This is another essay I wrote for my LJ a while ago. Nothing more to say.The Problem with MiriyaWhen it comes to
Robotech: The Macross Saga, and its originator, the anime series
Super Dimension Fortress Macross, I’m all about the cultural transition of the Zentraedi, from a race only bred for war to one that grows to understand the value of tender emotions.
Unfortunately, there’s one Zentraedi character whose personal transition comes with a cartful of baggage, one whose changes I can’t enjoy. She is Miriya Parino Sterling, originally written as Milia Fallyna Jenius. Once the flying ace of the female Zentraedi group, she tried to kill the human Max Sterling/Max Jenius who had humiliated her in battle, but, following multiple defeats by him, they fell in love and were swiftly married.
(Since I am more of a
Robotech fan and there’s more material to address because I’m factoring in the novels and older comics, this work will use Miriya rather than Milia, though all of my comments on the original series could be applied to Milia, too)
No one play the strawfeminist card: the problem here is not that a female warrior falls in love, gets married and has a child. The problem is the subtext of “taming”, and that Miriya did not take an active interest in human culture until Max showed her the way, was indeed entirely ignoring it in favour of the goal of killing her defeater. That, and there seems to be a strong assimilationist subtext to Miriya after her marriage.
As mentioned above, Miriya was originally the flying ace of the female Zentraedi group. When defeated by a human in battle (Max, though she did not know it at the time), her pride is so wounded that she gets herself shrunk down to human size (for those of you who’ve only seen
Macross Plus, Zentraedi were originally a race of giants) and ventures into the Super Dimension Fortress in order to defeat him in single combat. She searches all over its internal city, trying to find her destroyer, and after a few cases of mistaken identity, sees that it is Max, after he defeats her in a war game at the arcade.
For his part, Max does not notice her hostility, and is taken with the mysterious woman’s beauty. Before Miriya can leave, Max intercepts her and offers to meet Miriya in the park in the evening. Miriya comes, but only to attempt to kill him in combat with a knife. Max takes the knife she has offered for his defence, and the two battle it out. Max manages to disarm Miriya...in more ways than one, as, when the defeated woman begs for Max to end her life because she can’t suffer the humiliation, he instead asks her to marry him, and she accepts.
What’s disturbing about this scenario crosses gender lines, to an extent: the notion that someone can put all their heart into something, approach it with the firmest conviction, only to have it destroyed by the very target of their search, have their worldview completely turned around. All of Miriya wanted to destroy Max, but he wins her completely over. She had no hand in shaping her own destiny.
That might be the nature of love, a viewer might say. But it looks a little dubious when only one person in a couple is grandly altered by the event; it raises the question of “sacrifice”. Miriya essentially is broken down and built back up again from scratch, has her entire self-image challenged and then removed, but what does Max sacrifice, in contrast? Nothing, and he gains a lovely wife.
This is not about the story ignoring the fact that Max’s marriage would place him under heavy suspicion if it were sanctioned at all, no, it’s about the internal change, the sacrifice of character, that Miriya undergoes. Nothing comparative happens to Max, and even if others actually despised and challenged him for marrying an alien, it wouldn’t be the same as what Miriya underwent, not unless Max was invested enough in his reputation to actually feel pain at having it damaged through his marriage. But that doesn’t seem like something that would have happened with Max, should the narrative have explored any backlash against his marriage (which it didn’t until the Expanded Universe, and even then the mention is brief).
But, while the problem of Miriya transcends gender differences to a degree, the gender issues can’t be ignored.
One would have had to live under a rock not to notice tales of a female warrior being defeated by a stronger male, including those where she can’t offer love until she is defeated, which stem from the same basic root. Even though Max is obviously not engaging in any malicious, personal, or consciously sexist attempts to bring Miriya down, the results are the same: she is defeated three times by him in battle (in the air, in the arcade, and in the park), and yet comes to love him anyway, gladly becoming his wife and flying as his second. It suggests a female need to be “tamed”, to always submit to a stronger man, and at worst, a masochism that is not attributed to any kind of secret, personal dominance kink and hence is being suggested as a universal “feminine” thing.
Furthermore, before being Micronized, Miriya comes off as petty and arrogant, with a fragile ego. She is instantly dismissive and boastful when hearing word that Zentraedi will be doing battle with “Micronians”, and deliberately and smirkingly ignores orders when attacking the Fortress. After hearing about an ace in the enemy fleet who can defeat her, Miriya structures a battle so she can find that single target, instead of doing her job and blowing away all the enemy vessels. And when she is defeated, Miriya is so wounded by this single loss that she deprives her fleet of its best pilot (namely herself), engaging on an alleged “spy mission”, one really undertaken for the sole purpose of assuaging her pride.
It’s hard not to see this all as a suggestion that Miriya is “uppity” and needs to be taken down a few pegs, a “hysterical” woman who breaks into metaphorical tears at the slightest challenge to her dominion, a strawoman there to be knocked down by the force of Max’s love.
It’s true that some
Robotech character profiles like to state that Miriya’s hatred for Max was “really” love and she just needed his proposal to recognize her true feelings, but this doesn’t really excuse anything: it’s still Max who makes her realize this “truth” about herself; Miriya still lacks self-awareness and control of her own path, and the universalized (as opposed to personalized) masochistic/submissive subtext is if anything more blatant in this interpretation.
It all could just be understood as Miriya “choosing” to be second to Max and to accept her defeats at his hand. But Miriya just doesn’t have a vivid enough personality, not one which demands she be thought of as a “person” making “personal” decisions before one reaches for the feminist criticism. This is totally subjective and difficult to justify, but I look at Miriya and see a character who becomes whatever the narrative needs her to be at any given moment, without much organic, naturalistic change.
She is at first an arrogant and cold-blooded pilot, but all that just melts away in Max’s arms. Then, Miriya loves her husband, loves her child, fights for her adopted home, is confident but also demure in the right situations. This is all what is expected of a loveable heroine, but what makes her distinct? What are the reactions and mannerisms and conflicts that would be unique to Miriya? I find myself drawing up a blank when it comes to describing her personality as opposed to describing what happens to her.
The tradition continues in the
Sentinels continuations. There, Miriya is largely just another pilot, without much distinction but her usual heroine traits mentioned above. In the McKinneyverse she is swept along in whatever adventure she happens to come across, whether it’s an aerial battle or giving birth to a wunderkind messiah-child. Her reactions and opinions are not explored in any depth.
Miriya’s retirement from battle following the birth of Aurora in
The Sentinels is not problematic in the sense of sexism, since Max does the same thing. However, the audience shouldn’t be left to wonder why Miriya retired, or why she chose to become an ambassador to Tirol/Fantoma, especially since it’s another display of Miriya changing without much interest in how she got there.
Another reason why some viewers might not default to “choice” when dealing with potentially problematic character arcs is because these arcs have been held up as the gold standard for years, and only recently have alternatives started gaining a foothold. The advantage is still to the character arcs which reinforce tradition.
That Miriya is the only positive female Zentraedi character in the original Macross series, and only one of two major female Zentraedi characters in that entire show (the other being the human-unfriendly Azonia), also makes it easier to default to a feminist critique of her before anything else.
Others might complain about female characters always having to stand as a representation of their gender, but this happens because there are usually so
few female characters in a cast. In this case, Miriya is the only transitioning female Zentraedi explicitly dealt with, so it falls on her to be the ideal representation of such. More female Zentraedi, with a wider range of both personalities and transformations, might have helped Miriya’s image a little bit.
What else could make her character transition more palatable? Some sense of Miriya questioning herself before duelling with Max, and any evidence that she was starting to be effected by human culture before he had to defeat her again. Or perhaps Max could not be her defeater in any capacity, but another soldier who was caught up in Miriya’s quest for revenge, someone she found herself noticing in the same way that he noticed her.
There should also have been something for Max to lose: perhaps the sweet and friendly Max could have harboured some nasty prejudices, which he found himself overcoming, or a deep interest in his reputation, which I mentioned above. Those would both be grossly out of character for him, but that’s the rub: any attempt to make this thing more nuanced and palatable would involve radical change in the characters and storyline.
After their marriage, there are several gender-role subversions for the couple, or attempts made to make Max and Miriya into more well-rounded characters. On the official front, later episodes show that Miriya doesn’t know her way around the kitchen, and of course there’s the two of them forming a “battle couple”, fighting side by side in their own custom-coloured mecha, as well as the infamous “baby-throwing” scene from the original
Macross (which isn’t presented as any serious display of ill parenting, but played for laughs).
On the licensed but non-canon
Robotech side, there is also the comic series
The Malcontent Uprisings by Bill Spangler, and its expanded novel adaptation,
The Zentraedi Rebellion. Both of these chronicle the Zentraedi backlash against humans, and to Max and Miriya introduce such issues as prejudice, cultural alienation, and racial tension, in high contrast to their neutral portrayal in
The Sentinels.
The conflict and drama presented in the Malcontent stories is successful in making Max and especially Miriya seem more like “real” characters, offering a brief escape from the problem of their courtship and their nature as characters who are more archetypal than individual. In both Spangler and McKinney’s takes, they are shown as much more “human”: Max loses his temper, Miriya feels insecure about parenting, both feel alienated from each other and there is the tacit acknowledgement that a relationship takes work. There is also exploration of the life that Miriya had before Max, which helps further define her as an individual.
But, while these are great stories on their own, outside of their confines nothing has changed. Tthe way that the two characters got together remains in place, without any material ever attempting to “humanize” it. As a result, there’s a dissonance that ensures these Malcontent stories don’t have any effect on a viewer’s perception of the characters’ initial bonding. It’s just that
here they’re archetypes, and
here they’re fuller characters with real problems, and the two never completely mesh.
It’s also true for any other subversions. That Miriya doesn’t stay “in the kitchen” also doesn’t change the nature of their getting together. Things could have been worse for her, but they could have been a lot better, too.
There are other difficult aspects to Max and Miriya’s relationship. For instance, after marrying Max, Miriya is usually not treated as a Zentraedi by the narrative. One major exception occurs in the episode “Viva Miriya”, where she is part of a bluff to take a Zentraedi factory satellite, but besides this, Miriya is not shown interacting with other Zentraedi, not referred to as one, and all of Miriya’s friends are also primary human cast members that Max knew before she did.
In promotional artwork, Miriya is often the only Zentraedi character shown in what’s otherwise a mixed-gender shot of the human cast, suggesting that she is to be considered “human” now. This is true for both American and Japanese works. On the American side, there’s Tommy Yune’s
modern Robotech artwork, and for Japan, Haruhiko Mikimoto, the iconic Macross character desiginer and artist,
really seems to like this.
Furthermore, the way Miriya is treated in other
Macross material is more akin to the attention/respect paid to the human characters. Among all the Zentraedi redesigned for modern
Macross productions, Miriya is the only one that’s never, ever been radically altered (she just has pointy ears and a new outfit), and the only Zentraedi character that’s ever gotten a modern
action figure. Some of this can be attributed to the greater desire to preserve the beauty of female characters, and that at least in Japan, female character figures are more popular for the older collectors. But it still ties into the assimilationsit implications.
Maybe Miriya just likes humans better and had no personal ties in the Zentraedi fleet, but as the narrative never explores any of this, we’re left with the suggestion that, by being married to a human, Miriya might now be considered the same race as her husband and must sever all ties with her older world and be absorbed into his circle.
Even the Malcontent stories, as good as they are in acknowledging Miriya’s life before Max, squarely set all the positive Miriya-Zentraedi interaction in the past. Her former friend Seloy Deparra has become a danger to all humanity, and the only Zentraedi she ever meets with are hostile anti-human rebels. When she must renew her ties, it is with humans again, and she has no apparent friendship with the human-friendly male Zentraedi.
To drive the point home, except for the Uprisings material, the non-canon Robotech sequels never include Miriya when referring to all the Zentraedi. The novels even say things like, “Miriya’s Zentraedi past”. While the
Sentinels adaptations make a big deal about Exedore staying Micronized, Miriya is left out of the equation entirely. How she now relates to her people, what she thinks of their positive, post-Uprisings transition, is apparently not important. Her choosing to become an ambassador to Tirol/Fantoma might have worked as a sign she wants to be close to her people, but again, it is never explored.
One might ask why I’d be annoyed with Miriya and love Rico/Bron/Konda (or Rori/Warera/Konda - yes, I know what their names mean!), three bumbling comic relief male Zentraedi. After all, it was the trio’s fascination with Minmei which drove them to seek out human culture and adapt to it, and they also found human girlfriends. Isn’t that the same as Max with Miriya, sorta?
No. To start with, Rico/Bron/Konda were actively interested in human culture and pursued it with that goal in mind. The reason they took on their spying mission was because they wanted to see more of human culture. There was no period of ignoring it, or the hostility of some other male Zentraedi.
And Rico/Bron/Konda’s relationship with Sammie/Vanessa/Kim did not destroy and remake their selves in such a deep, radical, painful way. All they had was some awkwardness before happily settling into it, and this awkwardness came after they were already interested in human culture. More importantly, Rico/Bron/Konda never looked at Minmei, or Sammie/Vanessa/Kim with hateful or murderous intent, not in the same way Miriya once looked at Max. This makes the trio’s transformation easier to enjoy in the idealistic way that the story intends. To be more critical of Miriya’s romantic transition than theirs is hardly exhibiting a double standard.
Even if the male Zentraedi attraction to Minmei had to do with sublimated sexuality, none of them married her, and Minmei was more of an untouchable symbol. It was she, not the three “Bridge Bunnies” who started the transformation in Rico/Bron/Konda, making the power imbalance between trigger/triggered absent in the case of Rico/Bron/Konda, while it remains with Max and Miriya, because Miriya married the person who triggered her change.
On top of everything else, it bugs me that these three guys who (much as I love ’em) are just comic relief with undefined, interchangeable personalities, come across as more self-possessed than, and yet just as self-defined as, the TV series’ only positive female Zentraedi, one of its major heroines. That just shouldn’t happen; Miriya should be a much more strongly defined, much more emotionally powerful character than these three tertiary ones.
I haven’t brought up one of the most obvious issues around Miriya and Max’s bonding: the issue of informed consent. She has just been introduced to love, and then to a wedding night. The squick potential is very high, but nothing can be said that hasn’t already. The same problems here are those at the root of the general problem of how they got together: Miriya lacks control, but the idealized nature of the story sweeps it all under the rug.
This last part is also serves to neuter the threat that Miriya posed to Max. That he proposes to a woman who just tried to murder him is something that isn’t a big deal, because he gets power over her anyway.
Ultimately, no after-the-fact subversions or deeper explorations, nor the point that the sexist aspects could have been even worse, changes the fact that Miriya was not involved in shaping her own destiny. It took the man she despised to show her the way, in the process rendering her own convictions moot. That fact is just impossible for me to get around, no matter how many good stories come afterwards.
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In case you haven't noticed, here I am the *queen* of Serious Business, and have been analyzing my own feelings towards Robotech and its characters for quite a while now.
