Fanfic / Kimi No Na Iowa

I have finally remembered you, whom I am about to lose yet again.

Kimi no Na Iowa., otherwise your (name is) Iowa., is a KanColle/Your Name Alternate Universe, Continuation and Fusion Fic cowritten by WarpObscura and max_and_emilytate, with art by Be-ta, Hiroki Ree and Melisaongmiqin.

It is available at Archive Of Our Own, FanFiction.Net, SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity. The AO3 and FF.Net versions are uncensored and contain content that are borderline for SB or SV, albeit nothing explicit.

Warning: Unavoidable Late Arrival Spoilers for your name., its supplementary material - especially Another Side: Earthbound - and the rest of Makoto Shinkai's filmography follow!

A small town girl, dissatisfied with rural life and her miko duties to her family shrine, wishes to become a handsome city boy in her next life. The next morning, her wish comes true in an apparent dream. However, she eventually discovers that it isn't a dream; she has been swapping bodies with him. As they work on improving each others' lives, however, the swapping abruptly stops one day. On a trip into the country to find her, he discovers a shocking truth: She was killed three years ago when a passing comet split off a fragment that crashed into her town. A desperate appeal gives him the chance to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, but circumstances conspire to separate them once more, and it is not till years later that they reunite.

Familiar ground? Wait a moment.

Taki Tachibana and Mitsuha Miyamizu's story ends when they finally reunite on a certain set of stairs. In another universe, though, Uileag Greer and Ayaka Godai will discover that the gods are not done playing with them. Dark forces emerge from the ocean depths to assail mankind, and warships of old return in human form to defend us. An old lesson about how one might encounter something not quite human when the Veil between worlds weakens at twilight ends up hitting a little too close to home when she learns that she is the USS Iowa reborn as flesh and blood, specifically the Pacific: World War II U.S. Navy Shipgirls version thereof.

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This fanfic contains examples of the following:

• A-Team Firing: Without hypertech sensors that take targeting data from shipgirls, conventional weapons are prone to missing abyssals. How much of this is due to the realistic consequences of conventional antiship weapons not being made to target or hit human-sized objects and how much is due to more exotic factors is a source of In-Universe debate.
• Accidental Truth: Due to Ayaka actually being a shipgirl, Morrie's talk early on about her having Past-Life Memories is actually accurate here, even if the context was wrong.
• Adaptational Badass: Shipgirls are already tough cookies in canon, but here they have More Dakka, Teleport Spam and are actual spellcasters. Abyssal encounters are far larger and come with More Dakka themselves, though, so they need it. Demons not only have the superior firepower and toughness to their nominal type as per canon, but also can Step, have Anti-Magic, and destroyers can fire barrages while cruisers have Beehive Barrier. Then there's above even the Demons the abyssal leadership who have the same supernal magic as the shipgirls.
• Adaptation Name Change: All over the place. In addition to the characters themselves, Itomori's Alternate Self is Imamura and Tiamat's is Fafnir.
• Alternate History:
  • Among other things, the small town of Imamura was founded by Japanese migrants to the continental US due to a Schism in the Shirokaze lineage well before the Meiji Restoration. Exactly how far in advance is unknown thanks to the Great Fire of Mayugoro destroying most of the records at the start of the 19th century, but according to what Ichiyo's great-grandmother told her, it at least predates the Thirteen Colonies' Declaration of Independence.
  • Chapter Eight casually mentions the existence of an International Moon Base.
  • There are mentions of Amtrak running High Speed Rail and maglev, with most of Chapter 27 taking place on one of the latter. Real Life America as of 2017 has yet to come up with an answer to the shinkansen. In addition, by 2023, the L0 Series Chūō Shinkansen is already operational, years ahead of Real Life schedule.
• Alternate Universe Fic:
  • Among others, instead of a rural native Japanese girl and an Tokyoite native Japanese boy, Mitsuha and Taki's counterparts Ayaka and Uileag are a rural Japanese American girl and a New Yorker Irish American boy.
  • Whatever Mitsuha was going to write on Taki's hand in canon, here Ayaka was definitely trying to write her name on Uileag's hand.
  • Unlike the roughly 1-month timespan of the swaps in canon, here it's said to have happened for multiple months.
  • Chapter 15 suggests this is also an AU to The Place Promised in Our Early Days, with (Takuya) Shirakawa and Tomizawa being mentioned working at an Aomori-based university on dimensional theory partially pioneered by Tsukinoe. The first successful portal was said to be created in 1996, the year Place Promised's middle school sequences took place.
  • It also does the same with Children Who Chase Lost Voices; the other person who created the theorem they're using is surnamed Watase. Asuna?
  • Chapter 24 starts Weathering With You's involvement in the story by having Uileag's living grandmother be the same one as in WWY.
  • Chapter 33 reveals that Naganami's birth name is Mika Nagamine, meaning she's Mikako from Voices of a Distant Star born a generation early. Takanami explicitly points out her strong reaction to mentions of Saitama Prefecture, Mikako's birthplace.
• Ambiguous Situation: In Chapters 29 and 30, there are various scenes of criminals getting mysteriously caught or killed. An easily-missed line early in Chapter 29 suggests it could be due to shipgirls going Vigilante. Another one in Chapter 31 points to abyssal covert operations. Whichever it is, or both, or neither, has yet to be revealed.
• Americasia: Implied due to the Broad Strokes compliance to Your Name despite the different setting. No one seems to find anything weird about an Italian restaurant with frontage to a busy New York City street having a Japanese culture or the Shirokaze being able to build a new full-sized shrine in 2010s New York City, regardless of earlier acknowledgement that Shinto is fringe outside Japan.
• An Arm and a Leg: Two members of Riptide literally lose an arm and a leg between them in Chapter 33.
• Apocalypse How: The abyssals' official plan - genocide of Japan and the USA - would result in Regional Species Extinction and Planetary Societal Disruption. From a purely numerical point of view, the death of almost 500 million is hardly humanity-endangering, but the cultural, economic and scientific losses would be keenly felt by the rest of the world, to say nothing of the security implications of America's ceasing to exist as world policeman. The addition of the other nations named in the Villain Song in Chapter 31 - Russia, the UK, China, India, and Australia - if they refuse to kowtow to the abyssals and help destroy Japan would raise it to the equivalent of Continental Species Extinction and Planetary Societal Disruption with possible low Collapse. The death of almost 3 billion would still leave half of humanity alive, well more than the minimum viable population needed to avoid inbreeding and genetic drift, but the additional loss in production and technical knowledge from China alone would leave humanity stalled if not outright regressing for years at least while the survivors attempt to adjust to the new normal, to say nothing of adding in the rest. The further addition of those nations the abyssals have also attacked without explicit mention, such as those in Western Europe and Southeast Asia, would merely be an ugly cherry on top.
• Arc Number:
  • Seven:
    • In this universe, Shinkai got his big break with his seventh film.
    • The fact that no Shirokaze woman has given birth to a boy in at least seven generations was one of the hurdles to Mr Greer's approval of Ayaka and Uileag's marriage. Seven generations is also how far back anyone can remember Imamura's history to with certainty, no thanks to Mayugoro.
    • In Chapter 21, Ayaka reflects on how, historically, the Nishimura Fleet came in numbering seven and left only one due in part to the Americans having seven-to-one advantage in escorts.
    • In Chapter 22, each salute is held for seven seconds and seven drops of blood are offered.
  • Nine:
    • As in canon, Ayaka and Uileag only reunited nine years later from her perspective.
    • The abyssal attack takes place on the 81st (9 times 9) anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
    • Ayaka is 27 (9 times 3) when she gets married, and the date is September (the ninth month) 3rd.
  • In Chapter 31, the abyssal supreme commander mentions nine Japanese war crimes in her first listing.
• Arc Words: Just a little more.
• As Long as There Is Evil: In Chapter 31, the abyssal supreme commander outright says "as long as there is one evil remaining" when giving a speech on why they need to be thorough in their genocide of Japan.
• As the Good Book Says...:
  • When Ayaka first sees Uileag after the latter awakens from his coma, she asks him, “What profit you if you save the whole world and lose your soul?!”
  • "Not one sparrow might fall to the ground outside the gods’ care, and all the hairs on our heads are numbered..."
  • "Maybe those who have not seen and yet have believed are blessed..."
  • Mr Jordan mentions that Peter swore not to deny Jesus and failed.
  • Stingray calls Or Energy the mana from Heaven.
  • When thinking about the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, Ayaka reflects on how Imamura's residents had been eager to offer the metaphorical widow's last coins to the reconstruction of the ancestral homeland.
  • On the topic of Willie D, Yorktown asks Ayaka in Chapter 16 if she was doing the right thing or merely what was right in her own eyes.
  • Yorktown also references the question of how many times to forgive your brother.
  • Later on in that chapter on the same issue, Ayaka thinks about the Parable of the Lost Sheep.
  • Biblical quotations come fast and furious whenever Northampton is present.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: In Chapter 17, Yamashiro rants about how no one was willing to take on the complexities of dealing with Yasukuni Shrine and its messy history until the abyssals took it out of mankind's hands.
• Battle in the Rain: The first battle between Uatu and the abyssal raiders near the Bering Sea that Ayaka is present for takes place in a storm.
• Berserk Button:
  • Ayaka finds flippancy towards Shinto customs to be distasteful.
  • Summoned/Manifested shipgirls cannot understand why a Natural Born would not want a relationship with her admiral or closest unattached substitute in the chain of command. Kongou demonstrates this most clearly in Chapter 21.
  • New Jersey, Missouri and Wisconsin are displeased by their depictions in Jane's.
• Big Applesauce: Replacing Tokyo's role in canon, though Tokyo appears separately later on.
• Big Eater: All shipgirls are this, especially after battle. Ayaka is horrified the first time she pigs out after her Reawakening. Unlike most KanColle fic, though, things aren't so bad if no combat has been engaged in; in Chapter 8, Ayaka only adds an additional pizza and serving of dessert for herself, and in Chapter 17, Yamashiro considers a mere six bowls of ramen to be enough. All above average, but well within the realm of human possibility.
• Bilingual Backfire:
  • O'Bannon chews out the rest of Gonzalez in Irish about their lack of reaction to Ayaka accidentally revealing she's Japanese, prompting Ayaka to reply in that same language.
  • In Chapter 26, Uileag reminds Kagami that he is also fluent in Japanese.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Unlike canon where visible injury is usually restricted to Clothing Damage and only very few shipgirls shed blood, here shipgirls are mentioned to be obviously wounded in Chapter Nine when the repair baths are introduced. Ayaka's wounds in Chapter 12 are shown to be quite bad. It goes both ways; footage of Choukai hunting down abyssals explicitly mentions blood flow when she's slashing and stabbing them.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Most shipgirls seek the marital hand of an admiral, but being incarnate ship spirits and having had many men inside themselves previously, they see absolutely nothing wrong with sexual promiscuity on the way there. Those that take issue with promiscuity, like West Virginia, are considered weird. As a Natural Born - someone who was born as an apparently human baby, grew up thinking herself to be human, and only Reawakened to her true nature later in life, as opposed to the Summoned or Manifested who came back directly from the supernal realms - Ayaka gets grilled by her sisters for preemptively settling for Uileag, a mere junior officer, instead of only taking one as a consolation prize. She doesn't understand why they have issues with that. She also comes to learn that all shipgirls have a Ship within themselves, an amoral entity somewhere between Evil Within and Heroic Safe Mode that is only concerned with self-preservation and elimination of targets and does not understand human morality, and semen is the most powerful and satiating source and catalyst of the magical energy powering shipgirls, which is why most shipgirls have such voracious sex drives.
• Book Ends: Chapter 17 begins with Ayaka thinking that the situations made it almost possible to forget one was on a mission of war rather than a government-funded vacation. It ends with her thinking that it was easy enough to remember she was on a mission of war rather than a government-funded vacation.
• Brick Joke:
  • Early on in Chapter 17, Ayaka expresses the desire not to see any cosplayers of herself. The chapter ends with her being grateful that she never did.
  • In Chapter 3, Mrs Greer tells Mr Greer that Ayaka and Uileag aren't going to do naughty things while the backs of the family are turned. In Chapter 26, Ciarán tells them they have permission to do naughty things while the family's backs are turned.
  • In Chapter 23, Ayaka lies down, tries not to panic and loses control of the situation. In Chapter 26, she insists she's in control of the situation.
• Broad Strokes: Despite the different geographical locations, the original events of your name. otherwise happened near-identically to canon.
• Casual High Drop: Shipgirls have no problems dropping from height into water unscathed. Zig-zagged in Chapter 5, where Gonzalez Team exit their Skyranger "only" at sea skimming height, but without it slowing from supersonic speed, which wouldn't be possible for normal humans to survive.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Chapter 6 briefly mentions that "Mr Solomon" was amused by the existence of Skyrangers and real Alien Hunters.
  • Chapter 9 reveals that Makoto Shinkai exists in this universe, though he never succeeded in turning If I’d Known It Was a Dream into your name., with his sixth movie remaining a cult hit and his seventh being Keit-Ai instead of Weathering With You.
  • In that same chapter, Alice remarks that Ayaka sounds like one of the voice actresses that's worked with Shinkai. No prizes for guessing who.
  • In canon, the Itomori Disaster is a clear proxy for the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, and several shots are composed near-identically to post-disaster photos of the real thing. Chapter 9 has Ayaka mention the Great Earthquake. In Chapter 13, as their convoy is going down the waters east of Japan, Ayaka has one of her scout planes overfly the Tohoku region and she reflects on how the KnNIverse Tohoku region also suffered from the Great Earthquake.
  • In Chapter 17 Ayaka stops to gawk at Café La Bohème, the real-world basis for Il Giardino delle Parole, pointing out the uncanny similarities.
  • In Chapter 24, Alice says that she believes there is still something love can do, quoting a line from RADWIMPS's song of the same name.
• Close-Range Combatant: A number of shipgirls, including all of Uatu Two and J-DesRon Two "Riptide"'s members, favour entering melee despite the availability of their naval cannon.
• Common Crossover: Freely draws character designs from various shipgirl works: Azur Lane, KanColle canon, Pacific: World War II U.S. Navy Shipgirls and Warship Girls.
• Continuity Porn: Call Backs to the events of your name. are everywhere once they start appearing.
• Continuation Fic:
  • Continues on from the ending of your name., starting months after the reunion on the stairs.
  • Also follows from The Garden of Words, as Chapter 17 reveals that this universe's Alternate Self of Yukari Yukino had married the alternate of Takao Akizuki sometime during the Time Skip up to the final portion of your name.
• Cover-Blowing Superpower: Inverted; swapping into Ayaka's body had given Uileag her command of Japanese while she had gotten his grasp of Irish, which helped them maintain a very thin illusion of normalcy that would otherwise have completely shattered had they stayed illiterate.
• Cryptic Background Reference:
  • There are scattered references to an "End of Terror" that happened in the past, recent enough that various older characters have fought in it, but far enough away that Ayaka has little personal experience.
  • Who is Yamata and why is he cursed so?
• Curse Cut Short: Chapter 12's narration expresses the hope that the abyssal submarines about to get depth charged had this sort of thought regarding their imminent fate.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In Chapter 33, Northampton deduces that Naganami is a Natural Born because her old kendō training constrains her from using Steps the way a real Summoned/Manifested shipgirl would.
• Deadly Lunge: One of the rotes Stingray teaches in Chapter Nine lets a shipgirl close to strike a target at Super-Speed. The abyssal leadership can do their own.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Willie D being The Millstone is not Played for Laughs, but instead has led to her becoming The Friend Nobody Likes. Furthermore, she knows she's a burden who brings harm to her comrades, and the guilt has led to her developing suicidal ideation.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Takanami is held by Naganami as she dies in Chapter 33.
• Disappears into Light: Takanami dissolves into Cherry Blossoms in Chapter 33 in a manner that the notes for the attached art state is directly in reference to Your Lie in April.
• Dissonant Serenity: In Chapter 12, Ayaka notes how chilling it is for Hammann to in a matter-of-fact, utterly without malice manner hope that the William D. Porter problem sorts itself out.
• Dramatic Drop: Ayaka drops her phone after she learns about Uileag getting hurt on the New Date of Infamy.
• Dramatic Irony: In Chapter Two, Ciarán recounts what Ayaka-in-Uileag did to her, she not having regained those memories yet.
• Dynamic Entry: In Chapter 32, Northampton makes her appearance by ambushing Takanami.
• Earth Is a Battlefield: Abyssals have attacked almost everywhere on Earth, although countries without major participation in World War II "only" got their ports and navies destroyed.
• Easy Logistics: Averted as the difficulty mankind has in producing enough hypertech, or conventional supplies for that matter, to be useful is constantly reiterated. One of the shipgirls' main advantages is that for all that their Big Eater requirements means they eat much more than a muggle, it's still much easier to supply a shipgirl than an equivalent steel hull.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: Justified in Chapter 17. When looking at Yamashiro's proposed itinerary for their visit to Tokyo, Ayaka notes that it's something of a greatest hits given the limited time they have on shore leave. That said, the chapter also averts it by clearly mentioning that they enter Tokyo at Shinagawa and a later part bringing up the Shitamachi areas of old Edo, both of which are fairly obscure to the average gaijin.
• Empathy Doll Shot: In Chapter 22, RDML Abel recalls how her sister's doll was the only thing that could be found of her after the first abyssal attacks.
• Enemy Within: The Ship, the primal instinct of warship attached to all shipgirls, is not outright evil, but it is amorally focused on destroying the targets and remaining combat-ready afterwards. To that end, it will attempt to take over in times of untenable situation where flight is necessary, overwhelming anger, or when the shipgirl is neglecting her manpower requirements.
• Establishing Series Moment: The first chapter makes clear that magic and the fantastic are going to be more prominent parts of the story than in most other KanColle fanfic and should serve as clear warning to anyone who doesn't like their KanColle in this flavour.
• Ethical Slut: A shipgirl functions most optimally when supplied with chiminage to turn into vitae, of which reproductive fluids are the most efficient. The Ship spurs her on to seek them out through the obvious method. That said, they will only do it with the consenting and single.
• Extreme Libido: Ayaka finds herself struggling with unwanted nymphomaniac desires after her Reawakening. It turns out the Ship spurs on this behaviour to maintain the host shipgirl's power to fight.
• Everything Is Big in Texas: In Chapter Nine, when Ayaka sees that the repair "bath" at JB MDL is actually a pool big enough to swim in, she wonders if a Texan designed it.
• Eye Scream: In Chapter 20 frenzying West Virginia stabs a Ri through the eye with the end of its own jaw and gouges out the eye of an abyssal destroyer.
• Flash Sideways: In Chapter Four, one of the memories Ayaka regains is that of what happened in the Alternate Timeline where she and 500 of Imamura's inhabitants were killed by Fafnir's fall.
• Flash Step: Called "Stepping", it is available to all shipgirls, though it is more like a teleport as it ignores physical obstructions.
• Fog of Doom: In Chapter 10, it is mentioned that the Bering Sea has been covered in some kind of fog that resists sensors, making bombardment of whatever abyssal bases are within impractical. Chapter 18 shows that it is also present at other abyssal-occupied locations like in the South China Sea, though the Chinese have been using thermobaric warheads to disperse it.
• Foreign Queasine: In Chapter 14, Maya expresses disgust at Takao's love for a smelly green spiky fruit.^note Implied to be durian, presumably picked up during the latter's end-war stay in Singapore.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Chapter Three, the mysterious voice says that "some might take issue with your present model." True enough, there are American shipgirls who are racist against Japanese.
  • In Chapter Eight, Uileag is briefly mentioned to be tightly holding onto something, which is later revealed to be an engagement ring.
  • In Chapter 11, Willie says she doesn't want to hurt Ayaka/Iowa again. The next chapter, Ayaka does indeed get hurt saving her.
  • At the end of Chapter 15, Maya thinks that the risk of Frenzy at the wrong time is high with a certain bunch of "repressed weirdos". True enough, the next chapter, Ayaka struggles with that, and Chapter 20 has West Virginia succumb. The animalistic primal aspects of Frenzy are also hinted at in Chapters 16 and 17 before they first appear in full later.
  • In Chapter 16, Ayaka says that she hasn't noticed any new instincts from becoming a shipgirl. It turns out they haven't become apparent yet. There are also repeated mentions of her struggling with unwanted salacious thoughts.
  • In Chapter 17, Ayaka thinks there is a proper time and place for her salacious desires regarding Uileag. Come Chapter 27, she ends up Making Love in All the Wrong Places.
  • There are a number of hints pointing to the coming of Northampton and the Second Battle of Tassafaronga:
    • The references in Chapter 31 to "Nora", a historical nickname of the ship in question.
    • The abyssal in question wearing a "strangely familiar" outfit, the description of which is a match for her sister Augusta's.
    • Augusta waking from a nightmare at the end of Chapter 31.
    • Chapter 32 taking place on 30 November, the same date as the First Battle of Tassafaronga.
    • Takanami sighting Savo Island at 2140 hours.
    • Naganami noticing Suzukaze's absence from J-DesRon Two, which is an otherwise almost identical match for Raizo Tanaka's Destroyer Squadron Two.
    • The unit passing south of Savo Island about 3 miles from Guadalcanal at 2240 hours.
    • Naganami noticing that the last time she had been in the vicinity, it had been to drop off drums.
    • Takanami spotting something half an hour later and being the first to do so.
  • There are a number of hints pointing to Naganami being a Natural Born, and specifically Mikako's Alternate Self:
    • Ayaka has a vision of the bus stop scene when they first meet in Chapter 13.
    • The design of the character in question's rigging.
    • Ayaka noticing that her kendō garb is older than it should be.
    • The character in question mentioning in Chapter 20 another character having given a lecture that none of the Summoned/Manifested characters remember having attended.
    • The character having a strange reaction to a certain phonecall in Chapter 29, and the vision her companion in that scene gets of Mikako's middle school uniform.
    • Another character in Chapter 30 noticing that this character shows a strange shortage of Step usage.
• Four Is Death: In Chapter 33, it is on the fourth attack of each combo Northampton makes that she creates an opening in Naganami's defence.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Ayaka gives Uileag this as a sign of her displeasure in Chapter Three.
• Fully Automatic Clip Show: Ayaka regaining her memories of the events of your name. is represented as a textual version of this, a rapid chain of quick flashbacks.
• Funbag Airbag:
  • During their meeting on the train back in 2013, Uileag accidentally falls facefirst into Ayaka's breasts when the train ride gets bumpy.
  • In Chapter 10, Ayaka's catch of a falling Willie is implied to result in this happening.
• Fusion Fic: An alternate universe's your name. events happened in the backstory, and it is this world that the abyssals attack and the shipgirls return to defend.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • China resorted to the Nuclear Option to fend off the initial abyssal assault.
  • The Filipino resistance resorts to, among others, questionably legal if not outright illegal drugs and stimulants and other unspecified methods in their fight against the abyssals invading their country.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Ayaka and Kagami's middle names. Lampshade hung in Chapter One, where Uileag recounts that Ayaka wasn't sure why it was there.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Outright mentioned as such in Chapter 20.
• Gunship Rescue: Subverted in Chapters 32 and 33. Faced with Northampton's impalement of Takanami, Naganami calls in fire support from the Chinese bombers on overwatch. The attacker proceeds to Teleport Spam her way around the incoming missiles and then use Judgment Cuts to slice both bombers in half, killing all but one of the aircrew. Later on, additional fire support is deployed from Australian F-35s firing antiship missiles, and both the Demons and Northampton dodge the missiles before the latter tries to Judgment Cut them as well. Naganami ends up having to save the saviors, and for her troubles she gets punched into a missile meant for Northampton.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: In Chapter 33, Takanami's Last Breath Bullet cuts her attempted killer and minions thereof in two.
• Happy Ending Override: The two leads reunited at the stairs... and months later, the abyssals ruin everything.
• Heritage Disconnect: Inverted in that Imamura's traditionalism and insularity from the wider America means Ayaka is fully in touch with her roots; Japanese shipgirls are surprised by her cultural and linguistic abilities, joking about her secretly being one of theirs, and a friend of Nakahara's doesn't notice anything wrong when she uses a cover story of having come down from Gifu. Also discussed with both Japanese characters and older ex-Imamurans showing disdain towards yonsei and other subsequent-generation Japanese Americans who have lost their way.
• Hero of Another Story: Various other units like the JMSDF's KanFlot Six, the Marina Militare's Spatha or Royal Australian Navy's Seventh Enlightened Shock Flotilla get mentioned from time to time as reminders that Earth Is a Battlefield and the war extends beyond Ayaka's narrow perspective.
• Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: In Chapter 19, a railgun-fired battleship shell is described as having a yield measurable in Tomahawk cruise missiles.
• History Repeats:
  • The abyssal supreme commander begins the attacks by, amongst others, attacking Pearl Harbor on the 81st anniversary of the original Date of Infamy using a similar phrase to that which Yamamoto did.
  • Alluded to in Chapter Four with Iowa using Santayana's famous “Those who cannot remember the past may be condemned to repeat it" line.
  • In Chapters 32 and 33, this is invoked by the abyssals when Northampton reenacts the Battle of Tassafaronga, leading a force with the same composition as last time against almost the same Japanese squadron on the anniversary of the original and once again resulting in the loss of Takanami.
• Homage:
  • In Chapter Three, Ayaka's Reawakening is presaged by an unknown voice giving an adapted take on the G-Man's "wake up and smell the ashes" speech. An extract also appears for Missouri's summoning in Chapter 22, implying it happens to both Summoned and Natural Born alike.
  • In Chapter 20, West Virginia going berserk is modelled after a Glory Kill rampage.
  • In Chapter 24, Ayaka reenacts the V-J Day in Times Square kiss on Uileag.
  • In Chapter 25, the conversation Adams had with his estranged son that he has flashbacks to is appropriately adapted from the one the Adama father and son had in the Battlestar Galactica (2003) miniseries.
  • A few early beats are similar to Belated Battleships: The protagonist, an Iowa-class battleship, first encounters a proper military base at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. She gets assigned to Naval Station Everett as part of convoy escort operations to Japan, which take her to the Yokosuka base, but not before getting attacked in the Bering Strait. One of the first things she does when leaving that base on shore leave is accompany a Japanese battleship to Tokyo. She later takes part in combat operations in the South China Sea.
  • Chapter 31:
    • One of the inspirations for the abyssal supreme commander's speech, as directly admitted by the authors, is John Basilone's "Jap Speech" from The Pacific.
    • The Villain Song near the end is adapted from "From Now On" from The Greatest Showman.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday:
  • The abyssals begin their attack on mankind on the 81st anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks.
  • The events that lead to Ayaka's Reawakening take place on the anniversary of the 1989 turret explosion.
  • The first attack led by an abyssal leader takes place on the anniversary of the Battle of Tassafaronga.
• Human Weapon: Defied. In Chapter Seven, Ayaka expresses her concern about having to reassure the public that shipgirls are not monsters, which prompts hitherto placid Cecil to explode into a rant about how no shipgirl is going to be dehumanised.
• I Have This Friend: In Chapter 20, Ayaka explains why she chose to save Willie by telling the story of a girl from the countryside who experienced body-switching with a city boy.
• If It Bleeds, It Leads: One of the gripes of various characters is that the greater world quickly forgot about Imamura's troubles because a small town in the middle of nowhere disappearing due to a fatality-free disaster just doesn't get media attention. One mention outright states "no bleeding so it’s not surprising that it didn’t lead".
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!: In Chapter 17, Albacore once expressed this desire regarding a Saratoga cosplayer.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
  • In “Choukai Cuts all the Carriers (Volume 2)" as depicted in Chapter 15, Choukai pulls a Vlad Tepes on a Wo with its own staff.
  • In Chapter 32, Northampton impales Takanami on her saber.
• In-Series Nickname:
  • Yuubari is called Melon.
  • Shipgirls sometimes call normal humans "frails".
  • A less polite term for Natural Borns is "exhuman".
• Instant Expert:
  • As mentioned in Chapter Seven, aviator fairies can easily jump between plane types without needing extensive qualification. This is a Mythology Gag referring to how the game lets you swap plane assignments at will and is likened In-Universe to Ace Combat.
  • Averted for shipgirls, however. They have some instinctual grasp of doing what they do, which was enough for the Manifested in the earliest days to get by or for a Natural Born to survive whatever situation prompted her Reawakening, but anything more complex like spellcasting requires deliberate training.
• Interservice Rivalry: In Chapter 12, Princeton says they won't be defeated simply because of the USAF's difficulty operating in bad weather.
• Ironic Echo: In Chapter 31, the abyssal supreme commander says that they must do "whatever it takes" to destroy their foes and that they have a vision of what the world could be. In Chapter 33, Takanami says that shipgirls must defend humanity whatever it takes and that they exist not to impose their vision of the world but to defend what is.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: In Chapter 32, before Northampton begins the ambush on J-DesRon Two, Naganami notices that abyssal radio traffic isn't increasing like it ought to considering there's an ongoing battle nearby.
• Jeanne d'Archétype: In Chapter 21, Augusta recounts the tale of Zirgzar, a legendary hero struck down by her own side on the brink of victory.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: In Chapter 27, Uileag attempts to dive into Ayaka's mind to confront the Ship over its pushing her into nymphomania. Her Mental World turns out to look like her ship previous life, with her fairies looking like full-sized but strangely blurry people, and the Ship turns out to be, well, the ship. Questionably sapient and certainly not negotiable with.
• Kimono Fanservice: Augusta and Ayaka wear yukata during Tanabata celebrations in Chapter 21. A blend of both types also appears during Ayaka and Uileag's Shinto-style wedding ceremony. Uileag's kimono/hakama/haori set is a simple monochrome, but Ayaka's shiromuku is a complicated multi-part white with red lining. Akagi, Alice, Kaga and Missouri wear more colourful and elaborately-designed furisode, as does Ayaka after the ceremony is over and she's off to the reception. Ayaka explicitly points out how odd it is to see Missouri wear more than minimal clothing.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Once the Call Backs to your name. start, no effort is made to spoiler said events.
• Layman's Terms: After offering the technical explanation for Gun Kata when Essex uses it in chapter 12, the narration promptly offers a TL;DR:
  Like doing the robot but with more murder.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Chapter 12 briefly mentions the abyssals rolling enough successes to get through the shipgirls' air defence, as if the fight was being decided by tabletop gaming.
• Magitek: Called "hypertech", it is described as seeking to bridge the gap between what mundane technology can do and shipgirls can.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: In Chapter 27 it is implied Ayaka and Uileag have sex on a train, as well as that she's looked for him at lunchtime at the base.
• Man, I Feel Like a Woman: After regaining their memories, Ayaka and Uileag sometimes trade jabs about having carried out "hardware diagnostics" while in each other's bodies. The authors' notes explain away the lack of such onscreen in canon by noting that any such experimentation would have required an R-rating.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • In Chapter 4, Nijimi wonders how much of the wisdom she had was naturally her own and how much was unconsciously drawing on the Truth of the supernal.
  • In Chapter 13, Ayaka wonders whether Imamura's inhabitants giving up on the town and dispersing after the Cometfall, unlike how the people of the afflicted Tohoku towns stayed to rebuild, really was for entirely human reasons or if there were also arcane reasons behind it.
• Meaningful Echo: In Chapter 4, Iowa says "did you know" to Ayaka about the number of ships there were supposed to have been in her class. In Chapter 21, Yamashiro says a very similar thing.
• Monumental Damage: Chapter 17 reveals that the Tokyo Tower was destroyed by abyssal attack, though the Imperial Palace, Mori Tower and Shinjuku Gyoen inexplicably were not.
• More Dakka: The game's Anti-Air Cut-In and Artillery Spotting mechanics are reinterpreted as temporarily and greatly boosting the user's rate of fire.
• Mundane Made Awesome: In Chapter 26, Ayaka harvesting from Uileag through the proper channel is accompanied by the triumphant choral strains of "Fireworks Festival" from Weathering.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In Chapter Four, we learn that "Mitsuha" was one of the names Ayaka's parents had been considering for her.
  • Also in that chapter, a character speculates about universes where shipgirls don't have additional magic powers beyond their existence.
  • Activating Artillery Spotting comes with holographic "banners" of a scout plane and the main guns in use appearing behind the shipgirl doing so, similar to how it is ingame.
  • Chapter Five talks about leading off an attack with land-based bombers before using naval aviation and then reaching shelling range, referring to the game's order of combat phases.
  • Quincy says that Albacore and O'Bannon look like sisters. Both their WSG incarnations, which are used here, were drawn by Saru.
  • In Chapter Six, Iowa expresses confusion at the idea of discussing corn production with Khrushchev, something that happens in Pacific.
  • Failure Penguin and Miss Cloud appear as a result of failed hypertech experiments, as mentioned in Chapter Seven.
  • The crack Ayaka makes in Chapter Eight about Hitomi possibly being a Natural Born comes from a joke the authors once made about how the new design for Pacific!Yorktown looks like Sayaka.
  • In Chapter Nine, Alice says that one of Shinkai's talents is his ability to bring out "the sorrowful gust of wind that blows between you and me", a line from "Nandemonaiya".
  • In Chapter 12, the Type 3 Shell is said to have been made actually useful by a pair of Japanese engineers surnamed Tanaka and Inoue^note As in Kensuke Tanaka, KanColle's creator, and Shinichiro Inoue, the executive producer on the anime.
  • In Chapter 15, it's mentioned that Yokosuka only has two of its four summoning chambers open for use, referring to how the game requires you to unlock the third and fourth with real money.
  • Also in Chapter 15, Maya mentions the Unlucky Tea Ceremony when talking about the Fusous, as they were such in Fubuki, Ganbarimasu!
  • In Chapter 16, Ayaka mentions how she had somehow had the impression that Yorktown would be petite when the opposite is the case, referring to how the Pacific designs for the Yorktowns have them as such in contrast with the considerable length of their hulls.
  • Chapter 17:
    • Ayaka has a feeling that her first sight of Tokyo should have been getting off the shinkansen from a western part of Japan, as Mitsuha had.
    • Ayaka recalls that when she and Gonzalez Team went to a mall, they encountered a small Saratoga cosplayer who had pink hair under her wig, a floppy flight deck and magical girl-style gestures, referring to the Azur Lane incarnation of Saratoga.
    • Ayaka also recalls that she used to patronise a cafe called Votre Nom. This is French for Your Name, just as Il Giardino delle Parole is Italian for Garden of Words.
    • The brief tour of Tokyo Yamashiro takes Ayaka on includes stops at the National Art Center and Mori Tower, places that Taki and Miki visited during their date.
  • In Chapter 18, Ayaka notes that Ning Hai and Ping Hai inexplicably look a bit like O'Bannon, because they too are Saru's designs.
  • Also in Chapter 18, Ayaka briefly sees visions of Akagi and Kaga's Warship Girls and Azur Lane incarnations as well as Ning Hai and Ping Hai's Azur Lane incarnations. Akagi and Kaga end up wearing adapted versions of their AL counterparts' outfits for Ayaka and Uileag's wedding in Chapter 24.
  • In Chapter 20, Willie says "Iowa ga most volleyball player!"
  • Yamashiro makes reference to the Gosei in Chapter 21. They were Arc Words for the KanColle anime.
  • Chapter 22:
    • The summoning ritual for a Large Day involves the offering of 4,000 fuel, 6,000 ammo, 6,000 steel and 3,000 bauxite. Primaries will recognise this as a Large Scale Construction recipe, and one for summoning Yamato (a common target of comparison against the Iowas) at that.
    • The speech Missouri gives on her return is adapted from The odd one out.
  • In Chapter 23, Missouri and Quincy make reference to Azur Lane's Affection system.
  • Chapter 24:
    • Ayaka and Makiko recount how Uileag had an obsession with creating memorable landscapes as one never knows when his hometown might disappear, and Ayaka talks about Kas and Shin joking that he'd never get an interview that way.
    • Uileag's grandmother, like her canonical counterpart, is peculiarly interested in her city's history, gives Ayaka a choco pie like was given to Hodaka, and stays in an antique house where a much, much newer skyscraper can be seen from the backyard.
    • Woven in among the lines of Ayaka and Uileag's wedding vows are adapted versions of those from AL's wedding certificate.
  • In Chapter 26, Charles Ausburne laughs at the idea of being limited to 31 knots, a jab at her "31-knot Burke" skill in AL.
  • Chapter 29's uncensored versions start with a variant of the "Every morning when I wake up" line that the film starts with.
  • Chapter 30:
    • Tabata Station is visited.
    • CMC Special Task and Evaluation, CSTE, is a clear nod to Pacific's canonical Special Task and Evaluation Command (STEC).
  • Chapter 31:
    • The abyssal supreme commander says that “A world subsumed by the N!p nightfall would be like the month of August without summer break or Santa Claus without any glee...^note From the lyrics of Nandemonaiya and there will be no more blue sky."
    • Part of the abyssal supreme commander's speech is inspired by similar content from Pacific canon.
  • In Chapter 33, some of Takanami's last words come from her in-game sinking lines.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The unnamed kannushi of Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America that appears in Chapter 24, with his conducting misogi shuho in the Pilchuck River and decades of aikido experience, is implied to be the shrine's actual Real Life kannushi Rev Lawrence Koichi Barrish, who is thanked at the start of the chapter, but this is never made explicit.
• No Periods, Period: Averted in Chapter 29, where Uileag notices Ayaka's strange reaction to her menstrual blood.
• Non-Fatal Explosions: In Chapter One, Uileag gets knocked unconscious by abyssal bombs, gets back up and manages to lead multiple rescue expeditions before a second bomb sends him Blown Across The Room, admittedly this time with internal injuries that eventually leave him in a month-long coma. Lampshaded by a Corpsman remarking on how lucky he must have been.
• Nuclear Option: Chapter 18 establishes that China resorted to nukes to destroy their abyssal attackers during the Week of Blood after the attackers present in the Yellow Sea razed not just coastal habitations but also penetrated deeply inland enough to destroy parts of Beijing, fatally wounding their then-president in the process.
• Offscreen Afterlife: Nijimi is unable to give any concrete details on what happens after death.
• Overcome with Desire: Ayaka expresses a voracious libido after marriage, and Uileag is worried about whether it's naturally part of being Insatiable Newlyweds or the fault of her shipgirl nature's needs.
• Past-Life Memories: Played with. Steel hulls are explicitly said to not be sapient, and what shipgirls remember of their previous lives is an imperfect composite of sensor data, recorded logs and their crewmembers' memories.
• Point Defenseless: Averted; both abyssals and shipgirls regularly swat missiles and shells out of the air with their anti-air fire.
• Power High: Shipgirls find using vitae a pleasurable experience.
• Pun-Based Title: It is a play on the "Wa" in both Kimi no Na Wa and "Iowa".
• Punched Across the Room: In Chapter 31 Charles Ausburne sends abyssals flying with her attacks.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • Chapter Four briefly shows how Ayaka persuaded Yoshimichi to get Imamura evacuated, which includes reminding him that if he refused, "the deaths of more than 500 people will be on. Your. Head."
  • In Chapter 28, Missouri calls the supernal phenomenon over the sacred body a "Giant. Fucking. Tower of Babel".
• Questionable Consent: In Chapter 23, Ichiyo wonders aloud about how many of the men having sex with shipgirls genuinely consent to it and how many are compelled by the superhuman allure of their would-be partners into accepting.
• Rage Breaking Point: In Chapter 33, Naganami burning Northampton's sword arm before the latter can cut down the Australian reinforcements causes the latter's usual icy Tranquil Fury to crack wtih viciousness, which she demonstrates by using her bare hands for the first and only time in the fight to punch the former into the path of an incoming missile.
• A Rare Sentence: Mentioned in almost as many words by RDML Abel in Chapter 10 regarding the Chinese providing fire support to Japanese forces.
• Reincarnation: Contrasting the Summoned shipgirls that were deliberately recalled from the afterlife and the Manifested who spontaneously returned to defend humanity, the Natural Born shipgirls were born to human mothers and grew up believing themselves to be such until some event prompted their Reawakening into their true natures. The original ship having been sunk is unnecessary; in Chapter 10, CAPT Zelben clearly mentions Iowa's old hull as still being at San Diego while briefing the shipgirl.
• Remember the Alamo:
  • In Chapter 19, General Shi calls on the VALKYRIE attackers to remember Kokura, Los Angeles and Tianjin.
  • In Chapter 31, the abyssal supreme commander lists out Japanese war crimes and the victims thereof when giving a speech to her cadre about why they must be genocided.
• Required Secondary Powers:
  • Shipgirls explicitly benefit from No Conservation of Energy because they always have a link to the supernal powering them at all times, which eating helps catalyse. They might be Big Eaters but, as mentioned in Chapter Nine, no one is eating a few hundred people's worth of food.
  • In Chapter 19, Yorktown contemplates the difficulties of making practical railguns and how Harumi's spell let them skip all that.
  • Also in that chapter, she contemplates how the railguns give them far greater range than they have the radar reach to use it. For shore bombardment they can get around it by extrapolating from video footage of the target location, but it's no good for air defence.
  • In Chapter 26, Ayaka recalls how there had been concerns that the conventional ships might not be able to take the stresses of operating weapons while moving at several times their as designed top speeds. Her acceleration spell also lets her ignore the hydrodynamic issues like cavitation that would normally come up with watercraft moving at over 100 knots.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Chapter 16 reveals its date of writing by how one of the natural disasters Ayaka mentions is the Chūgoku and Kansai floods of 2018.
• Running Gag:
  • Ayaka being called a giant beanstalk.
  • CLOSE RANGE (ALLCAPS actually in the text)
  • People saying Ayaka is not what they expected Iowa to look like.
• See the Whites of Their Eyes: Averted; with the exception of the Close Range Combatants that invoke this, everyone else fights at beyond visual range distances.
• Self-Deprecation: In Chapter Nine, Alice remarks that one doesn't watch Makoto Shinkai's work for intellectual rigour.
• Shocking Defeat Legacy: The Blood Week or Week of Blood started by the simultaneous abyssal attack all across the world caused great damage and death, including the deaths of RDML Abel's sister as well as that of RADM Adams's ex-wife, Uileag being in a coma for a month and the loss of Pearl Harbor, before the first shipgirls returned to defend humanity. While the latter has been reclaimed offscreen by the time Ayaka Reawakens four months later, the effects continue to be reverberate.
• Shoot the Bullet: In “Choukai Cuts all the Carriers (Volume 2)", Choukai sets off a Nu's shells by throwing torpedoes at them.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The train routes Ayaka and Yamashiro take in Tokyo in Chapter 17 are very much replicable in reality.
  • Chapter 24 covers a Shinto shinzen kekkon shiki in great detail as learnt through consulting actual priests, including the actual kannushi of Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America whose shrine said wedding ceremony is conducted at.
• Shrine to the Fallen: The Shirokaze family maintain one to Nijimi.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Northampton's method of fighting Naganami in Chapter 33, boiled down to the basics, is merely to keep her off-balance by continually repositioning for In the Back attacks. Despite the flair inherent to Teleport Spam, it's not a complicated plan at all, and it works.
• Sins of Our Fathers: The abyssals seek to punish Japan, the USA and other parties to the Pacific Theatre of World War II for their wartime conduct.
• Slashed Throat: Choukai did this to a Wo in “Choukai Cuts all the Carriers (Volume 2)".
• Something Only They Would Say: Nijimi assures Ayaka that she is the real deal by telling her of something only they could have known.
• Sorry That I'm Dying:
  • In Chapter One, as Uileag thinks he's dying of his injuries, he tells Curtis to pass his apologies along to Ayaka.
  • In Chapter 33, Takanami's last words are "osaki ni shitsureishimasu", a common Japanese expression of begging to be excused for leaving first.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • In Chapter 15, “Choukai Cuts all the Carriers (Volume 2)" is set to Offenbach's Can Can, in contrast to its ultraviolent content.
  • In Chapter 31, the abyssal supreme commander's genocidal speech is set to the heroic strains of The Avengers (2012)'s theme.
• Spiritual Antithesis:
  • A few early beats are similar to Belated Battleships: The protagonist, an Iowa-class battleship, first encounters a proper military base at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. She gets assigned to Naval Station Everett as part of convoy escort operations to Japan, which take her to the Yokosuka base, but not before getting attacked in the Bering Strait. One of the first things she does when leaving that base on shore leave is accompany a Japanese battleship to Tokyo. Both stories' protagonists also struggle with the question of humanity. However, the works contrast greatly otherwise. That story has the abyssals be twisted actual ships, only few of which have humanoid avatars; this one has them follow canon's xenomorphic creature designs. That story has Jersey be the first American to return; this one has Ayaka slotting into an already-populated USN shipgirl command. That story goes out of its way to limit the presence of carriers, even having a certain convertee revert to her original type in order to return; this one has no such issue. Jersey is a Phenotype Stereotype Eaglelander who is outwardly boisterous but secretly insecure and struggles with being a ship turned human and her relationships; Ayaka is raven-haired, scarlet-eyed Mukokuseki Japanese-blooded, normally quiet but open with her issues, struggles with learning she never really was human and starts out in a committed relationship.
  • To its source material, ironically enough. In Pacific, the abyssals first attacked in the 1950s, but mankind has been in a shadow war with them and The Masquerade is in place. Here, the abyssals attack in the 2020s and mankind wages open war against them. In Pacific, the abyssals have alien motivations, such that Word of God states that any abyssal that tries to take on the human mindset no longer counts as one. Here, the abyssals have very recognisably human motivation. In Pacific, there is a lot of We ARE Struggling Together as various nations dispute and at times even engage in covert ops against each other. Here, while there are acknowledgements of political realities and international tensions from time to time, with the exception of a few politicians like those in Moscow, humanity is a true Multinational Team that has resisted the siren call of petty self-bettering.
• Staircase Tumble: Willie D is introduced doing this.
• Star Scraper: In Chapter 28, Ayaka and her sisters see through True Sight that over the Shirokaze mountain crater goshintai is a supernal biomechanical structure so impossibly tall that even their Super-Senses can't see a top to.
• Statuesque Stunner: Shipgirls' human heights roughly correspond to how long their steel hulls were. As such, capital ships tend to tower. The roughly 887 foot/270 metre-long Iowa became 6 foot 8 and those within that ballpark are also staggering.
• Take That!:
  • Neither author is a fan of how canon KanColle did Iowa, to say the least.
  • In Chapter Nine, Alice mentions that Makoto Shinkai got an Oscar nomination for Keit-Ai in this universe, almost certainly a jab at the infamous Award Snub of your name. in reality.
  • Also in that chapter, Alice also mentions the Dumblr idiots of the late 2010s.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Nijimi tells Ayaka in Chapter Four that this is NOT the case, and they have only been able to talk unmolested because of the latter's Time Mastery.
• Taught by Experience: In Chapter 19, Kaga goes after the abyssal base's fuel tanks first thing, contrasting with what she did at Pearl the first time.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • In Chapter Five, Washington has Alice and O'Bannon use depth charges to check for a pulse with sunken abyssals.
  • In Chapter 18, the abyssals are systematically deforesting the Philippines under barrages of bombs and shells to flush out La Résistance.
• 13 Is Unlucky: In Chapter One, it is on Uileag's 13th search for wounded that he gets caught in a second explosion.
• Three-Point Landing:
  • O'Bannon and Washington land on the water this way in Chapter Five.
  • In Chapter 13, after Shimakaze trips, she recovers in midair and lands like this.
• Throwaway Country:
  • Malta and Singapore among others are briefly mentioned as nations whose people the abyssals have either slaughtered or forced into refugeedom.
  • Djibouti gets a one-liner in Chapter 18 about how its playing host to American, Chinese and Japanese overseas bases made it a lightning rod for abyssal attack.
• Torso with a View: Shimakaze does this to a Ri in Chapter 30.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Destroyers seem to enjoy ultraviolence that a civilian cinema wouldn't let them in for a bit too much.
• 20 Minutes into the Future:
  • When Ayaka notes in Chapter Seven, set in April 2023, that Vulcan's office doesn't look very advanced for a place developing Magitek, what with the lack of holograms or Tony Stark stuff, Vulcan says that she should see what they have down in the foundry. Actual interactive holograms make their appearance in JEXRA Yokosuka in Chapter 15.
  • In Chapter Nine, Alice says that 4K content and players have become reasonably-priced, but 8K is still rare.
  • Chapter 18 mentions F-35s operating off a USN LHA, while 19 establishes that the USAF has begun using B-21s and the PLAAF H-20s, and 27 has a minor Russian character mention the Su-57.
• Uncanny Valley: In Chapter Nine, Ayaka notes In-Universe how Summoned/Manifested shipgirls don't quite manage to properly emulate normal human behaviour. Later chapters invert it with Summoned finding Natural Borns not quite right and too human.
• Universal Chaplain: Averted in Chapter 18, where it is explicitly said that Maryland and the Tripoli's chaplain lead the Christians in one service while the Shinto priestesses hold their own ceremony elsewhere.
• Unperson: In Chapter 16, Ayaka suggests that a Shirokaze couldn't have married into the Nakahara because she would be cursed down the generations for the defection, causing West Virginia to counterpropose that maybe she doesn't know because the perpetrator was subject to damnatio memoriae.
• Villain No Longer Idle: As of Chapter 31, the abyssal leadership realise that We Have Become Complacent in thinking the mooks would have sufficed and thus start actively attacking humanity themselves.
• Villain Opening Scene: The first scene after the introduction is the abyssal supreme commander kicking off the attacks on mankind.
• War Memorial:
  • Chapter 15 shows that Yokosuka maintains one to the fallen of the Abyssal War, XCOM-style.
  • Chillingly, Chapter 31 shows that the abyssals maintain their own. Apparently modelled after the SAS clock tower, its walls are magically inscribed with the names of every non-Japanese and non-American dead.
• Wartime Wedding: Chapter 24 is dedicated in its full Shown Their Work length to Ayaka and Uileag's Shinto-style wedding.
• We Have Reserves: In Chapter 12, Hammann says that the abyssals sending 40 ships, including three battleships and six heavy cruisers, and 300 planes is a regular occurrence.
• Wham Episode: Chapters 32 and 33, in which the first attack led by an abyssal leader and involving Demons occurs, resulting in the (admittedly heroic) death of Takanami. They also reveal Naganami is a Natural Born.
• Wham Line: Chapter 32: "You are exhuman, aren't you?"
• Where I Was Born and Razed: Iowa was originally laid down in the New York Naval Shipyard, and the abyssals' attacking it is one of the factors that prompts Ayaka's Reawakening.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Imamura's exact location is even more poorly defined than Itomori's, with only vague references to it being somewhere in the rural mountains to the west of New York City. Ayaka's thoughts in Chapter 28 contrasting it with the Rust Belt communities suggest it's not in that area, but exactly where or even which state is not known.
• Worst Aid: Defied in Chapter One. Uileag tells a constructionman not to pull out a piece of shrapnel lest it make the victim bleed out faster.
• Wrong Context Magic: In Chapter 16, Ayaka discusses how what is known about shipgirls doesn't fit into her existing Shinto beliefs.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Inverted in Chapter 33, where Northampton says that Naganami might have been a Worthy Opponent had she not been Japanese.
• Your Head Asplode: In Chapter 31, Charles Ausburne punches a Ro hard enough that when it hits a wall, it becomes splatter and oil stains. She later punches a Ta hard enough its head turns into paste.

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