Awesome / Robotech

• For an Anime(s) dubbed in the Eighties, the horrors of war and death itself was never glossed over. And not just enemies or minor characters but major named character often being at risk. There's even aspects like interracial relationships and Lancer's frequent crossdressing that one wouldn't expect at the time.
• In adapting Mospeada. The Earth originally presented in the Japanese narrative was a fictional post-alien invasion one from the ground up. For Robotech, the Invid's invasion is a devastating event following two previous wars to save the Earth. The SDF-1 and Southern Cross's post-Zentraedi reconstruction efforts are thrown back in their faces. You also have the build-up to the Invid as Aliens that both the Zentraedi and Tirolian Masters dreaded.
• The novelizations turn the Destroids dying horribly in Khyron's assault on the earthbound SDF-1 into an awe-inspiring heroic last stand as the Destroid pilots try to buy time for the Veritechs and MACs/Monsters to arrive; they also include a scene of the Destroids marching out to back up the SDF-1's turrets in the final battle against the Zentradi fleet that was not in the anime, describing it loving detail and crediting them with tripling the SDF-1's short-range firepower for the last battle.
• A subtle one. The Pinpoint Defense System harnesses the protection of the Omnidirectional Barrier into three relatively small discs that can be moved anywhere on the hull of the SDF-1 without the risk of overloading the system. These discs are controlled by the three bridge technicians using fist-sized trackballs. Throughout the series, they are able to track incoming laser fire and catch most of those blasts with their barriers. That's equivalent to moving a six-inch target to catch a bullet. And they did this by hand through numerous battles.
• In the novelizations, each chapter is topped with an excerpt from various things including historical stories, military reports, and biographies. One excerpt is from Gloval's memoirs. In it, he recounts how he had explained to Earth scientists how they performed what they had called the Daedalus Maneuver. Placing all the defense barriers on the front of the Daedalus arm, jamming it into a ship, and opening the forward troop deployment doors so that a battalion of mobile armory could open fire inside the enemy vessel. The scientists dismissed his claims as their knowledge of the SDF-1 suggested this was just a fluke. Gloval comments that they were able to perform this fluke several times on command exactly as intended.
• After the timeskip Kyle became The Scrappy due his uncompromising anti-military attitude that indirectly allowed Khyron to rebuild his army, but one version of the Sentinels story, confirmed as canon by Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles, shows he has managed to outgrow that in possibly the most dramatic and decisive way he could have come up with: he joined the REF in disguise, helping them without anyone noticing until after he died trying to protect Minmei during Edwards' rebellion.
• In Robotech: The Movie, Mark Landry uses a transforming mecha/motorcycle to save his girlfriend Becky from Attempted Rape by a sleazy music producer
• The Robotech Rebels pull off an elaborate robbery of a protoculture cache that Lupin the Third would be proud of in one episode.

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