Genesis Climber Mospeada

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Genesis Climber Mospeada is an anime science fiction series created by Shinji Aramaki and Hideki Kakinuma. The 25-episode television series ran from late 1983 to early 1984 in Japan. MOSPEADA stands for Military Operation Soldier Protection Emergency Aviation Dive Armor, one of the transformable motorcycle-armors the series features. The other primary mecha featured in the show is the three-form transformable fighter called the Armo-Fighter AFC-01 Legioss, which is somewhat similar in design to the VF-1 Valkyrie variable fighter from The Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

In the 21st century, pollution becomes such a problem that scientists develop the use of hydrogen fuel called "HBT" as an alternative to fossil fuels. Due to overpopulation on Earth, humans have colonized Mars and the moons of Jupiter. In 2050, a mysterious alien race called the Inbit ("Invid" for Robotech watchers) invade the Earth; unable to fight back, humans are driven into a few small pockets of refugees, some of which manage to escape the now-desolate Earth to seek shelter on the moon. The Mars Base sends troops to fight the Inbit, only to fail miserably. The Inbit seem uninterested in other planets, and do not show any hostility unless attacked. However, they can sense the use of HBT, forcing humans to limit the use of the fuel near the Inbit. Now the humans of the Mars Base fight to reclaim their home planet and unravel the secret behind the Inbit invasion, before it is too late for both races.

Tropes used in Genesis Climber Mospeada include:

• Ace Pilot: Houquet et Rose ("Rook Bartley") and Yellow Belmont ("Lancer").
• Adjective Noun Fred
• After the End
• Alien Invasion
• The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best In People: Cruelly subverted as the people of the city by the lake pretend to be hospitable but in fact lure soldiers (including a child) to their doom in order to save themselves.
• Attractive Bent Gender: Yellow who crossdresses.
• Badass: Houquet, Yellow Belmont, Colonel Badass Wolfe and Battlar.
  • Badass Biker: Houquet
  • Badass Long Hair: Yellow
• Beach Episode
• Big Applesauce: Episode 22, New York Bebop.
• Big Bulky Bomb
• Biker Babe: Houquet et Rose.
• Bishonen: Yellow who crossdresses.
  • Long-Haired Pretty Boy: Yellow
• Bratty Half-Pint: Mint LaBelle ("Annie"), particularly annoying for her constant talk of marriage despite her very young age and even younger appearance (she's canonically thirteen, but looks closer to seven), and obsesses about any male character fairly quick to boot.
• Broken Pedestal: Bernard's mentor and hero, Major Johnathan ("Colonel Johnathan Wolff"), who has sold out to the Inbit.
• Combining Mecha: The Legioss and Tread fighters can merge into a bigger aircraft, and each can independently become a robot.
• Convenient Decoy Cat: Subverted during the New York City episode since it was a boy pretending to be a cat.
• Cool Bike: Probably the most distinguishing trait of the series (they pretty much name it, after all), turn into wearable Powered Armor, sometimes even in mid-air.
• Cool Plane: The Legioss fighters and Treads.
• Cowardly Lion: Jim Austin.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Ray, while not stupid, is not much of a soldier or pilot but has his badass moments.
• Cut and Paste Translation: Mospeada was one of three separate (and entirely unrelated) series cobbled together to make Robotech.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Everyone but Ray are shown to have this to varying degrees. It could also be argued that anyone that survived the Inbit invasion of Earth qualify.
• Dead Star Walking: The cast you meet in the first episode save Stig.
  • Sacrificial Lamb: The first episode is full of them.
• Debut Queue: Starts with Everybody's Dead, Dave, before the surviving protagonist meets the real cast.
• Distant Finale/Clip Show: The Love Live Alive OVA.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: Yellow rather convincingly.
• Dueling Shows: Compare Super Dimension Fortress Macross.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: Episode 1 ends with only one survivor.
• Fallen Hero: Colonel Wolfe.
• Fighter Launching Sequence
• Five Man Band (Anime):
  • The Hero: Stig ("Scott") Bernard
  • The Lancer: Ray ("Rand")
  • The Big Guy: Jim Austin ("Lunk")
  • The Smart Guy/The Chick: Yellow("Lancer") (despite his Robotech counterpart's name) and Houquet("Rook") are both amalgams of the trope in their own ways.
  • Tagalong Kid: Mint Rubble
• Genius Bruiser: Jim Austin.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The basic Inbit mooks.
• Green-Haired Space Babe: Solzie.
• High Heel Face Turn: Aisha and Solzie
• Heroic BSOD: Stig has one last almost an entire episode when he discovers the military army they were to accompany was completely destroyed.
• Heroic Sacrifice: A squad of old soldiers ram their ship into an Inbit fortress to destroy it.
• Hive Queen: The Inbit Refless.
• Hot Wings: When The Inbit leave Earth, they take the form of a huge Phoenix.
• Idol Singer: Yellow Belmont.
• Innocent Fanservice Girl: Aisha ("Ariel", a.k.a. "Marlene"). During the fortress seige episode, Yellow rather poetically explains it as her being too innocent of the ways of the world to have a concept of modesty.
• Invisibility Cloak: The Legioss/Tread Fighters.
• Japanese Pronouns
• Kill'Em All: All but one in the first episode.
• Landmark of Lore: The Statue Of Liberty when they pass through the Big Apple.
• La Résistance: Our band of heroes.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Aisha.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Stig's preferred method to down enemy mooks.
• Memento MacGuffin: Stig's pendant.
• Mysterious Waif: Aisha
• Non-Indicative First Episode: It presents an entire series' worth of cast members during a space battle, only to kill all but one of them in the destruction of their battleship. The survivor, Stig Bernard, is left to picks his way through a Scavenger World, meeting the real cast one by one.
• Ramming Always Works
• Real Robot
• Refrain From Assuming: The title of the opening theme is not "Lonely Soldier Boy." It's "Ushinawareta Densetsu (Yume) Motomete" (Searching for the Vanished Legend (Dream)).
  • However, a cover of that song by Malaysian band Hujan is called "Lonely Soldier Boy".
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: The whole point of the series. Any Inbit that saw the error of their treatment of humans underwent a Heel Face Turn eventually, while those that did not defect became progressively more genocidal in attempting to wipe out the human resistance.
• Roboteching: The funny thing about it is that it was one of the three anime series used to create the Trope Namer.
• Somewhere a Paleontologist Is Crying
• Spell My Name with an "S": The English release deliberately used different spellings for the characters and races whose names weren't changed.
  • On the other hand, some were just transliteration convention differences (Inbit vs Invid - 'b' and 'v' sounds used the same character, and Mint's surname just as easily becomes "LaBelle", as per the McKinney novelilzations, as it does "Rubble") or errors (the terminal 'tu' and 'du' are the same character, except for the easy to miss notation on the latter, which also goes for Stig (a proper Swedish name) vs Stick Bernard, another very common error).
• Surveillance as the Plot Demands
• Team Pet: Mint.
• They Look Like Us Now: The Inbit take humans forms as the ideal life form to rule the planet.
• Transforming Mecha
• True Companions: What the group becomes.
• Unsettling Gender Reveal: Ray had a crush on Yellow before he learned "she" was actually a he. The reveal left him devastated. Yellow does this again to a jungle prince.
• Unwanted Rescue: Houquet is not pleased when Ray and Stig interfere in her bar fight.
• Villain World
• What Is This Thing You Call Love?: Solzie's thoughts concerning Yellow.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Yellow's actual job is as a singer perceived as female, despite being male, and occasionally changes to his female voice to mess with team members. This started out as an emergency disguise for him though, since his previous occupation was more militarily-inclined - that automatically got him persecuted when the Inbit invaded.