Macross Plus vs. Top Gun: Maverick — The Man–Machine Frontier

There’s an uncanny mirror between Macross Plus and Top Gun: Maverick that becomes obvious once you place them side-by-side:
Macross Plus was probably chugging from the same cultural brew that produced the original 1986 Top Gun — and then, decades later, Top Gun: Maverick swung back around and ended up exploring ideas that Macross Plus had already gone weird, stylish, and cybernetic with in the mid-90s.

Whether anyone at Studio Nue had Tom Cruise posters on the wall is beside the point. Both stories were birthed from humanity’s primal dreams of flight:
that fighter pilots are rock stars, and jets are power fantasies.

But the real heart of this comparison is this:
Both works are obsessed with the same fear — that the machine might not need us anymore.

One handles that fear by doubling down on human instinct.
The other plugs a pilot’s brain into a warplane and asks, “What if the problem is the human?”

You know, light topic to discuss amongst human friends.

Why These Two Even Belong in the Same Hangar

Maverick is the Hollywood sequel machine doing what it does best:
Remind us that humans are awesome, irreplaceable, and extremely photogenic at sunset.
(How many litres of virgin blood is this man sipping, and is it sold in family-size?)

Macross Plus, meanwhile, sneaks in from the anime side of the fence and says:
“What if the future of flight is part dogfight, part therapy pugilism, and part AI-powered fever dream?”

They take different routes, but both orbit around the same existential aviation headache:

  • What does mastery mean when machines can outperform us?
  • Where is the line between pilot and system?
  • Is flying a craft of skill, identity, or ego-management?
  • And what happens when a prototype understands you a little too well?

Maverick: Humans Are Still the Sunset Aces

In Top Gun: Maverick, the tension is laid out right at the start:

The future is unmanned.

Cue Maverick, who responds (paraphrasing):
“Not on my watch, buddy. I’ve got one last mission in me, and I’ll fly it even if I’m powered by sheer old-man-on-yard energy.”

The film’s politics about drones aren’t subtle — but subtlety was never its mission profile.
This is a movie that treats instinct, experience, and pure human grit as sacred.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of yelling, “We don’t need no stinking gadgets!” over afterburner noise.

Earnest? Yes.
Bombastic? Yes.
Sincere in believing humans have an intangible edge? Absolutely.

Macross Plus: The Human Edge Isn’t a Guarantee

Meanwhile, Macross Plus looks at that same fear of automation and goes:

“Okay, but what if the pilot is the weakest link?”

Enter Guld, the hottest head in the hottest fighter, the YF-21 — a machine so advanced it literally melds with his nervous system. It becomes an extension of his body, a shimmering blue exoskeleton built for speed and fury.

Until… it isn’t.

His “mind-meld” with the 21 amplifies everything inside him — including the unresolved trauma he thought he’d buried. When he loses control, it isn’t because the aircraft malfunctions.
It’s because he does.

Macross Plus’ thesis is sharper, more chaotic, and more honest:

Technology doesn’t just replace us.
It reveals what’s broken inside us, and where our biology — psyche and flesh alike — betrays us.

It’s an unusually grown-up idea for a franchise with transforming space jets.
(I love Valkyries. Still do. I’m not sorry.)

Two Cultures, One Anxiety

This is where the comparison gets delightful:

  • Maverick says the pilot matters because of that mythic “human element” — intuition, improvisation, the ability to do insane things under pressure.
  • Macross Plus says the pilot matters, but mostly because humans bring baggage, trauma, ego, and passion — things machines can’t predict or contain.

Both stories defend human relevance…
but for very different reasons.

One story clings to the past.
The other warns that the future may expose us more than we’d like.

And somehow, they both stick the emotional landing.

The Machines Aren’t the Villains

Neither film is anti-technology.
Neither hates drones, automation, or AI.
What they actually fear — and dramatize beautifully — is loss of identity.

In Maverick, flying is who the pilots are.
In Macross Plus, flying exposes who the pilots are.

And in both, the machines only become “the enemy” when the humans start losing faith in themselves.

Why This Comparison Works (Beyond the “I LOVE PLANES!” Factor)

Because it highlights something timeless in aviation storytelling:

  • The cockpit is a mirror for the self.
  • Every jet is a metaphor.
  • And flight, in fiction, is always about more than physics.

They’re about who we become when we’re pushed to the limits of our craft —
and about the uneasy certainty that our creations will one day outgrow us.

Turns out, the real aviation fantasy is relevance.

The Grandfather Who Forgot to Die

This is part 6 of 6 of Revenant Machines
A painterly landscape of a ghostly B‑52 bomber flying through storm‑lit clouds above a desolate, apocalyptic terrain. The aircraft’s silhouette fades into mist, contrails tapering into nothingness, while the horizon glows faintly with amber light against dark swirling skies.
A revenant hymn in paint: the B‑52 drifts across a ruined horizon, stitched and spectral, a guest who never leaves.

A Revenant Hymn for the B‑52

Invocation

Born when slide rules ruled.
When glass burned amber.
When men smoked in mission briefings.
When “space age” meant orbiting dogs.

Eight engines. Two decks.
A wingspan like a deficit.
And still here.
Not retired. Not reborn.
Just—re‑engined.

Ascent

A stubborn grandfather.
Stitched and re‑skinned.
Showing up to every war.
A guest who never leaves.

It is inevitable:
He will still be flying—
—when his grandchildren are rust.
—when memories are void.

Seal

The world ended.
He never heard the toll.
Still he flies—
first as a relic, now as a ghost.

The Avenging Hog

This is part 5 of 6 of Revenant Machines
Oil painting in impressionistic style showing an A-10 Warthog flying high above a battlefield. Soldiers in the foreground are silhouetted against flames and smoke, looking upward as the aircraft recedes into the sky. The muted green aircraft contrasts with the fiery orange and red background, rendered with thick, expressive brushstrokes.
A-10 Thunderbolt II, the beloved Hog, seen from the ground as it ascends through fire and smoke. Ungainly in form, absolute in function — salvation remembered in orbit.

Ungainly in the heavens,
perfect in the mire.
The angel of the grunts,
the saviour of the mudbound,
descending where supersonic seraphs cannot follow.

The Avenger, spitting its hymnal —
a litany of blessings,
a litany of curses,
each round a deliverance,
each burst a verdict,
each BRRRT a divine fart of metal and fury.

Not beautiful in form,
function absolute.
Circling —
until the circle breaks,
until the skies bristle with javelins it cannot parry,
unequipped for denial,
its hymn falters at the edge of fires it cannot answer.

Yet in the memory of mud and smoke,
its orbit remains a halo,
its voice a liturgy of salvation and wrath.
Ungainly, inappropriate, unbeautiful —
beloved.
The angel, the saviour, the Avenger.

The Twilight Machine

This is part 4 of 6 of Revenant Machines
An F‑22 Raptor silhouetted against a vast twilight sky, flying alone with a sense of solemn aloftness.
The uncrowned king, aloft.

Invocation

Forged for supremacy,
for skies of worthy foes.
Forged in the dying breath of the Cold War,
he came after the wars of glory,
before the ghosts.

Prophecy

Thus was the Raptor: prophecy, unfulfilled.
A war god without a war,
a sovereign without subjects.

He does not roar. He whispers. And empires tremble.

Unchallenged

A relic of code and carbon,
yet the herald of a new age.

Forged to inherit the throne,
the final heir of blood and steel—
only the portent, not culmination.

Hollow

They crowned no rival, but named his successor.
He did not fail; none arose to meet him.

His reign hollow: unproven, unspent.
His only trophy: a balloon.

Epitaph

The king on an unearned throne,
the champion without a war.

Hymn of the Lineage

This is part 3 of 6 of Revenant Machines
An F/A‑18 Hornet rests on a carrier deck at sunset, its dark outline framed by the fading glow of the horizon, suggesting the end of the man‑machine age.

Dawn — The High Priests of the Pacific

The Wildcat’s first defiance,
the Whistling Death,
the Hellcat’s iron will,
the Avenger’s laden wings,
the Dauntless in its final dive—

They bore the ocean’s altar on their shoulders,
their rites written in fire,
in blood,
in salt spray.

Their eyes the first to witness the rituals,
their hands the ones that shaped them.

Zenith — The Cold War Crusaders

The Panther’s howl,
the Last Gunfighter,
the blast‑carved Phantom,
the Tomcat’s huntress grace—

They swore their vigil at the carrier’s altar,
their duels etched in contrails,
in prophecy.

Watchers of an age
balanced on the edge of Armageddon.

Dusk — The Twilight Keepers of the Altar

The Hornet — lean sentinel of dusk.
The Super Hornet — steadfast flamekeeper.

Last priests of the old rituals,
carrying the rites to their quiet end:
into shadow and swarm,
into networks and etched nerves.

Coda

Her brief blaze,
in the Tomcat’s enduring shadow,
a borrowed fire on silver,
before the altar dimmed
to thought without flesh.

The Undying Eagle

This is part 2 of 6 of Revenant Machines
- A painterly landscape of an F‑15 Eagle charging head‑on through a storm, afterburners blazing, framed by jagged lightning like a crown.
Wreathed in lightning, spitting hellfire.

Ascendant Warrior, Unyielding Challenger.

Invocation

Forged in the Cold War, war-standards raised.
Built for dominance, not grace.
A warrior that refuses to leave the sky.

Many machines were born of that crucible,
but few with such ruthless clarity.
The Eagle was not mere aircraft, but declaration:

— the air is ours.
— we own the skies.

Ascent

The boast was truth.
Where rivals rose, the Eagle struck.
Each victory a verse; myth eclipsed machine.

Time is the enemy of all warriors.
His sea twin, spine broken and displayed, others to oblivion.
The Eagle should have followed, too brutal for the stealth age.

It refused.
It shed tired feathers, grew new talons,
and returned, the EX-alted one—
no shadow‑dweller, no phantom,
a martial avatar
challenging the future.

Apotheosis

Once a war beast—
heavy cavalry of the sky, talons bared—
the Eagle becomes other:

— becomes war machine divine, thundering sky‑chariot,
— becomes no longer beast of sinew and claw, storm‑engine,
— becomes elemental: the sky made form.

The Eagle becomes machine‑god,
sharpening consecrated implements.

— Each upgrade a ritual.
— Each weapon an offering.
— Each flight an endurance.

Descent

As a machine‑god, still a fighter.
The Eagle is a creature apart.
Undying warrior, scarred by decades,
reforged, renewed,
the last incarnation of the eternal champion,
still aloft long after peers descended.

Cultural Afterburn

The Eagle never became a movie star.
No Top Gun moment, no blaze of pop culture.
Its myth was written in victories.
It still flies.

Where the Tomcat became a totem of imagination,
the Eagle is here.

Its imprint is quieter, heavier.
Not
nostalgia.
Presence.

Unyielding.

Tomcat: The Valhalla-Bound Huntress

This is part 1 of 6 of Revenant Machines
A ghost of an F-14 Tomcat soaring through twilight skies — a final flight into legend.

An apex predator’s flight into memory.

A farewell to the titanium creatures that once ruled the skies — and still haunt the horizon of memory.

Introduction

Somewhere in the haze of satellite footage and silence, five Tomcats fell. Israeli strikes, confirmed by released footage and military sources, destroyed several of Iran’s last F-14s — perhaps grounded, perhaps ghosts still dreaming of flight. Either way, among the last of their kind still tethered to this plane.

It’s a strange feeling, watching an era slip quietly out of the sky.

The Tomcat was more than a fighter jet.
She was a creature of myth — forged bones, swing wings, and a roar that once defined the edge of human ambition and engineering audacity.

Eulogy

They were never meant to last this long.

Forged on Long Island’s wind-swept tarmac, birthed with the arrogance of a superpower, the F-14 Tomcat was built to stalk Backfires and turn lumbering Bears back toward the pole.

Her swing wings inscribed prayers in the clouds,
a fleeting aria of flight, a hymn of speed.
Her titanium wing box, fused by an invisible fire, was a bastion of strength — a spine that bore every catapult launch and supersonic dive.

She carried the sky’s first silicon soul —
dreaming, flying, in code.

For decades the Aegis of the fleets.
Some crossed the ocean into Persian skies —
patched, coaxed, and kept alive by keepers
who refused to let a legend die.

They scavenged miracles from scrap
machining the impossible,
breathing life into machines
whose time had passed.

Even titanium bends to fatigue and time.

In recent weeks, some of those proud creatures were destroyed before they could ever take to the air again.

The news was brief, the footage grainy.

But those who know the shape of that wing —
that unmistakable silhouette —
felt that toll between the ribs.

It was the end of an age —
the last gasp of an era that once ruled Cold War skies.

Her fate was one of conflict —
born from tension and kept alive through stubborn will —
caught between eras,
between the analog and the digital.

So let us remember her not for the politics of her end,
but for what she was —
a machine that was more than its reality.

A set of forged bones and composite feathers that gave human will the power to challenge the horizon.

A predator with grace enough to make poets out of pilots.

Now the last Tomcats grow few.
No more will those wings sweep wide over desert dawns.
No more will that metallic heart thrum beneath mortal skies.

The sky is quieter tonight.

She may be gone from the earthbound flight lines,
but somewhere in the thin air above memory,
she still rolls into the sun —
wings sweeping back, engines singing their feral hymn.

Her judgement still reaches beyond the horizon,
she still growls — fading, out of this world… the Huntress, eternal.

Cultural Afterburn

Long before the last Cats left the carrier deck, their echoes found new skies to fly in.

The F‑14 wasn’t just an aircraft;
it became an icon — a symbol of analog audacity in a digital age.

Its silhouette, all claws and grace, swept into cinema, anime, and games alike.

On screen, the Tomcat roared into immortality with Top Gun (1986),
the movie that turned naval aviation into myth and pilots into rockstars.
When it reappeared in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), battered but unbowed, it wasn’t just nostalgia — it was resurrection, and farewell.

In Japan, the Cat transformed again:
Macross and its Western cousin Robotech reimagined the swing‑wing fighter as the VF‑1 Valkyrie — a love letter to engineering and imagination.

From After Burner’s neon horizons to Ace Combat’s operatic dogfights,
from Tom Clancy’s thrillers to model‑builder showcases,
the Tomcat became more than a jet. It became a totem.

Few machines cross that line between tool and totem.
The F‑14 did.

It didn’t just fly; it inspired.

And in every digital sky, every retro arcade, every mecha hangar,
the last Cats still prowl —
titanium hearts beating somewhere between memory and myth.

Legends Live Forever

RIP Ozzy, the Prince of Darkness, Godfather of Metal.

Without you, I, and millions of others, would have grown up differently. Your music shaped who we are and united us, my brothers and sisters in metal.

Tonight, we salute you.