cop drama, exerting such a gravity of imminent demise that it's practically enough to redirect bullets towards them.

There was always a suggestion of an unhappy ending hanging around Hayate and Freyja's relationship.  Not just because Hayate's the son of the most hated man in her home planet's history, but because the difference in their respective lifespans of Humans and Windermereans put a rather immediate cap on the duration of their Happily Ever After.  Hayate's a kid of 17 who, with the right medical care, could easily live another century.  Freyja's got 15-20 years tops.  The oldest Windermerean we see, who is so infirm due to his old age that he can barely get out of bed, is the 35 year old King Grammier Neirich Windermere VI.  How much longer he might've held on is unclear since he gets murdered during the TV series and is dead at the start of the movie version, but considering the average lifespan is said to be 30 one can assume Freyja would've been around for a good time not a long time and Hayate would've been a widower well before he hit 40.  The first episode of the series actually dispenses some of the same factoids that the people in Freyja's village do in the second movie... she ran away from home at 14 to avoid an arranged marriage because, in Windermerean terms, she was almost too old to get married and have kids.

 

Just my opinion, for what it's worth.  Overall, I agree with the general criticisms of the movie, but on the issue above....

Spoiler

I get where you're coming from and can agree that there are probably some better ways to approach it from a dramatic sense, but I read it a bit differently.  To me, it felt more like they were leaning into the destiny/fate side of it and highlighting the fact that there was no way for her to escape this outcome, so how does she make the most of what she' has left.  Tragedy was inevitable,  the drama wasn't in how she might cheat it (because she couldn't) it was in how she could make it mean something.

 

[Raikkonen]

Ok... so I finished both Delta films. I'm correct in saying this replaces the series as cannon in the timeline?

Spoiler

And is that the Megaroad 1 or 2 that briefly appears? I've only come across various debates over it. 

Overall, I felt the basic concept was good, but the execution had too many cringe moments while the music didn't reach the scale of the events. In my view.

[Seto Kaiba]

40 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:

Ok... so I finished both Delta films. I'm correct in saying this replaces the series as cannon in the timeline?

Macross doesn't have a hard canon... it runs entirely on broad strokes continuity, with any given sequel freely mixing and matching details from the TV and movie versions of any or all of the previous titles. Sometimes a new series will even invent new versions of events which don't correspond to any existing version of the story it's referencing.

For instance, in the Macross Delta TV series a presentation about galactic history mixes and matches aspects of the DYRL and TV series versions of the original story, and also combines aspects of both endings of the Frontier story by showing the TV series ending but with the YF-29 and the costumes from the Wings of Goodbye. Macross 7 straight up invented its own version of DYRL that included scenes that weren't in the actual movie like Max and Milia's wedding.

 

45 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:

Spoiler

And is that the Megaroad 1 or 2 that briefly appears? I've only come across various debates over it. 

 

Spoiler

It is supposed to be the missing SDF-2 Megaroad-01. 

It's a pretty lame explanation for what happened with the ship if you ask me. They've just been stuck in a fold fault for half a century.

 

[pengbuzz]

On 8/10/2023 at 8:16 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Macross doesn't have a hard canon... it runs entirely on broad strokes continuity, with any given sequel freely mixing and matching details from the TV and movie versions of any or all of the previous titles. Sometimes a new series will even invent new versions of events which don't correspond to any existing version of the story it's referencing.

For instance, in the Macross Delta TV series a presentation about galactic history mixes and matches aspects of the DYRL and TV series versions of the original story, and also combines aspects of both endings of the Frontier story by showing the TV series ending but with the YF-29 and the costumes from the Wings of Goodbye. Macross 7 straight up invented its own version of DYRL that included scenes that weren't in the actual movie like Max and Milia's wedding.

 

  Hide contents

It is supposed to be the missing SDF-2 Megaroad-01. 

It's a pretty lame explanation for what happened with the ship if you ask me. They've just been stuck in a fold fault for half a century.

 

The space equivalent of hitting a pothole and busting an axle, then waiting for AAA.

[Seto Kaiba]

22 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

The space equivalent of hitting a pothole and busting an axle, then waiting for AAA.

Kinda... if the norm for hitting a pothole and busting an axle was your car exploding and killing everyone in it or cartwheeling off the road into someone's front garden like in James Bond.

Macross Frontier, Macross 30, and Macross Delta (as well as Macross Chronicle) all generally agree that trying to traverse fold faults via fold navigation is a capital-emphasis Bad Idea.  If you bank enough power and calculate the fold jump correctly you can power through weak fold faults at the expense of greatly increasing the error in time measurement during the fold jump, but trying to forcibly cross stronger faults can severely damage or even destroy ships.  Macross Frontier, Macross 30, and Macross Chronicle all seem to go with destruction of the folding ship (or fleet!) being the norm in such accidents.  It seems, based on Macross Delta, that if you're REALLY stupidly lucky you'll get knocked back to realspace instead as Megaroad-04 was when it ran into the fold faults surrounding Windermere IV.  Absolute Live!!!!!! also seems to support "the ship is destroyed" line as well, as General Cromwell was counting on the New UN Forces to assume that the Battle Astraea had been destroyed in a fold accident when she disappeared with all hands...

Spoiler

... to conceal the reality that the Battle Astraea's captain and crew had deserted the NUNS 7th Fleet and stolen the state-of-the-art Battle-class supercarrier in order to further develop the secret organization "Heimdall" and directly pursue its goal of freeing the New UN Government from the influence of the mysterious "Lady M".

 

[SebastianP]

On 8/13/2023 at 8:43 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Kinda... if the norm for hitting a pothole and busting an axle was your car exploding and killing everyone in it or cartwheeling off the road into someone's front garden like in James Bond.

Macross Frontier, Macross 30, and Macross Delta (as well as Macross Chronicle) all generally agree that trying to traverse fold faults via fold navigation is a capital-emphasis Bad Idea.  If you bank enough power and calculate the fold jump correctly you can power through weak fold faults at the expense of greatly increasing the error in time measurement during the fold jump, but trying to forcibly cross stronger faults can severely damage or even destroy ships.  Macross Frontier, Macross 30, and Macross Chronicle all seem to go with destruction of the folding ship (or fleet!) being the norm in such accidents.  It seems, based on Macross Delta, that if you're REALLY stupidly lucky you'll get knocked back to realspace instead as Megaroad-04 was when it ran into the fold faults surrounding Windermere IV.  Absolute Live!!!!!! also seems to support "the ship is destroyed" line as well, as General Cromwell was counting on the New UN Forces to assume that the Battle Astraea had been destroyed in a fold accident when she disappeared with all hands...

It is a little strange that Megaroad-01 would run into a fold fault if they had any Zentraedi advisors aboard as anyone knowledgeable about deep space navigation should have told them how to avoid the phenomena and how bad an idea it was. Then again, they definitely didn't have Exedol with them, and I don't know how many other similar advisors were available to them at the time as Ogotai and company (from Gallia IV) could have joined up after MR-01 vanished. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

12 hours ago, SebastianP said:

It is a little strange that Megaroad-01 would run into a fold fault if they had any Zentraedi advisors aboard as anyone knowledgeable about deep space navigation should have told them how to avoid the phenomena and how bad an idea it was. Then again, they definitely didn't have Exedol with them, and I don't know how many other similar advisors were available to them at the time as Ogotai and company (from Gallia IV) could have joined up after MR-01 vanished. 

By all accounts, fold faults are relatively commonplace navigational obstacles in the galaxy.  The Zentradi supposedly know about them, but either don't really spare much thought for them because they're not an enemy or they simply don't mind losing the occasional taskforce.

Humanity's history with fold faults seems to be more problematic possibly as a consequence of scale or their early instrumentation not being as good at detecting fold faults and estimating their severity.  The standard case for a fold navigation accident described in Macross Chronicle and elsewhere basically consists of lowballing how much energy that a fold system will consume crossing a given fault and either getting stuck in fold space or running headlong into a higher dimensional immovable object.  Humanity has presumably gotten better at detecting and measuring them over the years and adapted their strategy for long-range route plotting somewhat by having ships make shorter jumps ahead of an emigrant ship to scout out the route before the main emigrant ship makes a longer fold jump to the next area of interest.  Megaroad-01 didn't have the benefit of that experience or technological advancement, so they probably blundered headlong into a severe fault on a long-ranged jump.

[Raikkonen]

Been meaning to ask this for a while...

Did Kawamori come up with Ragna and it's whole culture? 

And how did the humanoid species come to be there? 

[Master Dex]

It was probably his idea but I don't know for sure.

The Ragnans are descendants of the Protoculture just as humans are though. They seeded the planet with genetically alerted life based on their form, which they also did on several Brisignr worlds. It's likely Zola is similar despite being located elsewhere which is also not strange considering Earth is pretty far away as well. 

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

Been meaning to ask this for a while...

Did Kawamori come up with Ragna and it's whole culture? 

AFAIK, it hasn't been said who on the show's staff came up with all of the details of the various worlds that Xaos and Windermere visit in the course of the series.

Kawamori probably came up with at least a general outline, but the details were probably workshopped by the show's writing team incl. scenario writer Toshizo Nemoto, Ukyo Kodachi, and others.

The motif they chose for Ragna and Valette City in general is real world Malta and the Maltese islanders, though the floating shopping district is said to be modeled in part upon Dubai in the UAE. 

 

2 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

And how did the humanoid species come to be there? 

The Protoculture reengineered the local life forms into something resembling their own body plan, as they did on Earth and many other planets.

The Brisingr globular cluster is implied, in the series, to have been the Protoculture's last known holdout before slipping into extinction and it seems they created several species in that region either hoping one would inherit their will or at least as some kind of valediction.

Edited August 28, 2023 by Seto Kaiba

[sketchley]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The motif they chose for Ragna and Valette City in general is real world Malta and the Maltese islanders, though the floating shopping district is said to be modeled in part upon Dubai in the UAE.

Elaborating on that, I believe I read in an article somewhere that the wild cats of Malta directly inspired Kawamori-san to create and add the Mercats to the show.

[Seto Kaiba]

One remark I found while I was doing a bit of additional checking... apparently their fixation with jellyfish as a snackfood came from Kawamori being on a diet and snacking on dried squid in order to reduce his sugar intake during development.

[jenius]

I finally watched this last night. It feels almost like an overreaction to criticism of Delta. I was never really a fan of the Lady M storyline and this... i don't know if 'resolves' is the right word, but certainly leans heavily into it. So do I understand this correctly:

Epsilon steals Star Singer DNA, clone it, make a baby, sort of connect that baby to a newer Sharon Apple (but one that also has a robot body), and the New Sharon Apple is able to amplify its sound energy because of the baby?

Meanwhile Wright got some of the DNA also, cloned it, but they made a full grown Mikumo to counteract whatever Epsilon would do? 

The baby at the end threw me off a bit.. was it gestating still in the pod? Also, shouldn't the baby grow up to look more like Mikumo than Freyja? 

Bogue should have been given an all crimson VF-31AX with gold accents like his 262. 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, jenius said:

I finally watched this last night. It feels almost like an overreaction to criticism of Delta. I was never really a fan of the Lady M storyline and this... i don't know if 'resolves' is the right word, but certainly leans heavily into it.

In hindsight, I suspect a fair part of that is the changes that were made in the movie's story to accommodate the passing of Ernest Johnson's voice actor Unshou Ishizuka.  

They likely retooled the story quite a bit when they opted not to recast Ernest Johnson and settled on the retired Maximilian Jenius as a suitable substitute.  There's a fair amount of Max-centric moments in the movie that probably weren't a part of the original story concept, and a lot of the more out-there exposition about Lady M is delivered by Max's right hand man Exsedol.  It probably incentivized the particularly contentious connection the film ended up drawing WRT Lady M since both Max and Exsedol have got some personal connections with the notorious missing persons on that ship.

 

1 hour ago, jenius said:

So do I understand this correctly:

Epsilon steals Star Singer DNA, clone it, make a baby, sort of connect that baby to a newer Sharon Apple (but one that also has a robot body), and the New Sharon Apple is able to amplify its sound energy because of the baby?

You're close.

In 2060, a government agent named Sydney Hunt stole Star Singer cell samples from the shrine on Windermere IV and traded them to the Epsilon Foundation in exchange for a high-ranking position in the megacorporation's management.  He used his new position to sponsor research into biological fold waves and fold wave resonance effects with the goal of applying the results to Lady M's theories regarding songs as weapons in order to weaponize cloned Star Singer cells.  The Siren Delta System was the end result, a next-generation quantum AI virtuoid system that could excite the cloned Star Singer cells to produce extremely powerful biological fold waves for a variety of purposes including the remote operation of large numbers of Ghosts (the unmanned Sv-303 Vivasvat), boosting the performance of systems that use fold waves, and even traversing fold faults.  It is essentially a better/more stable version of Sharon Apple with more abilities.

The bloke in the rose pastel suit and pince-nez hanging around on the Battle Astraea's bridge is Sydney Hunt... or at least one of his remotely-operated cyborg bodies.  Like Grace O'Connor in Macross Frontier, he's heavily cyborged and has a bunch of spare bodies he can operate from afar.  He's the one responsible for arming Cromwell's anti-government organization and using them to test the Siren Delta System in the field, and late in the movie when the Siren Delta System starts misbehaving he tries to take it and go home but Cromwell's men take violent exception to him bailing on them at the 11th hour.

 

1 hour ago, jenius said:

Meanwhile Wright got some of the DNA also, cloned it, but they made a full grown Mikumo to counteract whatever Epsilon would do? 

The movie puts a different spin on Wright's actions.

Instead of being the thief who stole the Star Singer cell samples for Lady M, he tried and failed to recover the cell samples that Sydney Hunt stole and the one sample that he was able to recover from Sydney ended up in Xaos's hands after relations with Windermere IV soured too much for him to be able to return it.

Xaos then used that stolen cell sample it obtained from Wright to illegally create clone soldier Mikumo Guynemer as their trump card against Var syndrome.

(There's a remark from Berger Stone that suggests both the Siren Delta System AND Mikumo Guynemer were experimental weapons concepts of Lady M's.)

 

1 hour ago, jenius said:

The baby at the end threw me off a bit.. was it gestating still in the pod? Also, shouldn't the baby grow up to look more like Mikumo than Freyja? 

Exposure to Walkure's songs and the accompanying biological fold waves interacted with the Siren Delta System's self-learning functions and the Star Singer cells in some weird ways throughout the film, resulting in the creation of Yami_Q_Ray and the cloned cells developing into a baby.  Presumably the influence of Walkure is why it looks like Freyja.

 

1 hour ago, jenius said:

Bogue should have been given an all crimson VF-31AX with gold accents like his 262. 

That would've made him look too much like the hero instead of a minor supporting character.

It also wouldn't have meshed with the other Delta Flight color schemes, since the VF-31 had a more subdued color scheme and the VF-31AX went even lower key with it.  (Also, red was already taken... that's Mirage.)

[jenius]

Good, I'm glad it wasn't supposed to be a baby all along. It generally looked like odd floating shapes in bubbles but obscured and dark. So it was just a blob of nebulous Star Singer tissue that coalesced into a Freyja-like baby when Freyja and the Windermerians moved it with their singing. That's a new twist on the usual Macross ending.

Alright, so you describe her as "Clone soldier Mikumo", so she's not a pure star singer clone then, rather some sort of almalgam?

I didn't think the crimson SV-262 looked too heroic compared to the others but whatever... they went with a lame paint scheme for a mostly unlikeable character so not much of a loss. 

One last question... runes bloom? What does that do/mean? Did they know that happened? Stuff got weird. 

I thought, when they did the scene with Hayate going berserk because of Freyja's song, they were going to explore some sort of a symbiotic power the Protoculture devised as part of their effort to bring people together. Like, the fact they had Hayate with Freyja would have them overcome New Sharon Apple because she didn't have a matched pair. It kind of worked that way but more incidentally.

I could really pick this film apart but instead I'll just say that I look forward to the next Macross. 

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, jenius said:

Alright, so you describe her as "Clone soldier Mikumo", so she's not a pure star singer clone then, rather some sort of almalgam?

Whether she's a pure Star Singer clone or Xaos's illegal clone lab had to fill in some gaps Jurassic Park-style we don't know.

Mikumo Guynemer may not be engineered specifically for combat like the Zentradi, but she is a clone (of the Star Singer) that Xaos created specifically for combat use to support their PMC Division's Var suppression operations.  Until the end of the main story, she was treated like company property and kept in a lab most of the time when not on duty so no prolonged socialization wouldn't reveal the defects in her implanted knowledge and out her as a clone created just three years ago.

 

2 hours ago, jenius said:

One last question... runes bloom? What does that do/mean? Did they know that happened? Stuff got weird. 

It's not really explained properly.

"Runes" are sense organs that contain biologically-produced fold quartz and fold receptors, which seem to have been designed into the Windermereans by the Protoculture to give them a very mild, short-ranged empathic ability based on biologically-produced fold waves.  My guess would be that, given that resonance between fold wave sources has been a theme in Macross Delta, that runes "blooming" is some kind of resonance effect that occurs when large numbers of Windermereans are broadcasting the same strong emotion at the same time causing constructive interference (amplification).

 

2 hours ago, jenius said:

I thought, when they did the scene with Hayate going berserk because of Freyja's song, they were going to explore some sort of a symbiotic power the Protoculture devised as part of their effort to bring people together. Like, the fact they had Hayate with Freyja would have them overcome New Sharon Apple because she didn't have a matched pair. It kind of worked that way but more incidentally.

Given that using Var-like effects to boost physical ability was shown to be "Cast from Hit Points" even for Windermereans, causing them to age rapidly, that was probably never in the cards.  For Humans, it seems to be similar to hysterical strength and has all kinds of nasty physical consequences resulting from exceeding the structural limits of the body.  Hulking out like that just a few times was enough to put Messer Ihlefeld at death's door until Keith mercy-killed him (TV) or he just straight-up died (movie).

[pengbuzz]

On 10/26/2023 at 7:40 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Whether she's a pure Star Singer clone or Xaos's illegal clone lab had to fill in some gaps Jurassic Park-style we don't know.

Mikumo Guynemer may not be engineered specifically for combat like the Zentradi, but she is a clone (of the Star Singer) that Xaos created specifically for combat use to support their PMC Division's Var suppression operations.  Until the end of the main story, she was treated like company property and kept in a lab most of the time when not on duty so no prolonged socialization wouldn't reveal the defects in her implanted knowledge and out her as a clone created just three years ago.

So basically, she was a slave to her creators? Sad. Talk about having your life stolen even before you were born...

 

On 10/26/2023 at 7:40 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It's not really explained properly.

"Runes" are sense organs that contain biologically-produced fold quartz and fold receptors, which seem to have been designed into the Windermereans by the Protoculture to give them a very mild, short-ranged empathic ability based on biologically-produced fold waves.  My guess would be that, given that resonance between fold wave sources has been a theme in Macross Delta, that runes "blooming" is some kind of resonance effect that occurs when large numbers of Windermereans are broadcasting the same strong emotion at the same time causing constructive interference (amplification).

So with this in mind, I recall reading that the Protoculture seeded life throughout the galaxy. If this is true, and the Protoculture is known for creating the Zentraedi and the Evil series, did they also engineer Humanity in some way?

 

On 10/26/2023 at 7:40 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Given that using Var-like effects to boost physical ability was shown to be "Cast from Hit Points" even for Windermereans, causing them to age rapidly, that was probably never in the cards.  For Humans, it seems to be similar to hysterical strength and has all kinds of nasty physical consequences resulting from exceeding the structural limits of the body.  Hulking out like that just a few times was enough to put Messer Ihlefeld at death's door until Keith mercy-killed him (TV) or he just straight-up died (movie).

Wow...Messer really got the short end of the stick, didn't he?

[sketchley]

4 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

So with this in mind, I recall reading that the Protoculture seeded life throughout the galaxy. If this is true, and the Protoculture is known for creating the Zentraedi and the Evil series, did they also engineer Humanity in some way?

 

Short answer: yes.  They took a proto-human species on Earth and combined it with their DNA to make the human race (which they envisioned at the time as a "worker race" when they colonize the planet in the [distant] future).

 

Longer answers:

 1  The Protoculture Interference and the Installation of the "Bird Man" The Protoculture triggered the birth of the human race on the Earth. At that time, the Bird Man was placed to deter such things as self-destruction or the excessive development of civilization through wars and so on.

• Source: http://sdfyodogawa.mywebcommunity.org/MCRworldguide/02ABirdman.php

and

Planets inhabited by humanoids similar to Earth humans are likely to have experienced Protoculture interference.

• http://sdfyodogawa.mywebcommunity.org/MCRworldguide/01AProtoculture.php

 

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

So basically, she was a slave to her creators? Sad. Talk about having your life stolen even before you were born...

Yup.

Macross Delta is a metaseries that brings a lot of Unfortunate Implications to the table that the story acknowledges but never properly examines or resolves because they make the heroes (Xaos) look incredibly bad.

 

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Wow...Messer really got the short end of the stick, didn't he?

Yeah, I guess they were trying for the same kind of bait-and-switch that Macross Frontier did when they hinted that Ozma was going to die.

Passionate Walkure makes it look like Messer's going to survive when he dodges the shot that killed him in the Macross Delta TV series... only to die anyway a few minutes later from the damage Var syndrome did to his body.

 

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

So with this in mind, I recall reading that the Protoculture seeded life throughout the galaxy. If this is true, and the Protoculture is known for creating the Zentraedi and the Evil series, did they also engineer Humanity in some way?

Yeah, Humanity was engineered the same way the Protoculture created the other humanoids in the galaxy.

The topic comes up for the first time in one of the post-timeskip episodes of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, "Satan's Dolls", where the implications of the earlier discover that the Zentradi are virtually identical to Humans genetically are discussed... including the conclusion that Humanity is another creation of the Protoculture.  The official timeline and other materials explicitly confirmed that conclusion as fact, and even in-story it's essentially treated as the only reasonable/sane explanation for why every sentient species other than the Vajra is humanoid and apparently genetically compatible enough to produce viable hybrid offspring.

Macross Zero confirmed it in-story, when Humanity found the failsafe the ancient Protoculture left behind on Earth in case Humanity were to develop into a spacefaring species before resolving its own internal disputes.