This week's Nyan Nyan is an all new episode of awesome moeloli tsundere explosions, big beautiful explosions of Reaction missiles and best of all, Ranka's REVENGE. This episode continues to show why Macross Frontier is just so fucking awesome.

Apparently, Ranka was unable to sing in her First Live event 5 episodes ago. So this time, she'll get her revenge for that and sing back all the songs that she didn't sing. Technically, her actual debut was on that sad little planet which got Pacmanned, but all's well ends well. It seems the gods will not have Ranka not making a live debut at least once on Macross Frontier.

This episode went though some of the early days when Ranka was entrusted to Ozma after the big rescue from the 119th Research Fleet. Ranka seems to have been traumatized from the massive fight for quite a while. I wonder what its like...

Raising a would-be star is no easy task, as you can see from the changes Ozma has been through. From a young hopeful rockstar to an old hopeless ace. It just shows how much stress parenting can put on a person, even an ace pilot.

That actually looks more like a cheesecake than a pineapple cake. It does not look too shabby at all. I remember the first time I tried to bake a cake. I never grasped the concept of 'yeast' and 'baking soda' so every cake/bread that have made to date has never risen. They all ended up as biscuits. Judging from the way Ranka cut this cake, it was definitely not a biscuit.

Anyway, lets get out of the flashback and into the Macross Frontier opening. The opening HAS CHANGED!!! And why is it a big deal? Because... the main stuff in it now is not some old woman trying to sing about a Triangular love or something. It's Ranka's friggin awesome new debut single Seikan Hikou 星間飛行 (Flying through the stars). Yes, its the song that Ranka sang at that planet which got eaten up by Grace's Dimension Eater. And not only that, they have completely broken away from the dark technolithic theme that defined Macross's OP, but used a very laid back, casual style OP like Hidamari Sketch and Hayate no Gotoku, which was very refreshing indeed.

The new OP features some of Ranka's dancing moves as a cute chibi SD Ranka. You can watch the video here. The OP doesn't have the entire song though, and some of the dance moves have been omitted. The OP dance moves animation is based on a promotional video that was around on the Macross Frontier official website for a while now. That contains all the dance moves of Seikan Hikou. It's here.

I miss the old pao's that I used to have when I was a kid back in Malaysia...

Why is Macross's animation so good? Because they skimp on certain parts that do not appeal to any part of the Earthly population at all.

Klan Klein in moeloli mode is so priceless. This picture must be hung in the Lourve someday in the future.

People this reminds me of:

1. Fllay Allster (Gundam Seed)

2. Nanoha Takamachi (MILF)

3. Maria (Hayate no Gotoku)

Autodrivers need to be extremely advanced and extremely reliable to make these in-car TVs safe. This kind of show in particular, would be pretty lethal if you were driving and it so happened to come out.

Ranka seemed lonely, and the only guy who would scale walls and break rules to see her would be Alto. The tsundere trap of the century.

After coming in, Alto said something like, "why did you make me climb through the window like an adulterer?". I was wondering if he was trying to make up a joke or something. Were we supposed to laugh? I don't think Ranka got it either, and started blattering away about doing inappropriate stuff etc etc.

Ranka's new pet Ai-kun really doesn't look Vajra to me. I mean c'mon, look at it, there is NO WAY that thing can be related to the self-folding, gun-growing vicious man-squeezing monsters of the day. Maybe they picked it up from Eden?

Ok, so that part of Ai-kun just grossed me out. Everything about it is cute but the legs. Is Ai-kun some sort of arachnid? Wait, he seems a bit more Vajra now. Maybe the big gun actually grows out of that red bump on the top of its head. Eww... the legs...

Ok after I saw Ai-kun tear up that paper plane so viciously, definitely Vajra behaviour. I can sense that all the Vajra may have some sort of unimind or Overmind or some sort of combined conscience or linked thoughts or something Zerg-like that that gives Ai-kun the contempt on airplanes it's (probably) brothers have encountered... O shit. NOOO!!! YOU'D BETTER NOT HURT RANKA.

Alright. So this is what the fuss was all about. Apparently the guys at Galaxy are using Macross Frontier to lure the Vajra in to various traps and collect the fold quartz crystals for them. It seems the Fold Quartz only grows inside Vajra, which enables them to fold on their own and gives them the energy that powers the awesome weapons that... grow... off their hides. Man, I wish I grew a hand that was a gun. That would be awesome. The Fold Quartz has the property of being able to fold across long distances and ignoring the fold distortions that cause massive amounts of wasted energy during interstellar travel, limiting the effectiveness of fold travel and making the whole galaxy "still quite big". Looks like Birler's dream is coming true.

If you look closely at the text in the windows of this scene, you will notice that the text is actually a dump of a driver .inf file of some windows driver for some EPSON printer. Oh man, I hope this does NOT happen in the future. I would not trust my life to a spaceship powered by Microsoft's programs. And that goes for any Microsoft-made program at all. What if the life support bluescreened?!

Ranka is cute. Full stop.

Alright, time to fight again. It seems the SMS were ordered to sortie again just before they were allowed to attend Ranka's concert.

These VF-25's are really cool little planes. I should make one for myself sometime. This is the Armor pack. I can tell why it's called that, it really makes the entire variable fighter look pretty big and heavy, but since space is weightless, that is no problem, and it can hold 4 reaction missiles, which the pilot makes it a point to fire before he gets into the enemy line of fire. Why? To avoid those things exploding in their face. These reaction missiles are like the nukes of the Macross Frontier universe. Awesome and deadly.

The NUNS standard fighter. I wonder why people still make their fighter craft streamlined when they only use it in space, where there is absolutely no air? Weird stuff. This fighter looks like a pretty generic fighter that is mass produced to be destroyed. No wonder NUNS fighters are usually shown as cannon fodder in the series.

Oh no! It seems a fly has gotten past the last line of defense! This is not looking good...

This scene, where the Vajra shoots its load at the bridge of Macross Quarter, is probably the best scene ever in the series.

The captain looks stunningly calm as usual, obviously faithful that his crew are the finest of the finest men that could avert any apocalypse, and prevent any disaster from reaching them. Even if it does mean that your life would have to flash before your eyes for a moment.

This scene where Ozma comes to the front of the bridge to block the deadly beam was probably plagiarized straight from Gundam Seed. It also begs the question, if the bridge was so important, why isn't it guarded heavily with powerful force fields and shields in the first place? And, how come the variable fighters actually have more powerful shields and are stronger than the Macross Quarter?

It seems the Valkyries from Galaxy have a very nice beam cannon that they use to f**k up Vajra. The guys at SMS and LAI should try and buy these kinds of technology from them. Also, I could hardly stand listening to Brera talk as if he was the best fighter pilot in all of history. How can anyone be so egoistic?!

Watch Ozma kill the Vajra using the most basic of all weapons, the Knife. I'm in yer body shooting bullets at your nerves.

HAH. IN YOUR FACE. WHO NEEDS BEAM CANNONS.

After a semi-awesome fight against the Vajra, the guys are back just in time for Ranka's official debut concert at the Dragon Stadium. She actually looks like a star here! KYAAAA Look at that fang!!!

Lol, is Michael a shotacon?

Ooh... What is this!? Did a Vajra Queen infest a variable fighter!? Oh no. This is bad (Probably a fold quartz farm? Or a real problem later on for the story to capitalize on?)

Ozma forgetting to go the the hospital to get his wounds bandaged before going to the concert. Lesson: Always take care of your body first, even if you will never die.

That planet in the distance looks like Jupiter. Maybe there are lots of planets in the center of the galaxy, that look like Jupiter?

Oh what is this? Sheryl looks angry. Perhaps she needs love. What did she see?

Ah. Looks like its time for a Grace-Sheryl showdown. The next episode is probably going to be pretty interesting with all these new plots coming up. First, there's this conspiracy going on around the fold crystals, and there is the Vajra who are now resorting to infestation to defeat Macross Frontier, and there is the Sheryl vs. Grace combat scene which is probably gonna be due out next week. Ooh... I can't wait to see what happens when Sheryl discovers that Grace is a clone, and that no matter how many times you kill her, the same bitch is gonna get cloned over and over again. Also, it's high time they showed a bit of action on Galaxy. I would love to at least have a short tour of that space ship.

written by astrobunny \\ alto, fold, frontier, grace, hikou, macross, new opening, nyan, ozma, quartz, ranka, seikan, sheryl, sms, vajra, variable fighter