for her because even the able-bodied Fafner pilots are on the back foot against the Festum (Fafner‘s Angel-like enemies).

Nevertheless, six episodes in, Shoko drags herself from her bed, limps tragically to the cockpit while her mother screams for her to stop, and takes off half-cocked against a Festum that’s threatening their base. She unloads every weapon her mech has against the enemy to no avail, and in the end in a remarkably overwrought scene sacrifices her mech to destroy the enemy in an episode called Sacrifice. The series lays it on thick; the music swells with strings and piano as we see her mech, now an angelic light flying into the sky, drag the enemy with it. We see constant cuts to the timer for the explosives. Thereunexpected thing; he shows genuine contrition. Thinking he has finally killed his former friend Isamu, he suddenly realises he has been lying to himself and others all along, and blaming them for his own crimes.

When he sees Isamu survived an apparently inevitable death, the pair share a moment of genuine, as-old-times, friendship before he goes off to die – leaving the true glory and narrative resolution to Isamu. He buys his partner time to stop the rogue AI Sharon Apple by getting into an unwinnable fight against the Ghost X9, and realises the only way to win – and also to redeem himself – is to crash his plane into it and destroy both. While Fafner had Shoko’s terminal ascent be unsubtly compared to ascension to heaven, Macross