Robotech Academy Blues
Aug. 4th, 2014 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen trying to think of what to post about next in this journal, there are times I begin shaping ideas in my mind but think they need to wait for what they're built around to be finished first, such that they don't quite help the feeling I "ought" to post "every so often." In one recent case, though, the denouement came a few days sooner than I'd expected it to, and it only increased the sense of melancholia that had already pervaded what I'd been expecting.
The announcement a Kickstarter campaign had been started to raise five hundred thousand dollars for a "pilot episode" for new Robotech animation at least caught my attention. I remembered an official Kickstarter campaign before that to raise money for a game set with plastic mecha pieces that I'd watched run over its goal by a huge amount. Again, though, I couldn't seem to find the determination to do anything other than just watch in the first days. A familiar faction of self-proclaimed Macross fans, whose theoretical interest in that anime franchise always seems buried by indignation over the possiblity that a generous contract signed by Harmony Gold to make the original anime into the first part of Robotech blocks all attempts to license and release any other part of the franchise with official, readily available subtitles, or just enough anyway in their narrative to keep anyone else from having the gumption to mount a challenge that would surely be successful, had mobilized in most of the places where I saw the news to repeat their theories, exploit the rare gift of the news that Harmony Gold's president had been mentioned in the same breath as Italian president Silvio Berlusconi in connection to a scandal, and draw on negative reactions to the last burst of new Robotech developments. It might have been that a long period of not much but repackaging following that, as if animation ought to trump comics but a live-action movie long reported "in development" ought to trump animation in turn (eventually comments started being made about the downturn in the North American anime industry), had let people who'd taken it in at the time embroider their criticisms into something all-encompassing. I seem to have just shrugged thoughts like that off with my usual conviction that "entertainment isn't worth getting upset about--it doesn't make any difference anyway," and yet something that might even be described as "detachment" has its own risks too. The length of time between Robotech going off the air and my first going online to find at least a few other people remembered the show, when I'd made do with spinoffs in print to remember the experience, might have meant I was able to slide back into contemplating whatever unifying themes and plotlines might have already existed through luck or design as an exercise approaching abstraction. Now, it seemed that much harder to fit what preliminary designs and story hints were being offered into an existing pattern, and just perhaps too there have been enough mecha anime showing up in the past few seasons that I, at least, don't have a gap there that needs filling.
The feeling of partisanship to the "Harmony Gold's to blame" narrative, with seemingly nobody interested enough to bother to describe the problem from a more detached perspective, does seem to provoke some skepticism in me, and yet that didn't quite seem to drive me to the defiant making of a pledge. If other people had their own ways of reacting to the news of a project not continuing on from the infamous loose end of the final episode and the open-ended invention of the first continuation in animation years later but filling out a bit of the middle in a way not really dealt with before, uncertain possibilities filtered through existing negativity or just differing ways of detachment, it all added up to a gap between goal and pledges anyway. In place of the final drama of a possible push to success or failure that might have got me motivated even after the strain of all those Anime Sols pledge drives, the Kickstarter was just closed down early. In some ways, the status quo's been restored, but for the moment the awareness plenty of people continue to be unhappy in different ways doesn't do a lot for me either.
The announcement a Kickstarter campaign had been started to raise five hundred thousand dollars for a "pilot episode" for new Robotech animation at least caught my attention. I remembered an official Kickstarter campaign before that to raise money for a game set with plastic mecha pieces that I'd watched run over its goal by a huge amount. Again, though, I couldn't seem to find the determination to do anything other than just watch in the first days. A familiar faction of self-proclaimed Macross fans, whose theoretical interest in that anime franchise always seems buried by indignation over the possiblity that a generous contract signed by Harmony Gold to make the original anime into the first part of Robotech blocks all attempts to license and release any other part of the franchise with official, readily available subtitles, or just enough anyway in their narrative to keep anyone else from having the gumption to mount a challenge that would surely be successful, had mobilized in most of the places where I saw the news to repeat their theories, exploit the rare gift of the news that Harmony Gold's president had been mentioned in the same breath as Italian president Silvio Berlusconi in connection to a scandal, and draw on negative reactions to the last burst of new Robotech developments. It might have been that a long period of not much but repackaging following that, as if animation ought to trump comics but a live-action movie long reported "in development" ought to trump animation in turn (eventually comments started being made about the downturn in the North American anime industry), had let people who'd taken it in at the time embroider their criticisms into something all-encompassing. I seem to have just shrugged thoughts like that off with my usual conviction that "entertainment isn't worth getting upset about--it doesn't make any difference anyway," and yet something that might even be described as "detachment" has its own risks too. The length of time between Robotech going off the air and my first going online to find at least a few other people remembered the show, when I'd made do with spinoffs in print to remember the experience, might have meant I was able to slide back into contemplating whatever unifying themes and plotlines might have already existed through luck or design as an exercise approaching abstraction. Now, it seemed that much harder to fit what preliminary designs and story hints were being offered into an existing pattern, and just perhaps too there have been enough mecha anime showing up in the past few seasons that I, at least, don't have a gap there that needs filling.
The feeling of partisanship to the "Harmony Gold's to blame" narrative, with seemingly nobody interested enough to bother to describe the problem from a more detached perspective, does seem to provoke some skepticism in me, and yet that didn't quite seem to drive me to the defiant making of a pledge. If other people had their own ways of reacting to the news of a project not continuing on from the infamous loose end of the final episode and the open-ended invention of the first continuation in animation years later but filling out a bit of the middle in a way not really dealt with before, uncertain possibilities filtered through existing negativity or just differing ways of detachment, it all added up to a gap between goal and pledges anyway. In place of the final drama of a possible push to success or failure that might have got me motivated even after the strain of all those Anime Sols pledge drives, the Kickstarter was just closed down early. In some ways, the status quo's been restored, but for the moment the awareness plenty of people continue to be unhappy in different ways doesn't do a lot for me either.