mech798 wrote:The problem is that within the anime itself, there are tremendously contractidoroy bits of evidence for the zentraadi bombardment.
Eh... yes and no. Those problems are exclusively consequences of the rushed and rather sloppy
Robotech adaptation and various attempts by licensed materials to make the setting far bigger than it actually was.
mech798 wrote:On the one hand, we have Rick being amazed at flowers growing outside a reclamation zone.
On the other hand, we have Khyron's ship in a jungle.
The first problem is that jungles are not durable environmental structures--to the contrary, they're immensely delicate. The only way an Amazon Jungle survives two years after the bombardment is with a robust ecological backing. Which somehow indicates the Zentraedi managed to miss a part of the world that today, even ignoring major population sites such as cities, has a population in the millions. And again, if the bombardment was as bad as it was portrayed in teh movie--there wouldn't be any jungle, at all, because jungles are less durable than the kind of grasslands you find in the North American zones.
So that's evidence the first for a bombardment not being nearly as devastating as claimed. (Not to mention that Khyron was hiding in it. If there was only a little bit of the Amazon left, well, it would have been examined, especially if Rick is freaking out over some flowers). Doylist answer: The Japanese animators wanted a jungle and a story about giant warriors who freak out over J-pop is probably not going to tip the Hard Science scale very hard.
Well, you're not wrong about how fragile jungles are... but you'd be wrong to assume that a robust ecological backing is the ONLY way one would exist.
One aspect of the original story that was almost completely lost in the
Robotech adaptation is that there was a massive government effort underway after the war to deal with the consequences of the orbital bombardment, keep Earth habitable, and the long-term recovery of the planet's ecosystem through the gratuitous abuse of cloning and genetic engineering technology. Earth's surface was a near-total loss with only a few tiny pockets of its original ecology surviving. The New UN Government installed a 500km-diameter solar shade in orbit to mitigate the effects of global warming, seeded a vast area of the ocean with genetically-engineered designer phytoplankton to scrub contaminants from the seawater and manage atmospheric composition, deployed similar designer bacteria to restore Earth's soil and clean up areas of radioactive contamination, used various means to deal with the atmospheric particulate levels, and used DNA from seed and gene banks to begin reconstructing native ecosystems through cloning and genetic modification.
Hikaru being shocked to find flowers growing wild outside of a Nature Regeneration Project work zone and Quamzin's ship being partially buried in a forest aren't contradictions... they're a connection. The wreck Quamzin salvaged was one that crashed in an area that was later targeted by the Nature Regeneration Project.
One thing to avoid when pondering topics like this is the assumption that the Japanese creators didn't think things through. Unlike
Robotech's creators, they went into their work with a substantial amount of time and forethought instead of making it up as they went.
mech798 wrote:The second problem (we'll ignore the doylist bit of them being two different shows after Robotech) comes from both SC and New Generation, or their proliferation of cities. In Southern Cross, we know of New Macross and at least two other settlements described as cities. Even if they're small cities, say 20K, that's still over half the survivors, and 20 odd years isn't enough for new reproduction to replace everyone lost, even if some draconian "every woman is always pregnant" policy is followed, which wasn't a problem for Macross because they used cloning, but cloning is never even referenced in Robotechk, outside of the Zentraedi. (that's especially problematic when we see the scenes of people evacuating in various episodes--clearly thousands of civilians, many of them clearly older than the date of the Zentraedi attack).
The definition of terms like "city", "town", or "village" isn't applied consistently even today... so I don't think this is really an issue. Every culture or government sets their own standard, and even then that's not always followed.
This would have been less of a problem if
Robotech's rewriters had more closely followed the original material, but it is what it is.
mech798 wrote:The problem gets worse in Next Generation, because we find yet another city--Detroit, and yet this is defined as a full scale urban city, complete with skyscrapers, that was evacuated during the second conflict, and either was built (implying a much larger population base) or survived the bombardment (implying a far less intensive bombardment than we got in macross).
Alternatively, you could argue the city did not suffer a direct hit and its population was wiped out anyway by starvation, a lack of access to clean water, atmospheric pollution, etc. and the people we're shown inhabited the city after the fact.
mech798 wrote:then there are the trees, most of them obviously old growth trees, which indicates anywhere from twenty to fifty year age, and again, a forest is very hard to build "from scratch" because it's such an integrated ecosystem. (We should note that the various scenes of earth we get in Macross properties don't have much in teh way of forests, they have cities and wastelands, which indicates that in Macross, even though it has a far higher degree of sophistication than Robotech, reforesting earth either proved impossible, or impractical).
Mind you, this is a problem between the Masters Saga and New Generation. "Earth" is shown to be largely desolate in the Masters Saga with very little vegetation of any type to be seen except around SX Point 83 where the remains of the protoculture matrix reside. There's a loss of containment there at the end of the Masters invasion and the next time we see Earth it's got an awful lot of forests to hide in. One could surmise that these two situations are connected, and that that flower of life somehow accelerated the recovery of the natural ecosystem.
(The desolation of "Earth" in the Masters Saga is a product of
Southern Cross not being set on Earth at all. Earth in that setting c.2120 had been rendered incapable of supporting life in a nuclear holocaust and Glorie, the planet the series takes place on, recently emerged from an ice age with the assistance of human terraforming efforts. Its low levels of large surface vegetation are an effect of the planet's still-frankly-awful surface conditions.)
For
Macross, well, terraforming a planet-sized parking lot is time consuming even when you have advanced alien genetic engineering and cloning technology to help. In that setting, the recovery of Earth's ecosystem is expected to take thousands of years despite the most advanced technology in the modern galaxy.
mech798 wrote:And then of course there is New York , which is either a stunning example of bad marksmanship by the Zentreadi--or there were enough people giving on earth, to force them to rebuild a city--and more importantly, forced them to rebuild a city that is largely useful due to it's position on the coast--which indicates other cities that need seaborne trade, a point somewhat reinforced by the existence of patrol boats in New Generation, which would be more or less useless against an alien attack, but would be quite useful to police local shipping.
Same as the above for Detroit, really... it doesn't have to be a rebuilt city. It can be explained as a re-occupied city that lost its population without being simply wiped off the map.
mech798 wrote:But in Robotech, the later shows especially indicate that this could not have been the case--there are just too many settlements, too many examples of well-established flora and fauna, and too many people running around who are old enough to be part of the surviving generation, and yet are not part of the military, to the point where we have news media, news conferences, and a fairly big government, instead of the kind of small government you'd naturally get for a few hundred thousand people, most of whom are military.
So... apart from the topics I've already covered above, the
Robotech official setting's position on some of these topics offers explanations as well.
For instance, the government isn't "fairly big"... it's "mostly fake". Per HG's position on it, the government is essentially purely for show and doesn't actually govern anything. The military holds all of the actual power on Earth and the UEG is basically its Public Relations division. The existence of news media is covered right in the Macross Saga so it doesn't really need to be discussed in depth.
mech798 wrote:(You know, thinking of that, is there any kind of timeline on when Macross earth did get a civilian government? Gloval was running things for a fair long time, but at some point they did go civilian).
Officially? Earth established the New Unification Government in April 2010, about two months after the war ended. Prior to the atmospheric decontamination process reaching safe particulate levels the
de facto capital was established inside the
Macross and later moved out into Macross City once that was established around the ship.
Per
Macross Outside Story: the Lost Two Years, which discusses the events of the timeskip between episodes 27 and 28, Brigadier General Bruno J. Global was its founding chief executive due to his status as essentially the only person in a position to coordinate relief efforts. (This is presumably why the New UN Forces later named an aircraft carrier after him - the
Uraga-class CV-339
Bruno J. Global - in addition to the mass production
Macross-class ship SDFN-04
General Bruno J. Global that was named in his honor for his military service. The UN Forces previously named two other aircraft carriers after other Unification Government chief executives: ARMD/SCV-01
Harlan J. Niven and ARMD/SCV-14
Robert A. Rhysling.)
mech798 wrote:But this doesn't make the EBSIS make any more sense, because it's a bad mishmash of 1980s evil Russians, and people who seem to be attacking for no other reason than to attack.
Well, there are signs that it's coming back into vogue... but it was pretty cliched even back then.
mech798 wrote:But this ultimately is all tangential to the real problem. Palladium came up with the EBSIS because without them... there's not much to do. Robotech is a tremendously barren gaming environment. The big issues are all handled by the main characters (who are not you) and the events are tightly written, not leaving much room for people to do anything other than play the other guys--like Rick Hunter and Scott Bernard only not as cool.
Precisely right.
mech798 wrote:That's why if you look at it, Robotech, from Marcross to Shadow Chronicles, pretty much as the same plot. Aliens show up, Aliens look for some MacGuffin, humans fight the aliens, and either squeak out a victory that only prepares them for the next battle or manage a ruinous draw. Rinse and repeat only with fewer humans at every point.
To be fair, that's a problem that
Robotech mostly inherited from the source material.
Macross was an unexpected runaway hit, and the other two shows used in
Robotech were shows that jumped on its particular bandwagon.
MOSPEADA was a series by
Macross's original sponsor that got hijacked by its toy partners being green-eyed jealous of
Macross's toy licensing, and
Southern Cross was Tatsunoko's attempt to make the
Macross lightning strike twice but in a way they could claim the lion's share of the profits from. Stringing
Macross and two
Macross copycats together sounds smart on paper but it's less so in reality when you're trying to make three stories about humanity's first apocalyptic alien war join up in the middle.
mech798 wrote:It's... well it's not very good as a cartoon, but it's absolutely devastating for an RPG. The reason Palladium had tons of books about the aftermath of Macross was that there's not much to do for a PC during Macross. I mean, honestly, you can see that in the dearth of new products coming out, since HG got serious about "Canon" because HG's canon is a tremendously barren field.
Yeah... admittedly even in official original
Macross side stories, it's mostly just faffing about in the proximity of the stuff the main characters are doing.
HG getting serious about canon was in expectation that RTSC would take off and they'd have to be taken seriously as a proper bloody mecha anime franchise. They did not expect the OVA to tank at all, never mind tank so hard that it got panned by the
Robotech fanbase itself and cancelled with prejudice by HG's own management. "With the best of intentions, and the worst of luck". I honestly feel bad for the HG staff. They were genuinely trying, but they just did not have the resources to succeed. That has to be pretty hard to take.
mech798 wrote:Now Macross from Japan? that's a different matter of course. They've had love stories (with killer AI), renegade criminals, wandering fleets of zentradi, conspiracies within and without migration fleets--you can do just about anything you want in Macross, because unlike Robotech, there are lots of people, lots of places at (more or less) peace, and an immense amount of uncharted territory to explore without having to worry about breaking canon.
Really, it's the emigrant fleets that are what really opened that setting up. The main characters from the original obligingly sail off into the metaphorical sunset to never be seen again and the setting then has literally hundreds of what one contributor here once called "vagabond space cities" - he meant it derisively but it's just
so apt - wandering the galaxy looking for a new home. So that's narrative license to do basically
anything. It's a great big narrative blank slate that's allowed Kawamori and co. to tell stories about rock bands fighting space vampires, conservationists fighting illegal whaling, a rogue AI trying to kill the man it loves,
Ghost in the Shell-tier intrigues and navel-gazing about the nature of humanity and consciousness, and even political dramas about the "Reality Ensues" consequences of total pacifism and the volatility of any passionate social movement.
Unfortunately,
Robotech just kind of arbitrarily threw colony ships into its setting purely as a justification for the
Ark Angel taking on the same role occupied by the SDF-1 in their plans for the "Shadow Saga", so the setting wouldn't have gotten the same degree of freedom even if they'd finished the OVA.
mech798 wrote:Which, since this is an HG board, proves that what HG must do is try to negotiate the rights to Macross and say farewell to Robotech.
Well, that's pretty much sorted... HG has bent the knee after getting a spider's worth of black eyes in court and agreed to facilitate
Macross releases worldwide instead of opposing them, so we'll likely see
Robotech become an artifact title like
Star Blazers is on new
Yamato releases.
