Ambience A Fleet Symphony / Tropes I to P

• I Am a Monster:
  • Damon repeatedly makes no bones about the fact that he's not a very moral person.
  • Shigure has this opinion of her Guilt Protocol and considers it a Superpowered Evil Side rather than a normal Super Mode. Ayanami has the same about her Nightmare Protocol.
• I Call It "Vera": Daemonbane and Daemonedge for the two revolvers that come with Damon's ATLAS exosuit. While it's unknown if Damon himself gave those revolvers those names, given the fact that they both start with his own name, this may be the case.
• Iconic Outfit: maintained, as the uniforms that the ship girls wear in the story are kept the same, but due to the grimdark nature of the story, these Iconic Outfits aren't played for Moe points but for drama points instead.
• If It's You, It's Okay: how the Shiratsuyu-Class eventually view Damon, especially when the whole Deus Sex Machina with magic sex part comes along.
• If I Wanted You Dead...:
  • In chapter 55, Sanford reassures Damon that he needn't worry about Shiranui trying to slit his throat in his sleep, because she would have already done so if she had had the thought.
  • Chapter 183 has a nonlethal variant. Benjamin tells the Royal Navy ship girls that if he really wanted to spy on them, he wouldn't need to go to the trouble of implanting some chip in Javelin.
  • Another variant in chapter 254. Ayanami tells Akebono and Kasumi that if Damon really was a Shitty Admiral who was going to cut and run or do something nasty to the shipgirls, he's had many opportunities to do so already.
• I Have Your Wife: The reason why the Coalition ship girls are forced to fight. Each member of the Coalition selected one particular ship girl out of each pool of girls they've acquired, and has physically crippled their selected girl and threatened to finish the job in order to force their sister ships and fellow ship girls to follow their orders. This is why in the aftermath of Operation Norfolk, the Coalition ship girls could not completely surrender to Damon, instead having each group surrendering whatever ship girls had been incapacitated during the fight, while the rest return, as failure to do so would result in each group's master killing off the girl that they've each held hostage. This is what spurs Damon, after Operation Gander (an op to rescue Kaga and Shoukaku from an Abyssal outpost in Gander, Canada), to attack each of the four Coalition cities to liberate the remaining girls from their tyrannical masters.
• I Just Want to Be Badass: Shikinami wishes she had some unique power to call her own. Fulfilled in chapter 261.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: the fight between Zuikaku and Water Demon, since Zuikaku tenuously believes that her older sister can still be recovered from her Abyssal conversion. As it turns out, not only does Zuikaku win, but Shoukaku does actually get restored - but not the way you might think.
• Immune to Bullets: subverted. Ship girls, due to their Smartsteel constructs, can resist bullet damage and will not suffer wounds like a normal human would when shot. However, the shots will still hurt them, depending on the ship type, with weaker ship types feeling more blunt pain from bullets hitting them. And since their eyes are the most sensitive, hitting a ship girl in the eyes with bullet weapons is quite effective - the most amount of damage you can do to a ship girl, in fact, with a gun. If you hit a ship girl in the eyes with a big enough bullet, it will actually do serious damage - as an example, Shoukaku was shot in the eye by a sniper rifle round that was at least a .338 Lapua Magnum caliber, and this disabled her eye and smashed it pretty badly during the fleet's attack on Oceana Naval Air Station. This also works both ways, though, as the Abyssals, also being made of Smartsteel, also suffer these bullet effects, which is the main reason why the ship girls still bring their infantry guns with them into naval combat, as their computerized aims can help them shoot the Abyssals accurately even in the turbulence of battle.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In chapter 101 Shigure gets killed when the Re-class impales her through the chest with its tail.
• Improbably Female Cast: all ship girls in the story are female, meaning that the only major male members in the story are either the fleet commanders, developers, or important background characters (which there aren't a lot of to begin with). Justified because it's explicitly mentioned that male naval personnel are not possible with the technology that's responsible for ship girls, so ship boys are an impossibility.
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!: in chapter 295, one National Guard soldier asks his commanding sergeant if they can't just ask the girls to come fight with them for all their future missions because of how easy the ship girls are making things for them with their superior firepower. The sergeant says, "I wish."
• In a Single Bound: All ship girls have superhuman jumping abilities, but during the prelude to Operation Orlando (Chapter 79), Kaga, Shoukaku and Murasame, the former 2 having been partially Abyssalized, while the latter had a Navitasium cube loaded with Abyssal energy fed to her, respectively boost jump out of the water and onto the deck of a freighter to assist Damon and his escorts in securing it. Suzukaze also displays this when she boost jumps from the surface of the Delaware river and onto the deck of the USS New Jersey.
• Inconsistent Spelling: this story and author favors the name "Abyssals" for the standard antagonists of Kantai Collection.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: averted, see Adaptation Personality Change above. Kaga is nowhere near as antagonistic towards Zuikaku or Shoukaku in the story, and they all get along relatively well together. Of course, Kaga and Zuikaku have had a few bouts, but nothing that breaks their otherwise stable relationship. Kaga doesn't even complain or raise a ruckus over the fact that Zuikaku is the first carrier in the fleet to receive a Kai remodel.
• Injured Vulnerability: maintained in the story but for the ship girls as well: the story's made-up game mechanics on chapter 169 heavily imply that ship girls perform worse as their health ratings drop. This may apply to a certain extent with the Fatigue mechanic as well; the higher their fatigue meters, the worse off they will be in combat.
• Insane Admiral: definitely the Coalition faction leaders who come to possess their own small fleets of ship girls; most of them have a few screws loose and mistreat their ship girls to varying degrees. Damon can be considered one too, not in terms of his own treatment of ship girls but in terms of the lengths to which he'll go to protect his fleet and the things he will do to those who hurt or mistreat his ship girls.
• In-Series Nickname:
  • Damon calls Amatsukaze "Amy" because he finds her name a mouthful.
  • He calls Mutsu "Mutslug" because her headgear looks like a slug's stalks.
  • He butchers Kikuzuki into "Cookie" and ends up getting the other Mutsuki-class doing it.
  • In chapter 72 Damon reveals that his weird appearance led to him being called "Yellow Fever Kid" when he was younger.
  • Damon shortens Shiratsuyu into "Shirley".
  • He also secretly calls Shigure "Sugar".
  • In chapter 229, Enterprise is "Ellie", Wisconsin is "Winny" and Yorktown is "Yorkie".
  • when Damon and the French battleship Dunkerque meet, Damon calls her "Dunkey" in chapter 385 because he's afraid that he'll butcher Dunkerque's real name's pronunciation, a sentiment he is absolutely correct about. Dunkerque herself is hesitant to accept the nick, but she doesn't protest it.
• Insistent Terminology: !Samidare refers to the Shiratsuyu-class as daughter of so-and-so.
• Intercontinuity Crossover: Sanford eventually reveals that characters of the Touhou Project universe were directly involved in the F.L.E.E.T. Project and its subsidiaries. Subverted because crossovers between Touhou Project and Kantai Collection have been made, due to similarities between the games such as Improbably Female Casts, largely unexplained and undetailed premises, and cult followings, but perhaps this story makes a bigger crossover between the two games than most, or at least to this extent.
• Instant Runes: for a story that's beginning to be filled with magical powers, the only ship girls who possess runes of any kind are several of the Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers - fitting, as they are explicitly revealed to be designed as demi-gods with unparalleled magic power. But so far, only Shigure, Samidare, and Suzukaze, the ones who have gained access to their "Demon Angel" forms, have displayed them - and funnily enough, Yuudachi, who has accessed her own during Operation Hammer Down, has yet to demonstrate rune construction like her sisters.
• Interrupted Suicide:
  • In chapter 96 Murasame attempts suicide and is barely saved by Sanford. The men suspect the Abyssals are responsible.
  • In chapter 298, Jared Imwalle attempts to kill himself when he is cornered in a meat locker. Saratoga shoots his gun out of his hands before he could do so.
• Interservice Rivalry:
  • In chapter 61, Sanford (a Navy SEAL) sees a pair of Delta Force soldiers and calls them amateurs under his breath. In chapter 63, he also makes at jab at the Marines.
  • Several of the ship girls' attitudes show the influence of the historical rivalry between the IJA and IJN.
  • In chapter 310, Prince of Wales scoffs at the idea of shipgirls using guns, saying that it should be left to the infantry.
• Invaded States of America: averted; America is not overrun by Abyssals and is so far safe from them. In the events before the story's beginning, however, there was a conflict called the Federation War in which Southern American forces wanting to expand their power post-nuclear war managed to fight their way north to claim all of Central America and Mexico and threatened to penetrate the southern US border with Mexico, but the Americans were barely able to stop them and begin pushing them back down to South America with the help of the American ship girls Iowa, Wisconsin, Yorktown, and Enterprise.
• Invisibility Cloak: A standard ability for all submarine girls. Sendai is the only surface ship girl that has it, but unlike the submarine girls, whose swimsuit provides them with this ability, Sendai's cloaking is within herself, not granted by her uniform. The Lukenstor Systems XV-29 Banshee has a Cloaking field of its own as well.
• Invisibility Flicker: Sendai's cloaking breaks when she fires her ship guns.
• It Amused Me: Akebono's reason for charging into an Abyssal squadron, regardless of a lack of covering fire?
  "I just really want to kill something."
• Item Crafting: invoked within the story itself, as the fleet administrators can write up their own augmentation programs to equip the ship girls with, and now that Yuubari has her own weapons workshop, she can potentially create her own custom-made weapons for the fleet too.
• It Gets Easier: In chapter 69, Damon admits that he's become desensitized to killing and violence.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: In chapter 28, Damon takes it poorly when someone refers to the ship girls as "things". This wouldn't turn out to be the last time someone calls a ship girl not human.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet:
  • In chapter 21, as the group approach an abandoned mall, Damon finds the lack of any obvious hostiles disquieting. His fears turn out to be unfounded. There's no ambush waiting inside, only one man standing guard and another four relaxing.
  • Damon mentions it again in chapter 70 after apparently clearing the Newfoundland Abyssal base of hostiles.
  • In chapter 284, Eagle says that things have gotten calm and quiet between England and Germany suspiciously quickly.
• It's Raining Men: Starting from chapter 29, you can air drop ship girls onto land, or onto water, but wherever you drop them, they won't be needing parachutes.
• It Works Better with Bullets: In chapter 149, Wakaba tries to shoot a pair of mooks only to find that she has forgotten to reload. She resorts to Pistol-Whipping to take them down.
• I Was Never Here:
  • The briefing Eagle gave to Lauren at the start of chapter 144 ends with this sort of reminder.
  • Eagle says this again in chapter 189 after sending a highly-classified document about Baltimore he hacked out of the Feds to the Fleet.
  • In chapter 295, Colonel Fodemski tells Murakumo, Yuubari and Ooi that they never just had a certain conversation.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: Amatsukaze does this in chapter 20 after she's badly wounded.
• Jack of All Stats: according to the game mechanics in chapter 169, several of the ship girls have average stats across the board, such as Kagerou and Kitakami.
• Japanese Honorifics: The ship girls call Sanford and Araki "sensei", and Furutaka specifically calls Araki "taichou" due to their relationship.
• Jack of All Stats: maintained when compared directly to the game, but differently - on the Tropes page for KanColle, the heavy cruiser ship type is listed to be this, being "average" in all stats. But it seems that in this story, according to the stats written up in chapter 169, the heavy cruisers are actually the best-rounded ship type, offering great damage and attack power through their personal strength as heavy cruisers and their weapons, both ship guns and infantry guns, and speed to keep up with the faster ship types.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite his brusque demeanour, Damon will go to great lengths to protect his girls, such as carrying an injured Amatsukaze on his back.
• Jive Turkey: Dee Jay speaks this way.
• Joke Character: inverted. Maru-yu in the story, according to her stats, is supposed to be this, which is in line with how she is in the game, but what she does and how she conducts herself in the story make it very clear that she very far from being this. Let's just say that Damon won't be using her to modernize other ship girls (especially when there isn't even such a thing as modernizing in the story).
• Joshikousei: lampshaded frequently throughout the early parts of the story - Damon wonders why anyone in their right minds would build ship girls intended to fight in wars and armed conflicts just so that they can clothe them like they're schoolgirls. Eventually he gets used to the sight of them and thus stops asking, but it comes up every once in a while.
• Just Following Orders: In chapter 147 Shigure wonders if her obeying Sanford's orders to abandon Suzukaze was right.
• Kick the Dog:
  • In chapter 45, Inner Circle forces shell a hospital.
  • In chapter 229, it is revealed that the anti-Blackwood forces who shot Damon dead also shot his puppy.
• Kill It with Fire: Damon's initial plan against the mutants of Baltimore, for whom he uses a napalm flamethrower.
• Kill Sat: The Lukenstor-built HAVOC, which has a laser cannon built in.
• Killed Offscreen: The fact that Inner Circle exosuits are made of Smartsteel from activated shipgirls implies that at least one of them was scrapped for the materials offscreen, though we haven't been shown who fell victim.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: subverted slightly - ship girls with special protocols or powers may use their abilities to varying degrees in combat, but they will always use their issued infantry weapons and ship guns in combat. Even the Shiratsuyu-Class, who are the most guilty of possessing magical powers with their protocols, still depend very heavily on their ship munitions to fight the Abyssals, and oftentimes their protocols even work with their standard guns and power them up.
• Kukris Are Kool: the Chief of Army Tyler Wittiker that the Operation South Town fleet meets in Australia in chapter 372 carries a kukri around behind his waist.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • Damon wonders several times what kind of perverted mind thought personifying ships as young women was a good idea. He has a similar opinion on some of the more outlandish default outfits the girls were given.
  • In chapter 97, Sanford hangs a lampshade on the Mildly Military tendencies of the girls, pointing out that there would have discipline issues aplenty had this been a real navy.
  • In chapter 112, Mutsu wonders what was the point of recreating the IJN in the first place, never mind in human form.
  • In chapter 117, Orion notes how inexplicable The Abyssal's dragon-thing is. She and Monarch also think their developers were daft to bring back their Great War-era class.
  • In chapter 118, Satsuki wonders what kind of technosorcery F.L.E.E.T did to extract the souls and memories of their past warship selves that shouldn't have been able to have such things.
  • In chapter 138, Ryuujou wonders how on Earth the developers came up with the near-Magic from Technology the ship girls have.
  • In chapter 141, Khal wonders what good a doctor like him, even one who knows the Chancellor, will be in resolving the German situation.
• Law of Conservation of Detail: ties in with Chekhov's Gun from above - when the fleet first buries Damon at the Abraham Lincoln Cemetery outside of Chicago, Sanford leaves a plain karambit knife in place of a tombstone, since Damon used a karambit during active service. When Damon returns to dig up the coffin to claim the weapons that are actually inside rather than his own body, he also takes the karambit with him. He uses this karambit knife to ultimately kill Blackwood in chapter 250.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In chapter 318, Losira wonders if the story isn't progressing too quickly.
• Legacy Character: In chapter 152, Sanford reveals that the "SEAL Team Six" he used to belong to wasn't the actual SEAL Team Six, which was officially disbanded on schedule, but really a unit that still bears the name as a cover for their true identity.
  • in a warped sense, the Shiratsuyu-Class. The Moebius Project's method of creating the second-gens could imply that they had meant for the identities of the first-gens to be transferred into different bodies that had the true magic potential that they were striving for.
• Lemony Narrator: subverted; for the most part, the narration can be considered normal, but there are times when the narration suddenly becomes jarringly casual, sarcastic, cynical, or perhaps a bit of all. He also leans on the fourth wall, breaks it sometimes, even, and at one point even interacts with Damon, the main character.
• Lethal Chef: In Hiei's absence, Kongou seems to have taken up her inability to cook curry. When she does so in chapter 61, it knocks out almost everyone who tries it.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: the fleet does this in chapter 290 in order to fight the Whitewater mercenary company in the southern Midwest US, Italy, and Kentucky.
• Lewd Lust, Chaste Sex: many displays of intimate physical contact are shown in the story, often with or without a fair amount of detail, but the sex scenes are never shown (the author says it's mainly because he's afraid that the Fanfiction terms of service may forbid lemons) and simply become cases of Pre-Climax Climax.
• Lightning Bruiser: the heavy cruisers of the fleet. They're fast enough to join the destroyers in front-line duty if they need to, and they offer the most balance among high offensive power, durability, and speed. The fast battleships who are also capable of fighting in the front lines count as well.
• Limp and Livid: In chapter 143, Suzukaze moves lifelessly after having been chased out of Ablett Village when the Colossus Reactor turns out to be a curse. The livid part comes in when her reaction to people getting in her way is to turn them into bloody messes.
• Literalist Snarking:
  • In chapter 268, Zuikaku tells Damon to "bite me". Guess what happens next.
  • More seriously, in chapter 293, when Sanford dares him to pull the trigger of his Desert Eagle, Damon actually does - and shoots just right of Sanford's head.
• Literal Split Personality: Akebono gets this as a result of Damon's YRC. She uses it in battle to save a dazed and confused Furutaka from an Abyssal.
• Loan Shark: In chapter 176, Damon recalls that he had a friend when he was young who got killed when these came calling over her parents' loans.
• Lodged-Blade Recycling: In chapter 95 Damon pulls out a crossbow bolt shot into him and uses it to kill Alastor Scott.
• Loophole Abuse: remember that one restriction that ship girls have about deploying ship guns on land, as described in Do Not Run with a Gun? Well, there does exist a loophole in this restriction, best demonstrated by New Jersey and Kuroshio during Operation No Exit, when New Jersey carries Kuroshio with her ship guns deployed on her shoulders. Even before this, Kuroshio's sisters Kagerou and Shiranui were able to deploy their ship guns on the tops of moving armored personnel carriers to basically turn themselves into mobile artillery platforms; and even before this, there has been one instance when Mutsu even deployed her ship cannons while in a helicopter, pointing them out of an open side door and shooting her guns down at the ground. It appears that the movement restriction that ship girls suffer if they deploy their ship guns on land can easily be passed if they themselves are being carried by a third-person entity, since only the ship girl's body when deploying ship weaponry on land is affected and not necessarily rooted or locked down into the ground.
  • Jeannie must do this out of necessity to use her Keys. She explains to Damon that normally, she can only use her Keys inside her reality marble, Silva Gelida, which is also her dreamworld, and that the normal way of going about this is to simply deploy her reality marble, projecting what she sees inside her mind onto her surroundings. But due to then navitasium generator/core that she possesses, she cannot use her Keys this way because the physical world doesn't accept navitasium as a natural energy source that's native to the world, causing navitasium to be unable to fuel Jeannie's deployment of her reality marble and thus prevent her from deploying Silva Gelida to use her Keys. So to get around this, Jeannie uses her navitasium to forcefully convert her own body as a gateway for her internally produced Keys to enter the physical world, but this comes at the cost of suffering immense physical damage and pain, because her Keys end up tearing out of her body for her to use.
• Love Confession:
  • In chapter 61, Murakumo gives a veiled one to Damon, but was too subtle. She finally makes it obvious in chapter 253.
  • Chapter 131 reveals that Fusou received one from one of her developers back before she was shipped out. She's never seen him since.
  • Amatsukaze does this accidentally in Chapter 267, when Damon gets badly burnt by Kagerou's power activating.
• Luck-Based Mission: obviously averted, unless you count the randomness of war to be as such.
• Ludicrous Gibs: The fate of Major Lester at Suzukaze's hands in chapter 121.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Graf Zeppelin considers Akagi to be her mother due to the nature of her development. Kaga was unamused. Very unamused.
• Madness Mantra: In chapter 197, Damon is stuck in his dreamscape beset upon by Baltimore mutants, murmuring his mantra over and over, getting progressively louder and louder as the mutants close in on him and his mom.
  "- listen only to the sound of my voice - let your mind relax - let your thoughts drift - let the bad memories fade - let peace be upon you - surrender yourself to your dreams - let them wash over you like the gentle waves of the bluest ocean - let them envelope you - comfort you - imagine somewhere calm - imagine somewhere safe - imagine yourself in a frozen forest - you are standing in a clearing - the trees around you so tall they touch the sky - pure white snowflakes fall all around - you can feel them melt on your skin - you are not cold - it cannot overcome the warmth of your beating heart - can you hear it - you only have to listen - do you hear it slowing - you are slowing it - you are in control - calm - at peace - listen only to the sound of my voice -"
• Mad Scientist: Sanford and Big, and perhaps by association Okazaki Yumemi, the leaders of the Moebius sub-program that created the second-gen Shiratsuyu-Class. Subverted because they were tasked to create the second-gen Shiratsuyu-Class out of perceived necessity, rather than their own twisted scientific desires.
• Magic from Technology: proves to be more and more of a case in the story as the plot unfolds. At first, it started with powers like Shigure's Guilt Protocol and Ryuujou's, Jun'you's, and Hiyou's special plane-launching techniques, but it steadily escalates to Damon's YRC contracts and, the most glaring example, the Shiratsuyu-Class's godly powers.
• Magic Is Mental: implied to be averted. In the story's universe, magic apparently can be genetic. And as the ship girls who have access to magic abilities use them, they are implied to be tied to their physical abilities and capabilities, rather than simply an issue of mental fortitude, though perhaps there is a concentration element to using these magic abilities.
• Magikarp Power: averted heavily. Due to what this story defines as a ship girl, every ship girl is always useful, no matter how weak they may have been in the game, and this is their minimal effectiveness in the context of the story: many ship girls then have added powers, abilities, protocols, and even magical talent that further augment their strength. All this, and so far only four ship girls total have been remodeled so far.
  • the most standout example of this aversion is Shigure. She comes with her Guilt Protocol, perhaps the strongest protocol featured in the story at the time of her introduction, and it only grows stronger even before she gets her remodel (note this isn't her second remodel, where she gets crazy in the game).
• Making a Splash: Samidare and Suzukaze have the ability to manipulate water for defensive and offensive purposes, respectively.
• Man Bites Man: In chapter 155 Yuudachi bites into a certain enemy.
• Marionette Master: averted from the game: Chitose and Chiyoda are considered in the story to be straight-up light carriers, meaning that they have the same gear and equipment as standard carriers (the long-range plane-launching crossbow and flight deck), so they do not have their traditional gear that they use in the game.
  • but in a sense, maintained. Because the story makes explicit mention that the carriers can all directly take control of each and every individual plane that they launch, they can control however many planes they want at once, so long as they've got the processing power and mental concentration to pull it off, just so that they can get the most performance out of their planes or to ensure that they return back to them in one piece.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Damon's YRC can give ship girls extra magical powers, such as abilities or summonable weapons and gear. Almost all of the girls who've made "contracts" with Damon have obtained powers or weapons that are directly taken from a myriad of other franchises, anywhere from Halo to The King of Fighters.
  • more relevantly, this story is now becoming this in terms of the sheer number of ship girls that are potentially on the table for implementation, with ship girls from games like Warship Girls, Pacific, and Victory Belles, though Kantai Collection will still remain the main source of ship girls.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Many of the girls freak when the Abyssals make their reappearance in chapter 65.
  • This is also the Ayanami-Class's and the Sendai-Class's reaction when they first regroup with Damon at Baltimore.
  • The Shiratsuyu-Class also do this when the Anchorage Demon begins a self-destruct sequence in an attempt to take them down with her, but they escape in time.
• Meaningful Name: Every chapter title that ends with "Contact" will have at least one new ship girl appear.
  • Several of the ship girls gain powers or protocols through Damon's YRC that have a lot to do with their own names.
• The Medic: Damon, Harusame, Samidare, Umikaze, and Ushio are all this; Damon has medic training and has worked in hospitals and emergency rooms before, along with his field medic training while in the military, while the destroyers all have magical healing abilities thanks to their protocols (or, in Ushio's case, thanks to Losira's Hellflower).
• MegaCorp: Lukenstor is this in the story, being North America's biggest defense corporation, having amassed the former employees and personnel of pre-war defense and aerospace contractors and corporations like Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, etc. And as the story progresses, they're even revealed to be able to construction additional ship girls, becoming the only known entity in the story's current setting with the capacity to do so.
• Mercy Kill:
  • When a group of bandits roll up in trucks at the house where Damon had found Murakumo, he's forced to perform this on an infant that he found in one of the trucks after realizing that his opening of the door had exposed it to what was essentially lethal amounts of radiation for the poor child.
  • In chapter 9, Damon puts a paralysed bandit out of his misery.
  • In chapter 91, Damon puts down a mutated fox that lost its lower jaw attacking him.
  • In chapter 145, Mutsuki puts down a badly wounded neo-Nazi after the victim's facial expression made her recall Damon's mercy-killing of a mutated fox just prior to Operation Nashville.
  • In chapter 247, this is done to a soldier with a breached radiation suit.
• Mid-Season Upgrade: For a short time after his resurrection, Damon gains the use of an Inner Circle exosuit that lets him emulate ship girl abilities. He gets it back in chapter 242.
• Mighty Glacier: the battleships, at least the ones who don't fight in the front lines.
• Mildly Military: somewhat subverted from the game. Being a Darker and Edgier fanfic, the story does put more emphasis on the realism of maintaining a fleet (or at least hangs a lampshade over things that are absurd to see in a real navy), but for the most part, the fleet is more like an unorthodox private military company rather than a full-fledged, proper navy.
• Militaries Are Useless: heavily subverted; there are multiple times when modern human technology clearly trumps even the Abyssals and their powerful bosses, and the most vivid example of this is the aftermath of the Battle of Greifswald Bay, when the Abyssals, after defeating the Combined Fleet, are decimated and forced to retreat when a fleet of German jet fighters comes in to save the ship girl survivors. And while it's made clear that human navies will not beat Abyssals in a straight-up fight, mainly due to the sheer mobility and small targets that the Abyssals have and present, if they serve as the ship girls' rear line support task forces, they will almost certainly make the ship girls' jobs much easier.
• Military Mashup Machine: HAVOC counts as one - the Combined Fleet uses it as both a stealth observations satellite and an attack satellite.
• Mind Rape: Jeannie's Direct Neural Interface ability allows her to hack other ship girls' brains; this is her main assassination tool against ship girls, as interfacing with them allows Jeannie to exert total control over her victims' mental processes, putting their lives entirely at her mercy. She also demonstrates that she can perform what's called a Reverse Direct Neural Interface, which works on normal humans like Damon and allows Jeannie to show them what she sees in her own mind.
• Mind Screw: Damon's dreamworld - the scenes it creates makes sense once or twice in context, but most of the time it just displays scenes that look pretty cool but otherwise make no sense in the story's context. Also, the Moebius Sub-Program to the F.L.E.E.T. Project is just one big, giant mess that somehow makes the Shiratsuyu-Class out to be demi-gods.
• Mini-Mecha: both the Metal Slug and the Slug Gunner are described as miniature tanks that can only seat two people each.
• Misplaced Retribution: In chapter 213, Damon calls Suzukaze out on not properly focusing her desire for payback on Sanford.
• Missing Backblast: Averted in chapter 153. When Nagato makes the mistake of using a RPG indoors, the backblast sends Wakaba and Hatsushimo flying.
• Mistaken for Gay: Nagato assumes that Damon is gay when he refuses her sexual advances, though the latter quickly informs that he doesn't swing that way.
• Mix-and-Match Weapon: Mutsuki's YRC weapon she gets from Damon is this - being an obvious Shoutout to the rifle-scythe of a certain someone who happens to look just like her.
• Moe Anthropomorphism: heavily zig-zagged. While the base game of which the story is a fanfic may qualify as this, the story itself is not, as it functions as a Deconstruction Fic and depicts far more bloodshed and violence than the game itself (granted, it probably isn't that hard to do). However, the story's long break arcs, particularly the thirty-ish chapters after the Stolen Fleet Arc during which the fleet takes a week-long vacation in New Chicago, are filled with nothing but slice-of-life narrative and storytelling, with the ship girls engaging in plenty of acts of Moe.
• Monumental Damage: in chapter 243, the Black Ops attack the White House to rescue Lauren, Mary Britain, and Benjamin.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Chapter 55. After a pair of sombre conversations with Murakumo and Kisaragi, Damon walks into the rest of the girls holding an impromptu fashion show.
  • Chapter 259. After a lot of Slice of Life and catching up, the last part of the chapter cuts away to the aftermath of violence being done.
  • Chapter 265. After a heartfelt talk with Shoukaku and Zuikaku... pillow fight!
  • Chapter 288: After an ominous conversation with Benjamin about the true nature and purpose of ship girls and Abyssals, Damon gets dragged into a basketball game with the Shiratsuyu-Class.
• Mooks: the Agents of the Inner Circle are the straightest example of this. And when Damon infiltrates an Inner Circle research facility in Mexico, he encounters other types of Agents, like the ATP Engineer, that perhaps serve as Elite Mooks.
• Morale Mechanic: the story seems do away with the "sparkling" mechanic seen in the game but keeps the fatigue.
• Moral Myopia:
  • Several times Damon and co. encounter bad guys who try to use I Have a Family to beg for mercy, yet somehow see no problem with slavery, murder, rape and doing all sorts of evil to others who have families too.
  • The Abyssals claim they're morally "more worthy" of Earth and despise Mankind for its misdeeds, yet conveniently overlook the equally or even more heinous wrongdoings of their commanders.
  • Shiranui sees nothing wrong with being insubordinate and putting her ship sisters ahead of the needs of the fleet. Yet when Suzukaze does the same it's suddenly disgusting. Furthermore, despite her self-declared protective feelings for her ship sisters, she doesn't even stop to contemplate how she herself would react if, like the deserter, one of her own ship sisters were to turn on her for defending them.
• More Dakka: The battleship girls prefer machine guns and automatic rifles, while some of the destroyer girls prefer machine pistols and sub-machine guns (Satsuki, for example, dual-wields a pair of Magpul FMG-9s) in lieu of carbines and assault rifles. And the American ship girls, not surprisingly, pack quite a lot of heat themselves.
• Morton's Fork:
  • In chapter 99, the Abyssal reinforcements tell the Combined Fleet to withdraw without raiding the freighters, or else. While some of the girls are in favour of doing so as they've already taken casualties, others point out that they can't afford to go back empty-handed either. Sanford has them press on, though the results aren't pretty.
  • In chapter 105, no matter what Shoukaku did when the Wo-class demanded her surrender, she would have been captured and then converted anyway. The only difference that willfully surrendering without a fight would have made was that she would be converted with her memories completely intact. She instead tried to blow herself up and hopefully wipe out the Wo-class and her escorts with her, which had absolutely no effect whatsoever.
  • in chapter 364, upon making contact with the damaged British squadron down in Australian waters, Enterprise offers them a sadistic choice: either the British ship girls can receive what limited medical aid the Combined Fleet girls have to offer in exchange for information on what they are doing operating in Australian waters, or they can be left hanging on their own and risk the treacherous voyage back home to England or elsewhere to safety without any medical aid whatsoever and risk being finished off by another Abyssal fleet, should they happen to run into another one.
• Motive Rant: In chapter 249, Blackwood gives one.
• Mugging the Monster: In chapter 275, some gangsters that encounter Damon outside with some of the ship girls insult him for being a mutant white boy and make the mistake of thinking he's a pushover.
• Muggles Do It Better:
  • Downplayed. While ship girls are indeed superhuman and nearly immune to small arms, heavy weapons are still very much a threat. Excellently illustrated at the end of chapter 167; the Abyssals have just steamrolled the Combined Fleet, but when friendly air support shows up, the hitherto invincible Aircraft Carrier Water Demon is told to retreat under the belief that, as powerful as she is, even she can't stand up to the newcomers. This is a unique break from most Kantai Collection fanworks and fanfictions that subscribe to the notion that modern human technology is simply no match against Abyssal technology, or at best have such an unfavourable exchange rate as to be unaffordable.
  • This being said, the Abyssals would most likely beat modern human naval fleets in a straight-up battle, simply out of sheer mobility of their physical bodies and the large targets that modern warships present. It's just that, so far in the story, a battle like this is yet to be seen (outside of the small one when Mutsu and co. defeat a rogue American missile destroyer early on in the story) because the Abyssals have always been weakened to the point of retreat whenever human air support shows up.
  • Also, as explained by Sanford, technology can underperform, but it can't exceed the parameters it was built to achieve, unlike magic that has potential to grow. The Shiratsuyu-class, as a result, will eventually grow to exceed any actual shipgirl.
• Multinational Team: the Combined Fleet eventually grows to become this. At first, it's all Japanese ship girls, sticking true to the original Kantai Collection roster. Then, the fleet gets a small number of English dreadnoughts who come join after Operation London. Later on, they get a chance to fight with the German ship girls, though none of them come join them like the English do. When the Stolen Fleet arc rolls around, in the middle of the arc, Damon is joined by four American ship girls who reveal that they've been working and fighting for the country throughout the years of the apocalypse, and after Whiskey Hotel, they formally join the Combined Fleet too. After their vacation, they're reinforced by two more American ship girls and even a Canadian destroyer, and the fleet goes on to fight with Italian ship girls in the Mediterranean. And finally, during Operation Goldmine, the Combined Fleet are lightly reinforced by assisting ship girls from France, England, and Italy to secure the bauxite mines.
• My Greatest Second Chance: several of the ship girls feel this way, as revealed in the Fleet logs.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Kagerou's reaction in chapter 267 to accidentally burning Damon with her new powers.
  • Asashio takes learning that she accidentally shot a gun-toting civilian very badly in chapter 313.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Asashio's main trait is dutifulness and loyalty to her superiors, no matter how undeserving or immoral they are. It drove a wedge between her and the rest of the girls held by Nashville. Her Character Development involved her learning that there are people whose behaviour disqualifies themselves from receiving loyalty.
• Mysterious Past: Amagi has no memories of her past and her existence and capabilities only create more questions than they answer. And Wakamiya, who is even older, older still than the ones built during the Great War like the Kongous or Orions, just raises even more questions.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In chapter 86, Kongou deflects a shot with her bare hands.
  • In chapter 103, Benjamin bitterly makes a crack about repair buckets.
  • In chapter 119, the Tenryuu Kindergarten gets brought up.
  • Alexis and Gordon Kevinson, parents to the main character of the alternate universe fic, make their debut here in chapter 142 stationed aboard the USS George Washington, the same carrier that their son Franklin commanded in the alternate universe and was aboard when ISIS initiated strike missions against it. Though Franklin himself isn't mentioned save for a nod courtesy of an old paperback labelled titled F.R.Kevinson.
  • In chapter 201, Losira references a "boundary-shifting youkai hag." Whether or not it's a reference to Naraku no Hana or just a regular shout out to the Touhou Project series in general depends on whether or not she's referring to her as a fictional character.
  • In chapter 218, Losira mentions that Renko Usami and Maribel Hearn are part of ST6's Japanese branch, effectively cementing the link between this story and Naraku no Hana.
  • Chapter 235 reinforces the link to Naraku no Hana with The Reveal that navitasium is actually refined Abyssal energy or serenity, the Applied Phlebotinum of that work.
  • In chapter 269, Hatsuyuki and Shirayuki get called potatoes, a common moniker for the Shibafu-designed girls, while Imuya expresses her desire for a smartphone, which her canon self owns.
• N.G.O. Superpower:
  • The Inner Circle is another of those nominal terrorist groups with international reach and way more resources than they should have. During Operation London they deploy enough mooks to give the British Army trouble. In chapter 51 they're briefly mentioned among a list of major power holders, the rest of which are nations.
  • Lukenstor is a MegaCorp formed by merging many of the old aerospace companies. It has vast numbers of mercenaries on retainer, an air force, and builds Kill Sats. Its CEO Eagle Clinton plans to take the "N" out of "NGO" and is preparing for a coup against President Blackwood.
    • With Eagle becoming president after chapter 250, Lukenstor finally sheds the N, as Eagle has control of both the American Federal government and his own company.
  • The Combined Fleet is starting to edge into this territory. As of chapter 257, there are 89 girls present, definitely larger than some modern navies.
• Naked People Are Funny: In chapter 62 Sendai sneaks naked into Damon's room, having been given the impression by President Blackwood that he would be the kind of person susceptible to favours. Then has to go back to her bunk the same way after getting blown off.
• Never Found the Body: In chapter 237 Damon and Ooi note that they never found Dee Jay, TK and Big E's bodies in the Spring Hope massacre.
• Never My Fault: Murasame's log reveals that she has no regrets about driving Suzukaze away from the fleet, she does regret this later when she is able to make amends with Kisaragi, and again when she ends up having to explain to the revived Damon has to how and why Suzukaze was kicked out of the fleet.
• Next Tier Power-Up:
  • several members of the Shiratsuyu-Class demonstrate this, like Umikaze and Kawakaze.
  • the members of the Burial Agency demonstrate this too - the crests of the Last Rites that they possess are designated with ranks from I to VII, and according to Pope Julius IV, ascending the ranks of the Last Rites means that one is learning enough about their own powers and skills to improve noticeably and remarkably to earn the subsequent ranks.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • In chapter 228, Franklin scolds !Samidare for how her loping off Damon's arm started a series of events that led to his dying prematurely and ruining their plans.
  • In chapter 289, one of the missions given to the Combined Fleet is to go to Italy, where the Abyssals are going to attack in force, since the Italian ship girls were too good at wiping out Abyssal patrols to the last creature, apparently causing the Abyssals to think Italy has a much stronger fleet than it really does and deploy accordingly.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In chapter 63, an enemy Hind attack chopper pops its flares, causing the Stinger missile flying at it to instead redirect themselves to the Hind's wingmen in a Pave Hawk.
• Night-Vision Goggles: the former Seal Team Six operatives oftentimes use their tri-ocular goggles that are capable of night vision for several of their missions.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • Takao delivers a lethal one to her former controller, Monroe Arranchea of Orlando, Florida.
  • In chapter 92, after witnessing some mooks kill a family of civilians, Shigure tears the arm off one of them and beats him to death with it.
  • In chapter 99, Shigure and Yuudachi brutally destroy Armored Carrier Demon and Southern War Demon, even tearing bits off them.
  • The Re-class does this to almost everyone it kills.
  • In chapter 133, after getting ambushed by a mook, Suzukaze retaliates by literally beating him into pulp.
  • In a battle spanning chapters 291 to 292, !Samidare pulls this at the end of chapter 291, where she unleashes her magic that creates her own closed space that she is greatly empowered by and proceeds to deliver one of these to the entire class.
  • In chapter 301, Akebono does this to a Ri-Class heavy cruiser.
• No Honor Among Thieves:
  • In chapter 7, Damon witnesses a pair of clashing bandit groups.
  • In chapter 290, Damon mentions that bandit "conventions" were once a thing, but when you get too many crooks in one place, well, Surprisingly Realistic Outcome.
• No Name Given: Downplayed. Araki's full name (Kiyoshi Araki) is not given until Furutaka's fleet log, many chapters after she, Araki, and the rest of his ship girls were introduced. Chuck also qualifies, as it's never mentioned just what his surname is, or if Chuck is simply a squad callsign and has another real name that is simply unknown to those outside of the old Seal Team Six squad.
• Non-Entity General / Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": thoroughly averted; a lot of narration goes into fleshing out Damon's character. In fact, initially, more than a few ship girls didn't consider Damon to even be a legitimate Admiral at first due to the less-than-wholesome ways in which he'd acquired his first few to get started and the fact that Damon has no knowledge or experience of a proper Admiral.
• Non-Indicative Name: Suzukaze takes the cake for this one. Her Japanese name when translated into English means "Cool Wind", but not only is the protocol that she develops called the "Darkwater Protocol", but it manifests physically in the form of hot, black flames.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: In chapter 115, Suzukaze discovers that Tatsuya has been subsisting on meat carved out from corpses.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Invoked by the project, as all the plans and blueprints for the FLEET project ship girls were destroyed as the first set of completed girls were being shipped. The existence of the Royal Navy ship girls is explained as the pre-war work of Shadow Helix, another branch of the FLEET project (Sanford's branch, which produced the IJN ship girls, is known as Seal Helix), and they too most likely destroyed their blueprints and plans prior to delivering the girls to Great Britain (though as you can plainly see, they never got there, as the Inner Circle managed to get ahold of all of Shadow Helix's ship girls). The fact that the Abyssals exist means that someone is able to make them even though the plans are gone, which sets off alarm bells for Sanford. It's later revealed that Ken Simpson, one of the creators for the project, is in cahoots with the "Inner Circle", having divulged all the data on the project to "Mr. Abyssal". Invoked with the second phase of FLEET, as Jeannie deliberately destroyed all the data outside her own head while escaping.
  • Now that Lukenstor has demonstrated the capability to produce more ship girls like Warspite/Wikolia, Iowa/Iris, and two other unknown girls at this moment in time, this trope may now be averted, as Eagle could probably assign his company to produce even more ship girls and replace those who may be lost in future events.
• No Plot? No Problem!: mostly averted from the game, the story has a definite plot and direction, though more than a few readers have had problems with said plot and have seen glaring flaws with it.
• No-Sell:
  • This is usually what happens when you shoot a ship girl with a bullet, granted you don't shoot her in the eye or somewhere where it's a little more...private, let's say. Though, this gets subverted more the higher the bullet caliber a ship girl gets shot with, and it gets reinforced the stronger the ship girl type (a destroyer vs. a battleship, for example).
  • In chapter 47, The Abyssal nonchalantly slaps aside a RPG.
  • !Samidare in chapter 190. Whatever little that actually manages to hit barely seems to affect her.
  • The shipgirls don't need to take a mortar strike seriously, because seriously, they don't need to.
  "Murakumo rolls her eyes a little, scoffing at the laughable damage a mortar would deal compared to an actual ship caliber shell."
  • in chapter 412, when Anchorage Demon launches a volley of shells at her and her sisters, Yamakaze stands her ground and blasts them all away with a neutralizing force field that slaps the shells away, even those that wouldn't have hit her.
• No Swastikas: surprisingly played straight - the NDP are heavily implied to either be Neo-Nazis or have Neo-Nazi tendencies and idealisms, but no swastikas are ever mentioned or depicted during the Germany campaign.
• No Sympathy for Grudgeholders: The ship girls who can't let go of their grudges and resentment over the Pacific War usually get portrayed more poorly than those who have managed to move on.
• Noodle Incident:
  • The Battle of Baltimore during the Border Wars. Baxter Harrison of Mobile compared it to the original Civil War's Battle of Gettysburg and the second World War's Battle of Berlin, saying that Baltimore made those two look like catfights. Damon, a veteran of the battle himself and one of the very few survivors from it, really does not want to talk about it, but he does drop this much.
  Damon: "I won't give you the details since I don't feel like talkin' 'bout it, but I will give you a summary. Five thousand 'n three hundred Feds, including me, against ten thousand four hundo bandits 'n southerners. I got sent down there as a pilot to ferry in ammo and supplies, but as soon as I got in, they didn't let me out - both the Feds with their bullshit regulations 'n protocols and the bandits with their fuckin' AA turrets that no one fuckin' knows how they got their hands on. What shoulda been a ten hour battle then got bashed into a two month long struggle to stay the fuck alive. Seriously, fuck that place. Fuck that battle, fuck that city, fuck everyone who was a part of it, fuck everything that has or had anything to do with that shithole."
  • Orion wonders if the Battle of Baltimore was anywhere near as bad as a certain incident in the French seaside town of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Thunderer and Conqueror provide further details on this to set the baseline. They're referring to an incident from back when they were still under Inner Circle control, prior to the invasion of London, when these two girls and Kongou were sent into the town to find out what happened to a group of Abyssals that had been sent in days earlier to meet up with Inner Circle contacts in the city, as they did not return on schedule. They arrived to find out that Re-class PAINTED THE TOWN RED after one of the contacts refused to hand over some fuel.
  • In chapter 303, the Ta-class Battleship brings up a past incident, to which the Wo-class Carrier it was conversing with asks it to not mention it again.
  Ta-class: "But we haven't gotten an equipment overhaul in years. Not ever since our last encounter against the Demon Angel. And we saw how well that went."
  Wo-class: "Remind me not of such times"
• Not the Intended Use: During Operation South Town, Deimos' Reverse Psi Emitter and Kane's SSP rounds were originally meant to keep Abyssals away, and to defeat those that managed to brave the effects of the RPE, respectively. They work just as well against actual ship girls due to the presence of Smartsteel.
• Not What I Signed on For: In chapter 18, this is Murakumo's comedic reaction to having to take a helicopter.
• Not With the Safety On, You Won't: Damon points this out to a hostile in chapter 38. He has to point this out to Tenryuu too in chapter 39.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: After Damon's death in chapter 95, the dynamics of the fleet are completely upended, not least due to Sanford, with his very different attitude and command style, needing to take over as the new admiral. Even after Damon's resurrection comes to pass, too much has changed in the interim to return to the old days.
• Nuke 'em:
  • In chapter 49 we learn that the bomb Kongou tried to throw into the London sinkhole was a nuke, supposedly meant to cause London to cave in. Damon personally doubts the viability of the idea.
  • In chapter 206, The Feds nuke what's left of Baltimore after successfully evacuating Damon.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In chapter 301, an injured Wo-Class looks up to see a Teseo surface-to-surface cruise missile flying right down at her.
  • In chapter 307, !Samidare shows horror for the first time in what is probably very long both In-Universe and out after her opponent No Sells her and says a certain phrase.
• Old Master: Pope Julius IV. The narration describes him to appear in his late fifties to early sixties, and before the Italian ship girls came along and joined, he was the last remaining member of the Catholic Church's Burial Agency.
• Older Than They Look: invoked specifically in one incident: when Asashio accidentally shoots an innocent but armed civilian during one operation, the civilian's wife starts to berate her, causing Kasumi to come to her sister's defense and eventually yell at the wife, telling her that she and her sisters have lost more friends and allies in war than the civilians have friends put together.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • If Sanford loses his Psychotic Smirk, or worse, something has him seriously shaken up.
  • Damon is notably lacking his usual aggressive tone when he visits his mother's grave.
  • In chapter 74, Amatsukaze is dumbfounded by Shimakaze telling her not to get into a fight with some misogynistic scum.
  • In chapter 189, normally cheerful Shiratsuyu hits Rage Breaking Point over her sisters' indecisiveness between Damon and Suzukaze.
  • In chapter 204, Sazanami becomes unusually angry and doesn't drop a single meme when the topic of American museum ships comes up.
  • In chapter 213, !Samidare loses her cool at a certain "cataclysmic sight".
  • In chapter 228, the magnitude of !Samidare's screwup is reflected in Franklin being annoyed with her.
  • In chapter 251, everybody is stunned into silence by Murasame calling !Samidare a whore.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In chapter 276, Damon clears a houseful of gangsters by himself.
• One Bullet Clips: In chapter 147 Suzuya wonders if she should bother reloading when her magazine still has some bullets left in it.
• One-Hit Polykill: A frequent occurrence with the more powerful guns, along with the aforementioned aversion of Concealment Equals Cover.
• One-Man Army: Yuudachi becomes this during Operation Hammer Down when she consciously triggers her Demon Angel form.
  • in chapter 415, Jeannie also becomes this to defend against the Abyssals trying to force the fleet back to Louisiana, away from the Caribbean.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted on not one, but two occasions:
  • There are two Benjamin's: Benjamin Yamamoto, Damon's best friend and the self-proclaimed descendant of the historic Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, and Benjamin Korotayev, the Controller of Chicago and one of Sanford's acquaintances and ex-special forces partner.
  • A girl named Miyuki shows up who doesn't seem to have any link to the destroyer of the same name. Subsequent events make this more unclear, but given the sheer mutation she's undergone by then, it's hard to tell anyway. Now a moot point after her apparent death in chapter 121.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Damon's reaction to getting shot in the shoulder in chapter 8.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: the mutated monsters that Damon encounters in Baltimore.
• Out of Focus:
  • Discussed in chapter 112, where Iku notes that she got less attention as the fleet expanded.
  • To a lesser extent, Fubuki. She's the only starter ship girl who hasn't even been mentioned or seen in the story thus far. A Fubuki appears eventually, but not KanColle's.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: Suzukaze's Voyage has a tone more like horror than the normal action-adventure.
• Painting the Medium:
  • in chapter 228, the text starts turning into X, Y and Z as Damon gets revived and is kicked out of Franklin's dreamworld.
    • as a matter of fact, starting with Suzukaze, the narration gets filled with X's, Y'z, and Z's to indicate the progression of corruption in her systems. This later spreads to Samidare, and as mentioned above, Damon gets a glimpse of it too.
  • starting in chapter 306, Samidare's dialogue appears visibly tampered with and markedly different from the default font that the rest of the narration is written in. This font is called Zalgo text, and it is meant to portray the effect of Samidare's trauma on her speech.
    • and when Suzukaze turns into her demon angel form a second time after finding Samidare dead at Houston, her own dialogue becomes infected with Zalgo text, albeit looking more disturbed and harder to read than Samidare's.
    • with chapter 372, Shigure's last bits of dialogue are also written in Zalgo font to represent the fact that her own demon angel form is emerging.
• Parrying Bullets: In chapter 41 an enemy Royal Navy ship girl cuts Amatsukaze's shells in two with a sword. This is a common skill that ship girls demonstrate.
• Past-Life Memories: played straight in the story. The ship girls are all explicitly loaded with all known historical data and information of the Pacific War, so not only do they know the extents of their battles and their own fates, but they know everyone else's as well. This war knowledge also includes the American ships who have attacked and sunk them, to the point where somehow, the Japanese ship girls instantly recognize Iowa, Wisconsin, Yorktown, and Enterprise when they meet in the story even though they'd never met as ship girls.
• Perspective Flip: chapter 303 opens from the perspective of the Abyssals as the Ta-class Battleship and the Wo-class Carrier discuss future plans after the failure of their opening attack on Italy.
  • the above mentioned instance is just one of many such cases of perspective flips that the author employs in the story to depict the activities of other characters and factions that are not the Combined Fleet or Damon or their close associates. Really the only major organization/characters who have not yet had a dedicated segment of narration to themselves are the Inner Circle and their leaders.
• Phlebotinum Rebel: Darkwater-possessed Suzukaze is defeated by Samidare, who the former had empowered in the hopes of creating an ally.
• Playing with Fire:
  • Amatsukaze's Ignition Glove lets her create flames or Flaming Sword and use Elemental Punch.
  • Kongou's Burning Love is now a Literal Metaphor.
  • Hibiki's "Phoenix" lets her fire incendiary rounds that stick to their victims napalm-style and can grant this buff to friendlies.
  • Kawakaze's Firewater Protocol can generate flames remotely via pyrokinesis and, like Amatsukaze's Ignition Glove, let her use Elemental Punch (with kicks as well).
  • Suzukaze, after she becomes lost. When she arrives in Houston, the city eventually becomes swallowed by silent black flames.
  • Losira's Hellflower capabilities. First demonstrated in Damon's initial dreamworld memories, and further demonstrated when Losira actually shows up in Baltimore.
  • Damon's Yellow Reality Cancel gives him access to yellow flames that were seen throughout mentions of his dreamworld.
  • Kagerou can now release a heat wave from her body as a result of her interaction with Damon's YRC that will burn human tissue.
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You:
  • At the end of chapter 33, after an unsatisfactory discussion with Murakumo over whether he's no better than a slavedriver, Damon points out a nearby cleaver and tells her that he's going to sleep and she can do what she wants to him.
  • In chapter 44, he similarly offers Shiranui a gun when she doesn't want him to bring a repairing Kagerou along.
  • In chapter 82 it becomes Takao's turn to get the offer.
  • In chapter 107 Suzukaze tells Shigure that if she wants to defend Damon so badly, she should just kill her like she wanted back in Charlotte.
• Poirot Speak:
  • Khal occasionally lapses into his native German.
  • Araki slips into Japanese when his tenuous grasp on English fails him.
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • The Atlantan faction was founded by a bunch of slaving white supremacists.
  • Damon and co. run into an awful lot of misogynistic scum who can't keep the lust out of their face and words.
• Popcultural Osmosis Failure: A number of references go right over Retia's head.
• Post-Cyberpunk: initially averted and more Cyberpunk, as the story begins in a world devastated by a nuclear World War III, and governments around the world, at least in North America and Europe, are not friendly to their own people and are sometimes up to no good. But the more the story progresses, particularly with the downfall of Tawney Blackwood in chapter 250, the story becomes more this, with governments becoming reformed (usually through political upheavals) and acting more in the interests of their people or having generally better intentions than before. Add to this the concept of "ship girls", highly advanced battle androids that act virtually the same as human beings and have the power to fight at sea, and all the technological gadgets and vehicles that Lukenstor cooks up for the main character and the fleet.
• Post-Modern Magik: The whole shipgirl thing, of course, but without giving away identity-spoiling details, Power Armored Mage Marksmen and cyborg sorceresses among others also eventually show up.
• Posthumous Character:
  • Despite having died in the backstory, Damon's father Deimos keeps having an impact on the present day.
  • and now with the chapters detailing Operation Sandblast, Damon's uncle and Losira's brother, Hank, is heavily implied to be involved with the launching of the nuclear missiles that kickstarted the nuclear World War III.
• Post-Victory Collapse:
  • In chapter 195, Kaga experiences this after killing the Re-class.
  • Damon does this too after finally finishing Blackwood off.
• Powered Armor: The Inner Circle has been working on powered exosuits, and Sanford and co. discover to their horror, upon recovering a few pristine sets of these things, that they are made out of Smartsteel, the same material that ship girls are made from. Worse, it's not just any Smartsteel, it's Smartsteel of an ACTIVATED ship girl. Who knows just how many girls were recycled into these exosuits? When we finally get to see one in action, it turns out to be well worth the cost, with Hand Cannons powerful enough to literally stop a charging Re-class and punching hard enough to seriously hurt a battleship-class girl.
  • and later on, Damon obtains an upgrade for his exosuit, called Kinetic Armor, which covers his whole body except for his head with kinetic energy that repels and destroys incoming bullets the instant they touch it.
• Power Gives You Wings: Samidare and Kawakaze have both grown wings of energy thanks to their protocols.
• Power Makes Your Hair Grow: played with in Ushio's case, whose YRC abilities include being able to serve as a vessel in which Losira can materialize outside Damon's dreamworld and exist in the real world. The way others can tell Losira is occupying Ushio is through her hair, since Ushio's hair grows out to mimic Losira's.
• Praetorian Guard: The Secret Service are more or less acting as one for Blackwood.
• Pre-Climax Climax: In chapter 289, the narration cuts out just as Damon and Shigure have at it in the base bathhouse before going on the mission to find Sandman and !Samidare, which they may not live through. This applies also for all the other times Damon sleeps with several of his destroyers, who include Murakumo, Samidare, Umikaze, and Kawakaze as of chapter 375.
  • heavily subverted in chapter 391 - when he and a part of the fleet reach Moscow, Damon catches Kawakaze redhanded in the act with the Russian spy Ramsay.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Asashimo delivers one of these when she slays an enemy Tsu-Class in chapter 301.
• Pronouncing My Name for You: Shigure has to correct people who mispronounce her name as "shi-gure" rather than "shi-gu-re".
• Private Military Contractors: Atlanta employs a lot of these, including members of Whitewater. They're amoral but professional, which is more than can be said for the other ruffians in Atlantan service.
  • and later on, one of the fleet's operations requires them to put down an insurrection caused by mercenaries of a PMC called Whitewater who break away from the United States and attempt to forge their own territory in the Southwest.
• Psychotic Smirk:
  • This is Sanford's default expression. It takes a lot to have him drop it.
  • President Blackwood's smile is described as making him look like an evil mastermind.
• Puppet King: Pope Julius IV, the current Pope in the year 2029, freely reveals that the Council of Cardinals, a council that is ordinarily meant to be elected by a newly instated pope as his primary group of advisors, instead put him on the papacy after Benedict XVI's resignation with the intention of controlling him like a puppet Pope.
• The Purge: From Chapter 114, we learn that there was mass emigration from Russia to the US to escape postwar purges.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • Operation Little Rock. The last of the Coalition ship girls are liberated and the city's Controller is assassinated, but the fleet's admiral is killed in action.
  • Operation Dualsight. Sanford's team of ground-pounders get the info they need out of Ken Simpson and make a safe getaway, but things aren't so peachy with the fleet's op to secure 3 freighters of resources. The freighters are eventually captured and some Demons are killed, but due to the fleet being ambushed by a whole fuck-ton of Abyssal destroyers, and the appearance of the Re-class of all things (who REKTS every single ship girl who tries to take her on), the casualty list is massive. With so many dead and injured, 83% of the resources gained in this op have to be used to rebuild and repair the fleet, leaving only a net gain of 17% of the total take, and leaving the team only that much with which to perform Kai upgrades. Furthermore, not only has Shoukaku been captured by the Abyssals again, Re-class somehow SURVIVES the HAVOC strike.