YMMV / Sentou Yousei Yukikaze

• Alternative Character Interpretation: An in-universe example of this comes up in Chapter VIII of the first novel, "Super Phoenix," when Yukikaze forcibly activates both Rei and Lt. Burgadish's ejection seats so she can engage the JAM without carrying any humans, and Rei wonders what was her real motivation for doing so. The obvious answer is that she ejected the humans so that she could fight more effectively without endangering the lives of her crew in pulling high-G maneuvers. But the darker answer may be that she ejected them to prevent Rei from activating the self-destruct switch (which is standard procedure to do for any SAF pilot that is in danger of being captured by the JAM) and that she is willing to do anything necessary for self-preservation.
• Americans Hate Tingle: The anime, definitely. It was critically acclaimed in Japan and even won 2 "Best OVA" awards. But viewers everywhere else found it a disjointed mess of a Mind Screw. When the novels were released in English, they received some pretty positive reception, and it's common to find non-Japanese readers saying that the anime made a complete mess of the novels. Japanese fans don't seem to think so; general consensus among them appears to be that the anime is a perfectly acceptable alternate version of the story.
  • Most clips & AMVs of the show on Youtube are uploaded by Japanese users. Again, this is on Youtube, not Nico Nico Douga.
• Awesome Music: The opening theme.
  • "Apotheosis", the last track played in the entire series as Rei makes his Heroic Sacrifice to collapse the Passageway. It's quite dark and depressing, but still awesome, and considering the show's limited music, arguably the best track in the entire OST.
  • RTB, the ending theme, an upbeat yet yearning song sung in Japanese. The song and lyrics definitely cross into Tear Jerker territory, especially the whistle version.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Rei's second Guy in Back, Richard Burgadish is sometimes referred to as "Chicken Broth" by Japanese fans.
  • Copy Super Sylph is also known as Silver Sylph. The official name for it in Japanese materials (such as the video game) is "Grey Sylph."
• Genius Bonus: Probably half the technical terms and acronyms used among the pilots in flight (and even terms that simply appear on computer screens) won't make much sense unless you are a pilot yourself, know someone who is a pilot (preferably a military pilot), or look it up.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The entire theme of the books questioning whether wars still need humans to fight them instead of computer-controlled drones has become unsettlingly prescient over 30 years after the story first started getting written in 1979, as this question has now become reality for militaries all over the world as of the 21st century.
  • For a specific example of this, Chapter II of the first novel, "Never Question the Value of a Knight," features Rei being challenged to a mock dogfight against the fully autonomous Flip Knight drones, and despite being one of the top Ace Pilots of the Faery Air Force's Special Air Force, he loses twice in a row without landing a single hit on any of the Flip Knights. This scenario becomes uncomfortably prophetic to read as of August 2020 when a U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot went up against an AI in a simulated battle during the DARPA-organized AlphaDogfight trials and lost five times in a row without damaging the AI at all.
  • In Chapter VII of the first novel, "Battle Spirit," Booker writes a letter to Lynn Jackson where he criticizes people on Earth who are so distant from the war on Faery, specifically calling out people who watch combat footage on Faery and treat it as mindless entertainment. In 1991, seven years after the book was published, the Gulf War erupted in the Middle East, the first war to be televised live on TV around the world, and has been criticized as "the perfect television war" for providing only a selective narrow view of the war and treating it like a video game. This issue has only escalated in the 21st century with the dominance of video-on-demand platforms and live streaming video directly from a first-person view of battlefields, furthering the jocular and desensitized nature of warfare on a viewer's own personal monitor in the comfort of his or her own room.
  "The people who watch footage of actual combat on Faery act like it's a war movie... One day they may be destroyed by the reality."
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The beginning of the third OVA has a journalist interviewing Lynn Jackson about her book, which is a memoir of the JAM invasion, and he asks if the rumors that Hollywood wants to make a movie of it are true. Come April 2013 and Hollywood optioning a live-action film of Yukikaze. Although all news on the project went dead silent a few months later.
• Ho Yay: There's a reason why the OVA is nicknamed "Brokeback Air Force."
  • In an interview Jack's voice actor even comments on poor Jack ending up with his heart broken.
  • There are a couple of occasions early in the first novel when Jack jokingly tells Rei to "break up with Yukikaze and come work for me." The novels, though make it clear he views Rei as a friend and more importantly, he stops telling Rei things like the above once he accepts that Yukikaze is not Just a Machine.
• Narm: In the second novel, Ansel Rombert calls the JAM human copies "Jammies." Say it out loud and try not to think of pajamas.
• Paranoia Fuel: The Reveal of JAM human duplicates infiltrating the FAF. The FAF nearly self-destructs after this becomes known. In the novels, it does. The Intelligence Forces attempt to manipulate the clones and use them as ways to communicate with the JAM and learn more about them, even if it means betraying the rest of the FAF to do so. But they get Out-Gambitted by the JAM who use this to drive a huge wedge between the SAF, the FAF, Intelligence, and the System Corps.
• Strawman Has a Point: Despite his Jerkass & Eagleland tendencies, Andy Lander does bring up some good points regarding the FAF's relations with the UN, such as the UN forbidding the FAF from growing food. This makes them wholly dependent on a UN food exchange program and may well be a means to prevent the FAF from rebelling against Earth. Rei is mildly surprised at this: he knew the FAF imported food but had no idea it wasn't allowed to actually produce its own food.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "RTB", the OVA's ending theme, sounds a lot like Concrete Blonde's most well known song "Joey", down to sharing a similar BPM, key, and even structure as the lyrics to the latter can easily be sung to the former's instrumental.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The video game adaptation is something of a disappointment. There are 14 missions total, but a good chunk of these missions can be considered filler where very little happens. The entire game can be finished in roughly three hours, and according to the one existing playthrough on Youtube, the game is surprisingly easy even on Hard Mode: flares are pretty much always guaranteed to stop JAM missiles, and your own missiles have a 99% chance of always hitting (in said playthrough, the player missed only one shot in the entire game). The only weapon that requires some skill to use is the machine gun, which is required to be used in one mission where Yukikaze is conducting a test battle against a new FAF drone.

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