You may or may not have noticed, but there haven't been any Bite-Sized Backstories since late June. I put them on pause for a few months to pursue a big, fun project that I've wanted to do for a while. I enjoy anime, and one of my favorite anime of all time is the fifth show in the Macross franchise, "Macross Frontier." Macross Frontier is not necessarily the best anime of all time. It may not even be in my top 5 anime, but I enjoy it to such an extend that I've gone well out of my way to preserve some memories of it.

What does that mean? Well, I think y'all know I enjoy researching things and explaining things. And I enjoy pulling out plot points that might be hidden to those without the time to read, reread, and re-reread stories. I decided to do something similar to Macross Frontier. But, instead of retelling the plot in a condensed form, I tried to summarize it and point out key moment that watchers might have missed in something vaguely similar to the Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5.

Macross Frontier is special in one way in that it has tons and tons of references to the past Macross shows, movies, and mini-series, but it makes those references in the best, most cleanly in-universe ways possible. They almost never interfere with the stories being told, but are fun moments for longtime Macross fans to find. But, if one of your goals is to point out those references to Macross newcomers, how would you be sure to catch them all yourself? Well, if you’re me, you rewatch the entire Macross franchise. Yes, that means all 36 episodes of the original Macross from 1982 and it’s followup movie from 1985. Then, Macross Plus, the four part two hour long OVA from 1994. Then the 49 episodes of the fairly awful Macross 7 also from 1994. Then the five part movie-length OVA Macross Zero from 2002. And, finally, you watch all 25 episodes of 2007’s Macross Frontier while taking moment to moment timecoded notes of every key plot point and past reference along the way. Then you write a bunch of summaries, take and edit a bunch of pictures, and code up a bunch of posts. Each episode's article will end up having taken somewhere between three and five hours of work by the end. I really haven't been doing much else like gaming or Destiny since the end of June.

So… what have I been doing for the last three months? I’ve been creating the Macross Frontier Episode Guide. Currently it is a set of summaries, impressions, and lists of key plot points and included references for each episode of Macross Frontier. And I’m not done yet. There’s still two full length Macross Frontier movies that I haven’t gotten to yet.

I don’t know if any of y’all will enjoy this or use this, and I still need to do a solid editing pass on all my roughly 46,000 words to get it into shape, but I thought I'd show it off now anyway. My ultimate plan after doing the two movies and another round of editing is to unleash this on the larger Macross community and see what they think of it. But, it’s fun to reach a stopping point and fun to pat yourself on the back for accomplishing something big and fun to show it off to some friends who might say something nice. So, here it is:

(Click to hyperlink)

After this is all finished I’ll definitely get back to Bite-sized Backstory. But maybe, just maybe one of you will enjoy the reason for the delay if not the results of it.