Aurora Sterling -- WTF was that?

There's been threads here discussing Dana and Maia, but what about the other one, from the novels?

I don't know...to me Aurora has always been one of those ideas that I know I should hate, but I don't.

After all, she's a creepy psychic child Mary Sue plot device who came completely out of left field whose gestation turned Miriya into a fainting damsel in distress--what's not to hate?

BUT then part of me comes out and says it's intrigued by the introduction of something so radical into the story, wants to know what kind of interesting things would happen as the Sterlings have to deal with a daughter who is a complete stranger, and whom they, once again, have no opportunity to raise because she's also super-intelligent.

Not to mention the idea of Aurora actually being a character with her own personality and stuff.

Don't as *me* why my mind works the way it does. But thinking like that is a guilty pleasure of mine. It's SO tempting to just dismiss Aurora, but in a sense I can't.

Though that damn hippie name has got to do. She should have something...maybe a Zentraedi name, just to balance out Dana, yeah?

incisivis wrote:

There's been threads here discussing Dana and Maia, but what about the other one, from the novels?

I don't know...to me Aurora has always been one of those ideas that I know I should hate, but I don't.

After all, she's a creepy psychic child Mary Sue plot device who came completely out of left field whose gestation turned Miriya into a fainting damsel in distress--what's not to hate?

BUT then part of me comes out and says it's intrigued by the introduction of something so radical into the story, wants to know what kind of interesting things would happen as the Sterlings have to deal with a daughter who is a complete stranger, and whom they, once again, have no opportunity to raise because she's also super-intelligent.

Not to mention the idea of Aurora actually being a character with her own personality and stuff.

Don't as *me* why my mind works the way it does. But thinking like that is a guilty pleasure of mine. It's SO tempting to just dismiss Aurora, but in a sense I can't.

Though that damn hippie name has got to do. She should have something...maybe a Zentraedi name, just to balance out Dana, yeah?

funny you mention Aurora, I always thought she looked more like a young Dana than her sister, and yeah the name is too hippieish, but isnt aurora now called Maia now?

happypenguins wrote:

funny you mention Aurora, I always thought she looked more like a young Dana than her sister, and yeah the name is too hippieish, but isnt aurora now called Maia now?

No... Aurora Sterling never existed in the canon (animated) Robotech continuity, so she could not be replaced by Maia.

In my opinion, Aurora Sterling is one of the more obnoxious McKinneyisms... Luceno and Daley had a really bad habit of trying to turn every narrative molehill into a whole mountain range. They turned a protoculture-induced hallucination into a character in its own right. Of course, they didn't stop there, and made Aurora into a canon Mary Sue. (she's not a Mary Sue under the traditional definition, since that applies only to unnaturally-perfect author insertion fantasy personae in fan-fiction)

The only role Maia shares with the non-canon Aurora is that she's the second Sterling daughter. Apart from that, the two couldn't be more different. Given what we saw of her in Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, Maia is no canon Sue... she's more along the lines of an "author-insertion fantasy girlfriend". As obnoxious as that stereotypical tsundere girlfriend attitude makes her, she is, at least, much less obnoxious than Aurora Mary Sue Sterling.

Robotech's Public Enemy No.1 has spoken!

Well, she was orignally Macek's idea: I think all of them had a hand in making Aurora what she was.

Despite my admitted desire to make the silk purse out of a sow's ear when it comes to Aurora, intellectually I find both her and Maia both equally obnoxious in conception, both painful cliches.

And I perceive Aurora as a Sue not just 'cause she's the daughter of canon characters and has special powers, but because she's largely accepted as the child messiah by everyone around her with no problems, which even includes things like becoming an Earth council representative when she hasn't even hit puberty yet and somehow, perhaps, influencing her parents to stop making war.

incisivis wrote:

Well, she was orignally Macek's idea: I think all of them had a hand in making Aurora what she was.

Despite my admitted desire to make the silk purse out of a sow's ear when it comes to Aurora, intellectually I find both her and Maia both equally obnoxious in conception, both painful cliches.

And I perceive Aurora as a Sue not just 'cause she's the daughter of canon characters and has special powers, but because she's largely accepted as the child messiah by everyone around her with no problems, which even includes things like becoming an Earth council representative when she hasn't even hit puberty yet and somehow, perhaps, influencing her parents to stop making war.

She had special powers?

Hmmm...it's hard to tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but if you're not:

Yeah, she did. Aurora was...super-intelligent and had accelerated aging that slowed down eventually, and was somehow able to be...I don't know, some kind of conduit force that would allow the SDF-3, which was then stranded in another universe, to take the fold engines from the original SDF-1, which had somehow ended up in that same other universe. She could also commuicate across galaxies, which was how she told Dana to "Beware of the spores", though that seemed more like a reflex.

Oh, and Aurora also spoke telepathically to Jean Grant as she was being born.

I'm not making any of this up. End of the Circle is pure crack.

Yeah Aurora was an awesome character. A mite freakish, but without her you really couldn't make EotC work, IMO.

I always used to use her as an example of what happens when people start smoking protoculture spores.

khoroshen wrote:

happypenguins wrote:

Anyways, I don't like what they did with her character.. I mean she's half human and zentraedi, Dana doesn't have powers, so why would she? It just doesn't make a damn bit of sense.

It is part and parcel of the 'grand design' Dana was born with the power of harmony. The symbol of uniting the two races together. In ones P.O.V she performed a feat of power much stronger then Aurora could have done. The unification of the human emotion and the zentraedi prowess created a new being for the galaxy. The assimilation of technology with the Tiresian's and the Sentinel Races, reformed the 'human race' into the creators of a new universe.

Aurora was the vista update package, the troubleshooter patch, that had the power to fix and obtain artifacts that seemed impossible, allowing Minmei to become the "Virgin Mary" of Robotech, giving birth to Zor! Max & Miriya are our unwittingly Adam & Eve.

CRAZY SHIT HERE!

incisivis wrote:

Oh, it also gets better: some force or other turns all the children born after the defeat of the Regent's Invid into glowy-eyed psychic children, though unlike Aurora, they're not creepy or mystical and seem rather normal when they aren't doing their thing.

I swear, End of the Circle should come in a baggie...

I do love that book, though--sometimes in spite of myself--mostly because the there's a strangely "epic" feel to it all, and I do in fact love weirdness that warps a show's established universe out of joint.

When it comes to the novels, though: the writers did like to play up the idea of Dana somehow having special powers, like in the novels when this crazy scientist bastard Dr. Zand was always always trying to study her and there were several more characters who thought Dana was "special" (and not in the short-bus sense that we sometimes think).

Personally I never got that: isn't the whole point that Zentraedi and human are genetically compatible, so their producing offspring should be no big deal? Answer: yeah it was. So they're just making shit up...

...thought didn't Dana have her freaky moments in the original Masters dub, too? I think so, but I don't remember much about it.

Also, yeah, the whole EotC plot hinges on Aurora, but it didn't have to. Something else could have been written. Like I said, I would have had less of a problem with her if she'd have been a "real" character instead of a cilche, but that's all we've pretty much got with her.

Yeah which is exactly why none of the sterling children should have powers lol
if there were to be any children with "powers" then it would be the offspring of the human/invid couples.

Aurora is canon; we see the character that is supposed to be her in the series, AND in the pre-production lineups did for the Sentinels characters.

Maia (and anything done under the Yunes) is not.

2000 & later "HG Canon" isn't.

Hm.

I dunno, I tend to feel that it's not my place to determine what "canon" is: to me, it's just whatever's declared as such by the People in Charge.

On the other hand, I don't find canonicity to be a value judgement: I am going to enjoy the hell out of old Robotech novels and comics even though HG wants us to be all about the Shadows continuity, because it's what I want to do...it's not like either of them are any good, but at least Robotech apocrypha is the fun crap.

In my opinion, canon is what the intent of the original writers was, as reflected by the source materials they provided to their licensees, and distributed themselves (including the actual series).

If someone working later feels they have to PHYSICALLY ALTER whole sections of the series, to make their "canon" work, then it isn't really canon, and never will be.

For example: The Hunter Coma Logic Bomb.

Original Timeline:
SDF-1 lifts off on 1 July 2009, returns before 31 July 2010 (Lisa's report to her father, etc. indicates less than 13 months); Is sitting in the relatively calm waters of the summertime North Pacific, between Kamchatka and the Aleutians. Air temps can get into the 80s, but you wouldn't want to swim there.
A few days (At most a few weeks) later, a botched Daedalus Manuever ends up shooting down Rick, who is recovered unconscious, in an open-face helmet, in the water off the Byrd Island in the Aleutians. The damage from the impacts, bailouts and probable hypothermia (after all, they would have to reset from the Daedalus manuever to launch rescue birds) results in a hospital stay of weeks, if not over a month.

Tommy-boy's timeline (not sure how much he's tried to alter it since)
SDF-1 launch in February 2009 (as in DYRL - NOT the TV Macross as originally aired, which was in JUNE 2009 - the Macross timeline is polluted by 10 years of trying to retcon DYRL timeline to supercede TV timeline, before Kawamori reversed himself and decided that DYRL was a docu-drama filmed in the TV universe, for the backstory of Macross 7, Plus & Frontier). Returns February 2010.

(note that Macross has the return in October, 7 months, not a year, while the waters of the North Pacific are still cooling down, but relatively very warm, compared to February.)

Rick gets shot down in February 2010 (note that, originally, Tommy was having Rick and Minmei take TWO MONTHS to fly back from Japan, when the episode is obviously an overnight stay at most, and bringing Kyle back).

Oops: What do you mean, "Well, Tommy just killed Rick, and ended the series?"
Well, have you ever seen the TV show "The Deadliest Catch"? That show, filmed on real ships, is filmed IN THE SAME AREA, AT THE SAME TIME OF YEAR, that Rick was shot down, and if one of THOSE guys goes overboard, they're beyond hope of saving in less time than it would have taken the SDF-3 to launch rescue helecopters, let alone search for him -and THEY are wearing arctic survival suits - Rick WASN'T.

Okay, are there any other Byrd Islands? Only in the Arctic, and in the deep Antarctic, where the conditions are like the arctic in February 12 months of the year. Wait, what if we say it was "Bird Island"?

There's no such place.
Wait, there's this little island in the South China Sea, its name is the Chinese character for "bird".
So? Not even the locals call it "Bird" in English, let alone maps - no one translates island names from their local language.
Well, that's all I got, deal with it.
Uh, what about the previous episode?
What about it?
Rick and Minmei flew Southwest from the SDF-1 to Japan, as Gloval, Lisa and the others flew Northeast. in the opposite direction, to Alaska. In fact, the fighters came over for a second, pointed out the fact they were going in opposite directions, then returned to their escort duty, right after takeoff. If they were in the South China Sea, both sets of people would be traveling TOGETHER, until Rick's final approach to Tokyo/Yokohama (whereever he could find a place to land a civilian aircraft - Japan's not known as a hub of private aircraft use, after all).
Details, details....
What about the other 800 lb. gorilla in the room?
Huh?
The SDF-1 was landing hot - they chose to land somewhere away from people, in deep water - and they lost most of their flight control part way into the descent. The South China Sea is not only not away from people, but is too shallow for the landing we see in the series. Congratulations - in your atttempt to save Rick from a horrible freezing death, you just now got a total planetary kill, by destroying the SDF-1 by piling it up as a pile of wreckage in water too shallow for how we see it sitting in the show, let alone that full submersion in its splashdown.
Well, maybe it landed elsewhere and moved?
right...... They were supposed to keep everything secret, and report to Alaska Base, so let's move the ship from the relatively empty waters off Alaska to the heavily traveled sea lanes off Hong Kong, Shanghai and Macao, THEN have to fly for 15 hours in a transport to Alaska base - a flight that, from the cameras we see in that episode, only took a few hours. Tommy, you must not play chess, because you seem to be completely incapable of comprehending the repercussions of a single change/move.