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青葉 ("Green Leaf")
The personification of the IJN Aoba, lead and name ship of the Aoba-class Heavy Cruisers in Kantai Collection.
The historical Aoba famously had a war correspondent onboard, and as such, Aoba has been made out into being the reporter shipgirl. At best, this makes her optimistic and enthusiastic, but at worst, she's portrayed as a stalker or paparazzi. (In fact, due to the heavy overlap of artists between Touhou and Kantai Collection, she's oftentimes just drawn by former Touhou artists as Shameimaru Aya with the serial numbers filed off, due to the shared reporter stereotypes.)
Aoba has messy pink hair or purple hair (depends on the artist) in a ponytail that is tied up in a blue scrunchie, and blue eyes. She wears a blue-and-white serafuku with a yellow neckerchief and blue shorts. She also wears black thighhighs.
Her combat gear consists of a pair of twin-cannon turrets carried on a strap like a purse on her right, with a flight deck on her left. On her back, she carries a mockup of the real ship's bridge like a backpack.
Historic IJN Aoba
Historically, IJN Aoba was the flagship of Cruiser Division 6, which consisted of her sister ship, Kinugasa, as well as Furutaka and Kako.
Aoba was originally to be the third ship of the Furutaka-class Heavy Cruisers, but redesigns caused her to become a new class, featuring larger guns and an extended flight deck, and as the more updated design, she was made the flagship.
As the leader of CruDiv6, Aoba led many actions. In Coral Sea, she was assigned to protect Shouhou, at which point, Shouhou was sunk. She was then sent to protect Shoukaku, instead, at which point Shoukaku was heavily damaged.
Afterwards, she participated in the Battle of Savo Island, which was a victory for the Japanese ("Worst defeat of US Navy history") where several Allied destroyers and cruisers were sunk with no Japanese casualties, but afterwards, Kako was sunk by a US Submarine.
From there, she participated in the "Tokyo Express" runs, trying to support the ultimately disastrous Guadalcanal Campaign. During this, Aoba's Rear Admiral Gotou's insistant misidentification of Allied forces sank Fubuki and Furutaka, and also indirectly sank Murakumo. Aoba itself was heavily damaged, and Rear Admiral Gotou himself was killed when the bridge was struck.
After extensive repairs, Aoba next saw combat when she was bombed by B-17s while moored at Kavieng, striking her torpedoes and damaging her so severely she had to run aground to avoid sinking. After being towed back by Sendai for further repairs, which could not fully restore her engines and one of her three turrets, she was relegated to convoy escort duty, where she accidentally collided with IJN Kinu, and later was struck by a torpedo from USS Bream. While under repair, she was again bombed, and lost another turret, to be replaced with an AA gun. After further repairs incomplete, she was sent in a convoy back to Japan for more complete repairs, where her convoy was attacked again by submarines, including USS Bream, but only the nearby Kumano was damaged, which Aoba left behind to save herself and the rest of the convoy.
Upon returning to Japan, she was deemed irreparably damaged, and put in permanent reserve duty. Her final action was in defense of Kure Harbor, where she was critically damaged in waters too shallow for her to completely sink in. From there, her last turret was replaced with AA guns, and she was re-rated an AA platform. Further bombing finally collapsed Aoba's hulk, and split Aoba's stern off, sinking the pieces of Aoba.
See Also
Wikipedia entry on the historic IJN Aoba
The following tags are aliased to this tag: aoba_(kantai_collection) (learn more).