Yellowknife Azur lane

The Age of Yellowknife

Let me tell you a story, a short story that unfolded over a long time...

Ever since I was little, I have been drawing battleships. I loved the way they look and the power they projected. As I got older, I began giving them stories. Then, I built one out of lego at my grandparent's house during the summer following my graduation from elementary school. I was twelve years old and without a clue about history.

The ship I built was called Manitoba, HMCS Manitoba. She was simple and poorly built, but I was in love. Soon I began trying to draw her, and a story emerged. Manitoba was a Canada class Battleship, of which there were six; Canada, Manitoba herself, Yellowknife, Montreal, Quebec, and Ontario. There was no naming convention, and they were just named after random provinces, the country itself, and for Yellowknife, a city.

Soon my first year of middle school arrived in the fall of 2017, and my story evolved. Yellowknife had become the favorite of my battleships and the center of my drawings. For a grade seven short story project, I wrote about HMCS Yellowknife and her exploits in the Pacific during world war two. My random stories evolved into alternate history as I further developed Yellowknife and the Canada class battleships. During this early age of Yellowknife, I received a large bin of Lego from a friend and constructed the earliest version of the Lego battleship you know today.

During the same year, I stumbled into Azur Lane while looking up pictures of battleships in my computers class, beginning a new chapter in this story. Not too long after that, I began playing the game for myself, and soon began imagining the Canadas as characters from Azur lane. The story continued to develope through mismatched tales of my characters participating in glorious battles with the Sirens or Crimson Axis.

In the early fall of 2020, I discovered Wattpad, and Azur lane fanfiction. Every day, I would go on google and read a new story, fuelling my passion to develop my own fanfiction about Yellowknife.

Then, on November eleventh (Canadian remembrance day). While laying sick in bed, I came to a spontaneous decision, I was going to write Yellowknife. I made a Wattpad account, and started writing.

I immediately realized that I had no idea what I was doing, so I backed up and began writing plot for my brand new story on my phone's memo. Soon after, I began publishing. The chapters were short, poorly written, and full of even more spelling mistakes then the current version. Despite this, I was happy. I was enjoying a dream that I had since I was little; I had begun publishing a book.

By Christmas I had recognized the issues with my story, and began making plans to fix it. In January of 2021 I gave up and scrapped the story, losing interest in it and Azur Lane in general for several months...

Near the beginning of summer break, I began writing again, the second version of Yellowknife had begun.

I planned much better, took more time writing, and dedicated myself more to my work. This was my masterpiece, and I was proud.

There were setbacks, many in fact. I suffered heavy burnout from writing and school, along with periods of depression stemming from losses in my life. Yet I didn't give up, I drove harder. Despite slow progress, the chapters were better, longer, and seemingly well liked. By early 2022, Yellowknife was finally on track to success.

After many rebuilds over the years, the current version of the Lego Yellowknife was completed, and the drawings weren't far behind.

Then, earlier in early May, I made a realization. The storyline for Yellowknife was crumbling, and I was struggling to fix it. My morale had taken a hit as I realized I would need to restart again, but I shrugged it off, Yellowknife would come back better than before after all. So I began planning...

By late May, I had reached another, crushing realization. I hadn't made any significant changes to the Canada's names in the last fives years. This caused massive issues with historical accuracy, not to mention that the naming convention didn't make sense. Most of the Canadas were acceptable since they were named after provinces, but Yellowknife is a capital city. The only one named like that. Worse yet, it wasn't chosen to be the capital of the Northwest territories until 1967, almost forty years after the ship would've been named and laid down.

I was crushed. The main character of my story simply couldn't be. I suffered other issues in my personal life that further drained my will to write, and my interest seemed to dwindle with it...

That brings me to today. School is over, my stress has evaporated, and my motivation has returned. For the last month I've been planning something, something new. As far as I'm concerned, Yellowknife as a story is dead, but an Azur Lane story focused around the Maple Monarchy and ships of my alternate history will be written. This however will take time, my alternate history will need a lot of rebuilding to work and then a new story needs to be imagined. I don't simply want to rehash the plot that made up Yellowknife for it's to runs, as seeing it for a third time would probably be boring for my long time readers, thus I will make a new story...

I also wanted to quickly explain the ambitions I had for Yellowknife as a saga, yes a saga. There was going to be  several stories succeeding Yellowknife, and even a few prequels. These stories would've been written and released in this order;

"Yellowknife Azur Lane", "Yellowknife War on Home Shores", "Yellowknife short stories" (a name was never chosen), "Yellowknife in Victory's Grasp"(the concluding story) then there would've been the prequel "Maple Monarchy", followed by the spin off stories "Valour Azur Lane", "Resolve Azur Lane", and "Fearless Azur Lane" These stories would've fully fleshed out and built up the extented universe that was built around Yellowknife. For a better understanding, here's an old diagram I have...

I wanted to release this part to give you all a little bit of an idea of what has happened over the years, and what's to come. Most importantly, to share the real story of Yellowknife. It has been a long journey, and I am sad to see it end, but progress requires sacrifices and setbacks to be made.

I am beyond grateful that I had readers like you to join me for this journey, and I hope my next attempt at a story will be met with the same love and support from you wonderful people. Thank you again,

And have a lovely day!

-DevotedSail09