moar

The real reason he had to die, of course, was because consummation of THAT marriage was going to be, depending on just how rotten an otaku you are, either the stuff of nightmares or the stuff of legends. I’ll admit that was I was a silent supporter of the “giant robot x giantess” idea. Because the other way around? Uh. No. NO.

The mecha in Macross Frontier were technically excellent, but I already knew how they worked, what their gimmicks were, and Macross F did nothing to reinvent the wheel. As a mecha fan, I kind of demand…well, something other than slightly flashier and prettier mecha. I want to be able to look at a robot and think about what the fictional engineers were thinking, and I couldn’t do that with Macross F.

The characters were actually the best part of the show, and if you had told me I would eventually grow to care about two modern J-pop singers, I would have laughed the idea off, but I’ll admit to getting attached to Ranka and Sheryl by the end. While the mecha were vanilla and unexciting for me as a mecha fan, ironically the part that I usually care less about became the main reason I kept watching the show.

But again as a Macross fan, the big difference between the relationships in the original Macross, and the ones in Macross Frontier, was that there was a termination point. Lots of stuff happened, that put the characters through hell and back, and in the middle of it all the main character has to eventually figure out which one of two girls he’s going to end up with. Alto doesn’t do that; by the end, which girl he’s really matched to well is still up in the air, to appease the fanboys. It feels like Alto is a character to whom events happen to, who never makes a choice for himself–because if he did, that would ruin the harem.

Klan Klan and Space Playboy were a lot more in line with what I’d say were closer to the “real” spirit of Macross–they had a relationship, but with a lot of problems that they needed to work out first, rather than the whole thing just being a smooth progression. But we don’t get to see too much of that, and for obvious reasons, we’ll never get a resolution out of it.

So, yes: we needed more Klan Klan.