this post contains spoilers for everything Macross Delta obviously. To live in fear of Spoilers is to live in fear of earnest discussion and comprehension of art.
I skipped this show when it aired for several reasons
- AKB0048-induced burnout. Wasn't up for another Shoji Kawamori Idol Anime after two seasons of that.
- Macross Frontier drove me insane in a way few other texts have. Love the ingredients but hate the recipe.
- My life was put on hold for a couple of years due to a bushfire and it's a miracle I did anything besides stare blankly at a wall in 2015-2016.
Shoji Kawamori announced that there's a new entry coming next year (produced by Studio Sunrise which I guess meant it was temporarily cancelled when Bamco announced they were dismantling that company then brought back after G-Witch succeeded) so it was time to tap into the past and catch up on Robot Nerd-dom's Weird Hippy Cousin.
I guess I'll discuss the usual three Ms of Macross.
Music
Idol Group is kind of a musical genre of its own that's developed from the Swedish-influenced works Yoko Kanno wrote back in Frontier to the Morning Musume/ABK48 group choruses of the early 2010s. I was worried we'd be getting somewhere between that or a bunch of Snow Halation type derivatives but this soundtrack is... not that. Yes the first song you hear has "Halation" in the title but it goes off the rails right from the get-go. Time signiatures switch all over the place and it kinda refuses to even really have things like "verses", let alone your standard pop/Sonata AABA or ABA structure. Influences range from 70s soul and funk, 80s power ballads, 90s sentimental pop and mid-2010s half-songs. There's all sorts of experimentation going on across the several albums the show and its lead group recorded and I think the only real downers are the first opening (tragically used in the TV show's climax) and the band's cover of Do You Remember Love.
Mecha
Boy the animation industry sure is in an ongoing state of crisis eh? The planes with legs maintain the CG tradition begun with Macross Zero and they're mostly fine. There's far more purely aerial dogfighting than the rapid state transitions of something like Macross Plus and that's honestly for the better. In pure robot form things feel a whole lot more lifeless but it's easy to make planes go whoosh without needing to use squash 'n stretch, complex arcs of motion and all that nitty-gritty that makes for great Acting in animation.
The real sign of the times is that this was one of the increasingly rare 26-ish episode TV shows but it couldn't really afford to animate action sequences after the first 13. The script's compelling enough to get away with this but I still remember when animation studios were capable of releasing a weekly Dunbine or Zeta Gundam 8 minutes of fighting for an entire year's worth of episodes.
The usual Artdink tie-in game slapped a gigantic vinyl sticker of Mikumo and Freyja on a VF-35 then gave it the best stat growth potential in the game. This is what all licensed games should aspire to do.
Mromance & Characters
It's increasingly rare to see a TV anime last longer than 13 episodes so it's a good thing this cast was a joy to hang out with! Hayate Immelman (we're really naming a guy Gale Coolfipperson huh?) is hardly the most inspired lead but he's got a zest for life that keeps scenes breezy. There's some heavy themes looming in this show so I enjoyed having a nice guy who learns to try his best and support his friends.
Freyja's in one of those classic Awkward Anime Zones where within the diegesis her equivalent age is probably around 22-ish but she's still actually 14 then 15 years old while serving as the principal love interest. Toeing that AnCap Libertarian line aside (and indeed precedents set by SDF Macross in '83), Freyja's a delightful contrast to the pure naievete of Ranka Lee in the previous show. A nice guy and a passionate 'n slightly mischievous girl build each other up and eventually come to something more. It's such easy viewing and prevents the show from getting bogged down in too many periods of navel gazing and angst.
Poor Mirage. She can't live up to her family's legacy of ace pilots, is in over her head as an instructor and flight leader and she's fighting from behind in the game of love. Frontier went in hard on milking love triangle tensions so it was, once again, refreshing to have a show where tensions are more on the back foot. Mirage learns to loosen up only to realise it's too late to actually pursue a relationship with Hayate. Much like other aspects of her life, she realises she's not the main character in this story but she can clear the paths required for those who are to shine. Maybe she can outdo the problematic Hayate x Freyja age gap discourse by flirting with the 3 year old Mikumo or something.
The rest of the Walkure band are a fun time. Kaname is the oldest of the group and a veteran of the industry so it makes sense that she has more of a mid-late 00s vibe going on. Thirsting for daddies, angsty farewells to bad boys and all that. There's two lesbians! Society's moved to the point where you can show girls holding hands in a sexually suggestive way but as of 2023 we still can't really do kissing or have them stare at each other and say "I'm in lesbians with you" but it's notable how... un-notable this couple are. There's five girls and two of them are really gay. It makes it all the funnier when one of the show's villains starts to have it down bad for Reina.
Mikumo is a DND character sheet where at the time of creation the player happened to roll an 18 on all stats. She's not allowed to fly a Valkyrie because this show needs narrative tension. 3 year old genetically engineered people have to be Asexual because otherwise this would be a harem anime too powerful for this world. The next generation's Max Jenius.
My biggest criticism of the cast is the bridge crew don't get enough scenes. One of them has a funny jellyfish hat and another adopts Misa's hair in the second movie. Hooray!
Politics
Oh no, this show has these!
Okay let me talk about the original Macross. That's a show with its own messy thesis that's roughly "military governments are bad and untrustworthy but also this one Anarchist is a fucking asshole". The most interesting thing about its antagonists, the Zentradi is they're the rare fictional depiction of a Fascist movement that's incredibly old. Fascist groups usually don't last all that long because they can't accurately assess threats (enemies are simultaneously all-powerful cabals yet also frail degenerate weaklings) properly. The pursuit of eternal war and noble death in battle means there must always be a group to wage war against and thus internal purges are inevitable. Indeed, that's basically what happened to the Protocultre in the first place: they developed supersoldiers, taught them to be fascist and then whoops, the Zentradi killed their masters and now aimlessly wander the galaxy looking for the secret true threat of the Supervision Army, not realising that it's them.
The Zentradi spent millenia living lives of violence and basic survival with no other knowledge imparted. After all, all knowledge is already known under Fascism. Their society has literally nothing else to do and no motivation to live beyond fear of what happens beyond the immediate conflict. It's no surprise that a single tape of a pretty lady singing about her pilot boyfriend had the power it did. Literally any evidence that life has beauty on its own terms would do it. And this tape's now letting us know that you can have sex too???
It's a great political piece but it provides a very convenient founding myth for the world of Macross. Over the course of the original show and its sequels through to Frontier, you can solve all problems with a song and a dance and a belief in free love. Music tears down fascism, gives life to vampires and proves your humanity so brightly and obviously that even teleporting insects respect your personhood.
A rather convenient seg of circumstances, eh?
The world of Macross has kinda become this gigantic fleet of little Singapores that gleefully spread out into the galaxy, buying and selling consumer goods and making lots of music and movies. Almost every other species in the galaxy so far is a Protoculture genetic manipulation experiment, and thus the remnanets of Earthling Humanity have spent over half a century zipping around, playing the tapes and then learning they can have sex with the residents of the latest planet encountered, further bringing Galactic civilisation into a single mongrel race.
It's a bit Colonialist, innit?
Macross Delta starts to ask the question of whether the New United Nations Spacy's really doing this out of a positive free love motivation, or whether there's something more ~sinister~ (but not defined by the show as that'd require a more overt critique of extractive Capital) going on.
The spanner in the New United Nations' love & peace methodology comes as the galactic community meets the planet Windermere. It's a positional backwater (mostly surrounded by weird gravity wells so there's only one point to Fold into the star system). It's mostly an Agricultural society built around apple orchards. It's an Absolute Monarchy. This particular branch of Protoculture bioengineering was built around people with above average agility, reactions, brain power etc. at the cost of an average lifespan of 30 years. They have their own long folk music traditions built around singers gifted with a connection to their air currents, and legends of singers who spoke to the heavens themselves.
After a presumably Chinese Dynasty legnth of time alone, suddenly this fleet of humans who live twice as long arrive and tell them to start trading, start buying their own goods, their own music and to adopt their own military doctrine. There was a local resistance to this trend resulting in a brutal war for independance. A non-aggression treaty was signed after the New United Nations Spacy dropped a Dimension Eater, the Macross world's political equivalent of a nuclear bomb on a township.
So far so good, we have a conflict with an aggrieved people who are questioning the hegemony of the last 32 years of Macross. They have a sense of duty, are proud of their own culture and traditions and are only building up the conflict in the show itself because of a bad faith actor hijacking their political system for his own deranged plans. Good place to start a spicy deconstructive entry into the series, right?
There's just one problem: upon learning that the universe is larger and more diverse than ever thought possible, after learning to dive into researching their planet's own Protoculture relics this society quit unequivocably concluded that they are an inherently superior chosen people. It's not one or two bad faith actors who say it. Everyone does. Windermere seeks dominion of the Globular Cluster segment of the galaxy because they dug up an ancient text that showed some connecting monuments and therefore they have a right to own those planets and do what they want to the people on them. That includes using the relics to build mass mind control machines.
Windermere are young Fascists.
All knowledge is already known and it proves a connection to vast Ancient Progenitor that they are the True Heirs to. It's the occult branch of fascist thought! On top of the already mentioned racism the society's portrayed as rather sexist as well. Part of why Freyja leaves Windermere at the start of the show is the town mayor intends to force her into marriage and the rest of the town supports this move. In the entire 26 episode television show Freyja is the only Windermerian woman who has a speaking role and is almost the only woman from their society visually depicted at all. It takes until the sequel movie for another Windermere woman to speak and even then it's about marriage!
A huge amount of the show's runtime is given to Windermere royalty, Lloyd's (yes I know the official translation is Roid, please stop making this weird blunder) secret machinations and the soldiers who are backing the plan. The soldiers love to wax on about how they know they're Being Bad and "staining their wings black", acting like they're making some noble sacrifice for the greater good. They're not though. They're enacting a racial supremacist project that even without Lloyd's secret plans would still be about brutally subjugating other sapient people. This is why I didn't bring these fuckers up when talking about characters. These guys all fucking suck and Windermere needs to burn. Hell, even after Lloyd's been dispatched by his ex-boyfriend and the sequel movie introduces new villains, Windermere still suck! There's a nice friendly cute boy on the throne but the local Proud Boys still break up parties where Earth-adjacent people are hanging out. Even when one of those noble knights tells them to stop, he frames it as "look I agree with your racist hatred but it'd be a bit rude and politically inconvenient if you break up this specific gathering right now. Do it again tomorrow".
The potentially complicated critique of certain Macross themes is undermined by a deep confusion about how it decides to portray this particular conflict. Various plot details in the sequel movie leave plenty of room for the next Macross show to continue directly from this point and I'm kind of torn on whether I want to see a show do that discussion or to jump forward a few decades and show how the short lives of Windermerians meant another 30 or so years was enough for them to get on the galactic fuck-train and have a more peaceful integration into society.
The TV Show's Climax
I talked about the original Macross TV show's political reading but there's the complications caused by its compilation movie/remake Do You Remember Love? See, rather than the broader culture shock undermining the ancient fascist Zentradi military there's also an old Protoculture song and lyrics found. The movie kinda implies that maybe this song was developed as a Manchurian Candidate type of activation code to dismantle rogue Zentradi. Macross 7 implies that this movie exists in-universe as a state propaganda piece to help with the New UN's founding mythology (humanity was nearly made extinct in the original show and the government doesn't want that pinned on them). Alas, Macross Delta decides to start bringing it into the fold as part of the canon events.
There's this weird Orientalist charicature of a man voiced by Fujiwara Keiji (who tragically died during production leading to an awkward re-casting late in the show) who stares directly at the camera and tells the audience that they should think about the metaphysics and not the politics of those events. It's part of an episode that's all about tying together disparate elements of all the previous Macross shows to more clearly define aspects of the Protoculture, the mysterious ancient progenitor race that vanished from the galaxy millenia ago.
I think it's a really boring way to go about using Protoculture Relics as a plot device. Creating a singular Grand Protoculture Theory is less interesting to me than the current day consequences of people using what they find. A singular Truth interest me less than the truths learned along the way and all that. It all has to be done though because Lloyd has a secret master plan: use the Protoculture Relics not for mass mind control like the rest of his Windermerian shitheads but for something grander, something eternal, something that'll surpass the short mortal limits of the average Windermerian lifespan...
...the Human Instrumentality Project.
Yep, we're going there. Macross is a media franchise born from what was really the first generation of anime artists and writers to have a decade of anime to take influence from. It should be no surprise that Evangelion's enormous influence would finally show up in a Macross. It just feels so trite and contrived. I've put out so many words discussing ideas that I wished the show put more thought into, but it can't because it wants to build to being yet another cartoon that says "hey it's cool to be our own unique selves!"
This is what makes certain moments of nostalgic bait and tying together elements of previous Macross works in this show's climax so annoying to me. We're bringing back Do You Remember Love?, a work of stunning beauty that our real world society may have genuinely lost the knowledge of how to reproduce and we're using it in service of mimicking another guy's story. Let's ignore our own interesting ideas and questions about the future in favour of worshipping the past.
What's even more annoying is that since this project is kept a mysterious secret to be solved for so long, it gets in the way of one of the other ideas the show has. See, Lloyd has an ex-boyfriend named Keith who leads the Windermerian elite air force unit. The two of them went on a wild flight in their youth and the experience impacted their worldview for the rest of their lives. For Lloyd, it convinced him that the universe is so large and complicated that more than 30 years are needed by any one person to comprehend it. The eternal must be grasped and controlled. For Keith, the opposite was learned. Life is beautiful and meaningful because it's short. Whether it's 30 or 85 years we have, if it wasn't spent striving to shine and make something beautiful then it had no meaning. Alas, Lloyd's motivations are tied into his Secret Plan and thus can't be elaborated on for most of the 26 episode runtime. This hurts all those scenes trying to make you sympathetic to the Windermerians even more. Half the time they're not even allowed to discuss ideas until the very last second, at which point one nobody cares about these boys.
Fortunately, as long as I have rambled for here, it's more of an irritant than a show killer. The music plays and the characters worth caring about are back on the screen. Mirage is one of the greatest Wingmen in history and all the emotional beats related to Our Heroes stick the landing. As cliche as the climax is, the direction is such that I left the show with a spring in my step and a song in my heart. Ikenai Borderline to be precise.
THE SEQUEL MOVIE
There's a sequel movie but I don't really feel like talking about it. It's for the most part great! Earlier I alluded to it leaving room to either make a direct continuation or jump ahead in time and I'm fine with either. It's worth mentioning that it again introduces a Fascist group and this time they're the Italian Futurist type. You can do so much with this concept and I hope they're expanded on going forward.
This movie also has the courage to kill Freyja at the end. The show built up that whole "life is worth living to your most even if it kills you" and since the Protoculture machines weren't revealed to be a system to turn off the rapid aging for Windermerians or something, I respect them going all in on the bittersweet ending. Hayate and Freyja had the romance of sweet youngsters but they both maturely accepted the inevitable tragedy of their circumstances. The pacing throughout the show and movie builds to the moment in a way that feels earned and the characters are charismatic enough that it stings in the right way. After all the frustrations of Frontier it was nice to see a work that on average really felt like it confidently knew what it wanted to, wanted to say and how to go about doing so. At least on the emotional level.
Maximillian Jenius is the fucking man. This movie was Daddy City.
If you have somehow re-read all of this post since I migrated it from cohost.org then congratulations you also get to learn that Mikumo was such an intense moment of Gender Euphoria for me. That's who I wanna be and what I want my vocals as a woman to sound like.
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