The Sea Queens

Throughout history, sailors have often treated the ships they sailed as if they were sapient. The Sea Queens project asks the question "what if they were sapient? What stories would they tell?"

Brainchild of Joel Hassell (username K9Thefirst1), hosted on Spacebattles, the project takes the Spaceship Girl trope and cranks it up further. Whenever a ship is built by human hands (or other races, let's not be exclusive) that exceeds a certain size threshold, the ship itself ends up with an Anthropomorphic Personification that can interact with the crew. Usually taking female form (though male avatars are not unheard of), these avatars are the ship, often with personalities based on what they were built (or refitted) to do.

Tropes used in The Sea Queens include:

• Amazonian Beauty - Cargo ships have respectable levels of Super Strength, with physiques to match.
• Baby Got Back - Ocean Liner avatars had quite defined backsides, as a subtle shout-out to Lewis Bodine's infamous description of the Titanic sinking.
• Big Beautiful Woman - Given their leisurely pace, non-destination itineraries, and rather hedonistic onboard facilities, cruise ships are rather plump.
• Blood Knight - All warships display this trope to one degree or another. After all, they're all built to fight.
• Blue and Orange Mentality - It's important to remember that just because the personifications look human, and largely act human, they are not human, and thus their priorities may and often do diverge from a regular human's from time to time.
• Body Horror - Avatars often have sympathetic injuries that appear when the ship is damaged, the type of injury depending on where the damage is. Broken legs often correspond to a lost rudder or damaged engines, broken feet for damaged propellers, and breaking a ship's keel will break the avatar's back.
• Boobs Of Steel - Warships trend toward large bra sizes, often in direct proportion to the firepower of their main armament. Ultimately, the Iowa-Class, with their 16" guns, and the Yamato-Class, at a whopping 18" main guns, looked something like this. And that's not going into Japan and Nazi Germany's ideas about the next generation of Battleships, the Design A-150 and H-44 *tee hee!* proposal respectively, which would've had guns with barrels a full twenty-inches across, which overshoots Boobs Of Steel and heads straight into Gag Boobs territory.
  • Lampshaded be Word Of God: "Have you seen the way gun nuts talk about their favorite guns? Swap out a few words or phrases and suddenly they're talking about porn stars."
• Cool Old Lady - When retired, a personification doesn't age, thus subverting this trope for most museum ships - They may be 50, 60, 90 years old or more, but they still don't look a day over thirty or forty. Played straight with the HMS Victory and USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warships in existence and afloat respectively. At over 220 years old, they look like Octogenarians, but can still command the respect of the ships of their respective navies.
• Handicapped Badass - The HMS Victory is permanently drydocked, and many modifications have been made below decks to help preserve her from the ravages of time. This unfortunately means that she'll never sail again. The result being the personification being wheelchair bound.
  • Similarly, the RMS Queen Mary, who in WWII carried millions of soliders and evaded U-Boats like a pro, has had much of her power plant and engines removed, along with her propellers, and is similarly wheelchair bound.
• Line to God - K9 is all to happy to answer questions on the board, which helps iron out any wrinkles left in canon. Unfortunately, some people still contest anything said and try to put fort their own ideas, which leads to a lot of confusion.
• The Masquerade - Only sailors, shipbuilders, and the people who own the ships know about the personifications.
• Spaceship Girl - Taken to extremes with even wooden sailing vessels having an avatar.
  • However, there are no literal examples in real life, as the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Orion capsules are nothing more than glorified bullets, and the Space Shuttles were the astronautical equivalent of a dugout canoe.
• Surprisingly-Sudden Death - More than one warship avatar simply keeled over dead on the spot when the ship is rapidly subjected to hideous amounts of damage, such as direct hits to the ammo magazines.
• Team Chef - During World War II, aircraft carrier avatars frequently packed lunches for their pilots so they'd have something to eat on long patrols. As space in planes became more cramped with the advance of technology, this tradition now involves making sure a warm meal is available to pilots and aircrew when they land. Verges into Supreme Chef territory as they are the best cooks among military vessels.
• Team Mom - Given how they operate both as a ship and as part of a fleet, Aircraft Carriers are pretty much the embodiment of this trope, right down to aprons and demeanors not that out of place of a 50's sitcom.
• Vaporware - Intended to be an Edutainment book series... But the setting needed some kinks worked out, hence the SB threads. The author claims that the setting is now "set," so the next logical step would be actual writing and, hopefully, publishing.