Talk:Samuel B. Roberts/@comment-32181426-20180424142239/@comment-27633922-20180425024439

Unlike us westerners, the Japanese decided to name their ships after places, rivers, mountains, trees, natural phenomenons, etc., and since the words themselves are mostly of a neutral or feminine nature which helps them out a lot.

In comparison, our (US, German, English, etc.) ships sound less attractive, due to the lack of correlation between the shipgirls and their masculine names. Z1, Z3 and others break this by using hypocorisms which can cancel out the effect, but some others can't.

In the case of Luigi Torelli, her Italian name isn't really attractive to us due to its masculine nature, but "Lui" can break that frame to some extent and when becoming I-504 she calls herself "Go", but some japanese consider this to be masculine, the only moment when she gets a more feminine name is when she becomes UIT-25 when she calls herself "Ui", which is a feminine name in Japanese.

To top it off, ships (in the english language) are naturally supposed to be female, which make matters more confusing. Though this is currently trying to be changed by discouraging the use of feminine pronouns for neuter ones.