Hm. This is an anime blog, maybe I should write about anime once in a while, right? Well I’m enjoying Arpeggio of Blue Steel. I didn’t think I’d care for anthropomorphic moe WWII IJN ships, but it’s actually intriguing how they’ve handled it. There’s a lot of handwaving, but some genuinely interesting parts. It’s not Strike Witches at sea. The ships aren’t actually, well, ships, exactly. Nor is it WWII, redeux. It’s the 21st century, but after we screwed up the climate and the icecaps melted. (Either there was considerably more than 200′ of water trapped in ice, or Japan subsided. That looks like about 500′ over Yokohama.) So there’s worldwide famines and conflicts, and then the Fleet of Fog shows up. They’re automated alien weapons that land in the water and copy existing ships from our history, but with insanely higher weapons technology. For whatever reason, they copy only obsolete ships from a century before and only subs and surface combatants — no carriers. Stats are given in the OP. Yes, we’re looking at one of the mecha tropes, but sometimes the gear can be an important character — anyone remember Gargantia?.
I usually don’t do this, but I’m going to give the central concept the show is built around out first. Without doing so, it’s impossible to differentiate Arpeggio based on the setup — it sounds like Strike Witches. So, final warning, massive spoilers below the fold.
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