Fridge / Ambience: A Fleet Symphony

Warning: Here be spoilers!

Fridge Brilliance

• A meta case: at the beginning of the Italian campaign, Monarch and Thunderer are seen making references to the film 300. Not only is the Italian campaign called "Operation 300", but these references themselves are made on chapter 300.
• in chapter 396, the Catholic pope is introduced as a character, and he goes by the papal name of Pope Julius IV. But why Julius? The pope is then presented in the same chapter as a magically talented and capable fighter, with the ability to summon Black Keys and wielding them with great skill, along with the revelation that he was at one point the last remaining member of the Burial Agency, the Catholic Church's ultra-secret magical organization that's tasked with eliminating threats, both ordinary and supernatural, to the Church and to Christianity as a whole. In history, Julius II, who reigned from 1503 to 1513, is known as the "Warrior Pope" for having personally led troops into battle and having an aggressive militaristic approach to Vatican political affairs.

Fridge Logic

• The fact that Shigure, with Damon's "help", can use the Raging Demon (a.k.a. "Shun Goku Satsu") raises a lot of questions.
  • Assuming that this story adheres to Street Fighter canon at all, the Raging Demon isn't a physical attack; it targets the victim's soul and purges it, destroying it in its entirety. After Shigure executes her Raging Demon, the story narration makes no explicit mention of !Samidare's clothes to suggest that what Shigure did to her was anything physical. In addition, because she was able to survive it and still fight afterwards with no apparent discomfort, chances are that !Samidare was able to survive the Raging Demon flawlessly. How did she survive? In the Street Fighter universe, people have been known to survive the Raging Demon by using a counter technique called the Musou Seiken ("Fist of Nothingness"), a technique that empties the user's mind completely in order to achieve a Zen-like state, to which the evil power from the Raging Demon can do no harm. An alternate interpretation of this is that the Musou Seiken user empties his/her body of his/her own soul, protecting it from the attack that would otherwise destroy it. Because !Samidare was able to survive Shigure's Raging Demon so well, this means one of two things: either she is actually skilled enough to parry all 1000 of Shigure's hits during the Raging Demon (in pitch darkness, mind you, and when Shigure was throwing hits at her at a rate which her own sisters had trouble counting them all, even with their computerized senses) and still make it seem like she was defeated by it, or she was able to empty her own soul to keep herself safe.
  • The second option leads to even more questions if it's the case: if !Samidare defended herself from Shigure's Raging Demon by emptying her body of her soul, then that would imply that she herself does indeed have a soul. And once Sanford spills the beans on the Moebius Four Sub-Project of the F.L.E.E.T. Project and the true natures of the first and second generation Shiratsuyu-Classes, we know for a fact that !Samidare does indeed have a soul, because she was once a human girl whose entire body, for the purposes of Moebius Four, save for her vital organs, was turned into Smartsteel. But then that raises the question of whether or not her soul is actually still intact even after being forced to become a ship girl. Does she still have her soul? And is it completely intact despite what her body went through? Or is it damaged? Is it a partial-soul, perhaps? Or did she lose it somewhere along the way, most likely as a direct result of the Moebius Four program? It could even be that !Samidare never had a soul to begin with, because in this world, no one has proven the existence of "souls", as Losira mentions to Damon that there only exists a belief in the existence of souls, called the Soul Theory. In which case, if souls are not even a valid concept in this world, then Shigure probably chose one of the worst attacks with which to try to finish !Samidare off, because despite looking like a very strong attack, her Raging Demon ended up doing absolutely nothing but stall !Samidare for a few moments at best. In fact, in a world where souls do not exist, it wouldn't hurt anyone.
  • Alternately, according to the Street Fighter wiki, another interpretation of the Raging Demon is that when using the attack on someone, the user supposedly transfers himself/herself and his/her victim into hell, where demons come and attack both of them mercilessly, dealing a blow for each of all the sins that they have committed in their lives. There is a definite sense of heaven and hell in this world, if Samidare's and Suzukaze's angelic transformations at Houston are any indication, so the existence of a "hell" of some kind, especially one that only the Shiratsuyu-Class can access with their powers, isn't exactly unreasonable. If this is the case, then Shigure's Raging Demon suddenly becomes one of the best attacks that she could have used against !Samidare, since the latter would undoubtedly have a lot of burdens that she's carrying in her mind. It also bypasses the possibility of the Soul Theory being false, giving Shigure another way to deal damage that doesn't depend on her victim having a soul. But because Shigure is taking blows from those demons from hell too, alongside !Samidare, just how badly damaged would she have gotten because of her own Raging Demon? Recall that when her attack finishes, Shigure is described to be hunched over the body of !Samidare that's lying on the ocean's surface, gasping for breath. Whenever a Raging Demon attack is performed, at the end of it, the user is typically standing with his/her back facing the camera, with whatever kanji represents him/her burning on his/her back, over the bodies of his/her victim, but this isn't what Shigure is doing. She's got the kanji "罪" ("Guilt") blazing on her back and in the air for a short while before they disappear, but she isn't standing; rather, it seems that she's exhausted. At first, it may seem that she's exhausted simply because the Raging Demon is a difficult attack to execute - after all, there are a thousand hits being landed in a very short time. But if this above-mentioned case is true, then Shigure is exhausted for a very different reason, because she's been trying her best to survive all the attacks that her own demons have been beleaguering her with, leaving her vulnerable to a sneak attack by !Samidare that comes in the form of a plasma grenade that blows Shigure's right arm off, and this seems like an attack that Shigure could probably avoid very easily if she'd been at her full strength.
  • But then if the above is to be true, then how did !Samidare survive those attacks from hell? Did she parry all of those attacks? Because it seems highly unlikely that someone like her who's absolutely hellbent on killing her daughter and her nieces would be able to achieve a state of absolute peace in order to ward away those demons. But take into consideration that !Samidare, at the end of the fight at Booneville, chose not to kill them when she very easily could have, just like she did to Yamakaze, but instead beat them to mere inches of their lives so that they could get an idea of the kind of suffering and despair that she and her own sisters experienced being a part of the Moebius Four program. What if !Samidare actually doesn't want to kill them, as unlikely as it is? What if leaving them alive so that they could suffer and come at her next time with more hatred and fury is just a cover-up excuse? And as Sanford pointed out afterwards, !Samidare is a ship girl herself, so she knows that she could have just destroyed Yamakaze's memories by striking her temporal lobes, since a ship girl's memories are perhaps the most important aspect of her identity, why didn't she do it? Perhaps !Samidare is not as hellbent on destroying the second-generation Shiratsuyu-Class as she gives off - she needed to have survived that Raging Demon somehow, and perhaps in order to do so, she was able to come to terms with her past demons and empty her mind of them, implying that she could also come to terms with the second-generation Shiratsuyu-Class, however unlikely.
• when the author released the stat sheet on chapter 169, Damon Polchow, even though he's a human (albeit a mutated one), had bar none the highest level cap out of any single character in the entire story (or out of those listed on the stat sheet) at 999. But with the revelation of the truth behind the Shiratsuyu-Class, all ten of the Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers have since also had their maximum level caps raised to 999, though interestingly they still keep their old maximum level caps of 125. Even though the stat sheet specifically mentions that base stats between human characters and ship girl characters are much different and typically are much greater for the latter, how would level caps be differentiated? If in case level caps are simply an arbitrary measurement of character potential, does this mean that Damon has the same amount of potential as the Shiratsuyu-Class, who are girls intended to be born to be more or less demi-gods?
• in chapter 325, Ushio is seen healing a wounded Italian Army soldier who was injured by fragmentation grenade shrapnel with black flame burning in her hand. The only reason why Ushio would have such a power is because of Losira's presence in her body due to Damon's YRC interaction, not to mention the previous times Losira has taken control of her body to use it as a medium of existing in the real world outside of Damon's personal dreamworld. But Losira has not demonstrated that her Hellflower was capable of healing anything at all; whenever she is seen using her power, the reader gets the sense that nothing about it also suggests the power to heal, with all its destructive potential and nature and all that, yet that is how Ushio is seen using it, which seems like a power contradiction at first. But when you start thinking about Ushio's own interactions with Losira, you begin to realize that Ushio is the one in control, because, after all, it's her own body that Losira is borrowing to exist in the real world. Ushio has already demonstrated back at Baltimore that she can and will wrest control of her own body away from Losira, despite Losira perhaps being an objectively stronger entity than Ushio herself. If she can exert control to such an extent, why couldn't Ushio also influence how she chooses to use Losira's Hellflower ability and use it as she sees fit?
  • this also ties in with the below entry regarding the nature of the ship girls' protocols. While Ushio doesn't have an explicit protocol of her own (at least not yet), in the context of how protocols allow ship girls to produce their own powers through them, it could be entirely possible that Ushio is forcing a non-protocol variation of this with Hellflower, turning its powerful energy thanks to its usually destructive nature into a benign, healing energy capable of restoring human tissue.
• Remember that mutated dog in chapter 187? And remember how Damon, Samidare, and Suzukaze find a puppy with them in the ruins of Houston? What if it's the same dog? And if it is, how was it brought back to life after getting vaporized by Suzukaze? When she used her Six Black Heavens' Guns, Samidare may have destroyed the city, but she did not destroy either Suzukaze or Damon - in fact, she restored Suzukaze back to normal, and Damon, considering how badly mangled and battered his body was at the time, was restored fully as well, despite his fatal wounds. Bringing back a dog who got vaporized by Suzukaze's Darkwater may be a stretch to some people, but considering what Samidare and Suzukaze are supposed to be, it might not be to others. That, and the likelihood of a random dog who simply managed to wander all the way through the ruins of the city to find Damon and the girls from outside the city is comparatively low to the odds of the same dog who was already in the city at the time of its death finding them.
• in chapter 334, Iris and New Jersey reveal as part of their ship loadouts that they wield M61-A3 Vulcan Autocannons. At first, this may seem like modern anachronisms to their otherwise faithful reimaginings of their classic World War II-era weaponry, but the M61 Vulcans are the weapon platform that is a component of the CIWS short-range anti-ship missile defense system. With these Vulcan autocannons, the battleships are pretty much walking and talking Phalanx CIWS's.
• the end of chapter 372. In it, Shigure, in an attempt to save her fleet from the pursuing Abyssal fleet, divides the part of the sea that they're all in with a large wall of Guilt flames, trapping herself on the side with the Abyssal fleet so that the rest of her fleet can have a chance to escape and reach their intended destination of Hawaii with the Australian submarine that's been deployed with them, carrying Australian servicemen and injured ship girls. However, it's not entirely a Heroic Sacrifice: the title's name is called "This I Know", a direct reference to a Killing Floor 2 soundtrack of the same name. And if you listen to the version that has lyrics, particularly the chorus and the extended chorus, the song rather closely describes Shigure's personal, hectic journey in discovering just who she and her sisters really are and what kind of godly (or ungodly) powers they really have, hence her transformation into her demon angel form. Even the artists of the song, "Demon Hunter", perhaps appropriately describes Shigure, depending on your perspective.

Fridge Horror

• As the main page mentions, if Tatsuya and Miyuki's parents didn't manage to flee the Trenton CCPL post prior to the Feds' extermination, they may well be among the bodies piled up in Atlantic City. Not only that, there is implication that either they would have eventually been discovered by Tatsuya had he not met an untimely death, or even worse, that he and Miyuki had consumed their corpses without either knowing it.
• Some of the girls have pretty severe glitches in their programming that do things to their psyche and memories. Okay, one or two might have been slipshod work when working on code complex enough for the subsequent AI to pass as human. But so many, and to a degree that not only resists correction but seems malevolent? You know what they say: Three times is enemy action. This becomes even more suspicious when we see the Abyssal energy in Murasame delete her memories, as well as learn that the Abyssals are derived from the F.L.E.E.T Project and that the Abyssal/Xenolith was infiltrated deeply enough into the Feds to be involved in the abortive second F.L.E.E.T Project (and may have been involved in the first). Put this all together and you get the horrifying implication that the Inner Circle is playing a long game - these are not mere errors, but deliberately introduced into the ship girls by the Inner Circle at the creation stage. If its pets can't beat the ship girls in open combat then it'll just corrupt and subvert them literally from within their very programming.
  • To add on one point that seems to be flying under the radar, now that Damon's Yellow Reality Cancel can grant ship girls their own "unique" and individualized powers (that don't even try to hide the fact that they are all leaning much more towards straight magical than technomancy), all of the ship girls who have gained weapons as a part of their newfound powers (Shikinami with her double-bladed spear, Murakumo's new elemental sword, Mutsuki's scythe, etc.) literally summon them out of thin air to gain access to them. Does this remind you of anything? Let's think back - who else before Damon could summon a weapon out of thin air at will? Shoukaku could - but in her Abyssal form, as Water Demon, when she demonstrates that she can summon her Abyssalized sniper rifle that she used before she was captured out of nowhere. This could mean one of two things: the Abyssals have someone like Damon who also has a similar power to his YRC that can instill powers into the Abyssals, or the Abyssals have a technology that mimics it. Either way, this adds another horrifying connection between the ship girls and Abyssals that in turn adds weight to the Re-Class's words at Cologne that the Abyssals and the ship girls are much more similar than otherwise believed.
  • Here's something to counter the main point: It's revealed that the F.L.E.E.T Project is actually derived from the Abyssals and not the other way around as first thought. The ship girls, as we see them in the fic, are a result of the discovery of AAHW's Abyssal project, which led directly to the creation of Project Moebius Four and the subsequent development of ship girl in order to counter the Abyssal threat. What still stands is the relationship between the two projects, because Navitasium is actually Serenity (The Abyssals' energy source) in purified form.
• Chapter 225 reveals the frankly fucked up things done to the first-generation Shiratsuyu-class as part of F.L.E.E.T, and the fact that Sanford was involved, something he's never told Damon. It casts a pall over everything he's said and done previously in the story. How much is he not telling Damon? How much of what he's told Damon is trustworthy? Even after he supposedly spills the beans in chapter 299, is that anything he's still hiding? And what about the other members of the former SEAL Team Six?
• Chapters 291 and 292 involve the Shiratsuyu-Class facing off against !Samidare for a second time, but this time, they manage to wound her enough to compel her to use her reality marble, Champion of Koprulu. In it, the narration mentions that the reality marble consists of an endless ocean of blood, and around the ship girls float piles of twisted, corroded, and ruined steel, in which ghastly bodies are lying, torn asunder and decaying. Their descriptions match those of the nightmare creatures that Damon faced in Baltimore, when he was trapped in the reality marble there during the Baltimore arc...which implies that if they also show up in !Samidare's reality marble, !Samidare herself would have known what those monsters were. Coupled with the knowledge that Koprulu, in Ambience: Platoon (Moebius Four), is the name of the Abyssal home sector in that story, would that mean that these monsters are also somehow connected to the Abyssals?
• Chapter 299 has Sanford explaining the protocols of the Shiratsuyu-Class in more depth. He explicitly calls them sentient programs because of the way in which they've been designed, being computerized versions of an ancient magic technique that he and his team studied called the Unrestricted Spell method. They develop powers and skills that pertain to their assigned themes independently of their owners, but the girls, with enough motivation and desire, can generate their own powers through their protocols. This means that Shigure's suspicion of her protocol that it feels like a parasite to her is actually spot-on. However, Ayanami, who is also another destroyer with a strong protocol in the form of her Nightmare Protocol, also shares this opinion with Shigure, that she feels that her protocol is sentient too, and she's not a part of the Shiratsuyu-Class...
• Also in chapter 299, when Yamakaze begins freaking out because of how warped the code in her personality codex has become following her ordeal from both her nineteen-year isolation and her captivity under !Samidare's control, Samidare is the one who calms her down...by reciting the same Madness Mantra that Damon was speaking to himself during the story's Baltimore arc. She doesn't just give it a passing mention, either - she recites it word for word. Damon was even thinking three chapters ago about possible connections between him and the ship girls, whether or not there is reason enough to believe that he and the ship girls have more in common than they think due to the three letters. Then is the Genesis Thesis Project that created Damon also somehow tied to the F.L.E.E.T. Project? Maybe to the Moebius Four sub-project specifically? And how many more connections are there between Damon and the ship girls?
  • Chapter 426 gives us some answers or at least additional speculation regarding these connections.
    • 1. The "Frozen Forest" Madness Mantra, known in-universe as Polybius, was confirmed by Sanford as something they added to the Mk1 Shiratsuyus during the Moebius Four project as a sort of "calming measure" while they were undergoing their accelerated pregnancies, and it wouldn't be unusual if this treatment was passed down to their daughters. However, seeing as both Damon and Jeannie have been seen spouting Polybius, there's more to this......
    • 2. Up until this point, the only two connections that Damon and all the Genesis Thesis Project test subjects had with the original FLEET was FLEET dev Kevin Simpson, who also worked on the GT Project, and the use of the Rebirth virus that has originally been used in the Moebius Four Project. While there's still the question of how Simpson, despite not being part of the M4 Project, even knew about the virus and how he got his hands on it, the more pressing concern is the Polybius treatment, as Damon was seen spouting the "Frozen Forest" speech during the Baltimore arc. There's also one more connection, or speculation of a connection, that will be discussed in a later bullet point.
    • 3. Jeannie and the Polybius treatment. Just who in the hell from the original FLEET Project was shanghai'd to work for Blackwood's version of FLEET 2 (Not Lukenstor Corp's version. To stress this again, the incarnation of FLEET 2 after Blackwood hijacked the project for his own use and brought aboard Xenolith/Mr. Abyssal.)? This would be second instance of a leak/defection from the original FLEET Project, doubly so because Polybius was exclusive to the M4 Project.
    • 4. After all this, Benjamin speculates the true purpose of the Genesis Thesis Project: It was not, as previously stated in-story, a project to produce a new breed of rad-resistant humans, but to create a human who had the power to control ship girls!. This is due to confirmation by Jeannie herself that the purpose of Blackwood's FLEET 2 was to create a ship girl who could control other ship girls. Due to the GT Project being deemed a massive failure due to only two test subjects (Damon, and some girl who later died when she was 7), technically surviving the project, Blackwood may have indeed been learning from this failure before re-tooling the concept into FLEET 2.
    • This last point is nearing confirmation. A former GT engineer by the name of Shelepov reveals to Damon that the strain of Rebirth used for the Project had been modified beforehand, via the installation with artificial genetic material. Shelepov suspects that he and some of his fellow engineers were writing a program that was meant to give its host body administrative powers over...something. That something could indeed be shipgirls.
• Recall for a moment the descriptions that the story had given to !Samidare and Sandman. The former is described to be wearing what can only be Shigure's Kai 2 hair ornament, and the latter is wearing what can only be Yuudachi's Kai 2 remodel. How exactly did they get their hands on pieces of Shigure's and Yuudachi's uniforms that don't even exist yet in this world? The immediate and most reasonable conclusion is that the first-generation Shiratsuyu-Class may have already been upgraded to Kai 2...meaning that Kai 2 exists in some way, shape, or form right now in the story. Unless by some insane coincidence Sandman and !Samidare decided to make these for themselves, but what are the chances of that?