Fanfic / Things Involving Shipgirls That Are No Longer Allowed

"Rule 2. Stop giving bottle rockets to the younger destroyers, unless you are willing to make repairs on your own"

— The rule that started it all.

Things Involving Shipgirls That Are No Longer Allowed is a KanColle rulebook roleplay from SpaceBattles.com started in 2015 by user dwennon. It's notable for having short stories contributed by its members, many of them published on Fanfiction Dot Net by user CV12Hornet. The stories are slice-of-life fics about what the Shipgirls of the world's various Navies get up to when they aren't blowing Abyssals to smithereens......and the rules that subsequently have to be drawn up to ensure they never do it again. As of this writing, there are over 10,000 rules, not including sub rules, with the shorts reaching up to the most recent rules.

Part 1 of the fic collection concluded when CV12Hornet decided that, after more than 500 chapters, it had gotten too long. Part 2 was started almost immediately. It too concluded in May 2018, in part due to overall writer fatigue and the desire to move onto new projects, but has since seemed to have returned to writing snips on occasion from time to time.

The project was picked up again by a new author, queenpearl, in June '18, who publishes the current list from a collaborative source of authors in order to prevent writing fatigue.

The first Spacebattles thread is here.

Due to the episodic and largely self-contained format, spoilers will only be used for overarching and more dramatic premises, like anything related to Yamato's baby and Aso.

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Tropes present in this fanfic include:

• 419 Scam: The Nigerian Prince Scam. By HMS Nigeria no less. While Supply Depot Princess (the IT Director) doesn't fall for it, a lot of Abyssals do. The country of Nigeria ends up with trillions of dollars pretty much overnight.
• Accidental Aiming Skills: A blindfolded William D. Porter is absolutely terrifying; she placed 2nd in a shooting competition for battleships only because her 5-inch guns physically couldn't reach the furthest targets.
• Agony of the Feet: Used comedically (stepping on LEGOs) and dramatically (torpedoes tend to hit the feet).
• Air-Vent Passageway: Kongo starts doing this as a way to jump people who annoy her, complete with Magic Skirt. She later started deliberately channelling Rei Ayanami from Nobody Dies.
• Alternate Self: Due to the sheer number of contributors there are multiple versions of the same character (not including versions from other games) with each version depending on the authors preference. Examples of this include:
  • HMS Belfast has three character interpretations, CV12Hornet has his Belfast which is based off of the character from the Fanfic The Greatest Generation, Falkeno's version from his fics Kantai Collection Belfast II Kantai Collection Restoration and as of recently Ghrathryn's natural born version of the character, in addition to the versions from the games Warship Girls and Azur Lane.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Averted with the Abyssals; while many are indeed non-sentient and thoroughly hostile to humanity, the sentient ones are indeed fully capable of having a Heel–Face Turn, Hoppo being the most prominent example.
• And Call Him "George":
  • Habakkuk's apparently fond of using Enterprise as a snuggle toy. Later switches to Seraph, who's a lot more willing because she likes them cold and Habukkuk's body temperature is much lower than normal due to being made out of Pykrete.
  • Nagato also uses Hoppo as a squeeze toy. Unlike the above, Hoppo doesn't mind - as much. Five minutes of squeezing is where she draws the line.
• Angrish:
  • Atago's attempts to play Dwarf Fortress ultimately become little more than "Unintelligible sounds of intense rage". Kirishima and Chokai too.
  • When confronted with something particularly mind-boggling in its stupidity, the Admirals tend to slip into this, with at least one making a noise that shouldn't be producible by a human throat out of sheer annoyance.
• Annoying Arrows: Using tank sabots, as it turns out, functions much like this. Samuel B. Roberts trying them on an Abyssal battleship simply results in a pissed-off Abyssal that resembles a "demented uranium porcupine".

• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: One summoned Abyssal hates humanity for scrapping her and using her for spare parts, hates shipgirls for defending humanity, and hates dolphins... for some reason she can't quite place.
• Ass Shove: Iowa thinks 5-Hour Energy Bottles are applied this way.
• Author Avatar: A few characters in the story act as this to SpaceBattles-based authors, like Captain Darren (Sheo Darren) and the minor character Admiral Farhan (Singapore's admiral, AA for the user of the same name).
  • Rule 10,000 has multiple instances of fictionalised versions of some of the authors appearing in the rulesverse.
• A Wizard Did It: "Magical Sparkly Shipgirl Bullshit" is the official term for whenever things happen outside known physics that no one can explain how. The counterpart is "Magical Spooky Abyssal Bullshit".
• Back from the Dead: On a species level; Akagi manages to summon a Mammoth. It goes by the name 'Snuffles'
• Badass Adorable:
  • Northern Ocean Princess, aka Hoppo-chan. While she rarely fights, she can carry the largest cannon ever built like a toy, and the narrative often takes pains to remind the reader that she's an Installation Abyssal, and thus not to be trifled with.
  • Most of the Destroyers count too. They actually had a contest to find the most adorable one of all. Akatsuki won.
  • And going even further, the Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy frigates and corvettes. They're even smaller and cuter than the destroyers, but the former will gang up on Abyssals and force-feed them depth charges and the latter are nearly invincible with hockey sticks while going after a puck.
• Badass Bureaucrat: While Ooyodo often gets lumbered by association with The Admiralty's problems, with the right bit of paperwork she can make your life hell. Later on, after her promotion to Second-in-command, Fubuki too, and much more willing to use it as well.
  • Later on, Ooyodo proved that, though she is a bureaucrat, she is still a cruiser, with all the ass-kicking potential that implies.
• Badass Normal:
  • Captain Yonehara, Ashigara's boyfriend, is a baseline human. He also killed a Re-class in single combat using Tenryuu's sword, taking no injuries beyond a couple pulled muscles. Yonehara's also tangled with Abyssals of varying tonnages on other occasions, coming out on top or at least without injuries.
  • Admiral Goto is no slouch either, being capable of reigning shipgirls of any tonnage in by force should the situation call for it. A few snippets also reveal that he can fight Abyssals of heavy crusier and battleship tonnage barehanded - and come out on top.
• Bad Boss: Admiral Laurito, who briefly replaced Colombo. He cut and screwed up the Shipgirls' dietary requirements, overworked them, cut back on maintenance, assigned his quack brother to a base medical position and generally made life miserable for his subordinates (basically by trying to run them like he would a regular military force, ignoring factors like the extreme calorie needs of shipgirls and the need for docking time). He lasted less than a week before Roma and Hornet CV-12 conspired to get rid of him.
• Bad Ol' Badger: Lutzow thought it was a good idea to get a honey badger as pet. Cue shriek of pain from Admiral Hartmann.
• Bears Are Bad News: The JMSDF Bear Club (Kuma, Chikuma, Abukuma, Mikuma & Kumano) once got themselves a Bear each; a Grizzly, Polar, Black, Panda and Koala. They were forced to give them all back at...erm... dragonpoint thanks to the Panda.
• Berserk Button: A good chunk of the rules detail those of various shipgirls (and Allied Abyssals). To name a few examples:
  • Yamato hates being called "Hotel-chan"or anything similar. If you value your life, don't.
  • Do not touch the blueberry muffins Admiral Goto eats every morning. The results are rarely pretty.
  • Do not associate USS Cowpens with anything cattle related. This includes name-calling and costumes.
  • Do not even mention crocheting around Hosho. Why it sets her off is never made clear, but the results are obvious and terrifying.
  • Kongo and most British shipgirls are very fond of their tea. Damage it in their sight or interrupt their teatime at your own peril.
    • Belfast subverts this as she prefers coffee and has stated she doesn't like tea.
  • American Football is a big one for American shipgirls, especially the ones who root for losing teams.
  • Don't touch the Tim Hortons Canadian shipgirls bring with them. That leads to hockey levels of asskicking.
  • Do not pull away the European shipgirls from their Football viewing. Especially not the FIFA World Cup.
  • Never, ever do anything to harm Fubuki. EVERY DESTROYER IN THE JAPANESE AND AMERICAN NAVIES will come together to screw you over for messing with their momboat.
  • Do not imply that any shipgirl got into a high position by Sleeping Their Way to the Top.
  • Spoiling the new Star Wars movies is a big no-no, as Iowa found out the hard way.
  • Naka does not appreciate other idol media. Showing her Hatsune Miku in particular is usually a sure-fire way to send her into a frothing rage.
  • WReck, and Re-Class Guided Missile Aviation Battleships in general, are very fond of their scarves. As Harder found out when she stole one.
    • Much the same goes for Wo-Class Aircraft Carriers and their capes. Their hats too.
  • Titanic (both of them) dislikes movies about the ship of the same name, mainly due to at best creative liberties and at worst outright lies and propaganda regarding the personalities and actions of her crew and passengers on the part of the writers. The fact that stories of the ship's actual passengers are, depending on opinion, usually more interesting than any fiction is another sore point. Icebergs are also a sore point for obvious reasons. That extends to Habbakuk, since she's functionally a floating island made out of ice (well, technically Pykrete).
    • For Olympic, it's bringing up what happened in New York in 1924.
    • For Britannic, it's mines. Belfast hates them too.
  • Westra aka MY Steve Irwin, hates Whaling Boats and their Shipgirls; she's a conservation boat, go figure.
  • Belfast when asking to see the scars from her mining as Courageous and Royal Oak found out, Her sisters are better but not by much. While treating her for something else Britannic (who is among the few she can call a friend) eventually invokes Doctor's Orders to force her to let him stethoscope her, which requires her lifting her top, and he gets to see them even though she's far from happy about it.
  • Calling any of the Town class 'Fat'. This had led to Sheffield and Edinburgh beating the offenders to a pulp. The offenders being Maya and Myoko, who lost badly, even when Kongou got accidentally dragged into the fight.
  • Indianapolis hates anything to do with sharks. One of the snippets has her hunting down five hundred sharks of all kinds every week out of sheer hatred for them.
  • If you're a regular human, don't get grab-assy with shipgirls, lest you lose the use of important body parts.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Canadian frigates can do a lot of damage with a hockey puck, sticks, and a challenge to score through a fleet of Abyssals. The only injuries they suffered were from friendly fire in exchange for the complete annihilation of the Abyssals.
• BFG: All Battleships have them by default, but that doesn't stop them (or any other Shipgirls or Abyssals) from upsizing. The winner is probably the Northern Ocean Princess Nii-chan and her 80cm Schwerer Gustav Railway Gun; she and her sister Hoppo-chan are the only ones who can even fire the thing without being thrown off their feet. She also asks if Rock Fortress Princess can have one too for a birthday present.
• Bifauxnen: Z1 Leberecht Maas, henceforth referred to as "Lebe", strongly resembles a cute boy, as in canon. This confuses many other shipgirls, and her boyfriend looks girlier than she does.
• Big Bad: The mysterious "Director" apparently behind the Abyssals.
• Big Brother Instinct: All over the place with the White Star Liner Shipboys. An attack on any of them, or their loved ones, is met with very open declarations of intent to brutally murder the ones responsible.
• Big Eater:
  • Even by her usual standards, Yamato's eating a lot. Turns out she's pregnant. Her partner Enterprise later experiences this too.
  • Jokes on the shipgirls' general tendency to be this are many and varied. As per usual Kancolle fandom, Akagi is the main culprit, though plenty of other characters get involved. It's also the reason shipgirls can't charge food to Navy expense accounts after Louisiana racked up a $2k bill on takeaway pizza, and the possibility of someone (probably a carrier) pulling the same trick on a meal at a high end restaurant was raised.
• Big Good: Admirals Goto and Holloway are the officers who seemingly have to deal with the most trouble. Notably, they're also the commanders of the two largest and most powerful shipgirl fleets on the planet, which just cements their status.
• Big "WHAT?!": Happens regularly with particularly insane revelations, like what someone has just eaten, or Kalinin having a pet Bear that no one knew about.
• Bizarre Alien Biology:
  • Shipgirl biology is weird. Quite aside from their eating habits and how the hell fairies work, shipgirl bodies can't seem to decide if they're more human or ship. Shipgirls seem to have Hammerspace in their bodies, and can survive some pretty extreme damage, up to and including Ookaze haviing her limbs and head separated from her torso and still being conscious.
  • Kanmusu have 3 birthdays: keel-laying, launch and commissioning.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Both Nevada and Alabama have made chilies that qualify. Alabama's temporarily blinded her; Nevada's managed to make Delhi feel it, and she ate Alabama's chili with zero issues.
  • In mitigation, the latter did season it with over a dozen drops of capsaicin (over 4 times as strong as the strongest chilli in the world).
• Born in the Wrong Century: HMS Thunder Child, the torpedo ram that killed three tripods in The War of the Worlds, behaves more like an idealized medieval knight than a modern soldier. She wears armor, treats Admiral Collingwood as though he were her liege lord and talks like a character in an Arthurian romance.
  • This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: She's also very Genre Savvy, particularly when it comes to dragon-slaying and other such chivalric things. This comes in handy when Tenryuu, under the influence of an evil axe, develops draconic traits. Thunder Child is able to figure out why DesDiv 6 weren't able to bring Tenryuu back to her senses (Tenryuu considers them her Dragon Hoard), and succeeds in bringing her back herself via a knight-style charge - modernized via a Kai Ni upgrade that incorporates a rocket-lance and a little help from NASA.
• Born Unlucky: William D. Porter is widely considered the unluckiest shipgirl in the world due to her klutzy behaviour, terrible service record, and overall tendency to attract trouble. She's one of the few things Iowa is afraid of.
  • The Jinx: Turns out that when she sorties alone, her bad luck turns against her opponents - one snip has her hunt down and bring back the heads of four Wo-class carriers on her own without taking a scratch, despite being heavily outmassed and outgunned.
• Brain Bleach:
  • Poor Admiral Holloway cries out for the stuff after reading one of Missouri's stories.
    Admiral Holloway: (Rolling around on the ground in agony) Somebody get the repair ships in here! I need new eyes! And a new brain!
  • Sendai's Hentai provokes a similar response.
  • Cincinnati as well, thanks to Admiral Briggs.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  Enterprise: South Dakota, you fool! You don't take ideas from anime! That way lies giant mechanical monstrosities!
  Washington: Or giant biological monstrosities!
  Constitution: Or giant bio-mechanical monstrosities!
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Both Kongo and Hornet do this, the former arguing with the narrator and the latter addressing the audience. One snip consists almost entirely of this, with Hornet (the narrator) arguing with the Director and Aso for comedic effect.
• Broken Hero:
  • A lot of the Belfast centric shorts come courtesy of Falkeno, who has written other fics with her as the protagonist, and alludes to sharing a backstory; after her historical mining (which left SG Bel with a broken spine) she was sidelined for years, during which her dear sister Edinburgh was sunk, in addition to Southampton, Gloucester and Manchester (as they are all different sub-classes to the Town class, they are more like half-sisters). By the time she had returned to duty, a combination of the physical pain she had endured, grief, and burning hatred had caused her to undergo significant Sanity Slippage to the point of Laughing Mad Ax-Crazy Blood Knight. It took a combination of What the Hell, Hero? from her comrades, who were a combination of scared, disgusted and/or fed up of her, and a subsequent My God, What Have I Done? before she snapped out of it. Due to her being afraid of the possibility of snapping again, and because deep down she believes she doesn't deserve to be happy, Belfast contents herself with playing Shipper on Deck. Maybe the others remembering what she was like during World War 2 is the reason why she's The Dreaded and sans The Olympic Brothers why everyone generally avoids her. It also sheds a new light on her heavy drinking despite her inability to get drunk.
    • Eventually comes to a head when Britannic finds her coughing her lungs out and forces her into his office so he can examine her, and gets a up close and personal view of how completely screwed up her body is. Her Medical File is pretty much blank, she hasn't had any maintenance in 40 years (due to a PTSD phobia related to the last time she was in Dry Dock), her lungs sound like someone with a 20 a day cigarette habit, and he has noticed that she drinks far too much. He orders her to take Sick Leave and reports it to Admiral Collingwood so he can force her into Dry Dock for some long overdue repairs; he's mad enough at her that he actually succeeds in intimidating The Dreaded into compliance.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Poor Rock Fortress Princess. All she wants to do is occupy Gibraltar like she was made to do; instead she gets Cabot rocket-punching her in the face, Kongo also punching her in the face, and Alabama trying to ride her like a rodeo steer. She gets thrown a bone when she's gifted the Rock of Gibraltar in exchange for staying neutral from then on.
  • Nothing Provence, the French Mad Scientist Shipgirl, builds works out. Her creations, being living creatures instead of mechanical or chemical creations like everyone else, usually chickens, tend to turn on her in painful and hilarious ways.
  • Aso gets a lot of this: she's on the receiving end of numerous brutal The Reason You Suck Speeches from other shipgirls (her idol Yamato included), her plans often backfire comedically or are violently foiled, and she's frequently subject to blackly comedic Amusing Injuries. Unlike most examples of the trope, this zig-zags between being comedic and serious. The Queenpearl continuity in particular (Rule 8760/Chapter 119) deconstructs this: Aso nearly being Driven to Suicide is due to constant taunting and ribbing over her past remarks from other shipgirls despite undergoing Character Development and acknowledging her past mistakes.
• The Bus Came Back: A common fate for more obscure characters; for example, Madison, Farenholt and Caldwell act as USS Kentucky (BB-66)'s gun batteries in one chapter, then vanish until a good couple of hundred chapters later. Apparently their long absence was due to some incorrectly filed paperwork.
• Came Back Wrong: Campbeltown blows herself up to take out a powerful Abyssal unit. She is later resummoned, but retains all of her memories. This makes her even more reckless, gleefully going on suicide bombing/kamikaze runs at every opportunity.
• Can't Hold Her Liquor: Iowa, of all people.
• Cargo Ship: Archerfish & Max the Boeing 737. Though not anymore after Max gets shot down then subsequently resummoned as a Planegirl.
• Chick Magnet: Titanic looks like a young Leonardo DiCaprio◊, is an amazing cook, and a quintessential gentleman. Him becoming one of these was inevitable. His older brother Olympic looks like middle aged Leo◊, and still garners the same reaction. Problem is they're both already taken.
• Chuunibyou: Kiso and Tenryu, very much so. The former is even explicitly called this at several points.
• City of Adventure: HMNB Devonport is turning into this, thanks to it being a crossover nexus.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Saratoga towards Holloway, despite the fact he's Happily Married with a daughter. Ditto with Providence to Marcus Harrington.
• Clones Are People, Too: Recent snippets indicate that the two Yuubaris are developing divergent character traits as time goes on.
  • Cloning experiments in general are frowned upon, mainly due to their tendency to explode. After the 'Give Shimakaze Sisters' incident, Vanguard replicated it in secret to get the entire Lion Class Battleships, and Hartmann ordered Gneisenau to repeat it to get all the H-Class Battleships and O-Class Battlecruisers. They always make sure to do some randomising so that they all come out sufficiently different appearance and personality wise from each other to avoid the Uncanny Valley.
• The Cloudcuckoolander Was Right: Briggs and the Doom Lobster.
• Continuity Cavalcade: Rule 533 (Chapter 176 on FFN) contains no less than eleven references to prior snippets.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment:
  • Wasp got her AC disabled after running an ice-cream eating contest that disables half of Norfolk via brain freeze. She ends up turning it on the Admiral by becoming a nudist.
  • Iowa punishes the rest of the American battleships for the Noise Wars (i.e. every one of them blasting their favorite genre at max volume 24/7 for a week) by switching it all out for 90s Boy Bands.
  • The solution to Nagato being lured into traps by cute things is to have her look at cute pictures until she's sick of them.
• Cool Car: Haruna's tuned Toyota AE86.
• Covert Pervert:
  • Kisaragi's perversion, while known to the reader, is (mostly) well-hidden from her fellow shipgirls.
  • Beneath Missouri's professional exterior is a very filthy mind. Mind-scarringly filthy, as the Brain Bleach example further up suggests.
  • One of the side effects of poor Inazuma hitting puberty.
• Creepy Twins: Airship girls Los Angeles and Shenandoah, a pair of catgirls who talk and move in unison.
• Crossover:
  • Thunder Child comes from The War of the Worlds.
  • Iku and Hoppo manage to get onto Deadliest Catch.
  • Harder gains the ability to turn into a man after a visit to a certain valley of cursed springs. Ning Hai, meanwhile, ends up able to turn into a dragon.
  • One chapter is a crossover with One Piece fanfic This Bites!, featuring the Going Merry as a shipgirl.
  • Samuel B. Roberts is a servant of Khorne.
  • Kyubey offers Kiyoshimo a wish. It doesn't turn out like you might expect, in large part thanks to the painful experiences Kiyoshimo's been through by that point.
    • As stated elsewhere, one chapter has Ooyodo visit Ambience: A Fleet Symphony. This was actually the result of the Yuubari's running tests on Kyubey, Kiyoshimo having met it and Kyoko Sakura the previous chapter.
  • Ellen Baker of New Horizon fame makes a brief appearance giving Kongou a few words of wisdom in trying to teach Hornet Japanese.
  • Sunset Shimmer and Discord make brief appearances at one point.
  • RWBY makes a brief appearance with a chapter on not asking for gun scythes, pistol katanas, shotgun gauntlets, etc. Ruby Rose, herself, becomes a Chief Engineer for the Admiralty.
  • O'Bannon got Aperture Science to make some potato grenades.
  • For quite some time, Admiral Briggs obsesses over a "Doom Lobster." GBS Leviathan eventually subdues it, leading to first contact with Atlantis.
  • While not officially a Crossover fic, a lot of the non-IJN Shipgirls are clearly taken wholesale from Warship Girls.
  • In one chapter, a miniature night-fighting P-61 Black Widow with a penchant for bouncing friend and foe alike appears, with admirals none the wiser on what an Army Air Corps plane is doing there.
  • At one point, Android 21 falls out of a dimensional portal.
  • MY Steve Irwin previously had a role in Whale Wars.
  • HMNB Devonport is home to a permanent portal to the Azur Lane universe.
  • Father Alexander Anderson makes an appearance when Bande Nere claims to be the next Virgin Mary.
  • Several fictional Spacecraft (The Enterprises, The Millenium Falcon) have gained Shipgirl forms.
  • One of the Devonport shorts has Megan (whose twin sister Sally is HMS Zephyr) nearly getting propositioned by the UK's Magical Community, possibly a nod to Harry and the Shipgirls. - Technically Megan is the reference to Harry Potter, specifically Ghrathryn's snippet in the original Harry and the Shipgirls thread. The short is a reference to the Harry Potter Fanfic 'Marriage Law Rejection Letters'
  • HMS Hawke of Devonport ends up inside the Corpse Party games during a Devonport short
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
  • For all her perverted antics, Iku is one of the best recon subs in the Japanese fleet.
  • Similarly, underneath the goofiness and ham, Kongo is easily one of Japan's most experienced combatants period and packs far more of a punch than her outdated equipment might suggest.
• Culture Clash: On more than one occasion, cultural differences between the ship girls has caused misunderstandings, fights and Innocently Insensitive moments.
• Cuteness Proximity: Nagato is frequently shown in Nagamon mode. Exaggerated with the Super Nagamon.
• Damsel out of Distress: Enterprise gets kidnapped by Abyssals, and is subsequently found by William D. Porter with an iron throne and a subservient Aircraft Carrier Princess.
• Dance-Off: During the celebrations that took place after England finally won a World Cup Penalty Shootout against Columbia, an argument between Olympic and Lusitania over who out of the Scottish and Irish were better drinkers degenerated into one of these, with Titanic providing music on the fiddle. They ended up breaking the table.
• Deface of the Moon: Phoenix once drew a dick on the moon. It was an attempt to ascertain the feasibility of 'Oppenheimer's Flashlight' and if her laser was powerful enough to make it happen.
• Demoted to Extra: Given that there's many characters, and the action tends more towards following the non-IJN Kanmusu, most of the canon characters (even the more prominent ones) rarely get a mention.
• Destructive Savior: For all that they're the linchpin of humanity's defense, shipgirls tend to break things both on and off duty.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Particularly problematic when your erstwhile superior officer is listening in, as Chevalier's enraged rant about the Third Fleet HQ demonstrates.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Frequent, and where a lot of the rules come from. Cumberland destroying an ice cream shop when they didn't have her favorite flavor stands out, though.
• The Ditz:
  • Scharnhorst is several cards short of a full deck, to say the least.
  • Kagero isn't any better, to the consternation of her division-mates.
• The Dreaded:
  • William D. Porter, of all shipgirls, is this to Iowa and the Abyssals. The former was due to the destroyer nearly torpedoing Iowa back during the war; Willie D. was one of the few things that actually scared her, pre-personality change. As for the Abyssals, well, Willie D. found out that when fighting alone, her bad luck affects her opponents, not her.
  • Kongo's pretty scary herself; the threat of her retaliating is one of the few things that keeps Iku in line.
  • Warspite is basically The Boogeyman to German destroyers, in reference to the Second Battle of Narvik.
  • For American and Japanese destroyers, Harder is used as a threat to get them to misbehave.
  • For many shipgirls and abyssals, Enterprise when she's pissed. Normally, she's friendly alright, and enjoys being mom to her child with Yamato. But piss her off, and she brings out her Grey Ghost side.
  • Belfast is this to most of the Royal Navy due to her past persona of being a Laughing Mad Ax-Crazy Blood Knight.
• Driven to Suicide: A post Character Development Aso attempts to Eat Her Gun, due to a combination of constant ribbing from everyone else and an internal My God, What Have I Done? moment that left her with recurring Guilt Induced Nightmares about WWII atrocities she used to deny. Shoukaku narrowly stops her.
  • I Am a Monster: Having seen just how reprehensible the actions of Japan were during World War Two, her own actions since being summoned, and the subsequent abuse from most of the Shipgirls since, she uses this as her reasoning as to why she doesn't deserve any happiness and that the world would be better off without her. Shoukaku states they aren't so different; she too tried to end it all for taking part in Pearl Harbor and what happened to her country in response. In that instance, Kaga stopped her. What finally convinces her to keep going is letting the other Unryus into her room and glomping her; no matter what, her sisters, particularly fellow never-completed Kasagi, will always love her.
• Drives Like Crazy: It comes naturally to Shipgirls; they had to institute a rule that all Shipgirls had to pass the Driving Test before they were allowed to drive base vehicles. Orion averts this, due to British Stuffiness. The rest of them wish she'd play the trope straight.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Of a sort; several characters (Gotland, Ark Royal, Sammie B, Johnston, Nelson, South Dakota) made appearances here long before they arrived in the game proper, albiet with often vastly-different personalities.
• Eldritch Location:
  • 'The In-Between Space' that Kongo visits whenever she teleports. When she tried to teach Asagumo how to do it, the latter was left a drooling wreck. No one's yet sure why Kongo is unaffected.
  • USS Eldridge can also use it without any problems, and in fact weaponises it against people who annoy her, like South Dakota.
  • Whatever allows some shipgirls to cram more than should be possible in their holds also has this effect. South Dakota was left catatonic after trying to smuggle herself into one, and at least one phyisist was Driven to Suicide trying to work it out before the topic was declared verboten.
• Epic Fail: What else do you call every single Fletcher firing every single one of their torpedoes - and not hurting anything? It was later revealed that the failure was due to defective torpedoes - most of them missed and the rest were duds.
• Equippable Ally: USS Kentucky (BB-66) is summoned without her guns, so Madison, Farenholt and Caldwell are called in to act as temporary guns until her real ones are ready in about a month's time.
• Establishing Character Moment: Kongo is fighting a robot on the deck of the USS Constitution, prompting Constitution herself to self-summon and introduce herself thusly:
  "Salutations, motherfuckers!"
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • As detailed under The Friend Nobody Likes, Aso's racist views disgust even WReck, a self-confessed President Evil and Primordial Abyssal.
  • While the Mad Science shipgirls certainly live up to the "mad" part, even they have some lines they won't cross, though usually for pragmatic rather than moral reasons. South Dakota, for instance, knows Evangelions are a bad idea.
• Extreme Omnivore:
  • Shipgirls can eat and digest things that a normal person couldn't even dream of eating, like fuel oil, steel, and aluminum.
  • Akagi stands out by eating things even shipgirls can't stomach, namely the less offensive of Hiei's creations.
    • They can't eat everything though; some national/regional delicacies (of sometimes questionable legality) are beyond even a Kanmusu's digestive system; Casu Marzu cheese for instance (link is not for the squeamish ) had Texas' Fairies repelling the stuff out her mouth.
  • Submarines fit this trope less than the rest of the shipgirls; this is explained by their diesel engines being more picky in their choice of fuel than the surface shipgirls' steam boilers.
• Extreme Omnisexual:
  • Iku. Even getting a girlfriend doesn't stop her from doing such things as seeking out tentacle monsters for more happy fun times.
  • Iowa's no slouch, either, and even causes an entire Abyssal fleet to defect by seducing their leader Central Princess.
• Fantastic Drug: The Devonport Girls operate a Slime Farm. One of the products of this are Honey Plorts, which have an effect akin to overdosing on all major narcotics classes simultaneously.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Aso, the never completed 7th Unryu Class Aircraft Carrier. She is an example of Japan's attitude to everyone during World War 2. As she's the only one who exhibits this, most consider her Came Back Wrong. Later snippets reveal this to be a trait of many of the ships who were historically scrapped during construction.
  • Konigsberg refers to the dark-skinned HMS Kenya as a monkey, even offering her a banana. It's ambiguous as to whether this is her being wilfully bigoted or just an idiot, with her sisters' comments on the incident (rule 426) and Word of God implying it's the latter.

• Fastball Special: Several rules have been implemented to stop this happening, but the girls just find increasingly creative ways around them.
• Feathered Fiend: Manchester learns the hard way you don't mess with swans.
  • Provence and her various birds, most often chickens. They often end up turning on her, to hilarious effect.
• Fire-Breathing Diner: Tenryuu, quite literally, after biting into a combustible lemon.
• Fix Fic: Rule 1629 (Chapter 453 in Volume 1 on FF.net) makes an attempt at this, by having Ooyodo invade the first chapter of Ambience: A Fleet Symphony, kill the polarizing protagonist, and rescue that universe's version of Murakumo, who will subsequently re-appear in later chapters (She's noted as Murakumo (FLEET) to differentiate her from the Murakumo that already exists). However, as this was done with little to no knowledge of what happens in later chapters, this action would have huge ramifications on the plot of that fic, specifically the fates of many shipgirls and characters in the absence of the protagonist.
• Flat "What": Given the amount of shenanigans that goes on around the Naval bases, anyone who has a modicum of sanity will be at a loss to explain anything.
• "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome: Inverted when Iowa replaced her HE with nuclear shells, which Nagato unwittingly took in one battle.
• French Jerk: Dunkerque and Strasbourg lean heavily into this stereotype, with the former even dropping the "HON HON HON!" laugh when mocking people. It's unclear how much of this is an act and how much is them being legitimate Jerkasses, considering that their posts in the Kanmusu Online Confessions Thread snip.
• The Friend Nobody Likes:
  • Iku's perversions tend to get on people's nerves. Her recon skills are apparently the main reason the fleet still tolerates her.
  • Aoba's papparazzi tendencies, repeated invasions of privacy, and tendency to plaster cheesecake photos of the shipgirls everywhere soured just about everyone on her, culminating in a stint in prison. This continues after she's released and cleans up her act.
  • Aso quickly starts getting on people's nerves after she's summoned with her racist views. Even an Abyssal running a presidential campaign on the slogan of "Why vote for the lesser evil?" is disturbed and disgusted.
• Friend or Foe?: Harpoon missiles will just as happily target shipgirls as Abyssals, which leads to them getting pulled out of shipgirl support.
• From the Mouths of Babes: The destroyers who don't fall under Troubling Unchildlike Behavior will often do this, to the grief of any adults in earshot.
• The Gadfly: Captain Darren (Author Avatar of Sheo Darren, one of several writers involved in the fic) loves affectionately trolling Murakumo, though he's willing to do the same to Fubuki and other destroyers.
• Gargle Blaster: O'Bannon keeps a bottle of Tactical Nuclear Penguin^note Product of Brewdog, based in Ellon, Scotland. A beer at 32% ABV. One wonders why they didn't namedrop another Brewdog product Sink The Bismarck at 41% and the obvious naval reference being more fitting with the setting. on standby for when Royal Oak starts Drowning My Sorrows.
• Gender Bender:
  • Somehow, the Brits ended up with shipboys of RMS Olympic and Titanic. Later joined by their brother Britannic. It's indicated that this was down to the summoning ritual not being calibrated for civilian ships, as the majority of ocean liner shipgirls are specifically called out as being female.
  • Harder eventually gets the ability to switch to a male form, courtesy of a dip into the Spring of Drowned Boy.
• Gender-Blender Name: A number of shipgirls, like William D. Porter, have distinctly masculine names, thanks to their original ship selves being named after military personnel.
• Genius Loci: Phoenix summoning the spirits of at least four Volcanos, Yellowstone being the most notable. Later joined by The Planets of the Solar System.
• Germanic Depressives: HMS Uganda tries to convince Swiftsure that all Germans are antisocial, efficient and constantly depressed. In walks Prinz Eugen.
• Gone Horribly Right: Many rules ban some new way to fight Abyssals, be it a Laser-Guided Tama, Willy Dee, or bomb.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Goto hallucinating Kongo as one is part of what leads to his leave.
• Good-Guy Bar: O'Bannon runs an Irish pub in Portsmouth that's a frequent stop for the Royal Navy shipgirls stationed there, as well as the German shipgirls, American shipgirls on convoy duty, and the French shipgirls deployed in the Atlantic.
• Grievous Harm with a Body:
  • HMS Campbeltown has no issues being used as a spear by Hood. The British admirals are less sanguine about it. They're probably right to be concerned; Campbeltown now seems to be permanently concussed.
  • Abyssals have been used as bludgeons by Hood and other shipgirls on several occasions, usually out of desperation (for most shipgirls) or a lack of Campbeltown (for Hood).
• The Grinch: Kitakami does not like Christmas; bad experiences in past Christmases and her own cynical grumpiness leave her convinced that it's just an overcommercialized Western import. Unfortunately for her, literally no one else in Yokosuka shares her attitude. In fact, they object to it. Strenuously.
• Growing Up Sucks: Nagato thinks this when Hoppo reaches puberty.
• Happily Adopted:
  • Des Div 6 by Tenryuu. She has the adoption papers to prove it!
  • Hoppo-chan by Nagamon. More informal, but the former is officially a political refugee and no one particularly wants to argue the point.
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: Junyo, as in canon, joined by Musashi, Iowa, and many other older shipgirls. Yet another bountiful font of gags.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • There's an entire fleet of turned Abyssals called Allied Abyssals, not to mention a group trying to negotiate a peace treaty.
  • Probably the most obvious example would be Hoppo-chan, who turned to humanity for sanctuary from "that American harridan" (Iowa on a bender) and has been a major character in many of the snips since.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Enterprise and Yamato's reaction to finding out that the latter is pregnant.
  Akashi: I think I broke them.
  • Poor Mutsu goes into one of these when confronted by a bonfire that brings back bad memories of the turret explosion that sank her in Real Life; she faints standing up, forcing Iowa to carry her out of there before she collapses.
  • Admirals Colombo and Cunningham eventually suffered nervous breakdowns from the constant wackiness they were forced to deal with, sending them into retirement.
• Heroic Safe Mode: Enterprise reverts to The Grey Ghost after Aso kidnaps Yoshino.
• Hidden Depths: When South Dakota realizes that Shimakaze feels lonely as the sole ship of her class, she creates cloned sisters for her.
• Hikikomori: Early in the fic's run, Yūdachi becomes one for a while due to an obsession with World of Warships.
• Homosexual Reproduction: Enterprise somehow manages to get Yamato pregnant with Yoshino. Later, Yamato somehow manages to get Enterprise pregnant with Hope, and E has met the time travelling future version of their 3rd daughter Akemi. In Continued, Myoko and Takao fall pregnant at the same time and end up with psuedo-triplets and Kaga and Zuikaku have a little Kaga.
• Horrifying the Horror: Enterprise terrifies an Allied Re-class and Inazuma when she lets out the Grey Ghost.
• I Fight for the Strongest Side!: Aso's basic motivation, as revealed when she's captured after kidnapping Yoshino. This just makes everyone more disgusted with her.
  • It should be noted that this isn't out of opportunism or cowardice; see the Social Darwinism entry.
• I Lied: Happens often. New Jersey regarding getting permission to equip the newly summoned USS Kentucky with 3 destroyers in lieu of her absent main guns was the first documented case.
• I Love the Dead: HMS Seraph, due to Operation Mincemeat.
• The Immune: Akagi is seemingly immune to pufferfish toxin. She even managed to eat the liver and the ovaries of a pufferfish ^note The liver, ovaries, and skin of fugu are by far the most dangerous parts, as its infamously lethal poison is most concentrated in these areas without getting sick! (For the record, most Kanmusu are not immune.)
• Impossible Theft:
  • This is the U.S. submarines' hat; the narrator notes that they are often stereotyped as "kleptomaniacs verging on impossibility." This does indeed have some truth to it - one of them stole Enterprise's compass, which she keeps internal to her own body.
  • In an earlier chapter, O'Bannon and Gurkha collaborate to steal a rude bargoer's house out from around him while he sleeps. Somehow. And then move it to an airfield an unspecified but considerable distance away.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Iowa and West Virginia get in a darts competition - and proceed to stick a half-dozen darts to each other end to end, thanks to their ballistics computers allowing for a ludicrous degree of precision.
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!:
  • Nagato will sometimes do this when in Nagamon mode. Sometimes, as in the case of Hoppo-chan, this works out. In other cases, such as with Rodney, things get violent. It has gotten to the point where her reputation precedes her, and potential victims make it clear they will shoot her if she tries anything.
  • HMS Vanguard Snr was also a regular victim.
• Incoming Ham: Kongou, obviously. Though she admits it's just an act so everyone knows to stay away from the admiral, her man.
• Inevitably Broken Rule: Rule 1354 is getting Shipgirls pregnant is not allowed during wartime. This has been broken several times.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Almost everyone has one of these moments, most commonly Admirals. Lately Belfast has been shown to be this.
• Innocent Bigot:
  • Thunder Child, while on a visit to Halifax, calls a pair of Canadian destroyers (who are named for First Nation tribes) "redskin friends"; being from the 19th century, she clearly doesn't understand that the term "redskin" is now offensive. Neither destroyer takes it well, and Thunder Child is visibly apologetic in the aftermath.
  • Konigsberg refers to a Black Shipgirl (Kenya in this instance) as a monkey, with the rather unfortunate setting of a zoo. Hood puts it down to her being sunk during a time when such attitudes were common and implies that such attitudes are common to shipgirls sunk around the same time period. Her fellow Germans put it down to her being a complete idiot.
• Insane Troll Logic: Out-of-universe, the readers on the Spacebattles thread consider the train of thought that led to Wasp becoming a nudist this.
  NotHimAgain: Logic at it's finest, people. You can see how the decision was reached, and it's still an utterly ridiculous train of thought.
• Interservice Rivalry: Usually it's the Admiralty enjoying getting one up on, or shifting a problem onto, the Army or Air Force. Haguro's and Maya's boyfriends, who both fly planes for the USMC, throw the odd jibe the Navy's way.
• Interspecies Romance: Many Shipgirls have fallen in love with ordinary humans, and some have gone on to have (or will have) children, all of whom we have seen thus far have been girls.
• Jive Turkey: Revenge is a particularly cringe-worthy example of this, speaking some of the most tortured AAVE in modern fiction (though she seems to drop it under sufficient emotional stress). Wisconsin briefly became one when she tried to release a rap album, though ironically, her dialogue was far less insulting.
• Kaiju:
  • A giant fire-breathing chicken, courtesy of Provence.
  • The legendary Doom Lobster. It's miles long, strong enough to smash apart entire Abyssal fleets and go toe-to-toe with Empress-class Abyssals.
• Kill It with Fire: Warrant Officer Zaiz and Phoenix created some kind of incendiary that can burn underwater and managed to reduce an Empress-class Abyssal (made of ice) to a giant bonfire.
• Klatchian Coffee:
  • Johnston's instant pick-me-up: a cup of strong navy coffee mixed with a shot of hard liquor. Guaranteed to get her from asleep to enthusiastically awake in two seconds flat. Warning: only lasts for two hours.
  • Not to mention the time South Dakota recreates Agatha Heterodyne's Coffee Engine.
  • Black Blood of the Earth coffee mixed with vodka does... something to Akatsuki whenever she drinks it, turning her into a dramatically aged-up version of herself with a lust for Admiral Goto.
• Klingon Promotion: Explicitly and officially Defied after Provence picks a fight with Admiral Masson for the purposes of this trope and gets her ass kicked.
• The Klutz:
  • The Second Pacific Squadron (aka the Russian Fleet that got annihilated at Tsushima), who are called "The Pacific Derp Squadron" by Aurora. Immediately after their summoning by the Abyssals, they manage to knock half of their number out with their own torpedoes and wind up being single-handedly defeated by Willie D., a notorious klutz and bad luck magnet in her own right.
  • William D Porter, alias "Willie D.", at least before taking several levels in badass. And even then, she's mostly just weaponizing her klutziness and bad luck against her enemies.
• Knight of Cerebus: For the later chapters, Aso is this. Any chapter she appears in tends to get somber and serious in a hurry.
• LARP: After it was discovered Shipgirls could summon their steèl hulls, a few Americans tried their hand at some Live Action War Gaming. They nearly ended hitting Titanic and Langley who were trying to enjoy a cruise on his steel hull.
• The Lad-ette: Iowa's characterization here is that of a loud, brash, potty-mouthed drunkard. She may remind readers of Belated Battleships of that fic's interpretation of New Jersey. ^note While this may seem OOC for her, note that she hadn't been implemented in Kancolle proper by her first appearance here, functionally making her an OC at the time.
• Left Hanging: A lot of plot points (like Aso's redemption arc) were left unresolved or half-resolved after the fic abruptly ended on FF. Even self-contained shorts often end with no solid confirmation as to who is responsible.
• Lethal Chef:
  • Hiei. Good God, Hiei. Her creations require hazmat gear to dispose of. She is, however, very good at cooking comfort food from the American South, of all things.
  • Exaggerated when Hiei met Repulse, who seems to be the Royal Navy equivalent. The result of their collaboration was so bad the Icelandic government resorted to writing off the Hazmat team they sent in and dropping the entire kitchen into an active volcanic vent.
  • One of her creations gave her chemical burns. When they tried to weaponise it, using a random Abyssal as a test target, it came to life and possessed the unfortunate Ne-class.
• Lethal Klutz: William D. Porter was already one of these before she Took a Level in Badass. Now she's capable of pulling this trope deliberately. The results are predictably devastating for the Abyssals.
• Lost Him in a Card Game: Mogami, while playing poker with some Abyssals for some reason, finds herself short on cash and puts up Admiral Goto for collateral. Naturally, she loses. Unfortunately for the Abyssals, both Goto and Kongo object strenuously when they come to collect.
• Macross Missile Massacre: During a Tankery tournament, the Germans (specifically Scharnhorst & Gneisenau) field a P1000 Ratte (ie that experimental supersized tank with Battleship Caliber main guns, funnily enough the same model that S & G themselves used). In response, the Americans lob 11 M4 Shermans worth of T40 Whizbangs at them; 20 missiles per Sherman for a total of 220 missiles.
• Mad Scientist: Including (but not limited to): Yuubari (both of them) and Akashi for the IJN, Phoenix and South Dakota for the US Navy (later joined by Columbia from the Spacegirls), Vanguard for the Royal Navy, Gneisenau for the Kreigsmarine, Chapayev for the Russian Navy, and Provence (though not very well) for the Marine Nationale. Their collective antics are common fuel for gags.
• Made of Plasticine: Humans in comparison to shipgirls, which causes problems when humans and shipgirls alike forget this. Several snips have shipgirls effortlessly breaking human bone, with one utterly idiotic lieutenant getting the bones of his hand reduced to the consistency of flour after copping a feel on a shipgirl.
• Magical Girl: Canada's Admiral Janet Lombard. It's why so much of her file is redacted. Several also work in and around Devonport.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Due to both how shipgirls' bodies work and the efficiency of the repair baths, they can shrug off injuries that would instantly kill a human, so this trope comes up a lot. Warspite, of all people, even invokes this for "the best Black Knight cosplay ever," much to Admiral Graham's chagrin.
• Mama Bear: Enterprise and Yamato to Yoshino. Tenryuu to Des Div 6. Messing with their kids has led to the messy end of many an enemy, and in Tenryuu's case a boot to the face for many of the more assholish shipgirls.
• Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: Inverted, as Shipgirls with human partners need to be careful not to severely injure them while lovemaking. Cracked pelvises are a particular concern, as mentioned by Ashigara.
• Man on Fire:
  • This is why Yuubari's combustible lemons were banned: people kept mistaking them for regular lemons, and, well... Kongou experienced the trope name first-hand.
  • Enterprise doesn't mind being this, which has gotten her in trouble with Yamato a few times. Not to mention the financial cost from having to constantly replace the burned uniforms she goes through.
• Marshmallow Hell: Hoppo-Chan receiving one from a paralytically drunk (and by that point barely conscious) Iowa was what prompted her to request Political Asylum with Nagato.
• Megaton Punch: Apparently, Shangri-La can punch people great distances, given Hornet asks her to punch her literally across the United States.
• Minor Injury Overreaction:
  • Third person example; when Duncan from the Precision Mountings Workshop goes down with a bout of the flu, Oklahoma ditches training exercises and causes quite a bit of property damage to make sure he's alright.
  • When her boyfriend's leg gets scratched by a stick, Inazuma's first reaction is to pick him up and carry him to the infirmary.
• Monumental Damage: Mt. Fuji has a large trench in its peak due to several shipgirls messing around with a US Navy shipboard railgun.
• Mushroom Samba: Azur!Kaga once dunked a selection of Azur!Destroyers in manure. As payback, Azur!Akatsuki spiked her tea with Honey Plort, leaving her high as a kite and causing her to attempt to make out with all the American Carrier Girls (or in Yorktown's case, attempted rape)
• Must Have Caffeine:
  • American shipgirls are very dependent on their coffee, so things get nasty when Iku steals it and tries to blackmail them with it.
  • Graf is described as looking like a zombie without her coffee, to the point of blowing off an annoyed Prinz Eugen's reminder that she's meant to be at the docks in favour of looking for a coffee shop.
• Mythology Gag: Campbeltown's tendency to act like a suicide bomber is due to her most famous mission (Operation Chariot) amounting to turning her into a bomb and using her to blow up the St. Nazaire locks.
• Naughty Tentacles:
  • At least two rules have been drawn up to try to stop girls invoking "I've seen enough Hentai to know where this is going". The more lewd ones expect USS Kraken to be all about this. She isn't, and Iku finds this out the hard way by climbing into a tank full of Humboldt Squid that she keeps.
  • The Abyssal Capture Demon. While its physical appearance is thankfully not described, it's described as being covered in tentacles and resembling "Urotsukidoji as drawn by Hirohiko Araki" ^note For those unaware, Urotsukidoji is the manga that popularised the Naughty Tentacles trope in Hentai, while Hirohiko Araki is known for his highly realistic art style as seen in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Draw your own conclusions. (And have a bottle of Brain Bleach handy)..
• Negative Space Wedgie: The result of bringing Yukikaze (who has very high luck) and William D. Porter (who has basically negative luck) in contact with each other. Physics goes... wonky near it, the Abyssal forces unfortunate enough to encounter it collectively decide to defect to the human Navies, and the entire area is quarantined.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet:
  • Averted. It is later established that Wreck is the Abyssalised USS Kentucky, yet the two meet later on and interact with no difficulties.
  • The liners have more than once produced a kanmusu of each gender who interact quite regularly off panel.
• Noodle Implements:
  Harder: THE DIARRHETIC RHINOCEROS WAS NOT MY FAULT AND YOU KNOW IT!
  Admiral Holloway: But the superglue, chicken feathers, olive oil, and super-strength condoms were.
  • Rule 1324 makes mention of Musashi doing something with two gallons of vanilla frosting and numerous cucumbers. Considering she's implied if not outright confirmed that she was an AVN star in the past, it's probably best we don't know.
  • Food and Needles were involved in whatever it was Titanic and Britannic did to render Lucania near catatonic for upsetting their brother.
  • Langley and Titanic are mentioned to have done something with candles, baby powder, and a spoon in their bedroom that's enough to make Olympic sound like he's being strangled.
• No Sense of Direction: Enterprise isn't very good with this normally, but when her compass is stolen she completely loses any sense of direction she had. She actually ends up in the Indian Ocean while thinking she's still off the California coast.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: The existence of the destroyer escort "Manlove".
• Not Me This Time: Several snippets see Aoba or Iku get blamed for lewd goings-on, only for them to protest that it wasn't them this time. Usually, this means it's Kisaragi up to no good.
• Not What It Looks Like: When Hartmann sees his Destroyers helping unload a cargo ship, he makes a beeline for the Harbormaster as to how he coerced them into doing so. The Harbormaster blurts out that they offered candy to them, prompting Hartmann to prepare to go nuclear on him before Nurnburg clears it up; they offered to help to earn a little pocket money as their pay is struck in trust funds.
• Obvious Rule Patch: The entire fic is basically incidents leading to new rules being added.
• Official Couple:
  • Admiral Goto and Kongou. Now parents to baby Mikasa.
  • Admiral Cunningham and King George V.
  • Ashigara finally gets a boyfriend in Captain (now Rear Admiral) Sosuke Yonehara, a character borrowed from a doujin called Rabaul Base's Shiba Dog Admiral and the Fleet Girls' Everyday Lives.
  • USS Enterprise and Yamato. They even have a daughter named Yoshino together! Later joined by little sister Hope (birthed by Yamato and Enterprise respectively).
    • Conversely, HMS Enterprise & Yahagi
  • Captain Hartmann & Bismarck. The former is Admiral Hartmann's son and the latter is his secretary ship, so the two have considered the eventuality of being Father and Daughter-In-Law.
  • Iku eventually starts a relationship with Lieutenant (Commander) Noriko Kamata.
  • As of Continued, Takao and Myoko. Mothers to triplets Ami, Makoto and Hotaru.
  • Haguro and USMC Captain Sheppard.
  • Kaga and Zuikaku, later joined by Akagi and Shoukaku.
  • Titanic & Langley are confirmed to be a couple, with their inventiveness in the bedroom being a Running Gag.
  • Olympic & Lusitania
  • Britannic and Hornet CV-8
  • Vanguard & Tirpitz
    • Vanguard Snr & Revenge
  • Prinz Eugan & Hood, bonding over their mutual unrequited Single-Target Sexuality toward the above mentioned Bismarck
  • Mutsu & Haruna
  • Kirishima & Washington
  • Ooyodo & Akashi
  • Maya & USMC Lt Matthew Chance
  • Seraph & Habbakuk
  • Jintsu & Honolulu
  • Fubuki unknowingly has a harem, consisting of Yudachi, Mutsuki & Kisaragi
  • Kiso and Hokaze, unwillingly on the part of the former (shotgunned into it by Tenryuu).
  • Iowa and Central Princess.
  • Portland and Tuscaloosa.
  • The yet to be summoned USS Fitzgerald and JDS Chokai, so their crews marry their steel hull counterparts instead.
  • Louisiana and Truxton Cross
  • Oklahoma and Duncan
  • Kisaragi and Re-Chan
  • Archerfish and Max the 737; formerly a Cargo Ship, but Max has been summoned as a Planegirl. One child with another on the way.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Abused to hell and back; a notable instance is William D. Porter Taking A Level In Badass after Abyssals kill her pet fish George by going out and killing four Wo-class carriers on her own.
• Old Soldier: HMS Victory and USS Constitution, and the fictional HMS Thunder Child from The War of the Worlds. Belfast also ends up finding Mary Rose from the Tudor period.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted due to the American WWII habit of naming new-build ships after sunken ones, the two Hornets being the most common offenders. Usually, the narration will chime in with the class the ship belongs to differentiate them.
• Only Sane Man: Belfast appears to be one.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: British Shipgirls are prone to this when particularly stressed; while they as standard have fairly neutral accents, they slip into others (often the place where they were built) when wound up.
• Original Generation: While the canon Kanmusu show up, and girls somewhat based on the more famous fanworks appear (New Jersey, for instance, is seemingly based on her incarnation from Belated Battleships, and O'Bannon from Pacific), there are a lot of completely new characters just for this story.
• Our Presidents Are Different:
  • POTUS Wreck planned to be a President Evil (just look at her campaign slogan), but changed after discovering how bad the situation was in Washington. Now, she's primarily a President Action, mixed with President Iron and a dash of President Jerkass; she has a strong desire to fix the country's problems, damn the bureaucracy.
  • Yavuz once she overthrows Turkey's President Erdoğan. President Action for personally leading the coup.
• Overheating: Sustained fire can cause gun barrels to get hot, hot enough to cook bacon on. Sadly, cooking bacon on your gun barrels has a tendency to attract hungry destroyers just as happy to eat the gun barrels along with the bacon.
• Panty Thief: One of Harder's appearances has him acting as one. Apparently, this is why Takao and Atago don't wear any.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Post-Reform Aso's response to the makers of an Allegedly Free Game that is fleecing other kanmusu? Torch their headquarters after ensuring that everyone is outside.
• Persona Non Grata: Shipgirls are banned from the State Of Nevada after Yukikaze bankrupted roughly a third of the entire Casino Industry, and now technically owns three of them herself. On the plus side, the monthly windfalls from the venture will be enough to keep the Yamato Sisters running for the foreseeable future.
• Pervert Revenge Mode:
  • Several Too Dumb to Live people try to grope shipgirls in one of the snippets, only to be met with (in order) a broken hand, a cracked skull, and a shattered foot.
  • When the Carriers attended Comic-Con as the character's from Sailor Moon, some drunkard tried to grope Taiho, only to get his just desserts from Shokaku and Akagi.
• Pirate Girl: Destroyer USS Kidd talks and acts like a stereotypical pirate, and is a frequent and enthusiastic participant in any chaos that ensues on base.
• Platonic Life-Partners: The Harland & Wolfers, ie the Olympic brothers and Belfast, can often be found together.
• The Prankster: USS "Hit 'em again" Harder. All submarines are, but she (or sometimes he) is the most prolific, and probably the most vicious.
• Prank Gone Too Far: Seymour D. Owens' 'prank' on Intrepid is to play the song 'The Bear Went Over the Mountain' at the former which causes her to suffer a PTSD attack, prompting the latter to be hunted by the entirety of Norfolk's shipgirl population until she is captured by Admiral Briggs after she decides to hide in his office.
• Potty Emergency: One of the earliest chapters involves several ship girls who, after eating some sugar-free gummy bears, get a severe case of the runs. Emden sent them without knowing its laxative effects.
• Ramming Always Works:
  • HMS Thunder Child is an ardent believer that Ramming Always Works. Which makes sense, considering she's a torpedo ram. She even teaches a large number of shipgirls how to do it better.
  • A Mythology Gag for Campbeltown, as it reflects her finest moment, ramming (and subsequently blowing up) the lock doors at St Nazaire docks during Operation Chariot (so Tirpitz couldn't use the dock as a base, though that never comes up here).
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Considering the sort of company they keep, Admiral Shinichi Goto for the Imperial Japanese Navy, James Holloway and Jeffrey Briggs for the United States Navy, John Collingwood and Charles Cunningham (later replaced by Graham) for the Royal Navy, Janet Lombard for the Canadians, Erich Hartmann for the Kreigsmarine, Masson for the Marine Nationale, and Colombo for the Regia Marina (before he broke down and was replaced by Amanda Russo). Even then, their reasonableness has its limits.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Yamato to Aso due to her racism. Notably, this one actually seems to get through to her due to invoking the Emperor. Unfortunately, the subsequent re-evaluation of her beliefs prompts her to kidnap Yoshino several months later.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: This literally happened to Iku when, after hooking up with Kamata, they spent the next three days having sex in Kamata's apartment, and Ooyodo came to check and see why she wasn't reporting for duty, only for Iku to try and get her to join in.
• Recoil Boost: Attempted by Kiyoshimo with a battleship gun as part of her never-ending quest to become a battleship. Unfortunately, being a destroyer, the recoil propels the gun - and only the gun - right into her face.
• Rescue Romance: How Haguro met USMC Cmdr Sheppard; he was flying air support for the under-attack convoy she was escorting and got shot down, she dragged him out of the cockpit before his plane sank.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Royal PT Navy Boats take the form of Corgis. This leads to some confusion when the RN Shipgirls visit Windsor Castle and think that Queen Elizabeth's Corgis are PT Boats in disguise, or that Liz herself is a Shipgirl.
  • The X & XE Class Midget Submarines are Otters.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Russia's IRL 2022 invasion of The Ukraine is written into the story when Mriya, the Antanov 225 Plane girl, is summoned and has a few choice words for Gangut, and Moskva the Slava-class Cruiser, which was sunk in the war, is summoned.
• Rocket Punch: Yamashiro is convinced Mississippi has one, though nobody else believes her. She's actually right about it.
• Running Gag:
  • Concussions, and those afflicted with such parroting what they've just said and/or forgetting the what entire conversation was about.
  • If Campbeltown appears, expect her to explode. Likewise, if Thunderchild appears, expect something to get rammed.
  • The Mad Science boats performing an experiment only for it to catastrophically (and often comically) backfire on them is another running gag. It's even referenced In-Universe, with South Dakota's efforts to understand the submarines' trickery killing her so often that Phoenix has a procedure in place to bring her Back from the Dead.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Admirals Goto, Cunningham, and Colombo have all ended up more than a little frayed around the ends, necessitating a senior Shipgirl (Fubuki and Roma, for the former and latter) assume their duties while they went on mandatory leave. The latter two ultimately went bonkers and ended up being sent into retirement, with Admirals Graham and Russo replacing them.
  • Admiral Laurito was driven to a (well-deserved) psychotic break by Hornet (CV-12) at Roma's request. His last appearance in the story is him slinging explosives at them while wild-eyed and screaming about his intent to kill Hornet.
  • Some Shipgirls have also gone a bit peculiar over the course of the fic, varying from becoming Cloudcuckoolanders to developing Ax-Crazy Superpowered Evil Sides.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Baltimore attempts this to try and keep the Colts in the city. It fails, both because her travel actually puts the idea in Jim Irsay's head and because Peyton Manning also travels back to stop her.
• Shipgirls Can Breathe In Space: At least Provence can, after one of her experiments blasts her into orbit and she doesn't seem to be inconvenienced at all.
• Shock and Awe:
  • Inazuma gains the ability to generate and control lightning whenever she uses her Plasma-chan powers.
  • Sparky, the Tsukumogami of Sing Sing Prison's Electric Chair naturally has this.
• Shotgun Wedding: Sendai is married to Aircraft Carrier Princess in this fashion.
• Shout-Out:
  • The (original) Allied Abyssal fleet is known as the Enemy Waters Fleet and is led by an admiral named Suwabe, who is stated to possess a villainous-looking goatee. This is a pretty obvious reference to the Danbooru-hosted series This Is The Enemy Waters by k-suwabe.
  • Father Alexander Anderson makes an appearance to check an Italian shipgirl's claim of being the next Virgin Mary.
  • Admiral Settle makes physical appearances in several canon snippets by Sheo Darren, and is mentioned in several rules.
• Shrink Ray:
  • The Yuubari's once built one as a back up in case the ritual to shrink Hibiki down from ship size to normal (don't ask) didn't work. Lt Kamata and Iku end up borrowing it for use as a sex aid.
  • South Dakota has built one too after watching Honey I Shrunk The Kids.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Most of the Shipgirls are pretty clean of tongue. Iowa & New Jersey play it straight, liberally sprinkling their speech with F-bombs both cluster and guided, at least before the former switches personalities.
• Slipping a Mickey:
  • Attempted by one of Tenryuu's failed dates. Since shipgirls have extreme resistance to drugs, she ties him into a knot and tosses him into a dumpster by way of answer.
  • Due to their armoured skin, the oral route works best for administering drugs to Shipgirls. That includes sedatives for whenever one of them is due a refit or remodel, and Akashi at least can be a bit duplicitous about it.
• Small Girl, Big Gun: Monitors. They're the size of light cruisers (pre-teen girls), move only as slowly as a regular person jogging, but often mount battleship-grade guns.
• The Social Darwinist: Pre-Character Development Aso is a genuine type II/V. She honestly believes that the 'strong' should dominate or exterminate the 'weak', and has no problem with being killed or "displayed as a symbol of Japanese weakness" by the Americans, only asking that she be allowed to watch them destroy "weak Japan" first. She only kidnapped Yoshino because she believes the girl "deserves to be the strongest she can be," which in Aso's twisted mind could never happen in Japan; she fails to take into account that Yoshino's other mother is the very American Enterprise.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Archerfish finding out she's pregnant again after Max gets shot down. Averted when Phoenix and South Dakota succeed in bringing her Back from the Dead as a planegirl.
• Sour Prude:
  • Maryland, who is usually seen trying to dress Shimakaze in more appropriate clothes and reacts violently to a Re-class fondling a Ta-class's breasts to try and invoke an incapacitating Nosebleed on her fleet. Rumour mill says she's actually a Covert Pervert.
  • Missouri pretends to be this, but everyone knows better.
• Statuesque Stunner:
  • Even by Shipgirl standards, Habakkuk is huge; she regularly uses already-tall carriers and battleships as plushies, and is tall enough to scrape or break most ceilings when she stands up. Truth in Television if she were ever built ^note For context, the largest military ships in WWII were Yamato and Musashi, at 263 meters long with a displacement of around 72,000 tonnes each. Habbakkuk's final design was expected to be around 1200 meters long and displace 2.2 million tonnes, pretty thoroughly blowing this record out of the water..
  • The bigger Battleship girls are all very tall too. Louisiana stands out most of all.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: U-2511 is a master at this, with the implication that the other Type XXI U-boats can do this as well. As a result, she unnerves Royal Navy shipgirls to no end.
• Stripperiffic: Shimakaze's standard outfit, as per canon. This lands the Japanese in hot water on at least one occasion due to her appearing on live television in it and then proceeding to bow.
• Strip Poker: On one occasion Mogami plays this with Yukikaze. It goes as well as you expect, culminating in her rash bet that she'll do a lap around the base naked if she loses another round. Guess what she immediately does?
• Stuff Blowing Up: Every Mad Scientist is in competition with each other to find out who can create the most powerful and least stable explosive known to man. Only Phoenix, though, actively specializes in such things.
• Super Mode: Quite a number of shipgirls have one, often named after one of their nicknames. The most notable is Nagato's Super Nagamon forms.
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: The Yuubaris once made one, which Nachi and Ashigara were accidentally exposed to.
• Superpowered Evil Side:
  • Arizona runs the risk of going Abyssal if she doesn't keep up her medication. Her dark side, the Abyssal Martyr Empress, is more than capable of ploughing through otherwise nigh-unstoppable shipgirls like Louisiana.
  • Pushing Missouri too far runs the risk of turning her into some red-eyed... thing with a black aura. Even Louisiana can only slow her down when she gets like this.
  • A number of shipgirls' super modes start out this way until they can be "tamed." Examples include Plasma-chan (Inazuma's) and The Nightmare of Solomon (Yuudachi's).
• Supreme Chef: Carrier USS White Plains makes burgers and sauce so good New Jersey and Musashi dress up in revealing maid uniforms and serve food in exchange for White making more sauce.
• Swallowed Whole: It is revealed that Re-class Abyssals contain an emergency repair dock inside their tails and this trope is the only way to use it.
• Team Dad: Admiral Goto, to the point where the girls organize an "Admiral's Day" party for him on Father's Day.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Yamato delivers an utterly scathing one to Aso, calling her out on her racism and her plans to brainwash Yoshino (Yamato and Enterprise's unborn daughter) into an instrument for the revival of the Japanese Empire at its worst, culminating in Yamato threatening to ask the Emperor himself to cast Aso out of the Navy if she continues in her ways.
• There Can Be Only One: Hornet CV-8 to Hornet CV-12. The latter doesn't agree.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know:
  • Take asked the allied Abyssals how they reproduce. She spent the next six hours projectile vomiting.
  • Looking into how shipgirl Hammerspace works is not advised, either. At least one physicist was Driven to Suicide trying to work it out before the topic was declared off-limits. South Dakota tried to smuggle herself inside one of the Liberty Ships' holds once, and was rendered near-catatonic as a result.
• Trademark Favourite Food:
  • Every destroyer loves ice-cream; riots tend to start when supplies are low. As it turns out, this even extends to Abyssal destroyers; some of them getting a taste leads to a swarm looking for more.
  • Enterprise (CV-6) and a few others will do practically anything for durians, even though most shipgirls can't stand them.
• Tradesnark™: They use trade-marks for the term "Magical Sparkly Shipgirl Bullshit".
• Tranquil Fury: USS Constitution's reaction to a British and French ship declaring her a useless has-been. She uses that fury to fuel her Super Mode and capture an entire Abyssal fleet.
• Trauma Button: Intrepid suffers a massive PTSD attack after Seymour D. Owens decides to try and prank her with the song 'The Bear Went Over the Mountain'.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: From Hibiki's drinking habits, to Samuel B. Roberts' bloodthirstiness, Kisaragi's perversions, and O'Bannon owning a pub, this is a distressingly common character trait of destroyers.
• Unusual Euphemism: Night battles are both actual battles at night, and also a term for sex. Sendai is highly proficient in both kinds.
• Use Your Head:
  • Tenryuu follows this philosophy, though she tends to come off worse for it compared to Thunder Child and warns Desdiv 6 to only use it as a last resort.
  • Tone uses it quite successfully to KO a Battleship, albeit knocking herself out too. Why? Because aiming guns was too much hard work.
• Verbal Tic: Yamato typically refers to herself with "I, Yamato," even in otherwise mundane sentences.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend:
  • Louisiana definitely qualifies. And considering her boyfriend's been kidnapped twice, she tends to immediately resort to tearing apart anything in her path to find him.
  • In fact, this trope applies to pretty much every shipgirl.
• Virgin Sacrifice: Some destroyers tried to use Iowa as one, but apparently being a former ship full of seamen means that she was never a virgin.
• Vodka Drunkenski: Hibiki can drink pretty much anyone bar Musashi under the table if it's vodka. Outside vodka, she handles booze as well as you'd expect a kid to. Even they are no match for the My Immortal Drinking Game however.
• Wardrobe Malfunction: Musashi got her Sarashi loosened during a battle, which made all the Abyssals present (and Kumano) get a Nose Bleed and collapse.
• Weirdness Magnet: Shipgirls, by their nature, seem to attract or generate odd occurrences.
• Weredragon: In the same chapter that saw Harder gain the ability to turn into a boy, Ning Hai likewise gains the ability to turn into a dragon.
• We Want Our Jerk Back!: After a few hundred chapters of being a stereotypical sailor (i.e. being a loud, profane, oft-drunken jackass willing to bang anybody), Iowa goes through a personality change that would make the Soviet Union blush. Most of the shipgirls who know her find this change disturbing.
• Wham Episode: Yoshino's kidnapping by Aso is one of the few snips to be played dead seriously, and causes significant shake-ups in the status quo. Most notably, Aso is officially dishonorably discharged from the JSDF and forced on the run, while the Abyssals resume offensive actions after months of inactivity.
• What Did I Do Last Night?: A not-infrequent occurrence for hard-drinking shipgirls. Abyssal-smashing rampages tend to be the best outcomes, such as Iowa's (in)famous binge-turned-rampage that resulted in Hoppo-chan defecting to the US.
• While Rome Burns: Thanks to Admiral Goto's Sanity Slippage, he remains completely calm as his building is on fire. And then he tries to return to the burning structure. After that incident he's sent on extended leave.
• World's Strongest Man: It's subtle, but Louisiana gets this treatment. Justified; she's the only Montana-class shipgirl in existence, and the Real Life versions of the class would have been able to take on anything else afloat and come out on top. Even Hoppo-chan can't stop her without help.
• Worth It:
  • A regular Shipgirl response to being caught doing something they shouldn't.
  • Played for feels with South Dakota risking imprisonment or possibly execution/scrapping, all in order to create some clone sisters for Shimakaze, all so that she'd never be alone again. Even Enterprise, one of the party sent to arrest her, agrees. Ditto when Ooyodo misappropriates some supplies to do the same thing for Akashi; everyone guesses what's happened but agree to keep it a secret.
• Wrestler in All of Us: Suplexes are a common way of settling disputes.
• Write Who You Know: In-universe, with Aoba writing erotic fiction about most of the girls at Yokosuka. Missouri's also known for this.
• Yandere: Ooi, as per usual fanon. Not per usual, Kitakami tries to do something about it, though so far she hasn't succeeded. The most she has gotten is a future-sight that allows her to dodge the worst of Ooi's advances.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: The Old Soldier shipgirls tend to speak like they're still in the 19th century.
• You Are in Command Now: When Goto starts to undergo Sanity Slippage and is ordered to take a vacation for his mental health, Fubuki is placed in charge temporarily.

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