Rubenerd

I left Twitter for a few weeks, and it seems half my feed is basically Azur Lane and lamentations on the current decaying state of global politics.

With all of us primed and used to the idea of immunocompromised ship characters, or at the very least willing to suspend disbelief in new and bizarre ways, it makes sense another series would enter the scene to challenge the incumbent Kancolle.

That term was supposed to be anthropomorphised, but it was autocorrected to a somewhat less desirable attribute. I suppose if we’re presupposing the existence of ship girls, the idea that bacteria torpedos could compromise a hull immune system doesn’t sound far fetched.

First, is a term you shouldn’t use to start a sentence. I also didn’t realise that Azur Lane wasn’t even a Japanese mobile game to begin with:

Azur Lane is a Chinese mobile game developed by Shanghai Manjuu & Xiamen Yongshi [..] Upon its release in Japan, this game has become vastly popular; this game began selling its official goods at the 93rd Comiket As of January 12th 2018, the players on Japanese server has boomed to 5 million registrations.

Their heel rudders are what do it for me.

And now for the point of this post. Azur Lane is now doing a collaboration with… wait, I need to explain this too.

See, in addition to series about anthropomorphised war ships, there’s a series of games and an anime revolving around characters who are CPUs, consoles, and networking equipment, who are of course bishoujo. Clara and I made it through the first few anime adaptation episodes before the suspension of disbelief went full Galloping Gertie.

So for a limited time in January 2018, you’ll be able to play ship versions of that Hyperdimension Neptunia series in Azur Lane, of whom Purple Heart is pictured above. So you can mix your post-World War II era ship girls with computer hardware components that now fly with attached…