You know, pictures like this and this: post #1969636
just make me think that, unless you're one of the fleet carriers and adopted Houshou as your mom, most ship girls don't have any parental figures. I suppose the admiral can step in and be a dad, but obviously that wasn't the case here. Fubuki and Co obviously never got "The Talk" and had to investigate on their own. What other important life experiences normally related to children by parents are they missing out on and have to get from other sources?
I get they have their sisters (sucks to be you, Shimakaze), and older girls to look up to/keep an eye on them but, for the destroyers especially, I feel that not having parents, grandparents, or even aunts and uncles leaves a really sad gap in their lives.
Scholastica said: just make me think that ... most ship girls don't have any parental figures.
I always figured they were raised in a crèche, maybe grown in a vat. The shipyard basically. It would explain so much. (Yeah, I know that's bleak, sorry). At least they've got the other girls, so not terribly lonely.
Except for the really young girls, I usually think of them as in the age that starts to interact more with outside, friends of their age, rather than parents (or even the age where they are starting to have conflict against older authoritative figures like parents/teachers/boss)
Fubuki: Ah, Commander, we're just doing Solomon Merry Go Round Admiral: ...!!!!?
... most ship girls don't have any parental figures.
The canon doesn't really talk about the shipgirls' lives outside of the military, but a lot of fan art does show some parental figures. pool #7548 is a Hiyou manga that shows her father. Occasionally they 'adopt' each other (not just Houshou), like in pool #8230 and pool #9435. There's one manga where the carriers run a kindergarten; so they would be parental figures for the destroyers/light cruisers. Of course there's also the shipgirls with kids art: pool #8415, pool #8000, and the if_they_mated tag in general. And then there's stuff here and there that imply the admiral as a father figure: post #1959853, post #1945604, post #1694065.
This would be Tenryuu's job, but she still needs it explained as well. Later destroyer groups can look up to Fubuki for such knowledge. The Kagerou-class can be well informed.
But that raises a related topic, how many of these admirals had to adjust to working with and raising a bunch of ship girls? If they had kids of their own it might help, but those officers married to their work suddenly found a wave of teens and tweens dumped on their laps. The older girls can look after themselves, but even the oldest destroyers appear, and presumably have the mentality of, a 15 year old at most.
Assuming they do embrace the father role, that's a lot of birthdays to remember. Presents to buy. Boyfriends to hunt. Cat fights to sort out. Special events that make the girls happy to attend.
I come from a family of six kids and I know that parents of large families after a while just stop remembering every ones names. Imagine what it's like for a admiral.
"Miyu- Hatsu- I mean, Shira... You!" -points to Fubuki - "Come here!"
Their father figures could be whichever guy (or one of several guys) who was responsible in some way for their construction or design. Like the CEO of Kawasaki Heavy Industries in the aforementioned pool #7548 for Izumo Ma Hiyou and Junyou.
Meanwhile, Connie Kongou's 'father' is Sir George Thurston. The naval engineer. In which case he would also happen to be the uncle to Fusou and Yamashiro, IIRC.
It's all very dependent on how the shipgirls are made in the first place. Are they human girls becoming weaponized, test tube creations, summoned from another dimension, literally constructed, or is it some other way entirely? An artificial life-form might have their thoughts, emotions, even false memories, programmed into them. A human becoming a shipgirl could very well have/had human parents. A summon might have memories of parents from a previous existence. There's also the possibility that fairies could behave as parental guardians. It's also possible that shipgirls are largely self-reliant with a sense of responsibility and as such don't really need parental figures at all.
^ I don't think we'll ever get an actual answer to these questions anytime soon, but that doesn't make it any less fun to speculate. If the anime can be considered canon, I think we can come up with some possible answers. Some people seem to be viewing the game and anime as two separate continuums, but the anime had to be greenlighted by Kadokawa itself, so take that for what it's worth. Given the way the game "tells" its story, I don't think it's likely we'll ever find the answer to this question via the game alone.
In ep. 2 of the anime, we learn the shipgirls' weights are measured in tonnage; a small, but intriguing piece of info. In ep. 3, Akagi mentions that they're fated to fight "from the moment they're born". The pre-airing synopsis of the show states that they "posses souls of ships of the past". I believe that they're created via some process of the naval base, whether by summoning or construction, maybe a mix of both. It might seem strange, but the fact that weigh as much as their real-life counterparts would imply that they're made of the same materials as they were (perhaps their flesh being steel, their blood being oil?). To put it simply, they're warships taking human appearances, and not "real" humans, at least in the flesh-and-blood sense. Even as far as game logic goes, there's no denying a normal human wouldn't be able to take a shot from a "small" DD cannon without being blown to bits. This would be enough to rule out the "weaponized human" theory for me.
I should mention that pretty much all of what I mentioned above lines up with boushi-yas "Kantai Collection: The Beginning" manga, which you can find as a pool here on db.
...In ep. 2 of the anime, we learn the shipgirls' weights are measured in tonnage; a small, but intriguing piece of info. ...
Actually, that's pretty significant, and is something I choose to ignore as the implications shatters my willing suspension of disbelief.
If we just convert a normal person's weight from kilogram(me)s to ton(ne)s, that means they are a thousand times denser than the average human, or about... fifty times denser than the densest-known substance on Earth. If we go with their actual displacements as ships, then they are about hundreds of thousands to millions of times denser, comparable to the lower end of electron-degenerate matter found in white dwarf stars (which is like, dense enough to 'start' giving the Pauli exclusion principle a big fat middle finger).
So, on the lower end of the scale you have to wonder how do the shipgirls float, much less skate around on water. And what kind of super-materials are the buildings made out of, really, to support their weight. Also TTK is like one Inazuma-trip (or Kongou-hug) away from becoming chunky salsa (maybe that's why he doesn't show up).
On the higher end of the scale we are looking, at say, an energy requirement of a thousand nukes (take the exact number with a fair-sized grain of salt, this is mostly guesswork) exploding every second or so just to keep Nagato from imploding on herself from her sheer mass.
Just to give some perspective, a mere tablespoon of whichever stuff the shipgirls are made out of would weigh from 15 kilos (33 lbs) to 15 tonnes, depending on which scale we're using.
Yeah, authors can't do math, etc. etc., but this makes air-filled Wailord balloons look tame.
If we are taking the anime into consideration, in EP 11 it was implied that they are "born" as shipgirls and not as normal humans. From there, we can speculate they are somehow "created", and I'm sure that method of creation do not require a father or mother...
And about the weight issue, let's put it in the "Because Magic!" section. Your brain will explode if you think too much into it...
If we are taking the anime into consideration, in EP 11 it was implied that they are "born" as shipgirls and not as normal humans. From there, we can speculate they are somehow "created", and I'm sure that method of creation do not require a father or mother...
And about the weight issue, let's put it in the "Because Magic!" section. Your brain will explode if you think too much into it...
Yeah, that's why I said I chose to ignore the units on the bathroom scale. I'm chalking it to a random joke/reference that is not meant to be taken seriously, instead of it being canonical information on the weights of their shipgirl bodies.
Yeah, that's why I said I chose to ignore the units on the bathroom scale. I'm chalking it to a random joke/reference that is not meant to be taken seriously, instead of it being canonical information on the weights of their shipgirl bodies.
That is quite reasonable actually. Someone need to take care of them after all. Well, guess in the end we can only say its up to the artists' interpretation.
And ya, I know its a joke, but after reading such a long analysis(?) I somehow started thinking about it seriously...
Scholastica said: I come from a family of six kids and I know that parents of large families after a while just stop remembering every ones names. Imagine what it's like for a admiral.
"Miyu- Hatsu- I mean, Shira... You!" -points to Fubuki - "Come here!"
don't forget calling someone by the dog's name, and then the cat's name, and then the other dog's name
Yeah, that's why I said I chose to ignore the units on the bathroom scale. I'm chalking it to a random joke/reference that is not meant to be taken seriously, instead of it being canonical information on the weights of their shipgirl bodies.
If we're applying logical implications to things mentioned, then applying logic to "TTK = Dad, Secretary ship = Mom" means the starter shipgirl is the great-grandmother to half the base, and there's an awful lot of incest going on with Dad's part...
