About

Snail Mutsu (Japanese: り陸奥たか, Rimutsutaka) is a fan-made creature inspired by Mutsu^[1], a fleet girl from Japanese online trading card game Kantai Collection (KanColle). As well as Plasma-chan and The 1st battleship of the Kongou-class from Jamaica, this funny-looking creature has been one of the famous fan-made characters in the KanColle fandom since the end of 2013.

Origin

In the KanColle players community, Mutsu's horn-like headgear (shown below, left), which represents the original Nagato-class battleships' booms for maritime signal flags (shown below, right), is sometimes compared to a snail or slug due to the resemblance. Even on the English-speaking web, she's sometimes called as "Mutslug" among fans.

Left: Fleet Girl Mutsu | Right: Japanese Battleship Mutsu

Inspired by this iconic item of her, an amateur illustrator blew^[2] posted an illustration of a snail version of Mutsu to both Nico Nico Seiga^[3] and pixiv^[4] on November 17th, 2013 (shown below, left). Then, this creature was named "Rimutsutaka" on his next post (shown below, right) in the following month^[5], which name comes from a pun for a backward reading of "かたつむり" (Ka-ta-tsu-mu-ri), a Japanese word meaning of snail, and the name of the battleship girl "陸奥" (Mu-tsu).

Spread

This funny-looking creature soon became to a popular character in the KanColle fandom, and many fan illustrations and Miku Miku Dance videos for it has been posted to pixiv^[6], Nico Nico Seiga^[7] and niconico Douga^[8] since early 2014. Meanwhile, explanations in Rimutsutaka fandom sometimes takes the appearance of documentary like SCP Foundation because those following works depict it like a giant monster or UMB (Unidentified Mysterious Battleship) living in Rabaul waters in Papua New Guinea.

Various Examples

Videos

Illustrations

Search Interest

External References

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