About: Spaceship Girl   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

A walking, talking female avatar of a Sapient Ship. Throughout history, ships and other seafaring vessels have always been referred to as "she", and spaceships are just an extension of the metaphor. Knowing how to treat a ship is like knowing how to treat a woman, The Captain will say; take care of her and she'll take care of you. She may have to be tamed, or she may take a gentle touch. The moderately sexist analogies go on and on. Strangely, this even applies to ships named after men (e.g., the USS Ronald Reagan). It also applies to aircraft. This has been reflected in the appearance of older sailing vessels and many military aircraft -- with scantily clad figureheads for the former and scantily clad women painted on the latter.

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rdfs:label
  • Spaceship Girl
rdfs:comment
  • A walking, talking female avatar of a Sapient Ship. Throughout history, ships and other seafaring vessels have always been referred to as "she", and spaceships are just an extension of the metaphor. Knowing how to treat a ship is like knowing how to treat a woman, The Captain will say; take care of her and she'll take care of you. She may have to be tamed, or she may take a gentle touch. The moderately sexist analogies go on and on. Strangely, this even applies to ships named after men (e.g., the USS Ronald Reagan). It also applies to aircraft. This has been reflected in the appearance of older sailing vessels and many military aircraft -- with scantily clad figureheads for the former and scantily clad women painted on the latter.
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abstract
  • A walking, talking female avatar of a Sapient Ship. Throughout history, ships and other seafaring vessels have always been referred to as "she", and spaceships are just an extension of the metaphor. Knowing how to treat a ship is like knowing how to treat a woman, The Captain will say; take care of her and she'll take care of you. She may have to be tamed, or she may take a gentle touch. The moderately sexist analogies go on and on. Strangely, this even applies to ships named after men (e.g., the USS Ronald Reagan). It also applies to aircraft. This has been reflected in the appearance of older sailing vessels and many military aircraft -- with scantily clad figureheads for the former and scantily clad women painted on the latter. The tendency to see great vessels as female could have something to do with the crew and passengers feeling that they're being carried in its belly through hostile environment and subconsciously seeing it as motherly. Maybe. Note, however, that the use of the feminine is not universal. Latin did, and thus romance languages directly and English indirectly do the same; on the other hand, in Russian, the word "ship" is masculine. Nowhere do they go so far, though, as when the ship is a girl. She may be a holographic projection by the ship's computer, or she may be a physical manifestation created by Black Box technology, she may be a Wetware CPU running the ship, or she may simply turn into a human when she wants to; but she is the ship, and thus requires special handling. Spaceship girls range from the deadly serious to the outright wacky, but they are never just machines. Hint: don't make her angry when you're parsecs away from the nearest planet... Compare with Robot Girl and Sapient Steed. A subtrope of Sapient Ship and often a kind of Genius Loci. Related to I Call It Vera and Living Weapon. Psychologically related to Companion Cube. Might become a love interest. Examples of Spaceship Girl include:
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