Category: Anime/Manga

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.

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.

Kanno Yoko/Scott Matthew – Dear John

Dear John - GitS SAC OST 3

Days of night slip through my mind
In a silent motionless sky
Paralyzed and motionless
All things falter
Somewhere back
I lost myself
So far deep inside of you
Everything’s become too much
So deep, so weak
Where did I go?

Images of falling light
Move across the hollow sky
I see movement after all
Calling, falling
Remember you’re not the only one
To feel this way, ’cause I’m one
Who has also had enough
So long, dear John
I’m gonna go

Unironically one of my favourite rock songs of 2004.