Trivia / KanColle

aka: Kantai Collection

• Acting for Two: With many characters and only a limited pool of voice actresses, a lot of conversations in the anime tend to become this. Averted for the English dub of the anime, where individual voice actresses are assigned to one ship girl, as opposed to multiple ship girls of the same class, taking advantage of Funimation's larger talent pool.
• Approval of God:
  • Bob bookmarks fanart of the girls he is the artist for.
  • A World War II veteran who served aboard the real Yahagi was presented with an illustration of the ship's KanColle counterpart, and expressed approval for her design.
  • A staff member at the Battleship Iowa Museum asked several veterans who served on the battleship what they thought of their ship's representation. The veterans were universally positive, and quipped that her image would be posted all over the ship had KanColle existed when the Iowa was still in service.
• Ascended Fanon: The anime adaptation takes some in-jokes from both the fandom at large and some of the spinoffs and canonizes them.
  • Akagi's Big Eater status comes front and center, after Fubuki witnesses the huge platter of katsu (or bauxite) curry she ordered. Kaga gets foisted with this as well come episode 6 (while her serving appears twice as large as Akagi's, it's likely that Akagi was halfway through her plate).
  • Ashigara's desperate Single Woman Seeks Good Man Old Maid status is also referenced by Kisaragi, after rumors of apparently another failed mixer.
  • Inazuma's "nanodesu", despite not being used often in the game proper, turns into a proper Verbal Tic, used in all but one of her lines in Episode 2 and it gets over-killed in Episode 6 with about 17 instances of it — the most of out all Verbal Tic-using characters in the episode. And only second to Yuudachi's "Poi~" throughout the entirety of the anime.
  • Ooi, while not too far on the crazy side in-game, suddenly goes on a RAEG when Naka takes Kitakami's hand. (Naka's trying to get Kitakami to teach Fubuki.) This may have to do with the Crazy Lesbian Ooi Bot, an actual person on Twitter who regularly roleplays Ooi and portrays her as an absolutely mad Manic Pixie Dream Girl who only only loves Kitakami.
  • Zekamashi, one of the fan nicknames for Shimakaze, gets used by Kongou in episode 4.^note It comes from how her name is written on her gun cannons, with the hiragana going right to left as was common at the time.
  • Raiden, a fan nickname for Inazuma and Ikazuchi, also gets used, again care of Kongou in episode 6.
  • Nagato displaying a much less serious, far more cutesy and goofy side while in private, as shown in episode 8. Mutsu even teases her about it at the end of the episode.
  • After Haruna's second remodel had her with dazzle camouflage, some fans started joking that she wears striped panties. Cue official art◊ confirming that yes, she does.
  • Iowa is frequently paired with Kongou in fan art due to their similar personalities or with Yamato due to their similar statuses as the biggest and best battleships of their respective nations. In the browser game, one of her hourly lines has her expressing admiration for the Kongou sisters, and another has her praise Yamato's cooking, though the latter doesn't go very well as she accidentally presses Yamato's Berserk Button.
  • Some fan artist have drawn Asashimo with shark-like teeth. Her Fall 2016 finally shows that she indeed has sharp teeth.
  • Many fan artists of both sides of the Pacific has drawn KanColle-styled American Fleet Carrier girls as wielding guns instead of bows or scrolls. The release of several USN carriers, beginning with Saratoga, confirm that this is true; all of them but Ranger launch their planes with guns.
  • Several fanworks depicted Houshou running an on-base izakaya pub, before Chitose finally got an hourly voice line inviting the Admiral for dinner at "Houshou's shop". It's not stated what kind of shop this is, but given that Chitose is a known Bottle Fairy, the odds are pretty good that it's exactly what people were expecting.
• Backed by the Pentagon: KanColle materials have been displayed at JMSDF open house events, including in the presence of none less than then-Minister of Defense Tarō Kōno.
• Casting Gag:
  • A subtle one in Episode 4 (cris-crossing with Actor Allusion): In order to lure out Shimakaze, the Kongou Sisters begin singing on a makeshift stage in the Naval Base's open grounds, only to be interrupted by Naka, the self-proclaimed Idol Singer of the fleet. Not exactly evident, until one realizes that the Star-Making Role of the seiyuu for the Kongou Sisters, was an Idol Singer as well, and she also voices/sings for another idol in a different phone game.
  • One for the English dub of the anime: A voice actress named Megan Shipman gets to do the role of KanColle's poster girl, Shimakaze.
  • Elizabeth Maxwell's casting as Nagato also comes off as this, taking into account that she also voiced Fuuka's Sara Iwami, the Fallen Moon guitarist who, prior to her introduction in the said story, was known through the twitter handle "Yamato Admiral".
• Colbert Bump:
  • Originally intended to be a niche game catering mostly to the military otaku population with a modest budget and minimal advertisement, its popularity experienced a huge surge after its players (including, among others, Kohta Hirano, whose Heroic BSoD on Twitter is most commonly cited as the main reason for the popularity surge) spread the word on Twitter and/or Pixiv.
  • Kisaragi's appearance in the anime and being sunk in episode 3 has resulted in loads of fan artwork of just her, when before she mostly showed up in group artwork or as a background character.
• Creator's Favorite: Fubuki is known to be this to Tanaka.
• The Danza: The devs seems to want to invoke this with the Matsu class destroyers. With the exception of Matsu, all current Matsu class destroyers have voice actress whose names contain their namesake.
  • Take, is voiced by Ayana Taketatsu.
  • Momo, is voiced by Momo Ishibashi.
  • Ume, is voiced by Megu Umezawa.
• Development Hell: KanColle Kai was originally scheduled to be released sometime in 2014. Then it was pushed back to spring 2015. Then to November 26, 2015. Then to February 18, 2016. To add insult to injury, the final delay was announced one month before the scheduled release. While it was finally released in February 2016, many fans fear that the repeated delays have hurt the game's chances. That worry turned out to be unnecessary, as the franchise's sheer popularity have made up for its shortcoming well enough to becoming one of the top-selling PS Vita game at its release.....until it was pulled from both store shelves and from the PSN Store just over a year later.
• Fan Community Nicknames: Players are referred to as "admirals". Unsurprisingly, given the game's premise.
  • New players are sometimes called "newfaces" or "newface admirals", from one of Kongou's Engrish lines.
  • Bad players (new or not) are called "shitty admirals" based on Akebono's lines.
• Fan Speak:
  • Night-battles - Often used as a double entendre, and adopted because of the teasing way some shipgirls themselves use the term. Heavily popularized by Sendai, through her dialogue lines.
  • Displacement - Fanmade description for breasts; the greater displacement, the better. Though there have been some certain exceptions (some of the flat-chested carriers) and inversions for that matter (some big-chested Destroyers). "Fuel Tanks" are seen as an alternative term.
  • On the same note as Displacement, shipgirls' body parts are often referred by the ship's equivalent; bow for head or hair, stern for butts, rudder for legs, torpedo bulge for body fat, horsepower for musculature, etc.
• Fanwork Ban: Kadokawa has prohibited fangames of KanColle from being made. This was first known back in 2013, but whether they have relaxed the ban since then is unclear.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Warship Girls is a Chinese game for the Android with a similar premise to Kantai Collection. However, unlike KanColle, Warship Girls from the very beginning featured WW2 warships from all sides, and has since pushed into the Korean and Vietnam War eras, with the introduction of jets as well ships equipped with long-range anti-ship and anti-air missiles. It was announced for an English release at E3 2015, but it wasn't until a change in publisher that it finally came out on December 18, 2018.
  • Another Chinese warship game, Azur Lane, gained prominence and popularity following its 2017 debut, being another take on the genre that includes ships from both the Allies and Axis. The game eventually evolved to become Kancolle's most significant competitor (though quite a few fans of both assert that they aren't actually direct competitors due to huge gameplay differences, since Azur Lane's combat is Shoot 'Em Up rather than card-based).
  • A Western Kantai clone is Victory Belles, a Kickstarter-funded Free-to-Play warship sim for the Web and iOS by American developer Black Chicken Studios. This particular take on the genre takes it up to eleven by not only having a wide variety of WW2 warships from all sides, but by having the shipgirls voiced in their native languages (e.g. Royal Navy ships speak English, Red Fleet ships speak Russian, etc.), thus averting Fake Nationality.
  • In general, the game's success led to several other Card Battle Games involving Moe Anthropomorphisms fighting for the player to be hosted on DMM, such as Touken Ranbu, Shinken!! and Flower Knight Girl (with the last being rather infamous for some versions of it being, shall we say, salacious). However, Touken Ranbu is the only one of these to become anywhere near as popular as KanColle. While previously hosted outside of Japan via Nutaku, both Flower Knight Girl and Shinken!! would be terminated in January 2021 and September 2017 respectively, thus remaining Japan-exclusive from there on.
  • Abyss Horizon, which is more accurately a KanColle Arcade clone, offers the gameplay of the arcade version to owners of smartphones, especially to those from outside of Japan who thus do not have access to KanColle Arcade machines. SEGA was clearly NOT amused and filed a C&D against the company operating the Japanese version. Though the lawsuit has since been settled, the Japanese version continues to operate by said company transferring ownership of it to a shell company operating in Hong Kong, thereby circumventing the C&D. However, the entire incident cast an inescapable pall over the game, and thanks to it and other serious management issues, the game folded at the end of February 2021.
• Genius Bonus: The signal flags beside Kashima's beret stands for "UY", which in Naval parlay means "I am carrying out exercises. Please keep clear of me." Fitting, since she is a Training Cruiser. ^note Others have interpreted this◊ as a reminder to the Admiral to stop flirting with her.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Sumire Uesaka is well known as a Russophile, yet the role of Verniy was given to Aya Suzaki. The official 4koma has Fubuki (whom Sumire Uesaka voices) communicating with the suddenly converted Verniy (Hibiki's second remodel) with (supposedly) good Russian, only to reveal that Verniy cannot really speak Russian apart from rudimentary words.
  • This became Hilarious in Hindsight, with the reveal that Sumire Uesaka will be voicing Hibiki/Verniy's Warship Girls counterpart, as well as two other VMF vessels (Kirov and Reshitelny).
  • Done a second time with Tashkent. Despite her voice lines sounding quite similar to Sumire Uesaka (especially if you compare them to Murakumo's), it was later revealed to be Wakana Miyakawa voicing Tashkent instead.
  • And Uesaka's Revenge continued in Azur Lane, wherein she got to voice Kirov again, complete with Red Alert memes. Hibiki herself, though, is voiced by Maaya Uchida (and Uesaka has no vocal connection to the overall Fubuki-class).
• Meme Acknowledgment:
  • Zuikaku's seiyuu Iori Nomizu has previously done the infamous Zui-Zui dance◊.
  • When the JMSDF introduced the helicopter destroyer Kaga (DDH-184), fans made a lot of art of her namesake in JMSDF uniform or with modern equipment. When an open house event was held on Kaga in July 2017, official depictions of a modernised Kantai Collection Kaga were put on display on board the ship.
  • Pixiv artists used the tag "Mother Fletcher" for Kantai Collection's personification of Fletcher. Helena refers to her as such in one of her hourly lines.
• No Export for You: The only way to play the game is to register on the Japanese-language segment of the DMM website, which itself is inaccessible to non-Japanese IP addresses. This means to even register for the game, a prospective non-Japanese player will have to jump through a lot of hoops to do so (usually by using VPN), never mind getting to play the game, which then requires newly registered members to win a lottery for one of the limited slots per server. And competition is steep for server slots.
  • The January 29, 2014 update was a rude awakening for many foreign players, as the most prevalent method used to play the game (the API link) no longer worked, since DMM had the game purge its API lists every 90 minutes. This meant that anyone who wanted to play via API was now essentially playing on a timer, and they had to hop on VPN to renew their API link when the time was "up". The other choices were playing on the VPN full-time, which carried its own associated risk, mainly a chance of getting banned for using a single IP (as DMM would technically see a single IP used by multiple accounts), or purchasing a private VPN to play the game on. In any case, this caused a lot of grief for non-Japanese players, causing some of them to drop the game outright rather than face the hassle of renewing every hour and a half. However, said API renewal forced a lot of players to log in simultaneously, overloading DMM's log-in servers, and essentially making the game inaccessible to everyone for hours on end. It was quietly removed in a subsequent update.
  • Since Koreans hate this game (although it still has a fan community), the anime series is not available on Korea^note Aniplus, a Korea-based TV channel, released the KanColle anime only in Singapore and Indonesia and not in their own country. It isn't available in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Merchandise from this game isn't available in those countries, either.
  • However, in Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries, basically territories which suffered greatly under Imperial Japan, merchandise and cosplays of the game's various ship girls are rather popular.
• Permanent Placeholder: When the marriage system was first announced, it was called kekkon kakkokari (ケッコンカッコカリ), which means marriage (temporary) and implied that "marriage system" was just a placeholder name. Kekkon kakkokari would later go on to be the official name of the system on implementation.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Jiji, so far the main artist for the Italian ships, has done fanart of the game before; just don't look for it at work. The same can be said of fan artist Acea4, who has already done a lot of KanColle-related art prior to being called in to pen Mikura.
  • Later articles also revealed that Shuu Uchida (Warspite's seiyuu) also played KanColle long before joining the cast; she even has Murasame as her "shipfu".
  • Yuki Yagi (Honolulu and her abyssal counterpart's seiyuu) is already a player herself before joining the cast.
• Schedule Slip: In general, anything the developers announce they plan to add can take a long while to be added.
  • Some fleet girls representing ships from the IJN, the Kriegsmarine, and the Regia Marina, that actually existed during World War II have yet to appear in the game. The most blatant case thereof would be that involving the Aircraft Carrier Shinano: Kadokawa had already released Alpha Art of her in supplementary materials ''way back in 2013'', but she has yet to make her appearance as of the end of 2023.
  • When the Shoukaku sisters were given their second remodels, the developers promised they would be able to operate jet aircraft. To further the hype, the Ne Type Engine was released as part of the November 2015 ranking rewards. However, for over a year, there were no jets available. Considering the case with Shinano, to add even more insult to injury, Warship Girls introduced its first jet aircraft, the Yokosuka R2Y2, into the game in Summer of 2016. By the time the R2Y2, and the Kikka were added to Kantai Collection later in the same year, Warship Girls had added another jet into the game, the McDonnell F2H Banshee.
• Shrug of God: The developers are ridiculously closed-lipped about the origins of both the player-controlled fleet girls and their opponents, the Abyssal Fleet, which leads not only to fans making their own theories, but even to the official print spinoffs not agreeing on where they came from.
• Sleeper Hit: The game was originally meant for the very niche market of military otaku, but thanks to some Colbert Bumps from big names in the manga and anime industries (the most notable example being Kohta Hirano's epic meltdowns about the game on Twitter) it got a lot more popular than intended.
• Star-Making Role: Shuu Uchida makes her voice-acting debut in this game as Warspite. Ditto with Kanon Takao as Gotland
• Trolling Creator: The game's lead developer, Kensuke Tanaka. At times, one can't tell whether what he did was a genuine mistake or completely intentional. (If he fixes it. If not, it's probably intentional. Probably.) Comparisons to SerB have been aplenty, as a result. Apart from the Schedule Slip entry, here are some of the infamous instances:
  • Affirmed that ships did sink at orange (50% or less health), in direct contradiction to information provided in the tutorial itself.
  • When the Autumn 2013 event was extended, he added a new ship, Yahagi, to the drop pool of the E5 boss. Some players who had cleared the event before the extension were not pleased. Then less than one month after the event ended, she was part of the starting LSC pool when it was implemented, available using the minimum recipe. Naturally, those who spent resources farming for her were even less pleased.
  • During the Summer 2014 event, ships used in the AL maps were locked out of being used in the MI maps. However, the last map, E6, was not known to lock out all ships used in the first 5 maps, until frontliners first got there and found that they couldn't use their best ships there, as they had already been locked in earlier maps.
  • In the buildup to the Winter 2017 event, the devs tweeted that one needed to prepare at least 2 Saiun for the Winter 2017 event, if you wanted to tackle the latter half of the event on anything other than easy. What was not specified was that you not only needed to consume one Saiun and 20 development materials for each of two attempts, it was simply wasted if your attempt failed, potentially making you need more. Some players were not pleased.
• Vapor Ware:
  • As discussed in the Schedule Slip entry above, Shinano had a design released in supplemental materials in 2013, but has not been introduced to the game as of the end of 2023.
  • A second season of the anime was announced in 2015. The closest thing to follow-up since then was the announcement of an animated project in 2019 starring the Nishimura Fleet that may have been the second season. In 2021, it was announced that the second season would air the following year. Only for it to fall into its own Schedule Slip after episode 3.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The temporarily playable Fleet of Fog ships. Let's just say, if the marriage(temp) system, which was confirmed for eventual implementation before the Arpeggio event started (and was eventually implemented some time after it ended), with the concept for it being leaked out some time before that, had instead been implemented before the event started...
  • If the game had failed to take off, it would have gone out in a Torch the Franchise and Run fashion with the Bombing of Kure as the final Event, which was planned to coincide with the 68th anniversary of VJ Day.
  • An earlier design for Fubuki was done by Shizuma Yoshinori and was effectively a brunette Shimakaze.

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