They are making an Ai-Kun plush.

I want one.

Now.

You've probably already seen this, but just in case:



Apparently there's been a few of these new Muppet videos being made.

Please, PLEASE use Uncle Deadly in one of the upcoming ones

My writing mood has changed, but let's get a few more done about Neo-Exsedol.

One belated geeky urge that both Robotech and Macross fandom have awakened in me is the fine art of Fanon Fantasy, where you can actually sit down and start to imagine, even plan out large-scale rewrites to a story.

All the times I keep going back and trying to imagine a better version of Robotech II: The Sentinels is the best example, but for some weird reason I'm starting to think of Neo-Exsedol, and the larger Macross universe, in terms of Fanon Fantasy.

I can't imagine a world where something good comes of Classic Exsedol becoming Neo-Exsedol exactly as he appears in the canon...but what about the basic idea of his place, his work?

And it seems like the basic idea of an older Exsedol journeying with the seventh Macross fleet isn't a bad one. You make him look like he's supposed to, make it clear somewhere that he's led a full life and that he can still do more than just talk to "Captain Max", don't make the Protodevlin so obnoxious and his terror of them so comical. Make him more than just a device for flat exposition and a shot of comic relief.

It's true that when you run into a single female fan of an ugly, strange, or unpopular character, the first instinct might be to assume she's idealizing them, becoming more attached to the version in her head than that in canon...but that ain't me.

Exsedol did once, in the TV series, express interest in going to see the Miclone world. And he may eventually age and grow tired of it, wish for something new, and so leave the Earth behind of his own choosing, to explore elsewhere in the galaxy, but he'd still have some kind of sense of self, still seem like that character from the original show.

But in the end, though, even if I'm doing stuff that most geeks were doing before they picked up their first Transformer, I've got to have something, if at least not the purest thing, but at least licensed, to give me a springboard when it comes to my favourite pieces of pre-made fiction. I can't just imagine my own little alternate scenarios and have them carry the same weight as what has really been produced.

Rewatching Macross: Do You Remember Love? had recently upped my antipathy towards the Zentraedi redesigns.

It might seem like I already live in a perpetual state of Nerd Rage towards them, but the truth is, I can find some mellowness about them at my core. I can remember watching Macross 7 last year and finding, despite all I could say and have said against Neo-Exsedol (my collective nickname for the rectonned version of the character, either in DYRL or Macross 7), I liked him. He wasn't "Exedore", never could be, never was, and that was horrible, but anything I could say against him had to do with that fact: on his own he was a likable character. I got worried about him, I wanted to see what happened to him.

But I think the days where I'd make Neo-Exsedol avatars and Neo-Exsedol plushies are over. I don't know what's happened, but it's that, while I still like him, there's a sense that I can't just push aside the re-creation, the reduction of the character I like so much.

Perhaps it is that I've become comfortable in my fandom skin, so that I can own up to my consumption, my selfishness, my blasphemy, and no longer pretend that I have to see Neo-Exsedol as a character to equally appreciate alongside Classic Exsedol, in order to show that I'm not one of the Bad People.

And so, I can let loose, I can say, yes, I'm angry, even though I would look like a hysterical bitch in the company of other Macross fans who simply shrug at the thought of Neo-Exsedol and can't understand why anyone else would have a problem with it. I. Do. And it's not so hard to understand why.

I can like Neo-Exsedol, and I do, but I can't pretend he's a stupid idea.

Now, this post is standard stuff from me, and I have more, newer material to add to it, but I'm heading into blue-green ungulate territory, so I'll just leave it here, wait a short while, and post the next part.

DARIA DVD BIG NEWS

...part of me still doesn't want to believe it. It seems too good to be true.

Let's see, shall we?

It's a funny thing: lately I've been stewing in a deeper awareness of just what it is that makes Super Dimensional Fortress Macross superior to the Robotech dub of the same, the former being the one which initially captured my interest, but when I turn back to that same Robotech dub, it all almost ceases to matter.

I say "almost", because of course there's an itching at the back of my skull: "That's not what they REALLY said!", but the larger part of me is just going sweetly back to, not an eighties nostaliga, but a last-year's nostalgia. It's still hard to believe that in January 2010, it will have only been two years since I saw Robotech for the first time.

So maybe I should give myself more time to "convert", but there's a deeper sense that it just ain't gonna happen. I can grunt and scoff and say that of course if it wasn't for those peskily appealing treatment of Macross characters I like in otherwise bad Robotech novels, I would have nothing more to do with Robotech, and certainly if it came down to a battle just between the Robotech dub of SDFM and the original uncut and subtitled SDFM, of course the latter wins.

Yet like I said, I still go back to the Robotech dub and fall right into it, except for the little scratching at the back of my head. Compared to the true-blue Macross purists, there's an anger towards Robotech I simply can't feel.

There are several reasons for that, but they won't hold up in a court of law, nor will they be understandable to people who already hate Robotech, because they operate on the premise that you can like Robotech.

The first one is, unlike most Macross fans, my primary focus is on the human-friendly male Zentraedi, over and above the main love triangle. I recognize which characters are the most important in terms of the narrative and the fandom, but at the same time, I know my notion of Exedore and Breetai and the spy trio being more than mere plot devices isn't a fangirlish delusion.

And I think these characters' arcs and personalities were changed less for the dub, so that I can still watch the dub and enjoy them, rather than SDFM's take being completely foreign, or their portrayal striking me as outright bad without having seen the original SDFM. Indeed, it was the Robotech dub which first made me like these characters.

Secondly, yeah, I do like most of the things the Robotech novels did with Exedore and some of the things done with the spy trio and Breetai. And it's impossible to express preference for even a small, Macross-derived part of the Robotech EU and then be unable to unironically take on the Robotech dub itself.

Honestly, though, it's not something you can explain, after a point. You either get it or you don't. To "understand" me, somebody would have to believe that the inauthenticity of Robotech and especially of Robotech derivatives can be rendered tolerable simply by those works doing something which makes me happy.

You want to ask why people like Robotech in this day and age? The simple thing may be that to some, these Robotech materials, while they may not be artistically authentic in a wide-ranging sense, they are personally legitimate to the viewer. That is, despite the external truths most modern Robotech fans really are aware of, there is a love (though sometimes not without reservations), and something they get from Robotech and its derivative works that nothing else can give them.

There may be a few Great unwashed, but I think most of us know that it was made from three different and unrelated anime series, and that its expanded universe material largely consists of clumsily puppeting other peoples' characters (since their own kind of suck, Kazianna Hesh excluded). But not everybody is going to react the same way to that.

It's still confusing, in a way. I don't entirely know why these things are possible for me, given that I've been a fan of "real" anime for a long time, and/Or I can see the problems in all things Robotech but tolerate it simply because it does a few things that I do happen to like. These things are "Macross", but sometimes there is something a little different.

But regardless of confusion, the simple fact is that shit has gone down, and by then it's too late. You can't shut off your instincts, sever your gut reactions. As long as your first encounter was a positive one, and to change or deny those feelings feels like moving a giant cement block, you're stuck. You're not one of the Good People.

This truth underlies a lot of conversations about "taste", really: that you either get it or you don't. Few entertainment-related decisions are really a thorough consideration of artistic morality before the move was made. If the existence of Robotech never struck me as "wrong" in any context, then I was open to the possibility of Stuff Happening.

And Stuff has Happened.

Neo-Exsedol sings "My Boyfriend is a Pilot".



...wow.

Just...wow.

Okay.

*breathes*

It's a perfect match for Neo-Exsedol's characterization. Duller and more dispirited that Classic Exsedol, and yet somehow charming.

On the other hand, he does seem much happier than his normal deadpan self.

What's funny, of course, is that I've often gone on record saying that I would have killed for an .mp3 of Classic Exedore doing his thing, either as Ted Layman or Ryunosuke Obayashi. And then the universe furnishes me with...this.

What's utterly bizarre, though, is that I wrote a scene in my unfinished fanfic which has Neo-Exsedol singing "My Boyfriend is a Pilot", far before I heard about this.

This is an omen for something, I'm not sure what.

The amount of cool things I've found at the Monster Brains blog would take months of posts, but here's a small one: the video for the song "Molten Light" by independent Canadian artist Chad Van Gaalen.

At heart, it's a simple revenge tale, of a murdered woman back from the dead to take revenge on the brothers who murdered her, taking on increasingly grotesque forms in pursuit of them.



(Waring, NSFW due to naked boobies)

What really makes the video is the sheer amount of shape-bending weirdness of both the people and the landscape, and the slow, haunting melody. The art style isn't the only one VanGaalen uses, and is otherwise familiar, but I can't place the artist who might've inspired it.

This time, I'll get on the ball with the mighty Venture Brothers

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Sadly, there's a new Venture Brothers episode that I have to download yet, and for some reason, though I loved last week's, I never blogged about it. Yet!

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Monster Brains

Dedicated to pan-medium examples of things that creep and crawl and make us shiver: posters, toys, covers, movie stills, sculptures, videos. Image-heavy blog, be warned.

XD

SDFM Episodes 27-30

Alll right, let's get back to where I want to be! Old-school SDFM, that's the stuff.

We're at the climax!

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In chat with a few people last night, the topic turned to Macross Frontier and it was mentioned that someone theorized that the "Folmo Mall", named after your friend and mine, Exsedol Folmo, a.k.a. Exedore Formo, was somehow one of a chain of such malls that the character himself had designed or been involved in the production of.

Bearing in mind that malls, even space malls, don't tend to be mass-produced objects in quite that large a capacity...it seems a rather un-Exedore-ish a thing to imagine, and this is coming from the person who thought Milia as a mayor in her fifties wasn't that far-fetched.

--It's doubly weird because it seems to me, any idea that he's had any sort of life before and beyond his Battle 7 hidey-hole is completely foreign. The character has been put into this certain dull niche, and it would seem pretty out-there to try to rescue him fromit.

Of course it's not canon, but it still seems bizarre to me that someone would come up with this fan theory out of nowhere, when it seems to be so different from the character as first seen.

This isn't the first time I've encountered fan theories related to Exedore which make me go, "Huh?" however.

For one thing, it seems to be a running joke in the Macross fandom that he's as big a Minmay fanboy as Warera, Rori, and Konda are (one memorable encounter of mine included the idea that his quarters under the Battle 7 are filled with Minmay posters), and that he actually enjoyed pretending to sing her song for the Earth council, and would perform karaoke at the drop of a hat at any later date.

Honestly, I haven't noticed any similar kind of odd theorizing around any other Macross character, and I'm wondering what causes it. Sure, Exsedore is a minor character, but his personality is pretty clearly established, so that a bazillion jokes based on "Messenger" coming out to be the sum total of his perception in the fandom strikes me as off.

To me, Exsedol is funny in "Messenger" partially because many of the moments are not his current normal behaviour, and "Messenger" also shows that at the end, Exsedol has some integrity and isn't just there for comic relief. He helps bring the alliance together, and refuses to be brought down by the prospect of Bodolza's coming.

Hence, I don't get how those funny ideas keep popping up whenever Exedore or Exsedol is mentioned...at least with nothing else coming around.

THAT Animeblog engages in a retro review of SDF Macross

I stumbled upon this a few weeks ago, and it's been a fun little read, keeping up with the author as he updates the series. The entries are heavier on screengrabs with funny captions than anything else, which means they're entertaining, but also easy to digest.

Of course, the review being of that type means there's not much that I can compare and contrast against my own scatterbrained notes on the series (the next part of which I'm almost done, by the way: I just have to decide if I'm going to include "Satan's Dolls" in my already-long entry or save it for the last batch), both because it's a lot more of a lighthearted type o' review, and because the blogger's interest lies in the love triangle and the main characters, rather than in the trials and tribulations of the male Zentradi like I like to write about.

He also seems enthusiastic about Max and Milia getting together, while I'm getting ready to swallow that bitter pill again.

I wonder what he'll make of "Messenger". :D

One thing that stood out to me, though, was the writer's first-blush speculation that the "Minmay cult" of Zentradi defectors might be depicted fighting against their own people in the future, a speculation which proves to be unfounded, at least in terms of Warera, Rori, and Konda, who are seen happily taking blue-collar jobs instead.

(We'll just leave out the "revelation" the Macross supplemental material made about their futures for now, lest I become Death again)

I think it works better that way. While we do have Zentradi fighting Zentradi in those later episodes, treating such conflicts as a matter of course works fine. Many of the initial Zentradi defectors may seem sentimental and childlike, but they're still warriors, and when it comes down to it, I think even the grunts would immediately understand that they'd have to fight their own people sooner or later if they stayed in a military role and also have not much of a problem with that. Angsting about having to fight their own people, cheesy or not, doesn't seem to be their style, and I'm glad the series largely skipped around that part.

(Britai in the Japanese version of "Viva Maria" seems to take the issue into consideration, though, but in a low-key way that doesn't impact his performance at all)

Secondly, I like the idea of putting the focus on those Zentradi who have outright refused to go back to war at all. One aspect of the Zentradi transformation I don't see much comment on is the fact that there must be all these individual tastes and inclinations repressed in the name of warrior service, so the ranks are filled with people who could have had any kind of job had they been born in a free society, and when that shell breaks, they take those jobs and become the people they should have been before.

It is today.

I hope there's many more years for the man who created the beautiful, beautiful world of The Sandman (Let's just say there are different kinds of beauty)

And other stories, but The Sandman is the one that will stand out in my mind, always.

As my interest in Robotech apocrypha goes on, and all my opinions become cemented, I start to realize that there are in fact very few things I do enjoy unreservedly about the novels' handling of the Zentraedi, and that there are more than a few things about their treatment that I was neutral on before, but now actively dislike. And in one particular case, I am downright embarassed for taking so long to turn on a Zentraedi element: the Fantoma backstory.

Basically, the Robotech expanded universe, by way of The Sentinels, dictated that the Zentraedi had been originally created as miners for the high-grav world of Fantoma (Romanian for "ghost", by the way), which Tirol, the planet where the Robotech Masters and the rest of their race reside, orbited. Some time before the start of the TV series, the Zentraedi were re-conditioned into warriors instead.

Maybe it was that last year, I was so excited at finding a new toy to play with, I didn't stop to look back and analyze something, but the problem with the Fantoma story should have struck me immediately, that problem being how much it hobbles the pathos of the original Zentraedi story as a viewer understood it.

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I have a really bad cough.

In other news, I did finish the first volume of Revolutionary Girl Utena. This is still before the series kicks in to Weird Gear, but it's an entertaining watch.

I really love the dreamlike quality of the whole thing, a sense that the series is doing whatever it wants, whenever it wants, but somehow comes out coherent. It's not so much that the author is attempting to create faux depth through obfuscation, but just that they're having fun, maybe screwing with the audience, but it's all in good form.

Obviously the series is turning on its head the conventions of the popular modern verisons of fairytales, and the Magical Girl genre. It's said that there's more to Anthy than she appears, and I can see signs of that already...and dear GOD do I hate Nanami. She is incredibly annoying..

Durh, I'll write more later.

More Venture Brothers

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