A to Z Challenge: Miriya and Max Sterling

Happy Tax Day!

In the first series of Robotech you had the established romance of Claudia Grant and Roy Fokker and the will they/won't they triangle of Rick Hunter-Lisa Hayes-Lynn-Minmei.  The least complicated was ironically the one that should have been the most complicated:  the whirlwind courtship of Max Sterling and Miriya Parino.

Max Sterling doesn't show up until after the SDF-1 has made its fold to Pluto.  When Rick Hunter is promoted to a flight leader, he gets assigned two novices:  Ben Dixon and Max Sterling.  Max doesn't really look like a Top Gun in that he's short, skinny, wears glasses, and has blue hair.  But Max has really great reflexes, honed in arcades playing video games.  So when it comes to flying a Veritech, he's the best around.

Outside the cockpit, you might nowadays almost put Max on the autism spectrum.  Or maybe Asperger's or something because he doesn't really understand human interaction very well.  So he doesn't have much luck with the women; in the books more than the show it talks about how he gets friend-zoned by pretty much every woman on ship.  He also doesn't really seem to get the difference between killing aliens for real and killing them in a video game; it's no big deal for him to shoot down enemy Battlepods.

Probably the most impressive flying Max does is inside Breetai's flagship when Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, and Ben Dixon are taken captive.  Max is ejected into space but sneaks his Veritech back on board and then knocks out a guard and manages to dress his Veritech's robot mode in the guard's clothes.  That's a tricky maneuver--almost as tough as me trying to squeeze into a pair of jeans.

Miriya

Miriya Parino is first introduced after Azonia takes command of the Zentraedi fleet.  She's the ace pilot of the Zentraedi who has never been defeated.  Khyron the Backstabber taunts her that there's one human pilot not even she can beat.  So she immediately launches an attack on the SDF-1, having her comrades lure out and isolate the ace pilot so then she can fight him.

Max and Miriya's first duel starts in the skies but eventually they go inside the ship to bust up Macross City.  Miriya finally retreats and is humiliated to be defeated for the first time.  Instead of just going back to try again, she volunteers to become human-sized.  She's smuggled onto the SDF-1, where Max Sterling sees her around and falls madly in love with her.

Their next battle is done in a video game arcade.  Miriya has been playing the Veritech game there and running up huge scores.  Then Max asks to play against her.  Not being smooth or anything, he actually beats her.  Then invites her to meet at a park that night.  Though what's weird is in the TV show he asks her to meet him at 9 in the morning but then it's night.  I guess it was poor dubbing.

Anyway, she tries to kill him, but fails at that.  Instead of killing her or having her arrested, Max asks Miriya to marry him.  And she agrees, not understanding what marriage is.

Max & Miriya get hitched

In a crafty move, Captain Gloval has their wedding made a big deal and the signal is beamed to the Zentraedi fleet.  But before the reception can really get underway, the Zentraedi attack.  Miriya rides in Max's Veritech and shows him a weakness in the Battlepods to disable them without blowing them up.  This compassion helps convince Breetai to call off the attack and eventually to join forces with the humans.

During the reconstruction, Max and Miriya have a little blue-haired baby named Dana, who I already talked about.  Max and Miriya take Dana with them to the factory satellite to use as sort of psychological warfare against the Zentraedi there.

Miriya figure

But when it comes time to leave for the home of the Robotech Masters, Max and Miriya leave Dana behind, thinking it should only be a short trip.  Instead it's more like a 20 year trip.  In the Sentinels series Max and Miriya join Rick Hunter and the aliens fighting the Invid.

At first it's just business as usual, but then Miriya finds out that she's pregnant again.  Worse, she's exposed to the atmosphere of the planet Garuda that is basically like LSD for non-natives.  So between that and that the kid is half-human, half-alien it turns out really messed up.  Miriya's pregnancy is basically a couple of months and while she's being born their daughter Aurora is actually communicating with her parents and doctor telepathically.

Like the pregnancy, Aurora's development is accelerated too so that in weeks she's walking and talking like a toddler.  So for the rest of the Sentinels campaign Max and Miriya stay with Aurora on Haydon IV, missing the final battles on Periton and Optera.  Their fighting skills probably would have come in handy too.

The Sterlings are still on Haydon IV when Dana shows up and then later the planet starts zooming around to take the entity Haydon to "newspace."  Except at one point fighting Dana in a freaky black mech, Max and Miriya don't do a lot.  Their daughter Aurora does a lot, communicating telepathically with the children on the SDF-3 and guiding the crew of the Ark Angel into "newspace."  Her and the children reach out in time and space and install the SDF-1's missing fold drives in the SDF-3 so the ship can escape.

After they return to Earth, Aurora becomes a representative to the new Earth government even though she's only like 10 while Max and Miriya become ambassadors to Tirol.

In The Shadow Chronicles Max and Miriya's second daughter is named Maia and she's the commander of the Skull Squadron.