How to Make Your Officers Look Like Gods: what happens when you bring Gothic symbolic density to naval fiction
Naval fiction has given us competence. I want to give you apotheosis.
Patrick O’Brian and C.S. Forester wrote grounded historical naval fiction masterfully. You have tactics, brilliant seamanship, the strain of command rendered with authenticity. There’s even an intimidating amount of really-quite-accurate technicality.
They gave us captains as skilled professionals navigating real historical conflicts. Watch any adaptation of Hornblower and you’ll see the same approach: competent men doing difficult jobs with skill and courage. We love a good competence porn.
I don’t believe I could ever measure up to what they’ve written. So I will simply try something else.
I’m writing what I will arrogantly declare is called elegiac naval gothic—secondary-world maritime horror where officers are intermediaries between their crews and a jealous ocean. Where the uniform isn’t simply a given because they’re naval officers, but is threaded through with an extensive material culture that encodes the philosophies of a people under siege by sentient sea. Where competence doesn’t just work as much as it borders on divine possession.
This isn’t better or worse than grounded historical naval fiction. It’s different aesthetic territory. The same way Warhammer 40,000 didn’t replace Star Trek but claimed adjacent space—Gothic grimdark in the void instead of optimistic exploration—I’m going to attempt to claim the space for Gothic grimdark at sea with what humility I’m able to muster.
Competence Treated as Mundane
I must identify what could stand to be elevated. What do I like about naval fiction and what does it look like to then turn some of the knobs and dials about in a bid for something exciting, strange and new? Something that I would read with stars in my eyeballs.
I love a good hero shot. And grounded naval fiction is swimming with those moments where the captain might take the helm in a storm. Turn the tide of battle with a genius play.
You may get the description of wind velocity. Wave height. The physical strain on the wheel. So we know what the enemy is. Then maybe the set of the captain’s jaw, the tension in his shoulders. The action of seamanship rendered with technical precision so we also understand the cost.
What I never see is transfiguration.
The moment when a man executing skills at the absolute peak of human capability stops looking human and starts looking like something… Else. The crew’s response isn’t just respect for competence—it’s the paralysis of witnessing the numinous.
Naval fiction is afraid to go Gothic. I’m not.
What Gothic brings to bog-standard competence porn is moments where ordinary human exceeds human limits and becomes something else.
And in a setting where the ocean is sentient and hungry—as I love to remind, it’s my boilerplate at this rate—that transformation isn’t merely metaphor but rather a form of survival. Officers don’t just look divine and tremendously neat in moments of crisis. They have to become vessels for something older and stranger, or the sea claims everyone.
And in so doing, you are transfiguring ordinary seaman into Hercules or Poseidon.
Competence as Religious Experience
Let me now attempt to show it.
This is Saltire—a working-class First Lieutenant—recalling his captain during the storm. He’s being asked by a child to describe what happened.
He saw Somerset at the wheel. Not the rakish officer who smiled his way through every wardroom and tavern, but the other Somerset—the one Vance had glimpsed at the summit of that impossible wave. Eyes wide, feral, his shoulders straining against the fine turquoise wool of his coat, the white countershading along his inner sleeves and flanks a blinding flash against the bruised sky—wounds of pearlblood rendered divine.
He looked like a man the sea had claimed.
He looked like a god.
The uniform is doing narrative work. Because that’s what I wanted to do when I was designing the material culture of Arune, their country. The turquoise wool (muirrine—the sacred color). The white countershading (dolphin mimicry). The visual description is intending to demonstrate that, for Saltire, the psychological experience was like witnessing something divine.
“Wounds of pearlblood rendered divine”—this is the iridescence, the light-catching quality designed into the white fabric. It looks like wounds that bleed pearl-light because the uniform is designed to make you look like you’ve survived the abyss and returned luminous. It’s something their people wished to encode in their officers.
This is what grounded historical naval can’t give you.
The moment when skill becomes something else. When a man doing his job crosses the threshold and becomes ferryman of the underworld. When his crew stops seeing their captain and starts seeing an intermediary between them and the divine, terrible ocean.
Saltire isn’t able to articulate this. He’s a practical man. So he reduces it to the simplest possible statement: “The captain did what needed to be done.”
But the reader sees what Saltire saw. The Gothic sublime. The horror and beauty of competence executed at a level that stops being human and starts being that strange other thing.
What Secondary Worlds Allow
In historical fiction, you’re bound by accuracy. Uniforms looked a certain way. Rank insignia followed regulations. You can describe them beautifully, but you can’t redesign them to encode your world’s cosmology.
In secondary-world fiction, you have a superpower of being able to design material culture from scratch to reflect belief systems.
I’m not writing about the Royal Navy (though I was deeply inspired.) I’m writing about Arune—a maritime nation where the ocean is god, where dolphins are sacred messengers present in the founding of empires, where the depths have myths and those myths have teeth.
I was going to write something entirely real, entirely grounded, but as I wrote I realised my instinct kept pulling me too far into the witchcraft of peak seamanship. And given that I cannot separate soul from salt, I decided to take the leap and just invent the whole damn world specifically to serve my distorted vision of our own.
Beginning with the seemingly mundane, I asked: what would a culture that worships the ocean wear?
And Arune was born for the first time when I began to design the uniforms.
Sacred Biomimicry
Dolphins (relansheer), particularly white dolphins—the Sollurela—are sacred to Arune. They’re messengers between the surface world and the deep, blessed creatures that navigate both realms without being claimed by either. They represent everything Arune aspires to: grace, intelligence, mastery of the ocean without being mastered by it.
So Arunean naval officers wear dolphin countershading.
White inner sleeves. White along the flanks of the coat. The same protective coloration that makes dolphins nearly invisible in open water—light from below, dark from above.
Officers are claiming the status of the sacred animal. They’re marking themselves as blessed, as chosen, as operating under divine protection.
When a captain stands on deck in full dress uniform, the white countershading creates a visual echo of the creature Arune holds most sacred. The uniform is making a theological statement also: this man speaks to the sea, and the sea recognizes him as kin.
Colour Taxonomy
Colour is everything to me. And so it means a great deal to the people in this world also. They have ontology for the colours of water.
So it isn’t simply what they wear, but also what colour it is.
In Arune, the water column—the vertical distance from surface to crushing depth—defines everything about their maritime culture. Which is encoded in colour symbolism.
When an Arunean describes something as muirrine, they’re not just saying it’s blue. They’re saying it has the quality of the most beautiful, shallow seas—sacred, beautiful, carrying the soul of their nation.
This is something secondary-world fiction allows me: systematic color symbolism. The colours become a vocabulary for emotional and spiritual states. For people, moods, things, places. I’m able to invent words for things I feel may not be effectively described by words like doomed, joyful, expansive, predatory beauty.
Rank Insignia: The Philosophy
Now we get to the shoulderboards. The rank insignia that every naval story includes but rarely makes mean anything beyond hierarchy. Not that it ever could, it’s not made for mythology, it’s for making rank legible. Fine.
I wanted rank to tell a story about what you’ve survived to earn it.
Lieutenant (Muiradon) : Churning, swirling waves on their insignia
Still learning to read the sea
Surface turbulence, chaos, motion
You command the waves, but the waves command you back
Captain (Maarendar) : The drauhessa appears
The drown-horse, the mythological mount of drowned sailors
Folkloric, cursed, the creature that claims those the sea takes
You’ve gone deep enough to encounter what lives in the myths
You’ve survived touching the cursed and returned to tell of it
At this rank, you don’t choose the drauhessa. It chooses you.
You’re a sea officer; you’ve been called to the deep. The insignia marks you as touched by the myth.
Commodore (Venmaarendar) : The relansheer (dolphin)
Administrative officers, shore command
They’ve chosen safety, chosen the blessed over the cursed
The dolphin says: I survived the deep, and I’m not going back
This is the path most officers take—up and away from the water
By commodore rank, many officers have moved to administrative roles. They’ve survived, and they’re choosing safety
The Dolphin Choice: Living or Skeletal
Any officer who wears the relansheer (commodore or admiral) faces an additional choice in how that dolphin is rendered:
The living relansheer honours the blessing itself. It emphasizes protection, the dolphin as sacred guardian, the forward-looking hope that the blessing will continue. Officers who wear this are choosing to focus on what the dolphin saves.
The skeletal relansheer honours the dead. It acknowledges that the dolphin’s blessing didn’t save everyone. That you’re standing here because others aren’t. Officers who wear this are choosing to remember what the blessing cost.
One looks forward, one looks back.
Admiral (Draumeir) :
At this rank, you decide: dolphin or drauhessa?
Most choose the relansheer (dolphin) with pearlescent backing—pearl-light, the only illumination that returns from crush-depth
They’ve earned administrative safety—they take it
They’ve been to the abyss and returned luminous, and now they command from shore, from safety, from the blessed side of the myth
But some will keep the drauhessa.
And when you see an admiral of the fleet wearing the drown-horse instead of the sacred dolphin you can infer something about that man’s soul.
He’s chosen the call, still. Chosen to remain a sea officer even when he could command from land. The drauhessa on his shoulder says the ocean still speaks to me, and I still answer.
It’s fatalism, of a sort. The mythology teaches that the drauhessa appears to claim sailors, to carry them down to the drowning-places. Captains wear it because they’ve been called, touched by that myth, and they know—somewhere deep—that the sea will probably take them eventually.
The Drauhessa
The drauhessa deserves special attention. In Arunean mythology, it’s not just “a sea horse” but is the mount of the drowned, the creature that appears when the sea claims a soul. It’s featured on heraldry alongside the white dolphin because both are sacred, but they represent opposite relationships with the ocean:
White Dolphin (Sollurela): Blessed, messenger, chosen by the sea, operates in the light
Drauhessa: Cursed, taker of souls, claimed by the abyss, dwells in the dark
Why do captains and admirals wear the symbol of the cursed alongside the blessed? Because to command at that level, you’ve been both chosen and claimed. The sea has touched you, marked you, and you survived. The drauhessa on your shoulder says you’ve been to deep places where men die—and came back.
And the pearlescent backing on admiral insignia; that iridescence that shifts between soft pink, teal and orange depending on angle? That’s the only light that returns from these dark places. Pearl-light. The organic treasure that forms in darkness under pressure.
They’ve been to the abyss and brought back illumination.
Make Material Culture Systematic
If you’re building secondary worlds and trying to encode actual themes rather than just making a formula fantasy, your material culture should encode your themes systematically.
Don’t just tell your readers “the sea is sacred”. Put the sacred sea on your characters’ bodies and make it mean something.
This is worldbuilding through material culture. It’s what Gothic fiction has always done—every detail is symbolic, every object carries meaning, surface appearance and intimate reality are different things.
I’m bringing that symbolic density to my naval fiction.
The genre has given us technical precision and historical authenticity. Beautiful. Necessary. I love it. But there’s room for something else—room for the sublime, for competence treated as apotheosis, for officers who look like what they actually are in moments of crisis: men communing with something vast and terrible that sometimes, horribly, answers.
Claiming New Territory
Elegiac naval Gothic is what happens when you take the competence and seamanship of historical naval fiction and admit what it actually feels like when executed at that level.
The sea is a jealous lover. Officers are her priests. The uniform is sacred vestment displaying a cosmology of depth, darkness, and divine blessing bought at terrible cost.
And when a captain takes the helm in a storm and brings his ship through the impossible, he’s more than skilled professional. He’s transfigured into a conduit between his men, ship and the deep. He’s possessed. By something strange.
That’s the aesthetic territory I’m claiming.
Grounded historical naval fiction will always have its place—O’Brian and Forester built something beautiful and true. But there’s room beside it for something that admits the ocean is older and stranger than any history.
If you’re curious about the actual maritime horror novel I’m building this aesthetic for, that’s The Reply—currently in development, set in the world of Nhera where the ocean only sometimes pretends to sleep.
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Fair winds,
—D.S.