Kantai Collection: Belfast
and its sequel Kantai Collection: Restoration are a series of KanColle fanfictions written by Falkeno on the site fanfiction.net, starting in late December of 2017 with the four chapter story Kantai Collection: Belfast, the sequel to which Kantai Collection: Restoration started two weeks later.
The plot of the series follows the character of HMS Belfast, with the first story Kantai Collection: Belfast serving as an introduction to her character, following her story from a kind-hearted and nice person to a psychotic madwoman, and finally into a broken wreck of a person. With the sequel Kantai Collection: Restoration opening at the start of the Abyssal war.
Tropes present in this fanfic include:
- Big Applesauce: In Restoration, New York City gets attacked by the Abyssals during the summoning ceremony for the USS Intrepid. As Belfast and Intrepid intervene in time, Monumental Damage is avoided.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Belfast's eye colour changes between her persona's, with Greenish-grey being the normal setting, indicating that this is post-war Belfast, Aka Trauma Belfast.
- The two other eye colours being her original Emerald green colour prior to her mining, and her dark-green (Almost Black) eye colour of War Belfast.
- Dark Secret: Belfast is a character who is haunted by her past due to her suffering a mental breakdown due to the effects of her mining and loss of four of her sisters, causing her to turn into a psychopath.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: Like her eye colour, Belfast also changes the length of her hair in response to her mental state as the story progresses, starting off with it long, changing to Boyish Short Hair when traumatized during the war, and wearing it somewhere in-between in the present.
- Laughing Mad: War Belfast laughs hysterically when firing on the enemy (and later when firing at all.)
- Madness Makeover: The Ax-Crazy War Belfast has Boyish Short Hair, Black Eyes of Crazy, and wears more-masculine clothing than pre-war Belfast.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Post-War Belfast is horrified by her actions during the war to the point of thinking she’s better off scrapped.
- Our Spirits Are Different: Like in most Kantai Collection fics, the abilities and nature of shipgirls beyond what is seen in the games and anime are up to the author. Here, ship souls exist before summoning as spirits invisible to humans with more limited power over their ship-bodies. ( Becoming able to fire her guns again without a crew is Belfast’s first act once she self-summons.) They can phase through their hulls, travel a short distance away, and manifest ghostly versions of anything that their crew once had onboard.
- Slasher Smile: War Belfast gives “a smile that would have caused Sheffield's skin to crawl if she had skin”.
- Walking Spoiler: Belfast’s personal history has fairly large twists that are hard to discuss without spoilers.
