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Forum Name: Source Material
Topic ID: 143
Message ID: 0
#0, Gedankenexperiment II: Fly Girls
Posted by Gryphon on Sep-02-14 at 01:09 PM
LAST EDITED ON Sep-02-14 AT 04:14 PM (EDT)
 
I had a dream in which some of the Order of the Rose characters were watching a TV show best described as "Upotte!! with airplanes". The cast appeared to consist mainly of personified World War II fighter aircraft (with character traits inspired by quirks of the aircraft, in the style of the gun girls of Upotte!!), who attend various rival high schools and do aerial battle (at the controls of, erm, "themselves", Arpeggio-like) for interscholastic prestige (à la Girls und Panzer). I had the impression that it wasn't a first-run show, but rather one that Corwin had liked as a kid.

I don't remember the specifics (if indeed the dream contained any), so naturally, the first thing my brain wanted to do when I got up was consider some of them.

- Everyone assumes Hurricane and Spitfire are sisters, because they strongly resemble each other and have very similar voices, but the only real connection between them is that they went to the same exclusive private junior high school. They seem very young and carefree (particularly Spitfire), but they've seen things you can't even imagine, and they know better than anybody else what it's like to have your back against a wall. Their only real shortcoming is that they're hungry all the time.

- P-51 also has a lovely singing voice, and she's very athletic, an excellent all-rounder. This, and her very high popularity, make her one of the stars of the show, but some people (both in the viewership and on the show itself, as the writers started to get wind of the former and lampshade it on screen) think she's a bit overrated. Her critics aren't bashful about hauling out the photos of that awful hairstyle she had in middle school, or snarking off about what poor stamina she used to have.

- P-51's older cousin P-40 is very cheerful, despite being considered outmoded by many of the others, because she's tough, reliable, and - perhaps most importantly - low-maintenance. Because of that, she knows she's never going to go completely out of style. There's always going to be someone somewhere who desperately needs a fighter that can operate out of an unimproved dirt strip out in the back of beyond somewhere with nothing but the tool kit from an old Indian motorcycle and a couple of barrels of avgas for a support facility, and for that, she's your girl. Besides, she may not be able to outmaneuver these bright young things they're sending after her nowadays, but she can usually outwit them, and let's see them bomb a bridge, strafe a train, shoot down a couple of bombers, and carry the mail back from Kunming all in the same mission.

- One of the few details I can remember from the actual dream is that P-38 wears her hair like Haruna in Arpeggio, which makes sense, because, well, twin tails. Well played, my subconscious! She's one of the older, more mature fighter planes, but despite that, she hasn't seen as much action as some of her younger colleagues (for various reasons that are no fault of her own). Her very distinctive silhouette can make her a target, but she's wily and tough, and very heavily armed for an American fighter. Catching her is only half the challenge.

- P-47 is the biggest, strongest girl in the bunch - think of Kanna from Sakura Wars - and she has the loudest voice of anybody except her cousin Corsair (who's in the Marines, with all that that entails). She's not very subtle and she eats like a horse, but she's nearly indestructible and she has impressive firepower for a fighter. She's not the most creative tactician, but she's dogged and relentless, and like P-40, she has a fondness for ground attack side jobs. Nobody enjoys blowing up a train more than 47.

- Me 109 is a veteran, like Spitfire and Hurricane, and unlike them she looks the part - her battle scars are on the outside. She's been doing this longer than any of the others, all the way back to the Spanish Civil War, and though her heart is still in the game and she's still a capable athlete, she gets tired sometimes. She's starting to wonder what the point of it all is... but she still has a job to do, and her meticulous German heart won't let her slack off, no matter how weary she is.

- Fw 190 is bitter. She's a better fighter plane than Me 109 will ever be, upgrade her as Messerschmitt's engineers might. She's newer, faster, and tougher, and her radial engine is more reliable - and yet 109 is the only German fighter most people outside the insular little world of fighter girls has ever heard of. She's the one in all the posters. She's the one the little boys at air shows want to see. That battle-scarred old hag! How dare she! She'll get what's coming to her one of these days, you just wait.

- The others all agree that Me 163 is insane. Tiny, fragile, not very nimble, and with almost preposterously limited endurance, she has one and only one party trick: she's the fastest sprinter in the world. For 100 yards or so, nobody can touch her; but then she's done, and what's more, she'll probably explode. She has pretty heavy armament, particularly for her size,but it's always an open question as to whether she'll manage to use it. Her battle cry is, "Hier gehe iiiiiiiich!" ("Here I gooooooo!")

- Wildcat and Hellcat should have a similar kind of rivalry to Me 109's and Fw 190's, given that the latter is an improved replacement for the former, but they don't. Hellcat, despite her name, is far too easy-going to feel any resentment about her big sister's continued popularity, and Wildcat practically worships her little sister, constantly pointing out to anyone who will listen (and anyone who won't, come to that) all the various improvements Hellcat sports that were directly inspired by her own experiences and shortcomings in the field. The other American and British fighter girls regard them both a bit warily, because naval fighters are just weird, you know? All that grabbing wires and getting yanked to a stop, it's got to do something bad to your brain. And sometimes they seem to be talking in this strange code that's all acronyms and bizarrely compressed phrases ("Did you hear about COMSUBPAC? He got into another fight with CINCPACFLT and it looks like he might get COMTRANned to SOWESPACFLT LOPU." "Ha ha, he's gonna spend the rest of his career counting CONRATs in Biloxi if he ain't careful"). It's not normal.

- Zero is sneaky, but then, she has to be, because she's incredibly fragile. She makes up for that somewhat with her impressive firepower and remarkable agility, but she knows as well as anyone that all her opponent has to do is land one good hit and she's done for. Her notorious glass jaw is a source of deep shame, but every attempt she makes over the course of the series to overcome it in some way - e.g., by wearing armor, by a brief flirtation with "bulk up" workout regimens and protein shakes - has hindered her best qualities to the extent that she can't even really fight at all, so she always goes back to what she does best: sneak attacks, spending most of her earned XP on enhancing Dodge rolls, and occasionally winding up in Comedy Traction in the infirmary.

- Yak-9 has heard all the jokes before, trust me. She's long since given up explaining to people that it's short for "Yakovlev" (Russian for "Jacobson", the name of her designer), and not a reference to a large and hairy animal, having concluded that nobody cares. Whether this constant low-level stream of annoyance has made her surly and taciturn, or if she's just naturally that way, is anyone's guess. Yak never says one word when none will do, except for her odd habit of shouting "ShVAK!" when employing the eponymous cannon (it's a contraction of the Russian for "Shpitalniy-Vladimirov large-caliber aircraft cannon") in combat. She knows she's obscure and underrated, and she likes it that way. Being underestimated makes her job easier, and that job isn't to make friends and influence people, anyway.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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