Hat Tip to RobotechX for finding this interview.
Megascifi.com has posted an interview with Robotech novelist James Luceno! Here is an excerpt.
Q: We’ve seen fighter pilots and ground/sea/space troops get killed any number of times in sci-fi TV (albeit seldom with scenes as moving as Robotech back in the day), but with good guy Captain Gloval, his actions—although for reasons clearly understood—directly cost the lives of tens of thousands between at least a couple of occasions (e.g., the Zentraedi putting his back against the wall, causing him to decide on executing an untested spacefold which ended up being a tragic misfold that forced the Macross population to live in constant danger within the SDF-1; the omnidirectional barrier incident that wiped out untold thousands on the ground). It had been the first time I’d seen that in a TV series, animated or otherwise. With these instances, did that kind of detail in the animated series make it seem you were writing novels of a saga which acknowledged certain truths about war that many fictional war stories didn’t?
JIM: This is one of the things that separates ROBOTECH from the pack: Characters die and survivors are left to grapple with grief, uncertainty, guilt, regret, and a slew of other emotions. I think that some of this is more or less hardwired into the original anime, but Carl and his crew were able to bring the collateral damage closer to the surface. More of this sort of thing has been on display since, in Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica, but back in the day ROBOTECH was breaking new ground.
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