YMMV / Ambience: A Fleet Symphony

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Chapter 142 features a C-130 making a landing on the USS George Washington. It sounds pretty unbelievable and several readers commented as such. In truth, C-130s have actually been successfully landed on and launched from a carrier, though the idea was later rejected as too risky to be made a routine operation.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • Some readers found the Fleet Logs a chore to go through due to there being just so many ship girls' backstory and thoughts to cover. This was slightly mitigated by interspersing Suzukaze's voyage in between.
  • Some readers have also taken issue with the extended breather arc that follows the Stolen Fleet arc; while there was a fair bit of Character Development going on, plot progression slowed greatly.
• Archive Panic: with nearly 400 chapters and over 4 million words, the story has become such that potential new readers are more often than not intimidated by just how lengthy the story is to want to pick it up, though it hasn't stopped a select few from doing so anyway.
• Audience-Alienating Premise:
  • Crossing over with Too Bleak, Stopped Caring. Quite a few prospective readers basically got turned off by something that happens in the very first chapter, Damon hacking Murakumo with his nano-blade, causing them to drop the fic on the spot as nothing more than a power/wish fulfillment fantasy.
  • For readers that did manage to get past that first hurdle, the extensive amount of infantry action that occurs before the girls finally get their rigging and still continues even after that has proven to be another stumbling block. That is of course if the rather questionable setting, questionable/tedious/dry writing, questionable dialogue, and just Damon's behavior and attitude in general haven't already turned off those that did get past the first hurdle.
• Broken Base:
  • Whether the story should have just stayed as a small-scale Fallout-style post-apocalyptic adventure, instead of making the Genre Shifts to the more complex thing it is now.
  • Whether the Abyssals needed to show up at all or human-borne malice and obstruction was sufficient conflict to go around.
  • Whether Damon's death and later resurrection were necessary.
  • Whether the more exotic and fantastical elements (well, apart from the Acceptable Breaks from Reality of ships reincarnating as humans that comes with the territory of being a KanColle fanfic) that appear later are needed or just make things more confusing.
  • Whether elements from other series and works make the story just that bit more interesting, or if they have the exact opposite effect, due to the impression that anything and everything is being added in with no regard to consistency, quality, or how it even fits into the world.
• Dancing Bear: Let's face it, unless you're a hardcore KanColle fan, you know about this story not because of anything that happens in it but because it is incomprehensibly long (as in formerly the longest single piece of fiction ever). Not unlike The Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest, who it dethroned for the title.
• Fan Nickname: "Samaria" for !Samidare, due to her looking and fighting like Lady Maria from Bloodborne.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In chapter 8, Damon remarks that EMP "probably doesn't even exist nowadays anyway." Long story short, it does.
  • In chapter 70, Damon says the way Yuudachi salutes him makes him feel like General Shepherd. In chapter 206, Blackwood tries to kill Damon the same way as Shepherd did to Ghost and Roach.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In chapter 77, while preparing to infiltrate a casino, Damon thinks the PAYDAY 2 soundtrack would be appropriate. Just over two months after the chapter was originally posted, Overkill introduced the Golden Grin Casino heist.
  • This fic: first chapter released in August 2014. Damon hacks Murakumo by stabbing her in the head. February 2016: XCOM 2 released, where you can Skulljack... aka hack someone by stabbing them in the head.
  • In Kongou's fleet log, she complains about not being blonde. While a depiction of Kongou with blonde hair predates Kantai Collection by 4 years, it wouldn't be until her Warship Girls incarnation's debut that there was a shipgirl game with a blonde Kongou.
  • Chapter 190, published April 17, 2016. In it, !Samidare is depicted to have the protocols of all Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers in the form of revolving energy swirls, one for each of the girls in the class. At the time, Yamakaze was the final Shiratsuyu-Class yet to be implemented into the game, and the only energy swirl whose color did not correspond to each of the existing Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers was green. Come Yamakaze on November 18, she's depicted with green hair and green eyes.
  • when the American ship girls are introduced into the story, the carrier Yorktown's nickname amongst them is "Yorkie". When Saratoga was implemented into KanColle, her 9 o'clock hourly notification has her mistaking someone at base with Yorktown, and she, too, calls her "Yorkie".
    • Yorktown's "Red Dead Revolvers" ability is essentially the Dead Eye ability, from the Red Dead series, and while it's named after Red Dead Revolver, its depiction is very similar to how it worked in Red Dead Redemption. Of note is that she only uses this ability when going Guns Akimbo with her S&W Model 500 revolvers. Two years later, October 26, 2018, saw the release of the prequel, Red Dead Redemption II, and that game's player character, Arthur Morgan, can gain the ability to dual-wield sidearms as well as use Dead Eye. John Marston himself can also go Guns Akimbo and use Dead Eye once the player takes control of him following Arthur's passing.
  • both Sandman (Admiral Kevinson) and !Samidare refer to Damon as "Serval", causing a few readers to think that this is a reference to Kemono Friends, which the author claims was unintentional, because he'd given Damon this callsign before he himself found out about the anime.
• Iron Woobie: Like him or hate him, it's hard to deny that Damon has suffered a lot, though he hardly ever admits it or lets it beat him.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • For some, Damon hacking Murakumo with his nano-knife, then Mercy Killing a fatally-irradiated baby shortly afterwards are insurmountable obstacles to the reading of this fic.
  • We've been getting steady doses of how bad the Coalition can be, but chapter 66 presents an all-new low in their treatment of the ship girls in their hands, such as making Ayanami a quadruple amputee.
• Never Live It Down: If someone has issues with this fic, the hacking of shipgirls will almost certainly be something they bring up.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Readers expecting a more traditional KanColle story will have to wait. Though it starts out pretty intensely, it's infantry actions for the most part, with the girls' ship weapons only showing up in chapter 15. And those expecting The Usual Adversaries, the Abyssals, to make their appearance rather than having Damon and co. merely face muggle malice should be prepared to wait even longer.
• Squick: The author certainly does not hold back with the gore and violence in some of the more graphic scenes in this fic.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: in addition to the popular problems that readers have with the story listed above, another one is the fact that the story deviates too strongly from the game, hell, even from the usual archetypes seen in the English Kantai Collection fanfic community. The emphasis on infantry combat during the early parts of the story, the heavily altered nature of ship girls and the fact that the Abyssals aren't even the main enemy throughout the early parts of the story too, the extremely graphic nature and atmosphere of the story, and the story's eventual turn to include magical elements on top of everything all make for a Kantai Collection fanfiction that seems so deviant from the usual examples of English Kantai Collection fanfics that many usual readers of these fics find it hard to believe that it's even intended to be a Kantai Collection fanfic in the first place. As this reviewer puts it quite aptly:
  Nippon Kagaku: My only problem with this piece of fanfiction – and it’s a serious one – is that this is not a Kantai Collection fanfiction...I came here to read a Kantai Collection fanfiction, [but] what I got is a post-apolcalyptic shooting-game fanfic with completely irrevelant characters (the Fleet Girls) thrown in...But as it is right now, if I ignore the whole “Fleet Girls” part of your story, I could give it a 7.5/10 to 8/10. If I do take the Fleet Girls into consideration, however, it would be a massive failure. Really, replace your “Damon” with Soap McTavish in Power Armor, replace your Fleet Girls with Sentry Bots and call this a Call of Duty/Fallout New Vegas crossover. It would be much more fitting. (10/12/14, review for ch.36)
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: In addition to what's mentioned above, even after getting past Damon's behaviour, it often gets revealed that no one has clean hands. The bandits, Coalition, Inner Circle and neo-Nazis are obvious villains, but even "good" factions that Damon works with aren't above things like hostage-taking, sinister experiments, and You Have Outlived Your Usefulness. This can make it hard to root for anyone.

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