A to Z Challenge: Dana Sterling

Technically Dana Sterling appears in both the first and second series of the Robotech show.  She first appears as the infant daughter of Max and Miriya Sterling in the Macross saga.  She's used as a weapon of sorts against some of the remaining Zentraedi on the factory satellite, who've never seen a baby before.  That the baby was made from a human and Zentraedi mating just freaks them out.

Baby Dana and her mother, Miriya

Then Dana is the focal character of the second series.  She's the leader of a Hovertank platoon who fight the Robotech Masters and their army of clones.  The thing is though, in Japan these are two separate characters, so in actuality it's not the same character.  Which is why as a baby she has blue hair and as a grown up she has blonde hair.

Grown up Dana Sterling

In the American series though I think they did this to help introduce some continuity.  Since they were separate series they couldn't include any of the main characters from the first series, so this way they could have someone with a familiar name to give the appearance of continuity.

The second series takes place about 15 years later.  Dana's parents have gone with the SDF-3 to try to stop the Robotech Masters, not realizing that the Robotech Masters are already coming to Earth.  By then the Robotech Defense Force has disappeared and the main military outfit in its place is the Army of the Southern Cross.  Dana is a lieutenant in the Southern Cross in charge of a platoon of Hovertanks.  The Hovertanks are tanks, obviously, that can turn into giant robots.  There's also an intermediate mode.

Dana in armor

They're the lamest of the vehicles but then I like planes a lot better than tanks.  Anyway, Dana gets caught up in uncovering the secrets of the Robotech Masters.  She also befriends a weird little creature called Polly that's a pollinator of the Flower of Life--the thing that makes the Protoculture all their vehicles use.  The pollinators helping to get the flowers growing is what ultimately brings the Invid to Earth.  So it's kind of Dana's fault; if she had just killed the thing the flowers wouldn't have spread.

Anyway, though Dana is only 17 she's given command of the 15th ATAC Squadron.  Though almost immediately she gets thrown in the stockade for a bar fight.  But as you'd expect it's her platoon that scores the biggest victories against the Masters, first by bringing down one ship by sabotaging its engines, then capturing the alien soldier Zor Prime, then breaking into another Robotech Masters' ship, and by crashing the Masters' flagship for good.

Dana, Hovertank, and Bioroid

When Zor Prime is assigned to her unit, Dana develops a crush on him, despite that he's pretty
obviously an unwitting spy for the Masters.  He eventually returns the affection, but in the final battle he puts her on an escape pod and then crashes the Masters' flagship into the ruins of the SDF-1, going down with the ship.

Dana is usually a brash, hotheaded leader, which in the books especially can be explained by her being half-Zentraedi.  Which of course in the Japanese version she's not half-alien nor are there any mentions of the Zentraedi.

After the Robotech Masters are defeated, a scout ship from the REF shows up and Dana and her platoon steal it to go find her parents.  She then goes to Haydon IV to visit her parents and her sister Aurora.  They're on the artificial planet when it suddenly starts zooming around the galaxy so that the entity known as Haydon can go through a black hole to the "newspace" the Regess has created and where the SDF-3 is marooned.

Dana doesn't do a lot there but at one point she's captured by a strange black mecha and soon is piloting it against her father in a Veritech.  There's something Freudian about that.  After the SDF-3 returns, Dana, Marie Crystal, Sean Phillips, Lunk, and a couple others form an exploration company that gets into its fair share of trouble.

In the books it talks a lot about her having special powers because of the Protoculture.  In the Zentraedi Rebellion, young Dana is experimented on by Dr. Lazlo Zand in a sort of Clockwork Orange kind of thing where she's shown a lot of violent imagery to try to stimulate her Zentraedi side.  But the experiment is broken up by Major Rolf Emerson, who cares for Dana once her parents are gone.

Later, after the final battle, Zand returns to try to steal Dana's Protoculture powers and winds up turning himself into a giant Flower of Life.  None of this is in the TV show.  Dr. Zand is entirely a product of the books; he never appears in any of the shows, though a lot is made of him in the books.  He was an assistant of Dr. Emil Lang who experimented on himself to boost his brain power.  He secretly made contact with the Robotech Masters before they arrived and kept the Army of the Southern Cross from learning about the Invid until it was too late.

In at least the "remastered" version of the series on Amazon Prime there are several gratuitous scenes with Dana in the shower.  One even shows a nipple!  I'm pretty sure the original American version didn't have that but the Japanese one probably showed a lot more.

On this blog a few years ago I mentioned how I bought an old Dana Sterling figure and took off the head to put on the head of a Black Widow figure and made it a Scarlet Knight figure.  Dana's red-and-silver armor was sort of the inspiration for the second version of the Scarlet Knight armor. So it just made sense.