Just a moment while I dig up a comment I made on a Fubuki pic over at danbooru a few months ago, in response to the usual carping about how "vanilla" she is:

I never thought it was fair that "vanilla" is equated with blandness in the first place. It's one of the most popular and sought-after flavors in the world. Vanilla pods are the second-most-valuable spice on Earth, capable of being cultivated, at great effort and expense, in only a handful of places. Only saffron costs more per unit mass, and that's only because it's virtually impossible to cultivate; vanilla is by far the more popular of the two. That all seems pretty special to me. And yet paradoxically, thanks to its massive popularity, it's entered the English vernacular as a synonym for bland, boring, unimaginative, and ordinary - which completely overlooks the simple fact that you can find it everywhere because virtually everybody wants it.

So yeah, Fubuki's vanilla. Because vanilla is awesome. :)

>>The construction system may be the silliest thing in KanColle,
>>which is saying something, given what an inherently silly thing the
>>game is. Imagine a shipbuilding industry so byzantine and stupid that
>>no one can tell what kind of ship is being constructed until it's
>>operational. Not even the Soviets did that. :)
>
>The only thing more hilariously awful (and nerve-wracking to fans) is
>the compass system, overseen by the "Compass Fairies," whose job which
>is basically an RNG deciding which route you'll take on a particular
>map. Roll one time, you get sent straight to the boss node. Another
>time, you're gonna have a bad time.

I saw a fan comic once where the admiral got so fed up with the randomness of the Compass Fairies that he decided to ignore them and send his fleet straight to where he knew the boss was—and received a hard, Marvel's-What-If?-style lesson in the ill-advisedness of messing with fate. The artist's take on it was that the course they send you on only seems random because you don't know (and they do) what would happen to your fleet if you sent it anywhere else at that particular point in time. Which I thought was rather clever, in a dark sort of way.

>Like the High Seas Fleet, the
>IJN may have been successful in sinking more USN ships, but their
>numerical inferiority and Japan's industrial deficit compared to
>America would have meant every ship lost to USN guns would be one that
>could never be adequately replaced.

Well, sure. The lesson of the Pacific War (I am finding reinforced in a dozen places in the course of the research I am currently undertaking) is that Japan was never going to win, whatever it did. I mean to say, here you had a country that received most of its oil and steel from the United States, starting a war rooted in technologies completely dependent on oil and steel with the United States. That was never, ever going to work. And the people in charge of Japan knew it! But they did it anyway, because Reasons.

(I'm sad that I really can't get away with entitling my paper on this topic Because Reasons: Japan's Route to the Pacific War. :)

>I admit I'm an alt-history buff, I love entertaining "what if"
>scenarios. It's why I'm looking forward to the second season of
>The Man in the High Castle later this month.

--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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