The Macross community knows and understands that we owe this franchise to the love Kawamori et al had for Gundam – after all, what they originally set out to do was make a parody of Gundam, but it eventually became the groundbreaking original TV series we know and love, with its innovative plot, dramatic battles, and relatable characters.

For many years, though, I was toying with the idea of a more “hard sci-fi” story based on the core premises of Macross: the crash of a runaway alien starship on Earth; its subsequent reverse engineering and refit by the humans and a global bellum omnium contra omnes over ownership and control of it; its rediscovery by the aliens it was trying to evade; an existential space war between the Earth and these aliens; and, finally, the dipole between culture, love, and coexistence on one side and blind, blunt militarism on the other.