This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Chrome Newfie: I thought this link
might be an interesting reference on the matter, particularly as I've seen the concept extended to people who exist as linked aspects of a single entity, like Rommy from Andromeda or Guu from Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu. =
Dark Sasami: Shoot, now I'm confused. Is this an Anime Trope, or is it a Humongous Mecha? For that matter, is Ryo-Ohki a Transforming Mecha?
Ununnilium: Anime Trope - the transformations are all either technology-as-magic (Ryo-Ohki) or not-really-transformations (Canal). The spaceship form isn't usually humanoid, either.
Dark Sasami: LT seems to have solved the problem neatly by putting it in Anime Character Types.
A friend of mine seems to remember that a ship, whose female masthead could speak, took Baron Munchausen to the moon in the original stories, making this one of The Oldest Ones in the Book. Any Munchausen fans or scholars out there who can verify this?
BT The P: I think, maybe, there needs to be a more general superset of Robot Girl and Spaceship Girl, that is to say Computer Girl. If you think about it, AI avatars, if they exist, are more often young women than anything else, and they show up everywhere. Just to name a few, Star Trek's computer voice, Cortana from Halo, Andromeda, the Robo Cop TV series (although she was a brain-in-a-jar).
Ununnilium: I'd say Spaceship Girl would be part of Computer Girl, but Robot Girl wouldn't. Computer Girl seems to be part of the general trope of anthropomorphizing one's tools, while Robot Girl is more a variation on older not-quite-human characters.
Red Shoe: Is that Andromeda comment true? Other than Rommy, the only avatars I can recall are male, played by Michael Shanks and Christopher Judge. The avatars I recall being dominantly female are the celestial ones (stars and black holes — the only male celestial avatars I recall were the moon of Tarn Vedra and the Abyss), who can't be honestly counted as "Spaceships"
Firvulag: For ships of Rommy's class (Heavy Crusier), yes, I think. We didn't see too many though, Andromeda, Pax Magellanic, Crimson Sunrise and one other. Michael Shanks and Christopher Judge both played avatars of Destroyers. There was a third male ship's avatar, he was from a troop carrier.
xwingace: Would the events from the Firefly episode Objects in Space (River pretending to be Serenity) count as a subversion of this?
Dark Sasami: Regarding the recent addition by Schol-R-LEA, does anyone have any actual examples of a Spaceship Girl that is a Virtual Ghost of The Captain's lost love? 'Cause I don't see any here, and don't know of any either.
s5555: Spaceship Girl, and still no mention of "Soreyuke! Uchuu Senkan Yamamoto" ("Spaceship Girl Yamamoto Yohko")?
binaroid: Despite the title, that doesn't count; Yohko and her teammates were just OrdinaryHighSchoolStudents brought to the future to win a mock war for Earth — they didn't have any special links to their spacecraft at all, IIRC.
s5555: I disagree. Pretty much their link to the craft is their team spirit and The Power of Friendship (as emphasize at several points in the show, although never explicit).
s5555: Might I also add I am talking about the TV series, not the OAV (The TV series was never released in the US. An Australian release was planned, but have not heard of it since).
Krid: "Moya on Farscape is part of a race of living ships. She apparently became pregnant prior to the series and gives birth as part of a major arc." This is incorrect. She was inseminated long before the series started, but the spores(?) were blocked-off and unable to actually make her pregnant. Naturally, the seal was broken on accident, thus resulting in her pregnancy.
The Defenestrator: I don't think the Krakow storyline is directly referencing this trope. I've seen lots of anthro planegirl art online. Here's an example.
◊
Zeke: Ewwwwww. That says things about airplane otaku that I didn't want to know. Anyway, I put the example here because we don't have a specifically "girls who are vehicles" trope; the Guardian Legend example is one of those too. In conclusion, EWWWWWW.
Doug S. Machina: " Then there's that whole Mecha Musume
trend, with this image
◊ being one very iconic example." This image is DEAAAAD! (It just leads to a "parked" website.) Anyone know what it was, and where it is now?
The Defenestrator: I don't know what the picture was, but the concept is the same as in my picture above.
Takagi: Here it is!
◊
The Defenestrator: Well, my image is much less loli.
—-: I learned in sociology that it is highly likely that the practice of thinking of property as female is tied in with patriarchal traditions. So calling a ship a "her" is like considering it your bitch. Wives and women in general have been considered in terms of property for much of history, and that probably gave rise to this tendency. I don't know why the Russians don't do it so much.
