[RFC] Being You is Deculture

[Black Aeronaut]

Again, sorry for taking so long to get back to this before. I can't really even plead much in the way of RL hassle as an excuse, just an excess of shiny objects vying for my attention.

Salright.  

<snip>*Stuff about games here* </snip>

Thanks.  Seeing as these are all probably Japanese language only (fuck you very much, Harmony Gold!) I'll have to see if anyone has done any English patches on these.  Given how big the Macross fandom is, I would be surprised if they didn't exist.

MISSION MUTHERFUCKIN' ACCOMPLISHED.

Seriously, I feel that Kamjin as a character is grossly underutilized despite the amount of screentime he gets, so I'm aiming to do something about that.

I wholeheartedly agree, as my earlier comments about how his discovering what that "love" thing the Micronians had been blathering about all this time with Azonia over the course of that one epilogue episode and realizing it, like, less than a minute before they die is one of the most underdeveloped character arcs in the entire franchise should suggest. Heck, in M30 he falls for Mylene and joins the hero cast for the final boss fight. I'm loving what you're doing here so far.

Well, I do plan on preserving the thing he gets going on with Azonia.  They really do make for a cute couple in a ways...

God, I can only imagine how they'd react when Azonia inevitably winds up pregnant.  They'll either become so outrageously dysfunctional that it circles back around to somehow being functional... Or they actually mellow out and become relatively normal parents...  Although I would expect that any children of theirs would come out highly disciplined.

I held no pity for her, because she of all people should expect nothing less from a woman marrying a hot-dog fighter ace like Roy.

Oh, Claudia! Hopefully Gar can arrange things to keep her and Gloval alive this time around... suggest installing an escape pod for the bridge crew, at least.

I always thought that was just a Robotech-ism that saw to Gloval getting offed like that.  But no worries.  Things are gonna diverge to such an extent that this won't even be an issue.

I'm not sure actually - like I said, it's been a very long time since I watched SDFM TV. I'm glad that you're planning on getting well off the rails, though. It's something that can be hard to do even with the best intentions since it means not being able to just lightly retool the set pieces every fan knows and loves (or loves to hate.)

Yeah, things are about to go wildly off the rails.

It will start with Gloval's debriefing in Anchorage... Basically, the top brass will demand that Garrick be remanded into their custody on charges of high treason.  Gloval and Misa both balk and they wind up getting confined to quarters pending a courts martial for insubordination and failure to obey orders, and the Brass starts looking for someone to send back to the SDF-1 in Gloval's place.  Of course, they're having a hard time of that because all the viable officers are taking one look at the situation and going "Oh HEEEEELLLLLLLL NAH!"  Not only because it would be a suicide mission, but one that knowingly condemns the civilians of Macross City to death.

Now that I think about it, this would cause a very profound schism to form in the UN Spacey - one that would gain the immediate attention of the UN General Assembly.  That, combined with Garrick's leaked information to the British diplomats, causes the UN to collectively field-day the hell out of UN Spacey High Command.  The Hague is about to see some very interesting legal actions go down.

Meanwhile, Garrick has sprung into action as he is won't to do and springs Captain Gloval using his C-Space.  But Misa opts to stay behind.  Her father wouldn't dream of holding her up on charges, especially if she refuses to go with them.  And someone needs to stay behind and do what they can for their situation.  The SDF-1 goes rogue, though it's not like as if anyone particularly cares at this point since the general knowledge is that they were supposed to be dead anyhow.  The incident where part of Canada gets vaporized by the overloading of the SDF-1's full coverage barrier doesn't happen.  As per Garrick's recommendation, they forego trying to off-load the civilians, based on his very sound argument that Kamjin would take the moment of vulnerability as an opportunity to attack.

Back on Earth, the entire upper-level leadership of the Spacey is shit-canned for the moment.  It's more of a "We'll deal with you pricks later - we got bigger fish to fry now no thanks to you!"

Basically, the whole of the UN has shat platinum bricks and they throw the whole world into a state of emergency - they nationalize just about every scrap of construction material and equipment on the planet and go full-bore on building shelters.  In fact, the entire planet goes full-on socialist mode as everyone suddenly has to ration everything.

Old shelters are inspected and reactivated.  New ones are built, but they are basic as all hell - just enough amenities to last about a week because they figure that if they gotta hold out any longer than that, they're screwed anyways.  Anything and everything that can be repurposed into a shelter is, such as the Wieliczka salt mines in Poland and various underground cities elsewhere in the world.

Once it's all said and done, Earth is still going to be missing a large majority of its original population, but it won't be so bad that they need to rely on cloning to repopulate.  There will be a massive wave of childbirths at the end of the first year, followed by a second smaller wave that is notable because it was mainly Meltrans giving birth.  Which will be interesting times because a good number of them were NOT micloned!

(Industry will be caught completely flat-footed here as there is a sudden need for infant products in Zentradi scale.  If it weren't for the implications for the new mothers and children it would have been funny as hell.  Fortunately, Zentradi are pragmatic people and made do by adapting wares they had on hand to the task.)

Kamjin, meanwhile, will have his Malcontents.  However, when he captures Minmei he agrees to at least parlay with Garrick.  Garrick offers them a two-front solution: remain as soldiers and train and drill as a proper military, and introduces them to Earth's athletic entertainment - primarily the various forms of Football.

It's not a perfect fix - Kamjin has no desire to ally with them just yet - but he welcomes the new forms of entertainment and comments that perhaps saving the micronians from total destruction was a worthwhile thing after all.

However, he doesn't relent on releasing Minmei until he and Garrick finally get to having that duel without anyone interfering.  Trouble is they can't decide for sure which way to go about it - maclonize Garrick, but have the very real risk that his proven cheating bastard ass won't pull something - or miclonize Kamjin, and I think we all know how he feels about that.

In the end, Garrick gets to be a Zentran for a day where he and Kamjin beat the ever-loving snot out of each other with no real victor.  Just think about the big fight between Sean Thornton and Red Danaher in The Quiet Man, complete with Minmei leaving just as the punches start flying ("I'll head over to the Nyan-Nyan and have dinner waiting for you, Gar-kun.") bets being taken on both sides (Exedore somehow winds up getting dragged in as the bookie), getting rip-snorting drunk afterwards ("No, I'm buying, dammit!"), and sharing drinking songs ("So we fired our gun and the British kept a-comin...").

The idea here is that these three are going to become a cohort and will be quickly branded as "The Triplets".  Put it this way: Imagine if the Powerpuff Girls were his daughters.  (With Hikari as Blossom, Akatsuki as Bubbles, and Hotaru as Buttercup.)

Troublesome?  Oh hell yes.  But so very worth it, because as much trouble as they'll cause, they'll also generate just as much awesome.  At the very least they won't be superpowered from the word 'Go'.

And then there will be Garrick - the ready-made father, just add kids.  (Once again, I will reiterate: I have literally had a coworker scream at me "WHY ARE YOU NOT MARRIED YET!?!?" after seeing me interact with a customer's little girl in the store.)  While there will be moments of "... Okay, color me fucking impressed, because I'll be damned if that's not a new one on me", he will be able to take those in stride, nonetheless, once he gets past his initial "How the hell did you do that?" reaction.

Heh, well, more troubles for the MC means more things to write about, so I'm hardly going to complain. Having a larger-than average family group should also mitigate the difficulty of multiple infants at once as well, since it at least means there's a pair of hands for each while still having enough spare that a couple of lucky souls can still pull the pillow over their head and go back to sleep until it's their turn.

Yep.  And I've had experience in this department, too.  My youngest brother had a tendency to stay awake after hours no matter what, so since I had no problems with staying up late, Mom and Dad would have me look after him after hours... unless something came up.  Like all the milk he'd had in the last few hours.  It's just one of those things you learn to take in stride in a family like mine, but even so moments like that call for backup.  Mom and Dad were a little annoyed, but perfectly understanding.

Besides, remember all those girls that chased Garrick through the palace?  At least two of them were childcare experts, and they fully intend on making it their mission in life to ensure that the parents aren't overburdened.

It doesn’t matter.  You’re people and so are we.

Hands Across the Galaxy? Can't do Voices while still not understanding the spoken language, I guess

Okay, apparently I just did something inadvertent.  Care to explain?  

The subtitle of Macross 30 is "Voices Across the Galaxy," as the premise of the game is collecting the main singers from Zero through Frontier plus the new girl (who is apparently a Protoculture survivor, found in a stasis tube in the second or third mission) and using their song powers to unlock the mysterious ruins on the planet. Well, Basara is a PITA as usual and only shows up when he damn well feels like it, but the rest of them join your party and enable various combat status effects as SP Abilities when flying in the back seat. Which apparently all VFs now have regardless of model, or any form of logical sense in NG+ when you have access to Zentreadi and Meltran battle pods and power armor as well.

Huh.  A Protoculture survivor?  That could have some interesting implications.

leader of the Adoclass Expeditionary Fleet of the Zentradi Army.  In some time, we

Its been a very long time since I watched SDFMTV - do they identify themselves as "the Zentreadi Army?" My impression was that they were the Inspection Army and the Protodeviln were the Supervision Army, but I suppose even if that was the case a few hundred thousand years ago, things might have changed after the Protoculture were gone.

I'll have to do some research on that.  I'm pretty sure it's floating around there somewhere on the Internet.

It's one of those things that's really unclear from everything I've read - sometimes it seems like it's just a variation on the terms for the same enemy (revealed later to be the Protodeviln mindslaves,) other times the "Supervision" versus "Inspection" seems like it's commenting on the difference in management style for the Protodeviln vs. Protoculture. Where Zero's "bird human" fits in just blurs the issue further.

Mostly I heard 'Supervision Army' from Macross 7.  And in Robotech they were fond of using stuff like 'Imperial Zentradi Army'.  ('Imperial'?  Really?)  So I think that just 'Zentradi Army' is relatively neutral enough.

I nodded.  “Lucky as fuck.  In my world, we never had ASS-1 crash land on South Ataria Island.  Instead, on the date of September 11th, 2001, there was a terrorist attack by Islamic Jihadists the likes of which you guys could never, ever imagine.

ASS-1 did far worse than the 9/11 attack to cities all over the world while it was aerobraking, and then they had the Unification War on top of that. I think they can probably imagine pretty well, especially with how the Anti-UN Octos mecha-subs popped up to attack with surprise in Macross Zero.

Ah, but the difference was that in our case, the battle was nowhere nearly as 'mechanized'.  It was visceral on a level that even they're having trouble imagining.  What they had was the open conflict that all the old school Cold War generals had been itching for all those decades.  What we had was downright murderous guerrilla insurgencies where every goddamn thing was hiding an IED rigged to blow at a fucking sneeze.

And on top of that was the outright implication that the USA, the people who are supposed to be the 'good guys', wound up stooping to their level in how they treated people in captured territory.

Additionally, there was the comparison to the Pearl Harbor attack - how it was focused primarily on the military facilities, whereas 9/11 had the implicit goal of mass civilian casualties.  And really, I think that's the biggest thing to set the War on Terror apart from the Anti-Unification War - the fact that civilians were a sought-after target.

Ah, okay, I see what you're saying here. The way it's written now though, it sounds like he's only referencing the 9/11 attack itself as beyond imagination, to which I'm mostly just seeing Misa's "Are you shitting me?" face.

I suppose I should be more clear about it in that bit.  I just figured that Garrick dropping the line, "...and America responded in kind" would have been enough, but I suppose that's a little too subtle.

It's going to be fun when we get to Katanagatari and the Yasuri Siblings force the issue without knowing the full implications.  (Yes, Nanami was fully expecting that there would be 'concubines' involved, but not the sort of package deal she's actually gonna get.)

Given that Nanami is like Seto in the sense that if he doesn't marry her then she may kill him out of spite, Garrick feels he doesn't have much choice.  And yes, Yasuri Nanami being able to kill Garrick outright is a very real possibility - by far, she will be the queen bitch of the Freaks of Nature pageant without any further qualifications besides her complete and total mastery of the Way of the Swordless Swordsman.  That said, she will fit into the arrangement with ease once she fully understands that the others are her peers and not simply her subordinates.

I've never even heard of Katanagatari before, but it sounds interesting from what you say here. I really haven't followed visual media in the past decade, with very few exceptions. I think probably Macross F and Delta, Strike Witches, Konosuba, Danmachi, and One Punch Man are the only anime I've watched in that time period, aside from a few scattered first episodes of things I didn't continue to follow. Oh, right, Gurren Lagann too, because people told me it was Evangelion without being such a downer, which was mostly accurate.

Oh man.  Fair warning: Katanagatari is a serious fucking tear-jerker at several points, but at the same time it manages to balance hilarity (Shichika and Togami's whimsical and witty tête-à-têtes are the stuff that legends are made of) with some seriously dark overtones.  And to top it all off, the characters are all lavishly drawn and have incredible development.  I can't recommend this anime enough.

And here behind the cut I break down Nanami's character...

Spoiler

As for Nanami and what makes her so spectacularly special?  I meant it when I said she'd be the Queen Bitch at the Freaks of Nature Pageant.  Think of the Uchiha from Naruto.  She has that basic Sharingan ability to copy techniques, only cranked to 11.  If she sees a technique performed once, then she can perform it just as well as the person she saw doing it.  But if she sees it performed a second time?  Complete and total mastery of the technique, and on top of that she is then able to further refine, enhance, and develop the technique.  This goes for both fighting techniques and ninja magic.

Oh, and what really makes her an utter nightmare to deal with?  She's been sickly for her entire life.  In fact, she was so sickly that she came all the way back around to fake normal behavior and appearances.  See, she really does have health issues, but she's such a monstrous Determinator that she's become able to completely ignore physical pain, exhaustion, and sickness.  Yes, she is all-but-dying, but her will is such that she will walk about and act perfectly normal.

One person that attacks her learns this to his detriment.  The poison he used on her - a double-dose even! - barely phases her at all.  So, in a fight the only way you make sure that Nanami stays down for the count is by making sure she's actually dead and not simply taking a moment to muster up her will power!

But the worst part is that the places a very low value on human life...  Which is actually par for the course during this time period.  Samurai Lords were capricious creatures.  They could be thanking you for a service well performed one day... and then be hacking your body to pieces the next day so you can't perform that service for anyone else afterwards!  Nanami will view a person as no more significant than a weed that needs to be removed from a garden should they stand in her way.  Weirdly enough, though, she absolutely adores her brother, Shichika (albeit in a very quiet and reserved way).  But even he's not safe.  When Shichika was little he had a habit of biting his nails.  Nanami fixed that by ripping out all his fingernails in one go!  And in her own defense, she will say that it worked - and she's not wrong about that.  Shichika never bit his nails again.

As for the family technique, the Kyotouryu...  Wheeew.  It is something else.  They are literally swordless swordsmen.  In fact, having a weapon in-hand simply gets in their way.  The school is based around sword-breaking techniques, sword deflection techniques, blade catching, and using your hands in piercing (literally!) or crushing blows.  In short, as a practitioner of the Kyotouryu, your body is literally your sword, and young practitioners are taught to think of themselves as swords.

Combine all that into the synthesis that is Yasuri Nanami and you have an absolute demon in human skin on your hands.  Garrick knows he needs to be incredibly careful about her, but she and her brother metaphorically pin him down.  Why?  Garrick has fighting techniques that has never been seen - ones that can actually be effective against the Kyotouryu.  This winds up being demonstrated by accident the moment he arrives and is attacked by Shichika as an intruder.  Additionally, the Yasuri siblings have been living on an isolated island by order of the current Shogun for a crime committed by their father, and Shichika is worried about the family line being carried on.

Shichika forces the issue of marriage on him, giving him no realistic way out without offending them or revealing his status as a slider.

The Juraians will have to make do with the fact that Achika will not be his first wife as originally planned... and also the fact that he is holding the leash of a monster that only happens to look like a beautiful little woman.  It's a good thing that she's sworn herself to him completely and takes that oath seriously, otherwise there'd be no end to the bloodshed.