Title: Ship's Log Entries
Author: Lord K
Rating: M (No official rating, but has graphic depictions of violence)
Fandoms: Kantai Collection
Genre: Action / Drama
Words: 63k
Status: WIP
Summary: A Canadian wakes up as a ship girl for a ship that was never built. Stranded alone, with no information or contact with anyone, CVB-44 has to rely on her wits and ingenuity to survive.
Links:
Chapters 1-3 - https://forums.spacebattles.com/thr...-idea-and-recs.332794/page-1043#post-32196592
Chapter 4 - https://forums.spacebattles.com/thr...-idea-and-recs.332794/page-1046#post-32336578
Chapter 5 - https://forums.spacebattles.com/thr...-idea-and-recs.332794/page-1051#post-32638654
Epilogue Part 1 - https://forums.spacebattles.com/thr...-idea-and-recs.332794/page-1120#post-35484898
Epilogue Part 2.1 - https://forums.spacebattles.com/thr...-idea-and-recs.332794/page-1267#post-42138934

Yes, it's a Kancolle SI fic. Not sure there's an audience for that here, but it's worth a shot.

The Good:

• CVB-44 is the best SI I've ever read, with a strong character voice and a believable character arc.
• Her struggle to survive is thrilling (from chapter 2 onwards at least).
• When she finally starts to interact with canon characters, it's in a way that doesn't make me want to punch the author in the face.

The Bad:

• Mostly "tell" instead of "show".
• Lots of exposition and navywank, especially in chapter 1 and any scene from another PoV.
• Speaking of scenes from another PoV, most are really bad, alternating between exposition/navywank and MC wank. The epilogue is better about this, but only in scenes that have CVB-44 in an active role.
  
• Weak prose whenever it shows up.
• Requires some knowledge of WW2 and Kancolle. The WW2 stuff can be easily googled if you care, but the Kancolle stuff is harder to figure out if you don't already have some knowledge of the base material.
• May be dead, since the author had their notes destroyed between epilogues part 1 and 2.

The Ugly:

• You probably noticed there are five links. That's because the story never got its own thread on Spacebattles. Instead, it's buried in multiple pieces in the Kancolle snippets thread. Most annoyingly, none of the posts prior to the epilogue have backlinks or links to the next chapter. To top it off, all of the story pieces are stuck in spoiler tags.

Overall, I give it a 4/5. It's an enjoyable read if you can look past the flaws (and the fact that it's a Kancolle SI fic), but even its best parts aren't masterpiece material.

 

Yes. To be fair, the ship he SI'd into isn't made from scratch. It was planned to be built, but never got actually built before the war ended. The actual canon has done this multiple times in order to pad its list of ships, so I don't consider it a big deal. The story does, though, so that's why I put it in the summary.

 

So they’re ships? Actual ships? Not an acronym for relation”ship” or something.

Are they like androids that can shapeshift into ships? Like transformers?

 

They're girls with tiny model ship guns who skate across the water. Each girl is loosely based on a World War 2 naval vessel. Whether they're made of metal or not, along with many other things, is unclear in canon, because canon is kind of shit and doesn't explain anything ever.