LAST EDITED ON Sep-12-14 AT 04:18 AM (EDT)
 
>Lysander
>
>Despite her name, Lysander is very much a girl,

You know, I was always glad the creative teams stuck to their guns on this.

When the series blew up big (Fly Girls really should have been a niche genre title, one to three seasons max; TV Tomodachi's marketing is still baffled) and started getting a lot of cross-demo attention, there was more than a bit of fan agitation and network pressure for some Fly Boys as well. Gotta make those demographic trendlines look good, you know?

The writers were adamant: no, never. This was girls entertainment. They were, of course, absolutely thrilled that so many people of so many genders (and species; Fly Girls was big in Salusia in syndication and the Romulan dub is a thing of beauty) could enjoy it, but it was primarily being written by women and for women. There would be no male fliers, thank you.

Fans being what they are, there were a lot of OCs created as Fly Boys. Prior to Jet Age coming out it was common for people into that sort of thing to make various jets into males. Choppers to; that was a thing.

Fans also being what they are, there was a lot of fairly ugly misogyny involved. Bad things happened to Zero, you guys. A lot. I'll leave it at that. You know where to find the materiel if you really want it.

There was one thing slipped in, though. To this day the reasons for it remain unknown, although the most commonly accepted theory is that it was an attempt to steer fandom to more productive endeavors.

One of the tactical instructors-slash-briefing officers at Brittania Academy was a Colonel who was a very stereotypically older British gent. Proper accent you could cut glass with, pip pip cheerio, stiff upper lip, all that stuff. He didn't have a name, or get a lot of lines; the ground crew and faculty tended not to if they weren't important. But he showed up in a lot of episodes, and increasingly in ways that usually involved him imparting some nugget of wisdom or making some dry British witticism.

In season four, Hurry and P-51 are having an involved conversation involving a lot of bad puns, and they walk by his office... and there's a quick, blink-and-you'll-miss shot of his nameplate.

CAMEL, S. (Colonel)

Had to've been deliberate.

Since then, anyone who is really dead-set on doing Fly Boys stuff in a productive, non-shitty way has gone all the way back to the Great War and worked with the biplanes. There've been some decent doujins done in that genre. The creative teams behind the series have stated more than once they find World War I dull where they don't find it incredibly depressing, which lends credence to the theory.

-Merc
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