Taking on the Fantoma Backstory

As my interest in Robotech apocrypha goes on, and all my opinions become cemented, I start to realize that there are in fact very few things I do enjoy unreservedly about the novels' handling of the Zentraedi, and that there are more than a few things about their treatment that I was neutral on before, but now actively dislike. And in one particular case, I am downright embarassed for taking so long to turn on a Zentraedi element: the Fantoma backstory.

Basically, the Robotech expanded universe, by way of The Sentinels, dictated that the Zentraedi had been originally created as miners for the high-grav world of Fantoma (Romanian for "ghost", by the way), which Tirol, the planet where the Robotech Masters and the rest of their race reside, orbited. Some time before the start of the TV series, the Zentraedi were re-conditioned into warriors instead.

Maybe it was that last year, I was so excited at finding a new toy to play with, I didn't stop to look back and analyze something, but the problem with the Fantoma story should have struck me immediately, that problem being how much it hobbles the pathos of the original Zentraedi story as a viewer understood it.

This is especially true in the case of the novel version. While you could make a case that whether as warriors or miners, as long as Zentraedi lived a restricted life devoted to one occupation, the story of their regaining essential humanity remains strong. However, the novels go a few steps furhter. Not only were the Zentraedi once miners, but they have an entire nanscent civilization to return to, embodied in a city called Zarkopolis

(I hate the name "Zarkopolis", by the way: it doesn't fit with any style of Zentraedi language and terminology, and just seems to be a ham-handed way to make things "Roman" to go with Tirol's visual style)

This damages the original theme in a big way. It's far more simple, and far more heartfelt, for the Zentraedi to have nothing when they come to Earth, so that they can regain everything. But giving them a city to return to, something already made, and suggestions that they went through at least some of the motions of a civilization beforehand, waters down and blandifies the original image.

Most of the information on Fantoma's significance to the Zentraedi is dictated through the viewpoint of Breetai, who in the novel version is hundreds of years old, and has just regained his memories of a life on Fantoma. At one point, Breetai ventures to his old quarters and reflects on the person he was before. The scenes are intertwined with his first meeting with Kazianna Hesh, a female Zentraedi who is cheerily putting the moves on the late-blooming Breetai.

Against all the known laws of art and the universe, I found this pairing really likeable, but I should have noticed earlier that the backdrop of Fantoma is completley unecessary for the pairing to happen, for the characters to connect with each other in any emotional way.

Lightning like this would shake any Human's faith in God, Breetai thought as a passing observation, while one of the rolling, rainless storms of Fantoma lit the sky, exciting the chancy tectonics of the planet and resounding against the hard sides of the mining machines and armored workers.

Here in the thicker medium of the unbreathable Fantoman atmosphere, great Breetai gazed down on a place out of memory.

Zarkopolis!

The history of a people, a race, all stemming from the first awakenings there; the things that had been blanked from neuron altogether but somehow, stubbornly, remained in marrow and soul-the past was washing in on him and he could no more sort it out than pick a handful from a wave.

With the mining operation safely established, Breetai had flown back for a look at Zarkopolis, the city where the Zentraedi had begun. A haunted world, he thought yet again, for the latest of times past counting.

Breetai took a step forward, to go down and look at the Zentraedi past. The officers who accompanied him made that same step, like shadows.

"Stay back," he bade them. "You may return to the camp; I wish to be alone." They hesitated, men obeyed.

There were only two Zentraedi from those days still alive, the ultimate survivors, and Exedore was now a happily diminutive little Human. The thought was unkind, but he couldn't help it; only Breetai was left.

With his vast strides, it didn't take him long to make his way down into the deserted city. He saw the high, fluted spires that had been erected by his people in defiance of the terrible gravity, not to announce their greatness so much as to affirm the Zentraedi ability to endure, to overcome, through sheer stubbornness and backbreaking hard work. How different a legacy from what the Robotech Masters had given them!

As a memory-wiped warrior for the Masters, he had always felt contempt for the scurrying, insect-colony industriousness of subject races-of workers. But now he looked upon Zarkopolis, remembering the pain and striving in each chisel mark, each laboriously-raised slab.

And memories began returning to him, recollections of what his people had been at the outset: builders and strivers, who had more in common with the Micronians of Earth, and Macross, and SDF-1, than the Robotech Masters had dared let the Zentraedi know.

It is no wonder to me, now, that we were moved so deeply by Minmei's songs, he thought. At last, at last, I understand!

With that there came a measure of peace within him.

Now he plodded down-the soil falling so fast, and abrading his boots with its weight-toward the stand of cream-colored bunkers and low domes and hunkering complexes that had been the center of all Zentraedi life so long ago.

He stopped. Why return to the source of so much pain and regret and resentment? But-he couldn't hold himself back, despite his iron will.

He had to go down yet again into the weathered, haunted precincts of the Zentraedi workers, and the multitude of voices that spoke to him across the ages. He didn't know why, knew only that he must stand there again, in the center of it all.

"My lord?"

He turned more slowly than he would have under lesser gravity; sudden moves could injure even the mightiest Zentraedi here. Kazianna Hesh was catching up with him, moving with unwise haste in her modified Quadrono suit.

She was again wearing those cosmetics the Human females favored. It confused him, seeing her features behind the tinted facebowl of her helmet. He said,
"What do you want here? You should be at your work."

She was a little out of breath. Kazianna panted, looking at him earnestly. "My work is done and I am off shift, my lord. I-I had hoped that you would tell me why Zarkopolis obsesses you so, and show me the city where once the Zentraedi dwelt."

He looked down at her and wondered how old she was. In the heyday of the Robotech Masters' empire, the life expectancy of a clone warrior was less than three years, and it was virtually certain that she was one of the hordes brought forth to fill the empty spots in the ranks.

But-whence this curiosity? This disturbing presence that she seemed to have? Breetai turned to look out upon Zarkopolis and suddenly understood that these characteristics were things manifest in all Zentraedi, in times past. That they should surface again now was, it could be argued, a very good sign.

"Very well; I shall." He started off again and she fell in with him. Breetai led the way down into the city, pointing this way and that, telling her the things that had come buzzing back into his head with the return to Fantoma and, all of a sudden, not hiding in the gaps in his memory.

"In that hall we met to thrash out problems, all of us; it took a very long time to cut the stone columns perfectly, so that they would support the weight of the roof, and even longer to assemble the roof."

A little further on, "Here, the clones were grown, coming forth when they were ready for work, descending those steps over there to adulthood." Steps he had never walked until recently; Breetai antedated the city, had helped raise it.

And so they went. Breetai was pleased, for reasons he couldn't name, to have someone with whom to share his memories. At last they came to a nondescript little house in a tract of them. It was only slightly more prestigious than the mass barracks in which most Zentraedi had lived.

Breetai pressed a button with an armored finger; the airlock swung open. Kazianna could see that it had been refitted to function again after a span of centuries. She had no doubt that Breetai had done it. Lightning was breaking again, and the odd, emphatic thunder of three-g Fantoma was sounding as the outer hatch slid shut.

Inside, the place was unprepossessing, the quarters of a worker/engineer. He had cleaned up the mess, but there were still a few models left, still a few mounted sketches, from the days when a different Breetai had dreamed larger dreams than all the Robotech Masters' fantasies of galactic conquest-dreams of building.

Breetai saw Kazianna looking around, and realized how spartan the furnishings were. In the age since he had lived in that place, he had learned to deceive, but he spoke the simple truth now. "I was the biggest and the strongest of the miners, the first of them," he said. "Only our leader, Dolza, was bigger than I; only he and Exedore were older.

"But-I had few friends-no life, really, except in my work. It seemed to me that they all thought me-"

He stopped, astonished, as she cracked the seal on her helmet and threw it back. Of course, her suit's instruments would have told her there was breathable atmosphere in the tiny quarters-atmosphere he had put there. Only he hadn't seen her check her instruments, and suspected she had done it on what the Humans called "instinct."

"They all thought you what," Kazianna Hesh encouraged him, walking around, glancing at his sketches, opening the other seams in her armor. "Thought you too stoic, thought you too formidable, great Breetai? Treated you so that you felt easier when you were either working or alone?"

She had always been deferential toward him, but now she sounded somehow teasing. She had made her circuit of the tiny living room and stopped now to flick the control that broke the seal on his own helmet. "They didn't see what was there inside?"

She unsealed his helmet and lifted it off, having to rise on her tiptoes to do it even though she was tall. The reinforced floor groaned beneath them. Breetai was too astonished to speak, and the wall was behind his shoulders so he couldn't retreat.

"Couldn't see the real Breetai?" she went on. "Well, my lord, I can." She pulled his head down to her, like some Human, and he found himself being thoroughly kissed. How had she learned about things like this, forbidden to the Zentraedi?

Many of his race had spent time Micronized to Human size. Maybe that had affected her somehow, or she had seen or heard something.

But he had little time to wonder about that. A kiss; the sight of such an act had almost debilitated him once, when Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes performed it on a Zentraedi meeting table. He was awkward at first, self-conscious, but Kazianna didn't appear to mind and in fact didn't seem to know a great deal more about it than he.

When the kiss ended, he would have caught her up in his arms for more, but she held him off and began alternately popping the seals on his suit and her own.

It suddenly came to him what she had in mind. "You...this is proscribed."

"By whom? By Robotech Masters who have fled beyond the stars? By laws that were never really ours?"

Breetai thought about that, and considered his hunger for her, too. The bed was refurbished; he had slept there once or twice on his off-duty hours, waiting for the past to filter into his mind once again.

Breetai put his arms around Kazianna and kissed her carefully, very happy about it but aware that he had a great deal to learn. Then he took her gauntleted hand and led her to his sleeping chamber. Since he had built the house back in the early days of the Tiresian Overlords who were to become the Robotech Masters, no one else had ever been in that room.

There are many prizes in this scene which I still enjoy.

What's added to Breetai's character in these scenes is the sense that he's a late bloomer, that other, lesser, Zentraedi have been off finding "culture" while the great and powerful Breetai remains behind, perhaps thinking he's too good for it, perhaps not wanting to, perhaps still a little uneasy about the idea, for he is confused and uncertain, the eager, when "culture" comes to him directly. But this all doesn't make Breetai weak: it humanizes him. It makes him a more interesting and complex character, while not taking away from his inherent badassery.

And Kazianna is not perfect, she seems like a "real" character despite her artistic inauthenticity, despite how easy it would be to condemn her for just being there to fill a niche.

But what the novel says about Breetai's past life as a miner has nothing to do with this. It adds some complexity to Breetai, but at the same time, it is also bland, boring, and disposable. The Breetai of this past was a stereotypical workaholic, but we already have the TV series essentially saying the same thihg about Breetai-the-commander, since that Breetai knew nothing about any other kind of life. We don't need to add that he was a voluntary workaholic as a miner on top of it; that's just redundant.

There are plenty of places in the timeline where a Breetai/Kazianna relationship could be set and put, without the need for Fantoma to exist, and plenty of opportunities for some kind of poignant Zentraedi stories without the past of Fantoma. Breetai doesn't need the Fantoma backstory for anything.

If I were to justify why it took me so long to dislike this part, it would be because the novels helped define and shape my interest in Exedore and Breetai as characters, by putting forth new aspects to those characters which somehow seemed to fit perfectly with their orignal personalities. Thus, it took me a while to unglue the parts I did like from what I should not have.

That, and the simple fact that while other Robotech fans can cheerily remake and remix the multiverse to suit their own images, I was instinctively reluctant to try to do that, since my notion in making fanfic is always, to hew as close as possibly to what's being given to me, so I initially absorbed all aspects of those scene with Breetai as "good" instead of questioning the Fantoma backstory. This comes from an urge for laziness as much as fidelity: it's not in me to write huge fanfic epics, but rather small character-driven pieces.

Even now, I can feel the pull of those secenes on me, despite not wanting to take back any of my criticisms of the Fantoma concept. Story a' my life.