Rule 5 Sunday – Welcome to the Azur Lane

Welcome back to regular (I hope) blogging. I’m going to start doing a Rule 5 Sunday post, focusing on the ladies of Azur Lane. There might even be some history as well. “What’s an Azur Lane?” someone might ask? Well, it’s a mobile game, a console and PC game, and a pair of anime shows. I was first introduced to it a year ago when YouTube’s magic algorithm figured that since I like history, pretty girls, and Lindsey Stirling, I might a music video that combined all three. They were right.

That’s actually a pretty good intro into the vibe of the game. The background plot goes that in the future (or maybe an alternate past), aliens with sentient weapons land on Earth and take control of Earth’s oceans. Humanity is powerless, until the discovery of Wisdom Cubes, a piece of alien technology capable of calling forth the mightiest warships from Earth’s history (ending approximately 1950) to be reincarnated as… shipgirls. Living weapons who look like humans, but are capable of controlling rigging, which is a nice way of saying that they carry all of their old firepower in a sort of exoskeleton thing. And carriers launch planes of some sort, and sometimes they get in sword fights… look, I didn’t say it all made sense, just that it’s sort of the background excuse for a gatcha game where the cute girls all have names like Enterprise, Hood, Akagi, and Bismarck.

Oh, and in the in-game campaign, the shipgirl leaders of German and Japan the Iron Blood and Sakura Empire factions, decide to re-enact World War II by attacking England and America the Royal Navy and Eagle Union forces.

All that to say that Azur Lane furnishes me with a pretty good excuse to start making Rule 5 posts that also combine some fun history of whichever shipgirl/warship I’m posting about.

And now, a little teaser for next week…