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Ship Prefix: KMS/SMS^note

Representing the Kriegsmarine/Nazi Germany Navy, the Ironblood is a member of the "Crimson Axis" alliance with the Sakura Empire, and they have the least number of ships available among the four major factions in the game. Ironblood ships have a military theme with their outfits, reflecting the militarist ideology of Nazi Germany during World War II, and they specialize in armor-piercing damage that deals heavy damage to bigger enemy ships. A common trait is their rigging either having some sort of monstrous traits, most prominently, a split in the hull of their rigging that resembles a Jagged Mouth (which ranges from cute on their destroyers to outright monstrous on their heavy cruisers, battleships, battlecruisers, and carriers) or being a bit of a Cute Monster Girl. Some of their ships such as Z46 and Prinz Eugen have some of the highest HP and defense stats in the game for their ship type, and their torpedoes are the only ones in the game with the Lock On attribute. The ships, however, have torpedoes as a secondary thing in part due to the middling torpedo stats seen on some destroyers and a number of cruisers.

Previously, like the Eagle Union, they did not have much of a single faction focus due to their small fleet size compared to the other three main factions. This lets them mix and match well with ships from other factions by providing defense, homing torpedoes, and AP damage and a few unusual units.

Starting with the Rondo at Rainbow's End event, the Kaiserliche Marine/Imperial German Navy is also represented as part of Ironblood.

After the introduction of more ships with faction abilities or benefits such as Bismarck and Zeppy^note, it is now arguably they might have as much of a faction focus as the Royal Navy.

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Faction-wide Tropes

Armor of Invincibility: The faction focus of Ironblood appears to shape them on the Defender Archetype.^noteWe do not currently have this trope page Bar a few special cases like the Deutschland-Class, most Ironblood ship's stat balance skew towards defense rather than offense. To wit:
- All Ironblood ships tend to have the highest armor stat(HP) among factions in the same category, From Destroyers to Battleships and Carriers.
- Of the only 5 vanguard ships that have a shield generating ability, 3 belongs to Ironblood.
- Graf Zepplin, the first faction buff ship of Ironblood, provides a buff of 15% damage reduction to all Ironblood ships in battle.
- The first Ironblood research ship, Roon, had both high HP and the strongest shield generating ability at the time of her release.
Armor-Piercing Attack: Ironblood batteries nearly all load AP ammo, unlike other factions that normally load either HE or Normal shells. This also extends to when they're enemy fleets in events, making them very rough on the backline and causing Ironblood events to give Izumo's "Specialized Armor" a chance to shine.
Art Evolution: Arguably the most drastic in the game and the least surprising given their source material. Early Ironblood shipgirl designs were relatively consistent with those of the rest of the game: outfits inspired by the military or country of origin, and rigging that, shark faces aside, looked like actual ship components. Around the time of the release of ships like Roon and Friedrich Der Große, you begin to see a shift in the design language. Most modern Ironblood ships have rigging that looks less like ship parts and more like some sort of monster or sea serpent that they fight alongside, color pallettes have been pared down to red, white, and black with occassional dark navy and silver highlights, and most uniforms will either be much more heavily stylized (in the case of military-adjacent ones) or draw more inspiration from goth, BDSM, and mythological references. It can be especially noticable when you compare either ships from the same class that had a significant release gap (Leipzig and Nürnberg) or ships who get retrofits/alternate version ships (Bismarck and Bismarck Zwei).
Artistic License – History:
- Ironblood is subject to a particularly large amount of historical liberty to make them a viable major faction that is treated as on-par with the Eagle Union, Royal Navy, and Sakura Empire, when their historical basis was more comparable to the French and Italian fleets (Iris Libre + Vichya Dominion and Sardegna Empire, respectively) than the other major factions in the game. The solution? Make them pull ships from the infamous Plan Z ^note This manifests in heavy PR representation and a particularly large number of unfinished or even never-started ships outside of PR, including every single Ironblood carrier.
- In addition, later story events show that their in-game leadership structure is a peculiar mix between the Third Reich and Imperial Germany (the latter from the late 19th century to the end of World War I). Early on, Bismarck can be considered as a Lighter and Softer Hitler stand-in, but the appearance and acknowledgement of Friedrich Der Große, whose namesake is a Prussian king, as another leader figure makes it so that the former is looked in a similar manner to her namesake, with the latter emulating Kaiser Wilhelm II with a bit of a twist. Other leaders like Prinz Eugen and Peter Strasser plays it straight.
Gender-Blender Name: Plenty of Ironblood girls are named after men and use their namesakes' whole names, but are still all girls.
The Ghost: Somewhat unsurprisingly (given who their real-life inspiration is and some of the potential implications of giving them unqualified sympathetic portrayals), the Ironbloods tended to be pointedly absent from a lot of side material (most notably the various manga). The only one who showed up with any regularity was Z23, and when she does appear, her affiliation tended to be pointedly ignored. It was only with the advent of the animated adaptations that this began to change, though those tend to be even more aggressive about removing absolutely any fascist-interpretable imagery from the girls when they do appear.
Lighter and Softer:
- Goes with the territory of being a game of cute ship-girls. Despite a majority of the ones to date having been built during the Third Reich under NSDAP leadership, none of the girls really discuss, and certainly never espouse, much in the way of Nazi or fascist ideology. The destroyers and u-boats, in particular, tend to be cute girls (one's even an outright reference to an Idolmaster character), and the bigger ships tend toward Proud Warrior Race Guy-ism without any (apparent) overt political bent. In fact, the first artbook strongly implies that the Ironblood nation is actually a direct continuation of Imperial Germany, right down to having a system of hereditary nobility.
- And of course, full Nazi symbology appears (virtually) nowhere on their designs; the Ironblood insignia is a redesigned Iron Cross. However, certain items like wall banners in Bismarck's dedicated furniture set trend much closer to real Nazi symbology^note, which makes some players (very understandably) uncomfortable. Reichsadlers also appear on some of the characters, though this is a bit vaguer since the reichsadler far predates the rise of the NSDAP (but conversely, a few of them, like on Bismarck and Z-46 most prominently, are obviously the Nazi Parteiadler specifically, just without the swastika within the wreath, while a few like Köln's use slightly different stylization, closer to a traditional heraldic eagle).
- Rather notably, in the 2020s (and specifically after that furniture set mentioned above), new IB girls tended to assiduously avoid anything even approaching specific Nazi-adjacent symbology, with the sole exception of the "white circle X on a red field" that stood in for the "prow swastika" on older ships. And even then, some artists went still further - Ohisashiburi, for example, turning Ulrich's into a symbol resembling a game controller crosspad instead. The imagery on the older ships, however, was not revised in the game (despite being, as noted above, pointedly removed or redesigned in other media).
Mechanically Unusual Fighter: While all factions have some quirks of their own, Ironblood is the one which you may find the most quirky ships to scratch that weird niche (or just itch) you want in your fleet. Destroyers who can wield cruiser guns? Here, the Type 1936A class does it. Destroyers with shields? Also look no further than Z23. Vanguard ships with arc shot AOE damage? The Deutschlands were doing this years before "Large Cruisers" were even a thing, and the Prinz Heinrich-class ships joined the fun later, all without the need to be Ultra Rare. Backliners with torpedoes? The Scharnhost-class and Tirpitz did it before anyone else. A main fleet ship who takes position in front of the flagship? Odin. And so on, and so forth.
Mighty Glacier: A tendency among Ironblood ships is that their ships tend to have less evasion if not also speed than similar ships as if to offset their higher raw HP and firepower.
Nazisploitation: The appearance of some of the bigger vessels has some shades of this (though naturally, it's all a hell of a lot more G-rated than the old films were); Deutschland and Spee, in particular, really do look like they stepped off the set of an Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS knock-off. (Notably, though, the full-on battleships tend to eschew this for a more generally refined look instead.) And then there are Eugen's various skins, never mind Deutsch's Live2D summer skin...
No Swastikas: All the Swastikas on the ships are replaced with either an Iron Cross (either the stylized one or a more standard one) or X symbols. The latter sometimes still tends to cleave uncomfortably close to the full symbology for some. However, some other symbols made it through more or less intact - in particular, many (older) Ironblood shipgirls wear a Reichsadler with the distinctive styling used by the Nazis or its opposite-facing counterpart, the Parteiadler, with the only change is to change the swastika in the wreath to an "X" for the few for whom it's actually large and detailed enough to actually see what's in the wreath.
Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: In terms of the original anime's trailer, they don't even really make much of an appearance other than a few quick shots of Z23 (although their nation is mentioned by Akagi). It's only in the opening they're shown more, with Prinz Eugen as the main focus. Slow Ahead! naturally averts this, with Z23 being one of the lead characters.
Spell My Name With An S:
- The faction's name itself has been subject to this - in the earliest trailers for the game, they were subtitled as "MetalBlood" alongside the hanzi. This was dropped for "Ironblood" later (likely because Manjuu realized they'd gotten the translation of Bismarck's famous phrase wrong when going back to English), but then a different, more minor but still very noticeable problem cropped up - "Ironblood" versus "Iron Blood". The JP and CN versions favor the former when spelling the faction name in anglo-roman characters, while the official English version tends to favor the latter. Neither one is "wrong", per se (铁血 is literally just the hanzi/kanji for iron and blood, and if you're using it as a proper noun, both having space or not having it are equally valid) but it can still be annoying if you prefer one or the other and see it written the other way.
- It gets extra frustrating when some of the JP/CN promotional material can't even keep it straight in the same promotional piece - in the trailer for Season 2 of the World of Warships collaboration, the faction name first appears as "MetalBlood" once again, and then, forty-five seconds later, is listed as "Iron Blood" alongside Friedrich!
Stupid Jetpack Hitler:
- The general theme of Ironblood ships is their superior technology with high-tech-looking rigging similar to technology wielded by the Nazis in the later Wolfenstein games or HYDRA in Captain America: The First Avenger. One of the promotional posters even focused on the girls working on their rigging in their downtime.
- Notably, a few of the vessels embody some of the real-life inspirations that led to the trope taking off: Friedrich der Grosse is an amalgamation of both the H39 and H41 battleship proposals, and the latter would've been able to theoretically out-shoot even the Yamato (if Germany could ever find the time and resources to build it); Zeppy, the "young" Graf Zeppelin, is an embodiment of the early design for the real Graf Zeppelin, back when she was planned to be given an absurd sixteen-light-cruiser-cannon secondary armament on top of her air wing (and yes, she was launched with the intention of being armed this way!); Heinrich and Adalbert are personifications of the P-class heavy cruiser, which has been described as "a 25,000 ton speedboat with battleship guns strapped on"; and, while Roon is largely an invention (see her entry for more info), her intended weapons are a paper design for a triple 203mm turret from Krupp of somewhat questionable practicality, especially for Germany's supply situation back in the day.
Wrench Wench: As stated in Stupid Jetpack Hitler, all of their girls do their own maintenance on their equipment.

Vanguard Ships ^noteDestroyers, Light & Heavy Cruisers
Main Fleet ships ^note
Submarines

Characters / Azur Lane Ironblood

Faction-wide Tropes

Alternative Title(s): Azur Lane Metal Blood

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Characters / Azur Lane Ironblood

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Faction-wide Tropes

Alternative Title(s): Azur Lane Metal Blood

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