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The Holy Hayase Family – Part 2: Daddy’s Little Girl

/ Konstantinos Tzoannopoulos / 9 Comments
Anime drawing of a girl with long, brown hair and green eyes, wearing a green, romantically-styled long-sleeved dress, waits behind a tree branch.
Misa Hayase in her early teens. Drawing by Haruhiko Mikimoto. © Studio Nue / Big West.

Among the many alarming scenes I spotted while reading White Reminiscences, I flagged one as particularly puzzling, as it’s completely at odds with the hyper-competent, determined, workaholic officer we see in the TV series; in a conversation she has with Riber, he asks her what she wants to be when she grows up – a rather simple question for most children, who generally respond readily and, in most cases, enthusiastically and proudly. Any child growing up in a normal household has some sort of dream for their future: some want to become doctors, others want to become pilots, teachers, nurses, and so on.

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The Holy Hayase Family – Part 1: Ten Red Flags

/ Konstantinos Tzoannopoulos / 2 Comments
Anime screen shot showing a brown-haired, middle-aged military officer looks to his right; he is wearing a white peaked cap; his uniform's jacket is black and has a high collar, while the shirt is white with a turtle neck and a zipper hidden under a teal accented stripe.
Admiral Takashi Hayase in Super Dimension Fortress Macross. © Studio Nue / Big West.

Takashi Hayase is Misa’s father. His wife and Misa’s mother is Sakiko Hayase. He’s a career officer of the United Nations Navy, who later becomes a member of the UN Forces’ High Command. In the TV series, he appears in five episodes (15 and 24–27). He also has an extensive presence in Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences and The Plundering Fleet. The only works in which he’s shown to interact with his daughter are the TV series and White Reminiscences. For decades, he’s been viewed by fandom as a very minor character, and this becomes apparent by the lack of discussions on what he does as an officer and a parent. This has led to his role in the formation of Misa’s personality being severely understated.

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The Holy Hayase Family – Introduction

/ Konstantinos Tzoannopoulos / 2 Comments
Manga drawing of a black-haired Japanese woman in a colorful kimono with a young, brown-haired girl sitting happily on her lap; on the right, the husband, a dark-haired man in anime-style naval uniform leans towards them, with his right hand on the woman's right shoulder.
The Hayase Family: Sakiko (the mother), Misa, and Takashi (the father). Drawing by Haruhiko Mikimoto. © Studio Nue / Big West.

Continuing from my review of the light novel Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences, I’m turning my attention to the Hayase family – Misa’s father, Takashi, and her mother, Sakiko. The starting point for this multi-part analysis is Matteo Watzky’s 2020 article “Gender roles in Gundam and Macross” (also archived here) on his blog Animétudes. In his article, Watzky argues that Macross tries to somehow “teach” its heroine, Misa Hayase, how to conform to a certain standard of femininity – soft, romantic, loving, mated to a man – in order to be validated as a person. My reading of Misa and her arc differs greatly from Watzky’s for a number of reasons, methodological and interpretive. The most important of these reasons is that no character, especially one as carefully constructed and as fundamental to the series as Misa, exists in a vacuum. Therefore, to understand her emotional restraint, her attachment issues, her adherence to her military duty, and her narrative arc, we must examine the family she grew up in.

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Revisiting Macross

/ Konstantinos Tzoannopoulos / Leave a comment

Yes, I know the order of posts is a bit backwards – I should have written this post before publishing my review of Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences, but I decided otherwise. I’d written the review and its Greek translation anyway, and I reckoned I could decide how to write this “prologue” later. So, here it is, without further ado.

Dramatic illustration of a massive blue-and-white space battleship, the SDF-1 Macross, launching above a mountainous area, escorted by several fighter planes.
Illustration by Yoshiyuki Takani. Originally published in “Super Dimension Fortress Macross Original Illustrations — Mechanics Edition” by Shogakukan. © Studio Nue / Big West.
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Review – Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences

/ Konstantinos Tzoannopoulos / 3 Comments
The cover of the novel being reviewed here, “Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences”. The Japanese title, in kanji, reads “早瀬未沙 白い追憶”, romanized as Hayase Misa: Shiroi Tsuioku. On a green woven background, it features a watercolor painting that shows the protagonist, a long-haired light brown-haired teenage girl, wearing a Japanese school uniform and putting on her jacket.

Part of my revisit to the underanalyzed in Western anime discourse Super Dimension Fortress Macross (SDFM for brevity’s sake) series and the overall Macross franchise is a thorough examination of its ancillary material – manga adaptations, novelizations, side stories, light novels, audio dramas, etc. As is my typical practice, I will be treating this material critically and without the rose-tinted glasses of childhood nostalgia or fandom loyalty; it goes without question that I am not going to bother catering to the sensitivities of fans who may view the creative team as “infallible”. Of course, this also applies to the animated material and dialogues we see in the series, the theatrical adaptation (Macross: Do You Remember Love? or DYRL? for short), and the OVA Flash Back 2012 (FB2012 for short).

In this first installment of my Macross “pilgrimage”, I am reviewing the novel Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences [Hayase Misa: Shiroi Tsuioku 早瀬未沙 白い追憶], which Gubaba kindly and generously took the trouble to translate for the benefit of Western readers, whose access to it has always been limited. You can read Gubaba’s translation here (also archived here). As it has been out of print for a long time, it is only available on the secondary market, and has never had an official translation to English, French, or any other Western language.

To better serve the readers, I will be judging ancillary material like this on two criteria: their artistic value (in this case, literary) and their documentary value. It should be pretty obvious what I mean by “artistic value.” The documentary value, on the other hand, is how well the work at hand, be it a novel, a novelization, or an audio drama, works as a context source.

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On AI and Blogging

/ Konstantinos Tzoannopoulos / Leave a comment

The rise of commercial artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude, etc. has brought with it a great temptation. The immense data centers that power them give them useful – in most cases – data identification, collection, and analysis capabilities. This tempts people to use them as “all-knowing assistants”, who can provide answers to just about everything, quickly and reliably. Well, not always reliably, but I’ll get to that later.

With generative AI, people have become increasingly tempted to replace actual human skills with computer-generated content – sometimes mimicking specific styles. This has resulted in a flood of what’s now known as “AI slop”, which is plagued by all sorts of aesthetic and even factual discrepancies. This is even worse with AI-generated texts, especially analyses, essays, articles, etc. Although, by now, more experienced readers have learned to identify AI-generated texts and images quite well, many still slip through the cracks.

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