The Patreon Letters - 16th Feb, 2020

Hello everyone! Em here after our one week production break to finally settle in and catch up on some of these Patreon letters! Thank you everyone for your patience, and let's get started with some much delayed thoughts on a show I recently finished. That's right, it's time for Macross 7 feelings!

Obviously, spoilers for Macross 7 throughout

I went into Macross 7 with a lot of disinterest for a series that I've mostly been positive on. Macross has been a fraught experience for us on the podcast, veering between moments of real emotional nuance and some of the worst anime metaphor we've ever had to talk about for the podcast. While I was certainly more positive on Macross Plus than Jackson was, I was also pretty tired of Macross constantly circling the drain of being just good enough with the robots and music parts to justify everything else. Knowing that 7 was leaning into trying to reintegrate the two versions of original Macross and be a direct sequel to it did not inspire a ton of confidence—Do You Remember Love? is fucking TERRIBLE and I mostly want to forget it.

It doesn't help that, let's face it, Macross 7 starts off in the worst possible light. Basara is an exhausting protagonist early on, constantly ignoring the very real concerns of his friends and the situations the city is in to run off and sing at aliens in the most inconsiderate way. Anime protagonists often have the problem of just doing the thing they believe in and damning the consequences, but Macross already is a franchise with a lot of weight behind the idea of actions mattering that Basara immediately grates against with his Goku-like fixation on singing to move people. You just want to throttle him, because he definitely does it every single episode.

Over time, however, I found myself softening on him. Part of that was seeing him start to actually make headway, as the other paths forward (military, just getting eaten by psychic vampires) started feeling like worse and worse options independent of anything he did. Also because as we get to know the members of Fire Bomber it becomes increasingly clear that Basara both does care and is fundamentally incapable of expressing that care normally. While this would be a problem for a protagonist, the back half of Macross 7 starts to drift from him as he fixates on using his songs to reanimate Sivil, one of the Protodeviln vampires who have been trying to devour the life force of the Macross 7. With him out of the picture, a different suggestion of protagonist arises: Mylene, the youngest daughter of Max and Milia, and bassist for Fire Bomber.

It's with the pivot to Mylene being the main POV character that Macross 7 starts to become a show worth special mention. She's a fantastic character to drive the show, hot-headed and incapable of not just shouting her feelings, constantly torn between responsibility and being a messy teen who kinda crushes on the boys in her life but also not really, desperately trying to keep up with the Chosen Musical Powerhouse energy of Basara as she too wants to be able to sing and achieve through song those things that Macross has always hung its hat on: culture shock, peace, the bridging of cultures through protoculture. 

Also she's ridiculous, with ridiculous parents we already love constantly being impediments to her life. Max as the captain and Milia as the mayor and both of them being very frustrated with how they've become boring adults of the heroes we loved in Macross is itself a good energy to bring into a sequel, but Mylene being generally disinterested in all of the drama of her parents' middle aged pathos because she's got bigger problems is really the epitome of why sequels and generational stories can be exceptional in ways few other narratives can. Time passes, a new generation doesn't get it, and the old generation doesn't get them. We can enjoy being decentered from protagonists even as we are awash in the fan service of seeing the long coda of their happy ever after through someone else's eyes. The best of both worlds.

It's that energy of the expanded family and the feelings of life going on that really sets Macross 7 apart. Yes, they're fighting an evil space empire with the power of rock music. Yes, the planes still gerwalk and still turn into robots. Yes, Exsedol is still a giant man and you wish more of the Zentradi hadn't been miclonized. But in reality this is as much a slice of life story about how being in a band can feel like life and death and sometimes you can't go fight the space war because you need to record these masters and now the band is fighting because the vocalists are bickering about something stupid and one of them marched out of the studio. The Fire Bomber plots are thoughtfully sedate, like when their first performance tour is to elementary schools and old folks homes and none of them know what to make of this modest start. 

And part of the reason this stuff works specifically in the context of a Macross sequel is because we've spent a decades long span in this universe, so when they play at the old folks home they're playing for people who were veterans in the tail end of the Earth-Zentradi war and remember Lynn Minmay singing to end the battle. Because when they get famous enough to be cast in a TV movie about Minmay, Mylene has to deal with her mom showing up to order everyone around as she insists she can still play herself three decades later. The cultural cruft of history gets to lay around this show with an intensity that makes the show's general disinterest in indulging in it palpable. Macross is just a thing that happened to the world of Macross 7, and it influences everyone differently, just like history does every day.

With all this said, it would be misguided to say that the show is all positive. The Macross problems are extremely present. The villains again are people with only a dim understanding of culture that have to be defeated through the power of artistic imperialism (seemingly an inescapable aspect of the universe). The tensions between the humans and Zentradi are almost nonexistent but when they do crop up it's in embarrassing ways that suggest many of the biggest problems of Macross Plus. There's a whole episode about how the protodeviln reawaken the Zentradi desire for war, and it goes relatively unremarked upon other than Milia having to remind everyone that she too is Zentradi and had to suppress her violent nature. It sucks, and rarely feels like it knows what it's doing with the loaded racial components of the now blended culture. 

The most ridiculous example comes 2/3 of the way into the show, when the Macross 7 finds a long lost protoculture temple and inside a vault that will supposedly open when it recognizes the Key of Peace. What this is is unclear, until plot machinations mean that the heroes get attacked and Mylene lightly cut to where she drops a bit of blood on the stones. When that happens, the vault opens up, and Exsedol and the Protoculture memory remnant both talk at length about how only a person with dual heritage, half Human and half Zentradi, could be the Key of Peace. Only when war is over could the two cultures intermingle enough to produce a child, and thus that child has to signify a better era. Which is absolutely the most brain-broken faux progressive thing I've ever heard, but the show plays the moment completely straight. Truly, war must be over and an eternal piece achieved if a biracial person exists. 

Macross 7 is truly a show that doesn't see culture. It would have voted for Obama a third term. It's really all in on Warren, and tries not to think about the DNA test. 

That I like the show despite all of this speaks to the character work I went on at length about before, because ... well, Macross 7 doesn't fix a damn thing about Macross other than ignoring the stuff I hated the most. It rarely comes up, it's poorly addressed, and the show goes back to concerts and robots as fast as possible. And on some level? I'm okay with it. The show so immediately plants its flag as being a high energy show about comedy and action in a way that none of the prior Macross entries do, and it makes me more sympathetic to its attempts to escape the gravity of its own franchise. Yes, it's absolutely a coward's move. But also, I genuinely liked a lot of Macross, and going back into that world able to feel positive about it at all without deep and pervasive misgivings is nice to me, a Macross fan(??).

I think Macross 7 is a great show. I think it's often very silly, and I think when it tries to say stuff it fumbles that badly, but it's clearly not the priority. On that front, I had a great time, and I think fondly about Fire Bomber and the other members of Macross 7 City pretty regularly since I finished the show a few weeks ago. And given how sour the memory of SDF Macross is for me at this point? I'll take it. A lesser show done well is sometimes all you need, not everything can be ZZ Gundam. God, that would be exhausting. 

Until next time,

Em

PS: I did watch the follow ups to Macross 7 also, and they don't bear much mention here, but I will say that the Macross 7 Plus shorts are cute and fun, the Encore OVA is genuinely the best type of fan service if you've watched the rest of Macross up until then, and the movie is extremely cool. There's a sequel OVA called Macross 7 Dynamite that was pretty bad even before it introduced an unnecessary and upsetting sexual assault scene in episode 2 that was so out of nowhere and unpleasant I stopped watching it immediately.

I don't recommend watching that one. In fact, I recommend forgetting it exists entirely and then putting of Macross Zero like I currently am. 

Some day.