Fubuki episode.

I appreciate that this is somewhat of a dismissive attitude, but seriously, Fubuki is just so damn boring – she’s a bundle of undeserved, uninteresting shipgirl angst and melancholy. She drags the whole tone of the show down with her.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad, but the show has suffered from a bit of a terminal lack of momentum the last couple of weeks – they’ve clearly decided where they want to end the series, and they’re spinning their wheels until they get there. Not in the fun way, either – this show could really do with another curry cook-off right now.

Still, despite the fact that they stuck a marriage sequence in the middle, it was a pretty gay episode, even by the usual Ooi-Kitakami-standards, this week, so I guess there was that. If that’s your thing, obviously. I suppose it could be pretty gay even with the marriage sequence, given that we’ve never actually seen the Admiral in a fashion that’d allow us to confirm (or deny) their gender-status (and I’m going to guess the explicit gendering in the Crunchy subtitles is mostly about having subtitles that don’t read terribly).

One thing it’s difficult not to notice is the fact that the skyline during the marriage sequence is of modern Tokyo – if nothing else, Tokyo Tower wasn’t constructed until the late 1950s, long after the end of World War 2. It’s yet again one of those things that doesn’t really do much other than confuse the setting some more. Is it the Admirals or Fubuki’s fantasy of a marriage scene, and are they some kind of amazing futurist envisaging the Tokyo to-be with an alarming degree of accuracy, or is KanColle set in the modern day, with a military run by someone with an overly fetishistic obsession with old-fashioned radio and telephone equipment?

Marriage is another game mechanic, coincidentally – in game terms, it’s a way to break the level cap and raise your shipgirls levels above the level 99 limit. The game gives you a taste – a single Wedding Ring – for completing a series of in-game quests, but for the most part, this is the one area in which DMM and Kodansha actually try to make some money by selling extras as micro-transactioned content. There’s not actually that much in the way of an advantage by having a large number of high-level ships, but there’s unique dialogue unlocked by putting a ring-on-it, as it were, so it’s something a lot of the high-rollers end up doing in bulk.

That’s pretty much that for episode 10, though. Fubuki is just that enthusiasm-sapping at this point.