A to Z Challenge: Breetai and Bernard, Scott

As part of the prologue to the first of the books, we learn how half of Breetai's face was damaged.  Basically when Zor was being attacked by the Invid, Breetai led the counterattack and in the process took a shot to the face.  You'd think the Robotech Masters could have fixed the damage but I guess it was kind of a warrior pride thing not to fix it.

Anyway, Breetai was the commander of the Zentraedi forces through most of the Macross Saga.  Like all the Zentraedi he's a giant about 50 feet tall and as I mentioned he has damage to his face that's hidden with a metal cowl.

Though he's a tough warrior, Breetai was surprisingly cautious in handling the SDF-1 situation.  He had about a million ships at first, so he could have surrounded the ship and destroyed it at will.  The reason he didn't is that he was ordered to take it intact so they could find the elusive Protoculture matrix.

Alternately, Breetai could have taken Earth hostage and forced the SDF-1 to surrender.  But he didn't because that's not how the Zentraedi fight.  Their code of honor really prevented him from winning.

At one point Breetai decides to capture a human or two to study them.  When Lisa Hayes's "Cat's Eye" recon ship is captured, Rick Hunter and his two wingmen try to come to her rescue.  Breetai fights the robot-shaped Veritechs with his hands and a pipe.  He's sucked into space but the Zentraedi were engineered to survive in space for a short period of time, so he managed to come back into the ship and jump Rick Hunter and take his Veritech apart.

Breetai was replaced by Azonia as commander of the Zentraedi forces, but after her failures, he's put back in command.  And really the results are the same.  Meanwhile, exposure to human culture is causing his soldiers to defect to the SDF-1.

When Dolza decides to take out the SDF-1, Breetai joins forces with the humans because he knows Dolza will kill him and all "infected" Zentraedi who have been exposed to human culture.  After the humans win, Breetai remains in orbit near Earth.

He leads an assault on the Robotech "factory satellite," which is a giant factory to produce weapons.  With human assistance, Breetai destroys the last Zentraedi battle fleet and captures the factory to take it to Earth.

After the destruction of the SDF-1 and SDF-2, Breetai agrees to let his flagship (pretty much the last space fold-capable ship) be converted into the SDF-3 to lead the expedition to the home of the Robotech Masters.

In The Sentinels series, Breetai visits the Zentraedi homeworld of Fantoma and learns the truth about his past.  The Zentraedi were miners with their own history and culture before the Robotech Masters erased their memories, programming them to be warriors.  Breetai even sort of gets a girlfriend.  Ultimately he sacrifices himself to take out the Invid Regent, the head of Invid forces in that part of space.  So while he was a bad guy, he became a hero.  His girlfriend was pregnant with his son at the time, so a part of him lived on.

***

By contrast Scott Bernard was always a hero starting in the third series.  He was part of the Robotech Expeditionary Force that went to the Robotech Masters' homeworld.  Though he was only a teenager back then; by the time the REF was ready to "liberate" Earth he was grown.  Scott was part of the first REF wave trying to defeat the Invid.

That first wave met with disaster.  Scott survived, his ship crashing in South America.  His last orders were to meet at "Reflex Point," the big Invid hive in the North American Midwest.  While at first he was on his own, he eventually gained some comrades to journey with him.

Scott was kind of a tight ass, so it's a bit hard for him to team up with civilians who don't have the military discipline.  I already mentioned he had a girlfriend who died with the REF forces.  Her name was Marlene, which is what he calls Ariel for a while.

Other than his relationship with Marlene there wasn't really that much character building with him.  Maybe because he was mostly from space so there weren't really family or old friends he could meet along the way.  Mostly he's the unflappable team leader who's kind of a fish out of water. on an Earth that's become feudal and disorganized.

In one episode they meet a group of old Robotech soldiers (in the books it says they served with Admiral Gloval and then the REF while in the TV show it says they were in the Southern Cross) and Scott is dismayed by their cowardice in not fighting the Invid.  But eventually the old-timers get their old ship airborne to destroy an Invid communications tower.  In another episode a man named Dusty Ayres is killing Robotech soldiers after they refused to save him from Invid experiments.  Scott basically leads the posse to find Ayres, though in the end the man kills himself to stop the Invid.

Eventually the team makes it to Reflex Point and convince the Invid Regess to leave Earth.  Then Scott, Ariel, and some others take the Ark Angel to look for the SDF-3, which is stranded in another dimension.  I already mentioned Scott and Ariel hook up while she's in the brig and after the SDF-3 returns home they get married and live Happily Ever After.  As happily as possible.

There's a different take on this in the ill-fated Shadow Chronicles movie.  The beginning is sort of the same in that Scott joins an expedition to find the SDF-3, but instead of going to another dimension they instead find out that the aliens of Haydon IV are evil and planning to conquer the universe.  But that never got past the initial movie, so I wouldn't really consider it canon.  Other people do.