User blog:Morgane of the Mists/Lore (Pt. 3)

My original lore post was on the weapons of KanColle and how battles are actually presented in two distinctive settings, but I thought I would take the time to answer some of these questions that has reached my (our) inboxes first.

'''How do you explain multiple ship girls in the game? Is my ship girl one of many ship girls, or is she unique?'''

tl;dr: Never clearly explained, and is up to the players to interpret what works the best for them. Kakuyoku no Kizuna seems to suggest that multiple individuals of the same "ship" can appear as separate individuals. Kagero, set sail! suggests the reverse, in that multiple individuals "become" the same "ship" as a result of that particular world setting.

The long version:

First of all, multiple ship girls of the same "identity" never appears in the same work in any capacity (with very, very few exceptions). At best, they're only vaguely hinted at in Kagero, due to the extremely depressing reality of that particular universe. The only strong piece of evidence supporting the idea that your ship girls aren't unique comes from Kumano, and the interpretation of this line is actually questionable. In game, Kumano's あら、また新しい子を雇ったの？いいけれど suggests that ship girls are simply hired. Though this could easily chalk up to Kumano not understanding how the world actually works, it is a point of thought, and a point of contention between the various self-proclaimed "otaku" fan groups.

Personally, I think arguing is silly. However, as you will quickly find out, depending on who you talk to, people are likely to all have very different interpretations of how the world is. And to be honest, that is how it was supposed to be. In fact, that's supported by the creators.

"At first, I thought of making a support system. Specific ship-girls in the same fleet would start to interact with each other and have stories specific to them. Because we knew such an amount of work was impossible, we decided to just put the game out as it. The reception from our teitokus, however, were so overwhelmingly positive, that we realized, ha? Maybe there was no need for us to write the story in stone after all."

- Interview with Kensuke Tanaka, from [Febri]. (Scanned by SoS blog - saves me the trouble of taking apart the magazine myself.)

"Even though there must be an association between the characters, I think in hindsight it was better this way. If I had forced a storyline into KanColle, it would have been mine. Instead, now, if each teitoku can use their brains to make their KanColle worlds, then to each of them, that would be the canonical KanColle. That's what I think would be best."

Now, before people take this portion of the interview out of context, let me also add to the observation that Kensuke never thought the game would actually get big. They originally even had the server-closing event designed, where the abyssal fleet would overrun the naval bases and the ship girls'll get to say goodbye to the admiral one last time. But that probably won't happen for a while now - at least, judging from recent interviews, they think KanColle has at least two or three more years of life in it.

'''What is a ship girl? (Pt. 2) More specifically, what happens when a ship girl becomes a ship girl? How does it work?'''

tl;dr: It depends. Generally, either:
 * Ship girls were ships (memories, spirits, or actual ships) given a new life as a human girl. Whether or not they're technically human and possess human rights is subject to heavy debate in the JP community.
 * Ship girls were girls first that became ships as a part of their "class."

I myself prefer the former.

Answer, based on works such as Kakuyoku no Kizuna or the Kaga/Akagi novel that I don't remember the title off the top of my head: Once a ship girl becomes a ship girl, she begins a new life as an independent entity. Thus, there is only one ship girl of that "individual" at a time. Nagato muses on this in one of the magazine editorals forewords (KnK is a serialized work).
 * Remember that in this particular setting, the admiral "summons"/"constructs" the ship girls on his own. In other works (such as the one I use as a contrasting point below) they are trained at some centralized location, the exact details of which was not given.
 * (Unfortunately, my room is filled to the brim with USMLE exam materials and papers. I'd scan this interview, but I simply can't find it at the moment. Thus, the below bit is operating off of memory instead of providing a concrete citation, sorry.)
 * More specifically, Nagato wonders whether or not they deserve rights like people do or even to live like people. It starts with her commenting that she is a weapon of war, and that her primary directive is to save humanity from the abyssal fleet. The unknown speaker (admiral?) asks her what is she going to do after the war, and she pauses, unsure of the question, and even more unsure of an answer. The gist of her response was: I never thought about it that way. I wouldn't know what to do with myself, because I never believed me to be anything more than a weapon in the first place. Remember, in Kakuyoku no Kizuna the ship girls were actually "ships" at one point.
 * Presumably, if say, Zuikaku is lost in battle, it is possible for the admiral (together with the error-cat) to re-summon another one of her. However, it'll be back to square one for all of them - the new Zuikaku would be nothing like the Zuikaku in the novel and would retain memories only up to the point where she was sunk (historically) in our world.

Answer, based on works such as Kagero: Normal girls are selected to become ship girls. Once a normal girl becomes a ship girl, they effectively lose all memories of their past lives and take upon the identity of the "ship girl". This include the ship girl's personality, as well as her collective conscious and unconscious experiences, which is why PTSD is such an issue in that setting.
 * Note that from the descriptions given in the light novel, this transformation appears to be on a magical/psychological level only. Say, for an example, that the teitoku lost Nagato. Whoever takes up the mantle of Nagato next will have a set of Nagato "class" equipment while retaining their characteristics. Thus, in theory, if I became Nagato, Nagato would be a tiny half-Asian. Vs, if my best friend became Nagato, you'd get a tall (irish?) Nagato with freckles and red hair. However, in either case, the memories are conserved. I.E. I would know immediately the tactics that Nagato would have known at the time of "inception", but functionally, anything that was developed after her time (such as modern tactics) would have to be learned anew. One of the reasons why I personally skip over this particular work is that the world design is a lot less clear (though given that it sold 300k copies as a light novel, I'd say the numbers weren't half bad).
 * To explain the collective unconscious, note also that the memories they've inherited contain both the good and the bad (sinking memories). Thus, if Nagato dies in battle (Kagero makes it pretty damn clear that ship girls die if they are sunk in battle), the next Nagato will retain that memory of sinking. It's safe to assume that in Kagero, that very few to no "prototype" of the original ship girl exists. On pg. 105 it is explicitly stated that BB Ru-class has already slaughtered hundreds of ship girls.
 * Part of a ship girl's training in this setting is keeping their sinking experiences under control.

Is the public aware of ship girls?

Once again, setting dependent. In Kagero, they are public knowledge, and ship girls are trained centrally and assigned to a number of naval bases. In KnK, they are kind of like the superheroines of the setting. Mysterious maidens showing up and miraculously driving back the abyssal fleet, but their existence is otherwise only known to a handful of people.

To put it another way. In lighter works such as Kagero, the ship girls are recognized (well, ok, the DD girls aren't, but the famous ones like CV or BBs are like celebrities). In KnK, they blend in perfectly, and a key criteria is that they don't want to draw attention to themselves. That being said, however, the town that is immediately adjacent to their base (as I mentioned before, cleverly disguised as a hotel) have people that knows that these girls aren't ordinary, and does a lot to help out with supply - bringing fresh fruits and sweets, for example, in a setting where these things are more luxury than daily goods.