YMMV / Legend of the Galactic Heroes

• Accidental Innuendo: Well, this is the internet.
  "But Bittenfeld, knowing it's a trap, decides to plunge in anyways!"
• Adaptation Displacement: Not many people are aware that the anime is directly based off the novel series. Also, many who have read the novels have noticed that the anime fleshes out a lot of what was told instead of shown in the novels.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Invoked very deliberately with most characters. The story is about the conflict between two galactic superpowers, and both sides have characters with sympathetic goals... whose means to reach those goals usually boil down to trying to destroy one another, as those goals often conflict. The series also doesn't shy away from showing that even fundamentally good men sometimes make short-sighted decisions that end up hurting innocents, even if it looked like the right decision at the time, nor are they immune from acting rashly on self-interest or sentimentality.
  • The existence of Brisbane as the place of establishment for the United Earth Government (and the reasoning behind it) could be read as a Stealth Insult to the city, with the implication being that it is so unimportant that it would require a catastrophe and every other city to be wrecked in order for it to have any geopolitical significance.
• Anvilicious: While most Western shows portray democracy as the ultimate good force, the series pulls no punches in showing the realistic failures of one:
  • Chronologically, it starts with the United Earth Government, which grows decadent thanks to an overgrown military and corrupt Earth financiers taking control of the government through lobbyism, the depletion of the planet’s resources leading to concentrated wealth on the Earth, and the people’s own ego as the center of humanity oppressing the colonies.
  • Then came the Galactic Republic, where progress and society stagnated to a crawl that plunged humanity into a state of anarchy and hopelessness, giving rise to Rudolph von Goldenbaum and his brutal Galactic Empire.
  • Finally came the Free Planets Alliance, where people still have not learned their lesson and turned their power over to politicians who are willing to send millions of talented people to their deaths to win the next election, send third party groups to kill political or potential opponents while ducking responsibility, invade planets to establish democratic systems where they are impractical or outright unwanted, and outright sell out their country to become The Quisling. It additionally includes those refusing to win when they had the chance just because they are too scared to be Drunk with Power and are a stickler for the rules instead of doing what was necessary to save democracy, let alone their nation.
  • Only with the eventual Iserlohn Republic are democratic institutions shown in a more positive light that provide much more stability than a government ruled by the whims of one man. Even then, a few undemocratic actions under extraordinary circumstances had to be taken to bring it back into positive light.
• Awesome Music:
  • The classical music accompanies the space opera quite well.
  • The awesome theme songs from the TV series such as "Tranquility" and "CRY" are composed by the legendary Hiroyuki Sawano. Even reading the songs' lyrics would make you realize why they fit perfectly for this series.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Episode 62, in which Attenborough inexplicably shows up in a pirate costume for exactly one scene. This is never brought up again. It is, however, entirely in-character.
• Catharsis Factor: The whole Imperial Civil War against the Lippstadt Rebellion spans multiple episodes to give these continuously. Anime News Network even says in its reviews that they do more than show that the rotten-to-the-core High Nobility do not just suck on the battlefield; they are so horrible as decent human beings, especially when looking through the atrocities they did prior to Reinhard, that anyone would just rewatch the arc to see the upstart and his allies give the over-privileged aristocrats humiliating deaths over and over again.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Continuity Lock-Out: Don't try to get into this series in the middle, you'll be confused out of your mind.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • You would expect that either Reinhard or Yang Wenli would be the most popular characters of the show. Granted, they are popular, but who is the absolute darling of ficwriters and discussants? The enigmatic, electronic-eyed and utterly ruthless Paul von Oberstein.
  • On Pixiv and similar circles, Muller is unusually popular, launching several rarepairs in the process.
  • Attenborough, whose importance was considerably pushed in the anime compared to the original books, is beloved because of his quotable lines and comic relief moments, and for being a very competent tactician in his own right.
• Estrogen Brigade: Not all that surprising in hindsight. This series is full of Bishounen.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Getting Reinhard/Kircheis and Reuenthal/Mittermeyer out of the way first, you'd be surprised at how popular Ferner/Oberstein — usually unrequited — is with fanartists.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Mostly Fix Fic-based stuff on the second war between the FPA and the GE, especially on making the two sides survive and come to peace with each other.
  • Some fics on what can happen after the reforms come through the GE with the FPA's former territories integrated. Ex-FPA citizens/officials who genuinely believe in democracy as the better choice rather than a dictatorial empire would not give in to GE rule. Some ideas shared included having anti-GE protests in ex-FPA territory, including the point of having a low-level insurgency.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Boring Germans in Space", due to one of the sides having noticeable Germanic influence and the fact that some anime fans find it painfully slow-paced.
  • A variant is "Boring Gay Germans in Space" - for obvious reasons.
  • Or, for a little Fun with Acronyms, Lots of Gay Hentai.
• Foe Yay Shipping: How some fans interpret the relationship between Reinhard and Yang.
• Genius Bonus: In episode 39, Yang explains his view on the political situation between the Alliance, the Empire, and Fezzan to Julian. Anyone with a background in political science (especially in international relations) will recognize his explanation as a simplified version of the Realist school of though, especially the Balance of Power theory.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The series is well-regarded in China. Much of it has to do with the series having many Chinese characters, with Yang Wenli being the most prominent, and drawing strong parallels to people and elements from its Imperial history. On a darker note, the story's extreme skepticism towards democracy and sympathies toward military despotism align with many Chinese attitudes toward their own history, where a common perspective is that Chinese democracy was a failed experiment, or even that democracy in general is and that authoritarianism works where it doesn’t. Works from its online literature base use this series as an inspiration and reference respectively.
• Harsher in Hindsight
  • There's a moment as early as episode 17 where a character mentions to another that if he's in trouble, "I'll get you to come save me". And then, around sixty episodes later, Yang is shot and dies, with Julian arriving minutes too late. He died within a single year after marrying Frederica, and during which they spent less than three months living in peace together. Considering how things turned out in the end, his inner monologue after proposing to her about how he didn't peruse her romantically before this point because he doesn't deserve family happiness becomes tragically accurate. It becomes more heartbreaking considering Kei Tomiyama's death.
  • Bittenfeld's joke about Drei Großadmiralsburg Fortress needing to be renamed if another high admiral were to pass away. Lutz, who chuckles at this joke, dies the very next episode.
  • If the ending is interpreted as allegory, as some have, then the idea of authoritarianism triumphing over liberal democracy, and the peace and stability that follows seemingly justifying and excusing that victory might count, in contrast to the social scene in Japan during the 60's, where social liberals tried and failed to get out from under the thumb of the dominant, rigidly-conservative, and not a little corrupt Liberal Democratic Party. In the 80's, it looked like that oppression was justified by a booming economy, before the bottom fell out of it in the 90's with the subsequent malaise and Lost Decade that's now lasted for three decades. That said, while the LDP remains firmly in power, there's no serious drive for an authoritarian dictatorship supplanting democracy just yet.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Episode 13 has Kesler having to deal with Reinhard's "scorched earth" tactic on a planet, while dealing with a woman named Vier, whom he would have did Childhood Friend Romance with, but left to join the military, and when he sees her again, he hears she was married and has a son, but find out her husband died in combat, and the kicker, Vier is voiced by Sakiko Tamagawa, who is currently the wife of Shūichi Ikeda (Kesler's voice actor). This can be combined with Heartwarming in Hindsight.
  • Rudolf von Goldenbaum was voiced by Chikao Ohtsuka, who, one of his final voice acting roles before his death, was voicing Adolf Hitler in the Japanese dub of Downfall. The hilarity came with the fact that not only Goldenbaum is inspired on Hitler, but their roles in their respective works (and Real Life as well, in Hitler's case) are painfully ironic in perspective. While Goldebaum is portrayed in the peak of his rule, at least at first, Hitler, on the other hand, at least in that film, is shown as a pathetic weakling at the verge of losing the war he caused.
• It Was His Sled:
  • It's pretty well known just how far the series takes its Anyone Can Die policy.
  • Likewise, the Empire defeating the Alliance is a rather hard spoiler to avoid, given that it comes up in almost every discussion of the show.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Maximillian von Kastrop pointed out that the Empire did not utter a word of complaint about his late father's embezzling funds during his tenure as the secretary of the Treasury. But they did wait till his father's passing to demand now that the stolen money be returned. It is possibly subverted in the sense that if Maximillian had just done so without complaint, he would most likely not be punished for the sins of his father. It is doubly subverted in the sense that he was no saint himself (even in unlikelihood that he wasn't an accomplice in his father's thievery) and the Kastrop rebellion at least served to get rid of a bad apple family in the Empire.
• Magnificent Bastard: See here.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Are◊ you◊ frustrated?◊
  • This wiki would be better if only Kircheis were here...◊
  • Louis Mashengo. Yang Wenli never remembers who he is and often wonders why he is around.
  • Taking Oberstein's ever-stoic face and captioning in things like "rofl XD"
  • The screencap of "You may have killed millions of people, but at the very least, you made me happy."◊ is sometimes used as a way to sum up the way people feel about their favorite morally questionable or even outright villainous characters. For example, Anime Twitter liked to roll it out to describe Cersei Lannister after certain Game of Thrones episodes.
  • Guards, this woman has lost her composure.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Oberstein keeps teetering on the edge, and arguably crosses it with the Westerland incident - made only worse by the fact that his actions proved to have an overall positive effect for Reinhard and his followers. In the novels, both he and Reinhard charge straight toward the Horizon by simply and explicitly agreeing to let Westerland be attacked. The OVA adaptation has Oberstein give Reinhard an inaccurate estimate of how long he has to act; Oberstein quickly sends a recon probe to capture the propaganda footage, while Reinhard waffles and only sends in The Cavalry when it's too late. This results in Oberstein making a shallower approach — since it's possible the faulty estimate was a genuine fault based on bad intel — but still crossing the Moral Event Horizon.
  • Of course, one can't mention the Westerland incident without mentioning its architect, Otho von Braunschweig. There's a reason Oberstein's gambit worked — nothing says "brutal, ruthless tyrant" like ordering the casual annihilation of an entire planet's population for rebelling against him.
  • Adrian Rubinsky starts out as a ruthless schemer who only cares about profiting from the war. At the end of the show, however, he dies of a malignant brain tumor. Then we find out that his death would trigger bombs all over Heinessen, killing god knows how many people in the process. Any why? Only so he might take Kaiser Reinhard down with him. For someone who was a Magnificent Bastard for most of the show, this act of pointless destruction sure makes him seem like a monster.
• Narm: Compared to episode 14 of the OAV, Commodore Falk's mental breakdown in episode 11 of Die Neue These is hammed up to the point of being hilarious to watch.
• Stoic Woobie: Oskar von Reuenthal. He has mommy issues, which are his Freudian Excuse for never being able to form a lasting relationship with his lovers, knocks up a woman who wanted to kill him, and is wrongfully accused of treason twice, the second time deciding to go along with it because he's too prideful to clear his name a second time despite knowing that he's outnumbered and will probably die. No wonder why he's Mittermeyer's drinking buddy, who wouldn't want to buy the guy a drink (besides Oberstein and Lang)?
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Die Neue These's theme song "Binary Star" sounds an awful lot like Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now".
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A significant portion of the fanbase reacts like this at every version of the story that is not the OVA. This has most notably been seen in the reception to second manga and the Die Neue These adaptations. That said, people eventually warmed up to DNT when it proved to be more like the OVA than they expected. The new manga still has a large number of detractors, however.
• Values Dissonance:
  • There are a couple of jokes about Frederica's cooking ability that given that she's both a naval officer and later, a politician would seem a little out of place in a more modern, western show. That being said, while Frederica may hold a relatively low official rank, the unofficial power she commands is rather substantial. As both Yang's wife and his adjutant, Frederica is basically his closest and most important advisor, and inherits his full political power following his death. It also seems likely that, with the end of the war and the new peace, that she will continue to hold a prominent role in Heinessen/Imperial politics.
  • A greater source of dissonance, at least from the point of view of modern liberal democracies (or those who are critical of autocratic rule), is the willingness to claim that autocracy can be preferable to democracy under certain circumstances. In the end, the autocratic Empire dominates the entire inhabited galaxy (with Heinessen left as a democratic reservation), though there are hints that it will become a Constitutional Monarchy through gradual reforms. It's worth noting that at the time, Japan was undergoing a lot of social upheaval, with critics of the rigidly-conservative dominant party being brutally suppressed. Some have interpreted the ending as symbolic of the Japanese voters prioritizing stability above all else, ensuring the defeat of democracy and seemingly justifying it by the economic boon that followed, only for that boom to be short-lived.
• Values Resonance:
  • The portrayal of a flawed if not near-dysfunctional democracy in the Alliance remains as poignant now as it had been in the 80's, especially amidst myriad scandals and a divisive political atmosphere in western countries. Job Trunicht in particular remains a timeless warning about the pitfalls of demagoguery and opportunism in politics.
  • On a similar note, the backstory behind Rudolf von Goldenbaum's rise to power continues to resonate for modern audiences, just has it did for fans of the original OVA. Whether it's the perception of seeming decline being exploited for personal gain, the deceptive appeal an autocrat who could fix all those problems, or the resulting consequences being difficult to undo.

---