Back to Southern Cross
Apr. 26th, 2019 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn the first three months of this year, I returned to Macross, then went straight on to also watch again two more mecha anime series from the early 1980s I could link in different ways to that first, foundational show. Even as I summed up those months in a “quarterly review,” the grand plans I’d formed by the start of the year pointed me on to one more series that could be linked to Macross both ways: Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross had shared a brand name in Japan and been stapled into the “long enough for American syndication” animated series I’d watched in all innocence in my formative years. Having just happened to somehow wind up pretty much on the wrong foot with Orguss, though (even if Mospeada, like Macross itself, had stayed more satisfying), I was at least aware of the hard time “Robotech: Masters,” and Southern Cross itself, has had with broad swathes of fan opinion, all the way back to certain comments in the letter pages of the Robotech comics and able to bring up how the anime was said to have been cut short to an abrupt wrap-up (right around when production was beginning on Robotech).
The slow-build opening episodes of Southern Cross, as the space colony world Gloire faces the initial probing attacks of mysterious “bioroid” mecha from enigmatic just-arrived starships, did have me bumping into the tension between “everyone’s enlisted to begin with; there’s no civilian hotshot lucking into action in this mecha anime” and the female lead Jeanne Francaix’s skating along the edges of “not taking military matters seriously” but always coming up roses. I suppose she might be something different even in an age where “strong female protagonists” attract attention but also and unfortunately “performative offensiveness,” but not necessarily something people could like. (The other female characters might be easier to accept, but I did get to considering that seemingly everpresent phenomenon of “officially presented” romances being scoffed at by fans while more casual suggestions are built up and celebrated to obsession.) I also remembered some uneasy feelings on going back to the second episode of Mospeada just months before with its laid-on-thick introduction of the peewee comedy relief character Mint; once again, though, I soon seemed to get past what I should accept might trip up others (and did become more comfortable with the sometimes-babbling Mint, too).
Getting to the third episode of Southern Cross started really reminding me that where the efforts to forge (and I do know that word can be taken in different ways...) a continuing storyline in Robotech can seem to litter “Masters” with cul-de-sacs and non sequiturs, the original anime does seem to make better sense to me (even if I still might have to think through some character motivations myself). In particular, I could remember the efforts of the Robotech novels to explain things by weighing them down with bolted-on shadowy machinations with a shaggy-dog denouement, and how some (if not all) of the “efforts at more positive promotion” I saw other people try to make could steer into holding up Robotech’s Earth commander Anatole Leonard (“Claude Leon” in Southern Cross). By the time the novels had finished trying to make him “the military aggressiveness efforts at coexistence are to be seen as countering” by setting up his motivations as “religious fanaticism and emasculating injuries,” I can at least see where a counter-reaction came from; however, the holding up could seem to pack overtones of also promoting “gut-level conviction leads to aggressive mistrust,” which seems contemporary in an unfortunate way. I’ll admit I’d rather turn back to the suggestions Southern Cross is “part comedy, too,” which I first happened on not that long before I last went back to the series, then saw brought up again just a few years ago. In the end, that might carry me along until things get more serious. Still, I also got to contemplating how I might have had just a bit more of a chance to “form my own opinions” of Southern Cross than with most mecha series of the past decade, where I either see people souring on them episode by episode or just have curt after-the-fact dismissals crash down on me.
Looking back at how I tried to sum up my previous return to Southern Cross not quite a decade ago does leave me supposing not much seems to have changed for me since then. One thing that was a little different was happening on someone who’d “fansubbed” an off-the-air tape of one episode’s original Japanese broadcast, including the commercials. Macross model kits aside, a lot of the sponsors’ products did seem aimed at grade schoolers, one more data point to be weighed against the shower scenes early on. In the end, though, for all the insinuations Southern Cross might be less than half the length it was supposed to be (longer than Macross or Orguss, and without any clear indication of what it was supposed to have been), the hopeful interpretations I’ve hit on held up. Trying to return to all of these series in the order they appeared in Japan means I’ve now seen all eighty-four episodes that went into Robotech (while recognizing the bits of Southern Cross repeated to cut into later episodes of “The Macross Saga” and make up an eighty-fifth episode that tried to set up the conflict quicker than the anime while skewing some character interpretations). However, I do still have a good bit of anime scheduled, linked up by more personal and whimsical connections.
The slow-build opening episodes of Southern Cross, as the space colony world Gloire faces the initial probing attacks of mysterious “bioroid” mecha from enigmatic just-arrived starships, did have me bumping into the tension between “everyone’s enlisted to begin with; there’s no civilian hotshot lucking into action in this mecha anime” and the female lead Jeanne Francaix’s skating along the edges of “not taking military matters seriously” but always coming up roses. I suppose she might be something different even in an age where “strong female protagonists” attract attention but also and unfortunately “performative offensiveness,” but not necessarily something people could like. (The other female characters might be easier to accept, but I did get to considering that seemingly everpresent phenomenon of “officially presented” romances being scoffed at by fans while more casual suggestions are built up and celebrated to obsession.) I also remembered some uneasy feelings on going back to the second episode of Mospeada just months before with its laid-on-thick introduction of the peewee comedy relief character Mint; once again, though, I soon seemed to get past what I should accept might trip up others (and did become more comfortable with the sometimes-babbling Mint, too).
Getting to the third episode of Southern Cross started really reminding me that where the efforts to forge (and I do know that word can be taken in different ways...) a continuing storyline in Robotech can seem to litter “Masters” with cul-de-sacs and non sequiturs, the original anime does seem to make better sense to me (even if I still might have to think through some character motivations myself). In particular, I could remember the efforts of the Robotech novels to explain things by weighing them down with bolted-on shadowy machinations with a shaggy-dog denouement, and how some (if not all) of the “efforts at more positive promotion” I saw other people try to make could steer into holding up Robotech’s Earth commander Anatole Leonard (“Claude Leon” in Southern Cross). By the time the novels had finished trying to make him “the military aggressiveness efforts at coexistence are to be seen as countering” by setting up his motivations as “religious fanaticism and emasculating injuries,” I can at least see where a counter-reaction came from; however, the holding up could seem to pack overtones of also promoting “gut-level conviction leads to aggressive mistrust,” which seems contemporary in an unfortunate way. I’ll admit I’d rather turn back to the suggestions Southern Cross is “part comedy, too,” which I first happened on not that long before I last went back to the series, then saw brought up again just a few years ago. In the end, that might carry me along until things get more serious. Still, I also got to contemplating how I might have had just a bit more of a chance to “form my own opinions” of Southern Cross than with most mecha series of the past decade, where I either see people souring on them episode by episode or just have curt after-the-fact dismissals crash down on me.
Looking back at how I tried to sum up my previous return to Southern Cross not quite a decade ago does leave me supposing not much seems to have changed for me since then. One thing that was a little different was happening on someone who’d “fansubbed” an off-the-air tape of one episode’s original Japanese broadcast, including the commercials. Macross model kits aside, a lot of the sponsors’ products did seem aimed at grade schoolers, one more data point to be weighed against the shower scenes early on. In the end, though, for all the insinuations Southern Cross might be less than half the length it was supposed to be (longer than Macross or Orguss, and without any clear indication of what it was supposed to have been), the hopeful interpretations I’ve hit on held up. Trying to return to all of these series in the order they appeared in Japan means I’ve now seen all eighty-four episodes that went into Robotech (while recognizing the bits of Southern Cross repeated to cut into later episodes of “The Macross Saga” and make up an eighty-fifth episode that tried to set up the conflict quicker than the anime while skewing some character interpretations). However, I do still have a good bit of anime scheduled, linked up by more personal and whimsical connections.