Think of it as role reversal. The admiral is filling the role of the girls in the game. They are playing with him in the same way players play with the girls.
I'm gonna go with that interpretation of it.... it's a lot less depressing than the worn cardboard cutout being a coping mechanism for whatever made the real Admiral leave.
Man, the questions surrounding this comic is a lot more gripping than I first thought. Seeing the various possibilities regarding the missing admiral somehow makes me sad and anxious.
Could the base never have received a commander, with the ships managing themselves before installing this admiral icon as a joke, over time becoming a ritual of sorts?
Could the commander have died or left and Kongou could not accept it, so the rest of the fleet installed this stand-in and played along for her sanity's sake?
Or could this be a meta way of looking in the mirror, highlighting the fact that our ships speak to us in game, but we can't really respond to them, effectively making us a cardboard cutout in their world?
Shit's deep; I'm going to turn into an abyssal if we go any deeper.
I felt something was off about this admiral with him not changing a bit in expressions even though all that happen. Turns out..... Is it depressing or funny?
Just how "Frontier" is this base? Maybe they are posted in the Solomon Islands, commanded (kinda-sorta) by the wandering spirit of a certain admiral who got shot in the skies of Bougainville....
