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krpalmerTwo years ago, I made a fair deal out of three decades having passed since I happened on Robotech. Sometimes, though, I do wonder if I've mythologized just what I made of that show back then as compared to any other science fiction-flavoured Saturday morning action cartoon I also watched visiting my grandparents, who had cable, or even to the episodes of Transformers and Thunder Sub my family had taped off our own TV and not recorded over soon after. I'm at least conscious of the suggestions of risk in letting personal identies get tangled up with inconsequential popular culture consumed, especially the stuff seen when young and impressionable. There is one bit of hard evidence left from back then, however, in a comic I drew to put together and in some small way preserve the serialized story I was taking in one disconnected bit at a time, even if I have to sum it up as the sort of thing a pre-teen could manage. It didn't wind up my only record, though, and the next part of a line that does trace between then and one of my leisure interests now picked up a bit over two years after my first viewing, which means it took place three decades ago right around now.
While I can link the first and the last episodes of Robotech I saw in the 1980s to Canadian Thanksgiving weekends, what happened next is a little vaguer in time. It was at the regular pre-Christmas book sale at my elementary school, stocked by the local bookstore of the day. (The next few sales before I graduated just had big metal cases wheeled in by Scholastic, which wasn't quite the same.) Among the paperbacks on one table, I saw a few with the familiar Robotech logo turned vertical on their covers, and they jumped out at me.
When I'd first noticed the official Robotech comic books, they'd got so far from their first issues the thought of trying to pick up where I could never seemed to occur to me; that they were more expensive (if with, as I only realised later, fewer ads) than Marvel's Transformers comic book didn't help either. With Robotech novels, things seemed different both from any other Saturday morning cartoon and just for me. I didn't have the four dollars on me to buy the fifth-in-the-series book, the lowest-numbered instalment on the table, but by asking I had a copy put aside for me. The evening passed in a flurry of anticipation, and I bought the book the first thing next morning and started sneaking glances at it during class. In the next evenings before Christmas I worked my way through the rest of it, and I can still think of a few accidental marks left on its pages from those first days. Now, though, there are other, more blatant and perhaps less pleasantly nostalgic marks in my copy from some years later on.
Over the next half year or so, I chased down the other novels in assorted bookstores, putting together the whole story at last even if in almost as jumbled a way as I'd seen bits of it on TV. From there, I went on to the five novels of "The Sentinels," unaware of how cruel some might have found the "Not seen on any TV series!" blurbs on their covers, and when they ended on a last cliffhanger now with no promise of a resolution I tried saving the day myself in stories scarcely more advanced than my comics. Then, I ran across the official conclusion in a novel called The End of the Circle, and I will admit that while I didn't resent that book while I was reading it I did toy with the idea it "didn't count," only to then figure out I could revise my own work to acknowledge what I'd been told had happened but keep going from there. That might have helped keep the story somehow alive in my own mind through the first half of the 1990s where otherwise I might even have accepted how clumsy the Battletech novels made their "'Mechs" seem compared to the descriptions of Robotech mecha. Along that way, I did happen on some Robotech videotapes in a video rental section then in the corner of a local furniture store. Where the first novel I'd read had taken me through one of the biggest battles of the series after only seeing the cliffhanger leading up to it on TV, now I had my chance to see the action at last. It did sort of amuse me to see how charred and mangled the heroic starship the SDF-1 had been left by the battle where the novel, perhaps, had taken audience visual memories for granted and just mentioned a "rusting derelict" two years in the story afterwards. Before that, it had been just as amusing to notice Rick Hunter managing to fly his transformed Veritech after giving his distinctive helmet to Lisa Hayes, given the big deal the novels had made of the helmets reading the minds of the pilots to control any bit of "robotics" in their mecha. Some other people, though, were less amused.
By the middle of the 1990s, I suppose my interest in Robotech as a story long experienced almost entirely in prose was winding down; new novels had started showing up to fill in the in-between years of the story but might have left me thinking they were trying that little bit harder to "grow up with their audience" while avoiding any actually interesting action, and I'd restarted my own stories too many times to try and iron out their self-indulgent strangeness until the fun seemed gone too. So far as self-deprecating thoughts of "guilty pleasures" connected to reading went, they might have shifted to the new Star Wars novels now rolling out. Still, when the first Internet service providers started up in my home town and connecting to the discussions about everything I'd heard so much about didn't mean a long-distance call any more, one of the first things I tried looking up (after following up on the Simpsons and Star Wars newsgroups and looking for hints for the Infocom adventure games that hadn't been bundled with them) was if anyone else still remembered Robotech. Some people did, but that meant dropping into the middle of a continuing argument about the novels and RPGs I did have and how multiple discrepancies were being proclaimed between them and the animation I didn't have.
Looking back on then from now, I do have to face thoughts that maybe I was pushed into changing my own opinions. At the same time, I've already said my interest in the Robotech novels could have been fading, and while it's easy enough to represent some of the arguments as "it's not the same and therefore it's bad" that might yet be misrepresenting them. There were at least some comments that to "visualise" complex motions so that "Protoculture" can read them from your mind is slower than reflex actions commanding an artificial intelligence with some awareness of what's around it. Too, I'd had some problems with a mad scientist added out of nowhere to the "second generation" novels to explain Dana Sterling's flighty mood swings as byproducts to make the unhappy in-between ending a selfish attempt to collect "hybrid powers" of much import but little apparent effect from her, only for that effort to blow up in his face. "The Shapings of the Protoculture," a sort of cosmic force offering quick interference with anything that might have seemed the obvious way out in advance of the actual conclusion (which The End of the Circle "retconned" anyway as the main characters just sort of watched things happen) hadn't quite appealed to me either. In the end, I took a black calligraphy marker and drew lines through all the references to things I'd been told contradicted the series, and once that was done I was even able to convince myself there were still big chunks of material left. It might have helped me join in the discussions while I was still trying to get over the feeling that discussions just slightly elsewhere about actual anime focused on things I wasn't seeing at my university's anime club because everyone else had already seen them themselves.
It's been years since then, though (as my "guilty pleasures" shifted to the alternative history novels of Harry Turtledove, and then perhaps just to all the manga I buy nowadays, although the translated "light novels" connected to them and anime I sometimes read can seem slog than pleasure to get through). Looking back, all the arguments can feel like big minnows in a shallow puddle fighting over who would influence a residue of impressionable people. The people holding to the original series might have won when an "official Robotech site" was set up with new technical profiles and timelines, but they seemed to declare victory by going off to other things, leaving their disgruntled opponents to indulge in hair-splitting reinterpretations that might have made the remaining discussions unpleasant that much sooner. After hearing about other "fan edits" that can only subtract, my private efforts do feel a bit more unpleasant, and I can sort of think it's a good thing I can make out the text under the black lines if I really look at it. I've also seen enough odds and ends about Robotech to have the feeling nobody had really thought to mention at least some of the overwhelming forces and connections of the novels were there in embryo in earlier spinoffs and the first comments of those selling the show. At the same time, I do have a few critiques of my own, such as how the younger characters were granted some nuance but the authority figures sometimes seemed to divide into plaster saints too noble to resist armchair admirals and crooked politicians undeserving of loyalty in the first place. That might stand out to me because it did seem to have wound up an overused theme in my own stories.
Still, I have to acknowledge having seen Robotech as text for so long kept it more of a unit to me. If I'd somehow been able to keep watching even a broad selection of the series, I might have realised how different the characters in the different generations looked from each other before I'd found clear descriptions of Robotech having been put together from three different anime series, much less that animation like them wasn't a singular bold achievement from a vanished past and might even still be reachable on this side of the Pacific. Of course, I might also have just fixated on the off-model episodes of Macross and wound up with a different sort of detachment.
While I can link the first and the last episodes of Robotech I saw in the 1980s to Canadian Thanksgiving weekends, what happened next is a little vaguer in time. It was at the regular pre-Christmas book sale at my elementary school, stocked by the local bookstore of the day. (The next few sales before I graduated just had big metal cases wheeled in by Scholastic, which wasn't quite the same.) Among the paperbacks on one table, I saw a few with the familiar Robotech logo turned vertical on their covers, and they jumped out at me.
When I'd first noticed the official Robotech comic books, they'd got so far from their first issues the thought of trying to pick up where I could never seemed to occur to me; that they were more expensive (if with, as I only realised later, fewer ads) than Marvel's Transformers comic book didn't help either. With Robotech novels, things seemed different both from any other Saturday morning cartoon and just for me. I didn't have the four dollars on me to buy the fifth-in-the-series book, the lowest-numbered instalment on the table, but by asking I had a copy put aside for me. The evening passed in a flurry of anticipation, and I bought the book the first thing next morning and started sneaking glances at it during class. In the next evenings before Christmas I worked my way through the rest of it, and I can still think of a few accidental marks left on its pages from those first days. Now, though, there are other, more blatant and perhaps less pleasantly nostalgic marks in my copy from some years later on.
Over the next half year or so, I chased down the other novels in assorted bookstores, putting together the whole story at last even if in almost as jumbled a way as I'd seen bits of it on TV. From there, I went on to the five novels of "The Sentinels," unaware of how cruel some might have found the "Not seen on any TV series!" blurbs on their covers, and when they ended on a last cliffhanger now with no promise of a resolution I tried saving the day myself in stories scarcely more advanced than my comics. Then, I ran across the official conclusion in a novel called The End of the Circle, and I will admit that while I didn't resent that book while I was reading it I did toy with the idea it "didn't count," only to then figure out I could revise my own work to acknowledge what I'd been told had happened but keep going from there. That might have helped keep the story somehow alive in my own mind through the first half of the 1990s where otherwise I might even have accepted how clumsy the Battletech novels made their "'Mechs" seem compared to the descriptions of Robotech mecha. Along that way, I did happen on some Robotech videotapes in a video rental section then in the corner of a local furniture store. Where the first novel I'd read had taken me through one of the biggest battles of the series after only seeing the cliffhanger leading up to it on TV, now I had my chance to see the action at last. It did sort of amuse me to see how charred and mangled the heroic starship the SDF-1 had been left by the battle where the novel, perhaps, had taken audience visual memories for granted and just mentioned a "rusting derelict" two years in the story afterwards. Before that, it had been just as amusing to notice Rick Hunter managing to fly his transformed Veritech after giving his distinctive helmet to Lisa Hayes, given the big deal the novels had made of the helmets reading the minds of the pilots to control any bit of "robotics" in their mecha. Some other people, though, were less amused.
By the middle of the 1990s, I suppose my interest in Robotech as a story long experienced almost entirely in prose was winding down; new novels had started showing up to fill in the in-between years of the story but might have left me thinking they were trying that little bit harder to "grow up with their audience" while avoiding any actually interesting action, and I'd restarted my own stories too many times to try and iron out their self-indulgent strangeness until the fun seemed gone too. So far as self-deprecating thoughts of "guilty pleasures" connected to reading went, they might have shifted to the new Star Wars novels now rolling out. Still, when the first Internet service providers started up in my home town and connecting to the discussions about everything I'd heard so much about didn't mean a long-distance call any more, one of the first things I tried looking up (after following up on the Simpsons and Star Wars newsgroups and looking for hints for the Infocom adventure games that hadn't been bundled with them) was if anyone else still remembered Robotech. Some people did, but that meant dropping into the middle of a continuing argument about the novels and RPGs I did have and how multiple discrepancies were being proclaimed between them and the animation I didn't have.
Looking back on then from now, I do have to face thoughts that maybe I was pushed into changing my own opinions. At the same time, I've already said my interest in the Robotech novels could have been fading, and while it's easy enough to represent some of the arguments as "it's not the same and therefore it's bad" that might yet be misrepresenting them. There were at least some comments that to "visualise" complex motions so that "Protoculture" can read them from your mind is slower than reflex actions commanding an artificial intelligence with some awareness of what's around it. Too, I'd had some problems with a mad scientist added out of nowhere to the "second generation" novels to explain Dana Sterling's flighty mood swings as byproducts to make the unhappy in-between ending a selfish attempt to collect "hybrid powers" of much import but little apparent effect from her, only for that effort to blow up in his face. "The Shapings of the Protoculture," a sort of cosmic force offering quick interference with anything that might have seemed the obvious way out in advance of the actual conclusion (which The End of the Circle "retconned" anyway as the main characters just sort of watched things happen) hadn't quite appealed to me either. In the end, I took a black calligraphy marker and drew lines through all the references to things I'd been told contradicted the series, and once that was done I was even able to convince myself there were still big chunks of material left. It might have helped me join in the discussions while I was still trying to get over the feeling that discussions just slightly elsewhere about actual anime focused on things I wasn't seeing at my university's anime club because everyone else had already seen them themselves.
It's been years since then, though (as my "guilty pleasures" shifted to the alternative history novels of Harry Turtledove, and then perhaps just to all the manga I buy nowadays, although the translated "light novels" connected to them and anime I sometimes read can seem slog than pleasure to get through). Looking back, all the arguments can feel like big minnows in a shallow puddle fighting over who would influence a residue of impressionable people. The people holding to the original series might have won when an "official Robotech site" was set up with new technical profiles and timelines, but they seemed to declare victory by going off to other things, leaving their disgruntled opponents to indulge in hair-splitting reinterpretations that might have made the remaining discussions unpleasant that much sooner. After hearing about other "fan edits" that can only subtract, my private efforts do feel a bit more unpleasant, and I can sort of think it's a good thing I can make out the text under the black lines if I really look at it. I've also seen enough odds and ends about Robotech to have the feeling nobody had really thought to mention at least some of the overwhelming forces and connections of the novels were there in embryo in earlier spinoffs and the first comments of those selling the show. At the same time, I do have a few critiques of my own, such as how the younger characters were granted some nuance but the authority figures sometimes seemed to divide into plaster saints too noble to resist armchair admirals and crooked politicians undeserving of loyalty in the first place. That might stand out to me because it did seem to have wound up an overused theme in my own stories.
Still, I have to acknowledge having seen Robotech as text for so long kept it more of a unit to me. If I'd somehow been able to keep watching even a broad selection of the series, I might have realised how different the characters in the different generations looked from each other before I'd found clear descriptions of Robotech having been put together from three different anime series, much less that animation like them wasn't a singular bold achievement from a vanished past and might even still be reachable on this side of the Pacific. Of course, I might also have just fixated on the off-model episodes of Macross and wound up with a different sort of detachment.