Ship Association claims to have received threats from Kantai Collection fans
Kantai Collection is a famous series based on a Girls’ Ships game. Azur Lane, in turn, can be considered a game born from Kantai Collection, and to this day, KanColle is quite popular in Japan.
However, there is a controversy
Ship Association claims to have received threats from Kantai Collection fans
What happened? Kantai Collection is a free browser game developed by C2Praparat. The game transforms real ships into anime girls, and players take on the role of an admiral, commanding the ship girls in battles.
One of the characters, named Kikuzuki (image below), is based on a homonymous destroyer ship used by the Imperial Japanese Navy from the 1920s.
Kikuzuki sank in 1942, attacked by the United States Navy during the war. In this context, there is the “Destroyer Kikuzuki Association” in Japan, managed by former ship crew members, relatives, and volunteers. This association claims to have owned the rights to Kikuzuki since November 2017.
They sent a protest letter to C2Praparat, the developer of Kantai Collection, claiming that since March 2021, the association has been harassed by game fans, receiving death threats, arson threats, suspicious objects left at members’ homes, and online defamation.
But what happened in March 2021 to trigger such behavior from Kantai Collection players? According to the Kikuzuki Association’s explanation, it all began when the organization approached the official KanColle X account (Twitter at the time) in response to a specific limited-time mission in the game.
The tweet was deleted, but it was a response to the 2021 Hinamatsuri Operation, which included using four Mutsuki-class destroyers (to which Kikuzuki belongs) as material to upgrade a destroyer.
Given that Kantai Collection aims to be a game that celebrates and pays tribute to the souls lost in war, the association questioned the treatment of the ship-based character as consumable material.
Apparently, some of the KanColle fandom found this act offensive, raising doubts about whether the association really holds the rights to the ship or is pretending to harm the game and similar ones.
The tweet was deleted a day later to protect the security of association members, who began receiving defamatory interactions and threats from various accounts on various platforms. The protest letter describes these acts as malicious, with offenders even using Tor to maintain anonymity.
It is worth noting that the company responsible for Kantai Collection has not commented on the case, remaining silent until now. With the letter going viral on social media, fans are still not convinced that the association truly owns the rights to Kikuzuki.
The Twitter post with the letter was deleted from the Association’s account.
via Otakomu
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