You never know when the next boom in the anime subculture will show up. One year the hottest thing might be products related to the indies shooting game Touhou, and the next, everyone at Comiket will be clamoring for Hatsune Miku and her Vocaloid friends. The Next Big Thing for otaku culture seems to be 艦隊これくしょん Kantai Collection (“Fleet Girls Collection”), abbreviated as KanColle by fandom, a Japanese online game in which players fight battles and collect cards featuring “moe” versions of famous Japanese battleships, destroyers and aircraft carriers from World War II. That’s right, the characters are cute anthropomorphized versions of the such famous ships as the destroyer Shimakaze, the carrier Akagi, and of course the great battleship Yamato. There’s even a moe version of the carrier-battleship Ise, which my wife’s uncle served on. The game is currently so popular it’s nearly impossible to get an account, and fanart based on the game’s characters have taken over Pixiv, Japan’s online artist community — I’ve been posting some to the J-List Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds if you want to follow along. We’re starting to see some great KanColle products showing up on the site including a 2014 calendar, and we can certainly hope to see an anime someday, preferably by the creators of Strike Witches.
Kantai Collection is the Next Big Thing in otaku culture.
