My hot take right now is that Ace Combat isn’t and has never been a representation of real-world politics or history (except for Assault Horizon, but it was bad so who cares,) but instead is an exploration of politics and philosophical questions on the nature of war mixed with a deep fascination on machines that often verge on and act in a way that is completely fantastical. It tries to convey its lessons and its themes not through the events of the greater war, but through the interplay of characters swept up in the greater conflict, who are inevitably characters surrounding the principle protagonists and antagonists, all ace pilots.
What I’m saying is, Ace Combat is and always has been deeply political- and antiwar- but also loves the Really Cool Machines that do the war. Ace Combat is a mecha anime.
Ace Combat is Jet Plane Gundam, and is subject to the same misrepresentations as the latter.
“But why do the planes act unrealistically?” because it was never a sim, it’s mecha anime.
“How can you fire hundreds of missiles in one sortie?” It’s mecha anime.
“How can pilots hear one another talking, what about OPSEC?” mecha anime thinks it’s cooler when they can hear each other, so they can
“How can something steeped in weapons of war be antiwar?” I dunno man, Amuro Ray was pretty damn unhappy about war despite piloting a multiple story tall war crime machine, seems to me like what they’re asking you to do is let go of realism and the rules of our world to allow for this heightened version of events to be used as a vehicle for storytelling, for you to engage not with the specifics of the “how” like a pedant, and to instead soak in the emotional and personal messages they’re trying to convey
“You’ve beaten 5 with just the fucking training jet, haven’t you, Fey?” Multiple times.
