>According to the semi-official 4koma*,

Oh... dear, that's a deep hole.

OK, see you guys in a few weeks. :)

>Hibiki and Verniy are separate personalities, with the trigger between
>the two being loneliness, a play on the fact that Hibiki was the only
>one of her sisters to see the war through to the end.

Mm. Doesn't seem to be the case in the TV show, but then they did only have 12 eps to work with, and that's a pretty complicated shtick to explain.

As an aside, man alive, is the fan art for this show ever a minefield because of little facts like that. I mean, on top of all the usual pitfalls of exploring an anime fandom (rape fanart! torture fanart! rape and torture fanart! what the fuck is wrong with Japan), there's a corner of it devoted to obsessively considering the emotional consequences of being reincarnated members of a navy that got completely annihilated in the course of the war. So you stumble across the occasional, sometimes quite-well-constructed, work which concentrates on, for instance, Hibiki being the only survivor of the Akatsuki class and then being handed into the not-particularly-caring hands of the Russians; or Zuikaku being the last fleet carrier standing near the end (and not making it out alive either); or Nagato managing to make it through the war only to be expended as a nuclear test target; or Haruna outliving her sisters only to be scrapped. I mean... shit.

"Well, yeah," the counterargument runs, "but that's what happened," so I suppose it depends on whether you take the view that KanColle is some kind of weirdly metaphorized description of the war that's actually set in the 1940s, or the view that it's a Strange Phenomenon occurring in a near-future semi-sci-fi setting. (Or that it's neither, it's just a cute web browser game featuring personified ships from history. That's a valid view, although it isn't one that leads anywhere interesting.) In the latter case, they don't have to be slaves to what befell their namesakes, which seems to be the approach the TV show takes (after certain of the ships themselves flirt gloomily with the thought that they might be for most of the series). A number of fan writers and artists, though - some of them quite talented - take the former tack, and it's just crushing. Sometimes it's hard to tell where they're going until it's too late not to see, too, which... well. It's hard work, taking an interest in this franchise, that's all I'm saying.

>The most childish ship of the quartet trying to convince others that
>she's a first-class lady. Leads to a truly hilarious moment in-game
>when you (provisionally) marry her:
>
>"To have a meal with the commander, just the two of us, as a lady....
>Wait! Why do I have juice? Furthermore, why does the pilaf have a flag
>in it!"

Heh. (I had to look up the flag part.) Somewhere down that terrifying well there's an adorable one-frame cartoon in which the other three are trying to get her to tell them if the Admiral is any good in the sack, and a deeply flustered Akatsuki insists that she just sleeps with him.

>Her namesake, along with Inazuma's, are also famous for rescuing 442
>survivors from British and America ships and treating them with the
>respect and honor as prisoners, something rare amongst a culture that
>viewed being taken alive as shameful.

Indeed, this was the topic of one of the less depressing "let's apply some realism to this" fan comics I've come across (less depressing in that Ikazuchi-the-WWII-ship sinks in the course of it, but Ikazuchi-the-fleet-girl doesn't).

>The best description I saw for Inazuma came from a comment about the
>same fan comic, that as wives, Ikazuchi would be the caring and
>supportive wife, while Inazuma would be a wife who's head of the
>household.

In fairness to Ikazuchi, I have to speculate that she would also be more fun, albeit less practically helpful. :)

>Also, her verbal tic is to add "nanodesu" (roughly: "it is so") to the
>end of her sentences, which is supposed to add to her moe cuteness.

As fleet girl verbal tics go, that's... not the most annoying one kuma.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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