Sunday, April 13th, 2014.

You know, for someone who's never written a journal before, writing one hundred entries in a row without dropping a single one is kind of mind-blowing to me. I suppose the only reason why I was able to pull it off is due to my military discipline.

Since today's a lazy Sunday and none of us did anything productive, I'm going to just write out a bit of a different entry for tonight...the thoughts that I keep most to myself.

I don't believe in humanity. I'm sorry - I don't. Growing up in the most stereotypical, American Hollywood-esque high school imaginable, having parents who're more concerned with raising the next great Navy officer than they are in raising a son, trekking through ROTC, Hargraves, the Army, and now the Navy under the stigma of nepotism, seeing everything that politics does to manipulate war, seeing everything that war has to offer, I've come to realize that human beings are driven by the need for power, the desire to achieve something they feel is greater than themselves. A legacy, perhaps - but if anime and manga has taught me anything, it's that the desire for unwavering and overwhelming power and the desire to control is ubiquitous across any culture, any race, and any region of the globe. There are exceptions, of course, but in the face of those who wield - or think they wield - such power, those exceptions cease to matter. Everything from the high school rat races of meaningless popularity to the authority of less-than-deserving government politicians and military brass - power is the common denominator, the base human need that, unfortunately, proves to be the most lethal for everyone involved.

I have been there, done that. I may not know what hell is like, and I know that many people across the world may beg to differ on what exactly hell is like, but I like to think that I am among the small group of people in this world to have come close to it enough times to be qualified to give an opinion on it. The hell of being the unsociable loner in high school, the hell of being the unintended victim of nepotism in military college, the hell of serving in the Army in the Middle East in this ambiguous "war on terrorism", the hell of serving in the Navy aboard the most battle-hardened carrier strike group in the world, and finally, the hell of living and fighting alone. I have seen the worst that humanity has to offer - everything from trivial things such as harmless teasing to the bombings of dozens of civilian villages suspected of sheltering insurgents. I've seen things you wouldn't believe - and done things that, should I be religious, would certainly guarantee me a nice roasting in hell.

While all other living species on this earth (most of them, I would imagine) do things to satisfy their basic needs for survival - food, water, shelter, reproduction - human beings are the only species that consistently do things for the sake of fulfilling trivial needs and instincts. It's just how it's been ever since human beings were a thing, and so long as we still walk this earth, we will continue to taint, kill, rape, and destroy everything in the name of stupid shit like power, money, and pleasure.

But it's funny that I should believe that the worst part about this all is the fact that I have long since accepted it. I've come to accept the fact that we humans, as a species, are all just downright awful. After all, for someone with such a bloody military career as myself, I wouldn't have gotten very far anyway if I didn't come to accept this fact. But it saddens me, that something so terrible can be accepted so readily. The fact that humans are so terrible shouldn't be so readily accepted, because there are still lots of people who are decent and resistant to the lures of the destructive human desires such as power, money, lust, and revenge. Yet, I find myself looking at my fellow human beings and just shrugging, helpless, because I know that there can be nothing to be done to change them or the world. One person can't change the world, and even if they could, they would have the whole world turned against them. And by that point, such a person would have to truly be larger than life, a character from a video game, anime, or manga. Makarov had the right idea, but where he failed was that he didn't realize that changing history is not the same as changing the world. It's easy to change history, alter the course of it to your liking, so of course the will of a single person can pull it off.

It's changing the way history is made that is the impossibility that dooms us all.

It is because of the above mentioned that I refuse to believe in the goodness of humanity. Obviously there are lots of things that I'm leaving out for the sake of putting my thoughts on paper, and I am, in many respects, being unfair to the human species. Perhaps if my attitude wasn't so fatalistic and pessimistic, I could have been persuaded eventually to think the other way, that humanity does deserve some degree of respect. But it is far too late now. Too many times, too many things I've seen that were the creations and by-products of every single terrible aspect of human vice. Even decent people, even good people are susceptible. Every single human being in this world is or has the potential to become a monster, and all it takes is just one trigger. It's only a matter of finding that trigger and pulling it.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that we all already possess our own inner demons, our own dark personas that rear their ugly heads whenever the moon is full.

Now take everything that I've just said and throw it out the window.

Ship girls are not human; they are, strictly speaking, sentient androids built with the purpose of combating naval threats at sea. They have been built to be like humans, but not quite. They do not possess the same sense of vice that normal humans are capable of possessing and feeding. Sure, some of them may have their disagreeable points at times and have personality faults, but the biggest difference that separates them from normal human beings, apart from their obvious combat capabilities, is the fact that they are all, at heart, genuinely good girls more inclined towards compassion and well-being.

Hopefully Naganami won't be the sole exception to this.

After spending just over three months with these girls, I have come to the point where I can back up my theory that the Moebius Four Armament didn't just produce combat androids to counter the Abyssal terrorist threat: the Moebius Four Armament was a pseudo-eugenics program designed to artificially create the optimal female human being. And while I may make this sound malicious due to the modern connotation of the word "eugenics", in certain ways it honestly is true. All ship girls are much more physically attractive than your average human female, are capable of any task from military sortieing to household chores, and are fueled by a desire to be productive.

But most importantly to me personally, the ship girls are not yet consumed by the horrors of the human species. We may have created them, but we did not let them inherit our terrible ways. Instead, unlike me, they are still willing to question things, ask why the status quo must remain the status quo. They still will not accept things for the way they are, because they still have hope that they themselves can bring about the change that they want. If anything should be taken away from this, it's that the ship girls have been created with the will to change the world around them. And in a world where humans can no longer change the way they themselves make history, it's these ship girls who must come in and achieve that very impossibility, for they can transcend the conformity that is too well established for humans to effectively change the world strictly because they are human only in the best of ways and not the worst of ways.

The ship girls have been born to tread the tightrope between human and machine. Dictated by binary but powered by human emotion, they are the perfect example of good hybridization, of taking all the good parts of two things and molding them into one to create a more efficient, more optimal result. Like children born into biracial families and raised in both cultures, the ship girls can easily phase into their combat and human worlds without a second thought to achieve what they desire most. Not for exorbitant amounts of corporate money, not for disgustingly excessive amounts of government power, not for sickening amounts of corrupting lust, but to serve and protect their friends and their nation. They are the very definition of perfect soldiers: willing to obey any order given to them without a second thought but also simultaneously willing to question that very order if they sense something wrong. They fight with a clear sense of purpose and an order to guide them, not for some nebulous sense of fanatical patriotism and lofty ideals as they were used in the second world war. It is because of this that I declare my faith not in my fellow human beings but in these young women known as ship girls, because they represent what the human species would be with all the impurities removed. These girls are the one brightly shining beacon in the darkness of the world, the shining lighthouse on the rocky pier that guides the ships on which humanity rides onwards into the darker nights of the future. And you may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not.

I will even dare to state that despite not being human, these ship girls are more human than human beings. I don't always call things or make prophecies, but I guarantee you that with due time, these ship girls will prove the words written in this journal entry true.