The upcoming Azur Lane anime is… something that is weirdly in my interest. I was never really a gacha game or phone game sort of person, but I’ve been playing around on Azur Lane for most of a year now; it has some decent character writing and is overall very friendly to casual players. When I heard they were going to make an anime based on the game, though, I was… less than thrilled. It would be cool to see some of my favorite characters moving around and doing things in a more fully realized world, but adapting video games, at least ones that aren’t visual novels, into other media has historically been very thorny. True, anime does this a little better than Western media; Granblue Fantasy the Animation was… not exactly what I’d call good, but it does look a little like Citizen Kane when you put it next to the filmography of Uwe Boll (probably the West’s most famous or perhaps infamous adapter of video games). But in any case there would have to be care taken and effort output in order to make an Azur Lane anime good.
And, one of the problems that occurred
to me, especially as my time with the game wore on and I experienced
more of its event stories and the works around the game, is that
there is a ton of story in Azur Lane, some of it contradictory. So
the production of an Azur Lane anime would experience pulls in
mutually exclusive directions, as well as having all the other
problems with taking a story in which the viewer is an active
participant and rendering it into a form where the viewer is a
passive, uninvolved observer.
What I’m going to do is watch the Azur
Lane anime all the way through. And, every week, I’m going to write
up my thoughts on the most recent episode, as a sort of running
review. I intend to do this for at least one new anime each season,
but I’ll be starting with Azur Lane.
But, since I’m quite aware of the
existing lore of Azur Lane (and yes that is a strange phrase to
actually say), I feel like I need to start with a lore roundup, going
over the different styles and interpretations of the property to
analyze both in what ways the production has set itself some
difficult hurdles… and why there’s a fairly big prize possible if
it manages to navigate all of them. As I go through the show, I’ll
probably be referring to this a good deal, so consider it a
retrospective for those of you already aware of the material and a
crash course for those who aren’t. I’ll also be getting into my own
theories and speculation, which is important because the anime format
promises to, if handled well, disambiguate a lot of the topics on
which I could speculate.
The First Story of Azur Lane: The
Second World War (Story Mode and some Events)
The most apparent story if you take a
cursory look at Azur Lane is World War II. The “Story mode” maps
cover the major battles of the Pacific war, putting the player in the
role of the Eagle Union (America) as you fight against the forces of
the Sakura Empire (Japan). There are cutscenes only through the end
of Chapter 3 (out of 12 so far on global servers), covering Pearl
Harbor and Midway. In this section we get basically what the
poster-level promos promise: the ‘main character’ is USS Enterprise,
who loses her sister Yorktown at Midway, and the ‘main villain’ is
IJN Akagi, an aircraft carrier that participated in the bombing of
Pearl Harbor but was then sunk at Midway. The events are essentially
a dramatized version of fact. True, the ships are represented as
girls with thoughts, feelings, and wills of their own, but in essence
you’re getting straight-up history. In addition to the abortive
Story Mode, there are a number of the game’s ‘events’ that get the
same treatment – typically the smaller events concerned with only a
couple ships. These play out vignettes from the naval side of WWII,
and that not just restricted to the Pacific. These events will
typically have a few story cutscenes with a lot of nods to the actual
history, such as the misinformation involved in the sinking/scuttling
of KMS Admiral Graf Spee. Pay attention! You might learn something.
Countless films and shows have been
made about World War II, from blockbusters to bombs, so there’s
certainly enough material here for an anime. If Azur Lane does
nothing but present the Pacific War (even if they only go as far as
Midway), it will be… passable. Not living up to its potential,
perhaps, but there’s a lot of inherent drama to be had so it could be
good in its own right as just a very weird period piece. However, I
don’t think that’s how it’s going to go.
The Second Story of Azur Lane: Cute
Ships Doing Cute Things (Licensed Material)
The upcoming anime is not going to be
the first time that someone will have adapted Azur Lane with the
blessing of its creators – there are actually three versions that
already exist! They’re the official Comic Anthology, the 4-koma Slow
Ahead, and the manga Queen’s Order. All three of these takes have
something in common: they’re harmless. They have, essentially, the
same take on the universe as well; while there might technically be a
conflict on somewhere, it’s not between the naval powers (after all,
when you’re playing the game you can recruit and form fleets from the
various factions, as mixed up as you please. Want Akagi and
Enterprise to work shoulder to shoulder? You totally can.) and it’s
very much not the focus.
The Comic Anthology is a grab-bag of
small stories. I believe each is by a different artist/author, so
they don’t share any sort of continuity other than the general
concept of being essentially happy fun times around port.
Slow Ahead is more one vision. The
4-koma follows the “starter” ships (the quartet of destroyers you
can choose between when you first start the game, depending on your
region – USS Laffey, HMS Javelin, IJN Ayanami, and KMS Z23) as they
meet pretty much everyone you could possibly else and have harmless
downtime slice-of-life ‘adventures’ with them. It really is just
cute girls doing cute things.
Queen’s Order has more of a plot. The
Commander (the implied player character, who is never actually seen)
has collapsed from overwork. HMS Queen Elizabeth, not wanting ‘her
servant’ to be replaced by the admiralty, takes over for him as he
recovers while covering up his state from most of the rest of the
ships at port. From there it mostly descends into a similar pattern
as Slow Ahead, if one with more structure and detail; Queen Elizabeth
will encounter one or more fellow ships (once more drawn from the
entire pool without regard to nationality) who threaten to usurp her
position, reveal her secret, or just bruise her massive ego. Wacky
hijinx ensue in which QE will ultimately manage to maintain status
quo, and we’re ready for the next round. It’s actually fairly funny,
mostly thanks to Queen Elizabeth herself.
The game does touch on some material
like this itself. Some small chains of cutscene play now and then
that pretty much exist to advertise some of the skins you can buy
with your fancy ingame currency during which the girls of various
factions seem to get along and have opportunities for events like
Christmas parties or school. And some ships have individual quest
lines you can do for them, which can be heartfelt or feature
excellent development for their leading lady, but which still paint a
picture of a cooperative combined fleet. However, the in-game
material typically has more of an undercurrent of menace than Slow
Ahead or Queen’s Order, thanks to a force known as the Sirens.
The Sirens, though scarcely if ever
mentioned in the current tie-in media, are supposedly the ‘real’
enemy in the Azur Lane universe, and the game’s softer material will
actually acknowledge them. Not always, but occasionally, and when
they do as a real threat that your fleet exists to fight against.
The Sirens are the main subject of the next story…
The Third Story of Azur Lane: Alternate
Timelines, Lost Souls, and High Drama (Events)
In my opinion, this is the ‘real’ story
of Azur Lane, and the one that is worth telling in anime form… but
it’s also the hardest to tell and tell right, and the one that’s the
least essentially ‘complete’ in material we have so far.
The story of Azur Lane, in essence,
follows an alternate history of Earth, diverging somewhere around the
turn of the century (it’s not entirely clear when). Beings of
incredible power, the Sirens emerged and laid claim to Earth’s oceans
as their territory. Humanity, however, gained the ability to create
Kansen (shipgirls), who could fight back against the Sirens. The
first great war against the Sirens, essentially a conflict replacing
WWI, ended largely in a draw. The seas aren’t safe, but they are
accessible to mankind. Fast forward to the “World War Two”
themed scenarios and you’ll find that the Sirens have manipulated the
Sakura Empire and Ironblood Reich (Germany) into their pocket,
stirring up a new major war between those factions and the titular
Azur Lane, and alliance between the Eagle Union and Royal Navy
(British Empire). Even as the Axis crumbles, though, or even as its
remnants join up with the Azur Lane faction, the Sirens remain a
credible threat in their own right, possessing super-advanced
technology and seemingly limitless numbers of expendable minions
while humanity doesn’t even properly understand Kansen technology.
Things look potentially pretty grim, which is where the player, as
commander of the fleet, comes in. In the mean time, things seem to
be drifting away from ‘history’ – IJN Zuikaku leads a revolutionary
force within the Sakura Empire against a ceaselessly resurrected
Akagi and Kaga and their soul-stealing Siren masters, while half a
world away things start going off script with the rejection of Siren
power by KMS Bismarck in her dying moments and the appearance of a
strange phenomenon and an unknown Kansen with incredible power and an
uncanny resemblance to a haggard and darkened Enterprise in the North
Sea.
Except that’s not really the story.
The real story is that the Sirens come
from the future – a future in which they allegedly wiped out
humanity. The timeline in which the game takes place (or timelines,
as the case may be) is a simulation the Sirens created to study human
adaptability and the Kansen phenomenon of ‘Awakening’. The Sirens
don’t care what happens to this world, its triumphs and tragedies are
just means to some unknown greater end. We see, in a lot of the
actions of the Sirens, that they’re not playing the same game as the
mortal factions, and we can’t even be sure that we can fathom their
goals or motivations. For one, they seem very determined to present
themselves as the villains… perhaps too determined. They want
Kansen and humanity to fight them, so perhaps you start to wonder
why… why simulate the existence of a defeated foe? OK, supposedly
it’s to further their own evolution, but there comes the question of
how much we really know about the Sirens once we start to comprehend
their actual nature, not as invaders from an alien world but as
invaders from an alien timespace.
We learn more, bit by bit… including
that such isn’t the full and real story either.
For the real-real story, the one that
for now is at the bottom of things and actually feels like it belongs
there (unlike the surface read of the “It’s a simulation” level),
I’m going to be drawing heavily on a couple events (Fallen Wings and
Ashen Simulacrum by name) that have two things in common. First,
they’re events that have focused on US ships, and second… they have
no historical grounding. This material is where the game most
aggressively invents its plot and it’s actually kind of strong.
Alright, it’s only as strong as the presentation allows, but that’s
something an anime could fix – would have to fix – and so this is
the part of the story I’d like to really analyze.
Let’s introduce, then, our players.
Most of them you’ve already heard of. I’ll start with the woman of
many names and critical relevance, that overpowered Enterprise
lookalike from earlier. She appears to be Enterprise, gets called
Code G a good deal, and has been dubbed Enterprise Alter (Enty Alter
or Alterprise) by fans, but the closest thing we have to a ‘real’
name for her is Ash, so that’s what I’m going to use. Remember how
Enterprise was kind of the main character of the vanilla World War
Two plot? Ash and Enterprise are without a doubt the leads of the
deep-Siren story, and a lot of the important reveals all tie into
Ash.
Ash, like the Sirens, comes from a
different timespace than this one. Her precise goals are something
of a mystery, but we do know at least part of the agenda: find “that
person”, a person who Ash’s behavior at multiple points pretty much
declares to be the Commander (The Player Character). In Fallen
Wings, we’re treated to flashbacks from Ash’s past, showing her
cooperating with the Sirens (though she’s not exactly friendly with
them) and at other points in her past interacting with her version of
The Commander, bonding with him. In Ashen Simulacrum, the pictures
we get are a little more scattered, but a funny thing happens – we
get them in character. The Commander sees visions of another
timeline, introducing new figures and new elements of the plot. I
will get back to this vision, it’s kind of important. The Commander
also finally encounters Ash personally, along with her buddy Ember
(an alternate version of IJN Takao with the same origin story as
Ash), and while we don’t get 100% confirmation about “that person”,
the behavior of Ash and Ember pretty much affirms that Ash has some
serious hangups about the Commander.
Ash’s interactions with the Sirens give
us another puzzle piece: The Sirens are not a monolithic force.
Instead, there seem to be at least three factions that could be
described as “Sirens”. The main one, the one that we see outside
of Ash’s story is what I’ll call the Yellow Siren faction (because
their lights and accents are yellow). There are also the more
enigmatic Blue Sirens, and then there are Ash and Ember, who the
Yellow Sirens refer to as Prototypes. It’s as good a collective name
for them as any. The web of affinity between the three groups is
surprisingly complex. The Prototypes (as largely represented by Ash;
Ember hasn’t done a whole lot as of yet) don’t seem to care for the
Yellow Sirens. The Yellow Sirens, on the other hand, quite like the
Prototypes, regarding them with respect and deference and showing a
continual interest in allying with them. As much as the Yellow
Sirens have expressed an interest in furthering their own evolution,
they seem to regard the Prototypes as the pinnacle of that same
evolution. The Blue Sirens and the Prototypes appear to be
cooperating, but also appear to not be on the same page. The Blue
Sirens appear only rarely (so far) and one of their major appearances
involves Ash yelling at them for not sending reinforcements. So they
may be working together, but they are not a single power structure.
Meanwhile, the Yellow Sirens and Blue Sirens have yet to encounter
one another as far as the players have seen. We don’t know if they
like each other, hate each other, or are even aware of each others’
existence. By context, the Blues must be aware of the Yellows, but
the reverse, while likely, is not necessarily true. While the Yellow
Sirens have clear interest in conflict, the Blue Sirens are more
reserved. However, the appearance of the Blue Siren Arbiter suggests
that they might pose at least as much of a threat as the Yellows
despite their so-far passive stance and unknown (but implied to be
potentially more positive – they say with some seeming regret that
they couldn’t save their creators) goals.
Ash and Ember also name-drop another
player that seems to have a lot of pull in the story of Azur Lane:
Antiochus. Right now it’s unclear whether Antiochus is a Siren or a
person, or even whether Antiochus is an entity, rather than a
mystical force or an organization. We do have some events laid at
the feet of Antiochus, however: Apparently, Antiochus hid the
timeline in which our gameplay is largely taking place from the
greater web of timelines that Ash and Ember have visited, and “our”
world is different from the others, perhaps because of the presence
of the Commander (a normal human as far as anyone in the same world
knows, “the Key” according to the Siren factions. Nature of Key
unknown, but might have something to do with those visions of other
timelines.). Antiochus also allegedly manipulated events so that the
Commander and Enterprise would meet Ash and Ember where we end up
clashing with them in the Bermuda Triangle. That was sent in motion
by an ahistorical attack by the Yellow Sirens against NY City. So
Antiochus can either control or manipulate the Yellow Sirens. Ash
and Ember also mention ‘them’ as an enemy and its ambiguous if they
are referring to the Yellow Sirens or something darker on the horizon
Now, I want to circle back to those
visions I mentioned earlier. In them, the Commander sees what
appears to be the past of another timeline. There are two that are
particularly of note. The first shows a conversation between two
individuals. They’re represented by ??? on their dialogue boxes.
One (Red ???) seems fairly generic but the other (Green ???) is
identified as a researcher, or at least former researcher since
things have gone pretty badly. The researcher believes that ‘they’
have souls and minds like humans do and are essentially people, able
to be reasoned with. Red ??? takes the opinion that ‘they’ are
monsters, after one apparently obliterated the entire second fleet
single-handedly. Red ??? would also like to remind the researcher
that the researcher has bigger things to worry about, like being
under arrest.
The second is an image: Enterprise’s
hand reaching out for the hazy image of a woman in a lab coat. This
suggests that the Researcher who believed in the Kansen as people is
female, and therefore probably to certainly not the same person as
the Commander, who is implied to be male as much as we get
information about him.
With that, we have most of the pieces
to put together the fully story, so far as it is currently known.
I’ll cover any others as they come up
So, what’s the full story? Right now,
people playing the game don’t exactly know. It’s told out of order,
disjointed, and across scenelets sprinkled over many months of
gameplay. However, I feel like I’ve been able to reconstruct a good
deal of ‘truth’ from the evidence we’re presented.
In a chronological sense, at least as
Ash would understand chronology, we begin with the creation of the
first Kansen shipgirls in what I’ll refer to as the ‘First World’.
The conditions of the First World aren’t known to us, but based on
the capabilities and understanding seen in various places, I’d wager
they’re more advanced than modern Earth, and thus that the First
World is set somewhere in our future. These Kansen (including those
who will become the Prototypes) are amazingly powerful. A single one
of them has the power to obliterate a fleet of conventional ships…
and whether lashing out thanks to mistreatment or going overboard in
‘war games’, one of them does. People die when an entire fleet
sinks, so naturally other people get very, very concerned about the
Kansen. The program is mothballed and their caring creator is put
behind bars, but the Kansen escape destruction intentionally or not.
Of course, world governments can’t put
the toothpaste back in the tube, and begin programs to create a new
generation of Kansen. Less overwhelmingly powerful, and possibly
easier to control. The result are shipgirls that don’t owe their
image to real ships, and who present some serious robotic mannerisms
thanks to their ‘artificial’ nature: the first Sirens, who will
eventually come to look up to Ash and Ember’s unrestricted generation
as the Prototypes.
Enterprise’s life with the person
special to her (the Commander) can’t last, though: Something terrible
happens, and he’s almost certainly killed. We know this because when
Ash and Ember confront Enterprise and the Commander in our timeline,
Ash protects the Commander saying she doesn’t want to “experience
that regret twice”, so presumably she had to watch the original
version of the Commander die.
At some point, this snowballs into the
conflict in which the Sirens turn on and destroy humanity. It’s
possible that the Sirens rebelled first and then the Commander’s
death turned the Prototypes against humanity rather than the other
way around, but there’s regret to be had in any case. Ash (truly Ash
now) apparently fought hard alongside the Yellow Sirens at some point
(they congratulate her for defeating all their enemies in a
flashback, though she isn’t pleased), as might be expected if she was
acting out of rage and bitterness against a society that took away
both her creator and her caretaker. Ash, after these events, seems
to have quite a dislike for the Yellow Sirens, so they probably took
it farther than she and the other Prototypes intended. This brings
in the Blue Sirens. They were “unable to save their creators”
which implies they tried. They would have been the Sirens who sided
with Humanity, at least against extermination even if they (the
Blues) originally fought for freedom, and lost (presumably spared by
the Yellows because the Yellows weren’t interested in killing fellow
Sirens). And the Blue Sirens are the faction with which Ash is
currently more chummy. So even if she started the war, earning the
eternal appreciation of the genocidal Yellow Sirens, she didn’t
finish it.
At some point in this, the First World
develops the technology to ‘simulate’ timelines. Of course, since
these timelines seem to have ontological inertia, whether they’re
really simulating or just finding one of Many Worlds that fits their
desired parameters is academic. Antiochus (who I speculate to be an
entity; the minions of the Yellow Sirens like Villain Akagi sometimes
refer to a singular ‘God’) also emerges in this period, and conceals
the Azur Lane timeline from the Prototypes and possibly the other
Sirens. Meanwhile, Ash goes looking for ‘That Person’ (her
Commander) in other timelines and fails to find him, while the Sirens
play their game to discover how to ‘awaken’ – observing weak,
limited, alternate Kansen to discover how to bridge the gap between
themselves and the ‘perfect’ Prototypes that preceded them.
Of course, that concealment doesn’t
last forever. The travelers find the Azur Lane timeline despite
Antiochus, or perhaps because Antiochus is ready to move into a new
phase of whatever game it’s playing.
The first force to be revealed in this
timeline is the Yellow Siren faction. They set up their game,
seemingly as usual – present themselves as the global enemy and
wait for the mass application of Kansen to attempt to fight them.
WWI with Shipgirls goes mostly on script, but things start to drift
away when WWII is engaged. Though the hunt for Bismarck goes mostly
‘according to plan’, Bismarck ultimately rejects a loan of power from
the Sirens and their control, hoping the Ironblood’s deal with the
devil dies with her. During Operation Tungsten, a singularity known
as Winter’s Crown appears, as does Ash to meddle with it. The events
of Fallen Wings, having nothing to do with the model of history,
cause even more drift. In the Pacific, the Sirens use their Mirror
Sea and Sanctuary pocket dimensions to keep their minions, Akagi and
Kaga, on the field while Zuikaku becomes problematically free willed.
She creates a faction within the Sakura Empire that stands opposed
to the sirens, recruiting (among others) the venerable Mikasa (who
was a museum ship IRL by WWII) and even the former Sakura flagship
Nagato to her cause. Somewhere along the line, Ashen Simulacrum
blows the lid off of everything. All the while, Kansen are finally
beginning the process of ‘Awakening’.
Somewhere along the line, this seems to have become Noein with cute warships. It’s actually amusingly 1:1. The Siren Factions split the roles of La’cryma and Shangri’la, mostly leaning towards the former, as ‘simulators’ of timelines which they can then invade looking for something of value. The Commander essentially fills Haruka’s role; while the nature of “the Key” isn’t yet defined, it took a long time for Noein to get around to explaining what the Dragon Torque was other than the McGuffin that the time travelers really wanted, so they’re kind of on the same wavelength. Meanwhile, Enterprise and Ash naturally slot right in as Yuu Goto and Karasu: the close friend of the living McGuffin, and that same character’s brooding, cloak-wearing, timespace-hopping future self who gets really bent out of shape seeing the living McGuffin character who they previously lost in their own timeline, all the way down to not being recognized by his/her past self at the first go. Even some of the notes in the action seem to follow very much in line. For instance, when Ash protects the Commander from harm in Ashen Simulacrum, it very much calls to mind Karasu’s early defiance and protection of Haruka, before he starts following along with her in earnest.
And I’m OK with that. If you’re going
to crib notes, Noein isn’t a bad place to crib them from…
especially since there are some very core differences that would see
Azur Lane take the same conceits in extremely different directions.
Noein is ultimately a psychological character study, where most of
the drama is down to the inner turmoil of our main characters. Azur
Lane presents itself as (and continues to be) a war story, where you
can expect a lot of the drama to hinge on action and fighting. The
characters of the ‘home’ timespace are all combatants with agency
rather than helpless kids. Enterprise would like to know how many
enemies she has to sink in order to finish this war, not what tests
she has to take to get into a good school.
The outcome of Azur Lane’s version of
history, of course, is unknown, and we can expect it to remain that
way for a long time as serves the nature of an ongoing game.
Or is it? There is one more note, and
I wanted to save it for last because it kind of implies a hidden
connection between the stories. If you, the player, gain your own
copy of Akagi – a rare drop from the ‘Midway’ chapter – you can
receive a small quest chain from her. Akagi’s not the only ship
who’ll give you a chain like that, and all of these chains pretty
much exist in the game’s version of Story 2 where a combined fleet
under the Player Character Commander mostly all gets along and we’re
not too concerned with the war that’s active as a backdrop. They
mostly just serve to further develop the character who gave you the
chain, giving more lines and scenarios so you can see more sides of
them. However, in an innocuous-seeming conversation between Akagi
and KMS Graf Zeppelin during the former’s quest chain, taken
alongside some of the other innocuous Story 2 sort of conversations
throughout the game, and put in the presence of the story of other
timelines cobbled together, paints a slightly different picture of
the relationship between the stories.
In that conversation, Graf Zeppelin
indicates that the commander “reenacted” the battle of Midway and
found Akagi there, hence her presence in the current fleet, while she
would still be serving her god if not for that meeting. This can’t
exactly refer to the Story Mode of Chapter 3 (Midway), because Akagi
sinks there. Akagi’s take is that there are many possibilities –
the Akagi who serves the commander is one, the Akagi who serves “God”
(in air quotes in the original) is another. In essence, the
existence of friendly Akagi fighting for the Azur Lane doesn’t negate
the existence of Villain Akagi, whose deeds in the off-script
segments of the Story (particularly the Zuikaku-focused side of
things) are called out as the other major possibility. The
Commander, apparently, doesn’t yet understand the full scope of this,
but Akagi believes that day will come.
This suggests a few thins to me. I
think Story 3 eventually catches up to the in-game Story 2 material.
The Commander – “The Key” – will eventually unify the human
forces, including the Ironblood Reich and Sakura Empire that are
currently on the Sirens’ puppet strings in Story 3. Thus, we get the
many scenes of old enemies from World War II working out their
differences and coming together as a single fleet. But, there are
still extremely powerful threats out there. The Yellow Sirens at
least are unquestionably present and unquestionably hostile. The
Blue Sirens and the Prototypes have their own goals as well –
certainly, they aren’t showing up as allies right now. And beyond
that are Antiochus and possibly an unknown “them” that the
Prototypes were gearing up to fight. Humanity may be united, but the
world is still very much at war. Somewhere in this, whether through
reverse-engineered technology or the Commander’s own currently
unknown and undisclosed “Key” powers, the Azur Lane force gains
at least a limited ability to manipulate timelines like the Sirens
do, hence the ability to “reenact” Midway and rescue at least one
timeline’s Akagi from her fate. To extend the Noein metaphor, while
the Commander isn’t ‘catching up’ with Ash or anything like that, he
is stepping into a lighter and softer La’cryma role.
There are other interesting anomalies
besides. Since Kansen often go on about their ship original’s
achievements in the real WWII, up to and including where they sank
(not something the Kansen could be reporting on from personal
experience), the Commander doesn’t seem to be the only one to possess
some Cross-Timeline information. And then there’s one Kansen, IJN
Junyou, who insists she’s your (the Commander’s) childhood friend.
Is she a nutcase, or does she just have some sort of bleed-over from
human counterparts in other timelines (“possibilities” of Junyou
that could have had childhoods)? I lean towards the latter; there
easily could have been a girl who was the Commander’s childhood
friend in the First World, and we don’t know enough about the
metaphysics of souls versus possibilities to say that her counterpart
in the Antiochus timeline couldn’t be a Kansen rather than a human.
What about the researcher? While freshly introduced, she seems like
a pretty important character, both to Ash and to the timeline (having
been at least part of inventing Kansen and all). Where’s her
counterpart? If it could be a Kansen rather than a human, we might
have an answer – the mad scientist in your base who can draw up
Kansen from ships that didn’t even exist, spin off loli copies of
Kansen that might sing a different tune than their grown-up originals
thanks to a lab accident, and who’s working diligently to truly
understand what Kansen are and why they are… better known to most
players as the greedy green cat who runs the shop, IJN Akashi. Or
maybe the Researcher became Antiochus, that’s equally possible. But
all of this is going a little deep into the speculation. What we can
really derive with a good deal of confidence ends with the humble
conversation in the Akagi questline that suggests game players are
experiencing the story from multiple points in time, rather than
multiple stories.
So there is hope for a Unified Azur Lane Theory. It relies on multiple timelines – countless ‘simulations’ of the WWII with shipgirls script; a world in which “The Key” exists, hidden by Antiochus, that went off script; and the origin timeline of the Prototypes, Sirens, and Kansen technology. And it would be hard to get this to go over well in an anime… but not impossible. Noein pulled off the tangled web of alternate timelines and other selves with flying colors. Arpeggio of Blue Steel gave something of a serious treatment to what it might mean to be a war machine incarnated in human form, which is still fairly important to the Kansen (whose first conflict, as seen in the Researcher flashback, is being seen as people or monsters). It can be done well, and if it is done well it has the potential to be not just “not crap”, but actually amazing. There’s material for military tactics, sci-fi action, and deep psychological drama available to the Azur Lane anime… if it actually reaches out and takes it. There’s also the possibility that the creators won’t try, and we won’t even see the Prototypes in the anime, without whom we don’t really get the multi-timeline plot. And if they do try, that doesn’t guarantee they’ll pull it off. For every Noein or Steins;Gate in existence that wields quantum physics and myriad timelines with deft skill, there’s a Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 somewhere that has no clue how to make timelines and time travel engaging, dramatic, or even remotely sensible and just hurts itself with the same tools that those better productions used so well.
Which one will the Azur Lane anime be
in the end? We’re going to find out, so I hope you’ll join me for
the ride ahead!