Waterskating Battleship Girls

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About

Waterskating Battleship Girls refer to a series of illustrations and photoshopped parodies based on a memorable scene taken from the trailer for the upcoming anime adaptation of the Kantai Collection^[1], KanColle for short, a free-to-play Japanese online card game. These parodies gained popularity on Twitter and on Japanese art-sharing sites immediately after the trailer was uploaded in early August 2014.

Origin

On August 4th, 2014 6:20am EST, the official KanColle Twitter account announced that the anime's preview had gone online on KADOKAWA's official YouTube account^[2]. The trailer for the anime subsequently gained over one million views in less than three days^[5]. While the anime had been anticipated, due to the large Japanese fandom already surrounding the game, one particular scene caught attention. The shot originally shows up 55 seconds in the preview, featuring the Aircraft Carrier Akagi holding a bow while skating on the water.

Spread

By 7:00am EST of August 4th, this screenshot from the preview was began being used as a source for numerous parodies emerging from the anitwitter subculture, with many appearing under the hashtag #KanColleCrappyCollageGrandPrix (#艦これクソコラグランプリ).^[10] Many parodies feature other characters from the Kantai Collection game, while others used various other popular characters, often from different anime and other medias.

まぁこうなるわな pic.twitter.com/LeEtF4uP7k
— Matu (@Matu834) August 4, 2014

A blank template of the scene was later posted by Twitter user @mohemohe^[8] (shown below) on the of the trailer's premiere, which later gained over 4,000 retweets and 3,000 favorites in less then a week. Other versions also began to emerge on the Japanese art site pixiv beginning on the same day as the preview release, under the tag "KanColle PV Parody" (艦これPVパロ)^[3] while appearing on Nico Nico Segia under the tag "Water Skating" (水上スキーコラ) ^[4]. News of these parodies was later reported by Crunchyroll^[6] and IRORIO.jp^[9] on August 4th, and later on Nico Nico News^[7] on August 6th.