Winding up the DVD formatting on the final volume of Lucky Star. Lotta work, but it'll finish the show up once and for all.

Still enjoying the heck out of the expansion, though I took some time away from the new content to finish up the Loremaster achievements. Yes, I'm now the King of No Life, and have a tabard with a yellow exclamation point to prove it. I oughta take a screen shot, just to document how sad it is.

The day job's been up and down lately - we've lost a lot of experienced people, to attrition, accounting irregularities, and the like. It's kind of bad in the sense that you get the idea is that some of them are getting while the getting is good, so to speak... that they're leaving because there are obvious problems that are unlikely to get fixed. On the other hand, with the exodus of experienced professionals, promotion opportunity beckons, and sticking it out for a couple of years gives me a much better shot at a decent salary later on. So it's kind of a mixed bag. The worst part is that I won't be working for a guy named "Pirate" anymore. (We're talking about somebody who helpfully copied two seasons of Aria fansubs onto my hard drive at work, "just in case I wanted to watch it". I'd have read him the riot act, but he actually went out and bought it too...)

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No, not the Combat Butler. I had ordered a Hayate Yagami figure from Hobby Search, and it finally arrived.

In a shipping container.

This thing's freaking huge. I have furniture smaller than the box it shipped in. It's currently inhabiting its own zip code. (Basically, it's more or less to scale with the Vita figure... but Hayate at 19 is considerably taller than Vita!)

It's not even that it's oversized or anything, it's just that the pose, with the out-thrust arm and flowing cape, means that the occupied dimensions are really out there. I've got it mounted on the corner of a bookshelf, partly because of the size and party because the pose means you can't really put it too far above eye level. (Well, you could, but I'd rather not have to explain panty-flashing to casual visitors...)

I'd take a photo, but I don't actually own a camera. Signals from the family seem to indicate that this state of events will end this month, so expect pictures then.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 08:32 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I blame Minoru Shiraishi and Arthas. (Probably more Arthas...)

Knocked out the last batch of extras for Lucky Star. It's been a while since I've been totally idle on the subtitle front - which is a good thing, because I've got games stacking up.

My primary monitor was on the fritz yesterday, so I went to Fry's to replace it. Turns out they don't even stock non-widescreen monitors anymore. So long as I was there... I ended up picking up paired 20" monitors so that I wouldn't have a mismatch (the working spare will go live with Dad), a new video card, and a terabyte external drive (the project archives were gettin' big...) Your anime dollars at work!

Running a couple of episodes behind on Toradora, and there's not really anything else I'm keeping up with at the moment. There's plenty of shows from last season that I haven't done through yet. Hell, there's plenty of shows on DVD that I haven't dug into yet! Picked up the Nanoha S1 box on that same Fry's trip. I've also got Fate/Stay and some of the Haruhi discs sitting around, and beyond that, Z Gundam. Enough to hold me for a while, I think...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:59 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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I'm transmitting the last episodes of Lucky Star now. Worth doing, but oy, I'm out of gas... the day job's been quite busy this week too and I could use some time to unwind.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 11:28 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Remember reading Huxley's "Brave New World" in high school? The problem I always had, relative to that book's dystopian predictions of a world where people were churned out in factories and mentally stunted to order, was the elevator button.

One of the tasks in that novel for which a degraded little sub-human had been bred was to operate an elevator, since that was a task that was obviously a waste of a full human intellect. And so we had a society which could produce this poor, shrunken idiot to run the elevator... but hadn't discovered that, in fact, it didn't need poor, shrunken idiots to run the elevators because you could easily install elevator buttons.

That's what came to mind when I was reading this discussion about space elevators at Steven's. Science fiction hasn't really done a great job of predicting the future as we end up living it. We didn't go through an era of flying cars, we didn't go through an era of rocket ships, we didn't go through an era of cybernetically-modified skateboard punks. Even reading through a lot of far-future settings, something that struck me is that I actually use a lot more technology than the characters I'm writing about.

And part of that reason is that there are innumerable things in the world which are enabled by the technology that we have, but that nobody really set out to develop, and were conspicuously unpredicted years in the past. Plenty of people wrote about computers, but I don't think anyone expected them to become a tool of ubiquitous networking. We spend a lot less time flying through virtual cyberscapes that are representations of hideously complex systems, and a lot more just typing messages out.

Nobody predicted that we'd all have solid-state music players with custom playlists of our favorite songs, even though in theory people had predicted solid-state memory, music compression, and the like. The idea never gelled, just like nobody in Huxley's brave new world ever thought "gee, instead of spending years raising this little chimp-like man, why don't we just put three bucks of electronics in the elevator and call it a day?"

That's how I think of space elevators. It's too much of a "to be engineered for" project to actually work; it's a flying car, a rocket belt, a USB port behind your ear. It's the sort of thing that looks like a good idea on paper thirty years before you realize that it's a tremendous overkill solution to a problem you solved in a different fashion long ago, as a byproduct of doing something else you were trying to do.

That doesn't mean that space exploration is unimportant! But sometimes you have to sit back and wait for the technology to catch up with you, perhaps.

In other news, Ghost Slayers Ayashi is done, I'm down to the last volume of Lucky Star, and Kagami won Saimoe this year, beating Tsukasa in the finals. I'm actually kind of glad I wasn't following it closely, now; my life has been a little too full of Lucky Star as it is, of late...

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Spending the weekend in Houston, paying the folks a visit. Should really have come a month or two ago, but work, anime, and just plain ol' torpor got in the way. It's about five hours down and five hours back, which is quite a bite out of the weekend.

Folks are doing well. There's actually a surprising amount of storm damage from the recent hurricane still being made well; tarps up on roofs and such. Folks are having to replace their roof, but it needed replacing and now insurance will cover it, so in its own way, it's for the best. A house on the next block took a pine tree through kitchen and bedroom.

Dad got a new laptop for work, which is a little ironic - he's 65 and retiring fairly soon (hope hope). It's a Panasonic Toughbook, and it's amazingly heavy, like picking up a laptop from the mid-80s. But back then it was just heavy components; with this sucker, the weight is -armor-, the sort of thing I'd want if I was going to go lugging it around with the 50-pound test weights. It also seems that all that metal works like a big honkin' heat sink... this thing heats up way less than other laptops I've used. Then again, I'm just running Firefox at the moment. It's not like I've fired up WOW.

On that note, I'm pretty happy with the recent WOW patch. I always enjoyed playing the warrior, but when you have a serious tank, doing anything besides tanking is like pulling teeth. After the patch, though, the amount of damage I'm doing is way, way, way up - it wouldn't be too much to say that it tripled, with the same gear. Now I can play it without thinking "you know, I could go get my mage and do this five times faster"...

Subtitling is going well. One volume of Lucky Star to format, then one left to time, and I'm down to the last episode of Ayashi, which I seem to enjoy directly proportional to how much Norio Wakamoto is in each episode. ;p

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 06:21 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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The best thing about finishing a batch of Lucky Star extras (of which only one remains to be timed, yay!) is that it makes normal subtitling work seem tremendously easy by comparison. I blew straight through a volume of Ghost Slayers Ayashi this week, and it didn't even feel like work. It helps that the show was transitioning from "let's do a bunch of vignettes focusing on one of the characters" to "oh crap, they've cancelled half our projected run, we'd better make with the plot!" Unlike the last time I saw a show like that, the terrible FF:U, Ayashi actually had enough episodes to get its ending together (and got a few OAV episodes after, heh.)

I'm in a pretty good mood. The day job has been slow, giving me lots of time to get these subtitles done (which is good, so long as they are followed by yet more subtitles). I've got a Vita figure that should be arriving any day now. Things are looking up for some fellow ADV-refugee friends from Houston, who should be moving to Dallas shortly (which, I suppose, will obligate me to do some heavy lifting... but I could probably use the exercise.) The Warcraft expansion comes out next month, which leaves me enough time to clear out all my current work beforehand; and if I obtain more work, well, I've obtained more work! ;p

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You were saying?

It's true that the content of FSN is pretty dark (though not as dark as you're worrying about, I think). But for me, the real fun of the series came after that. It's a great bunch of characters (especially Rin), and there's a wealth of fan takes on the characters and their dynamics that I enjoyed greatly. Of course, they're all hugely spoilery, but I'm essentially immune to spoilers at this point - hell, I spent this week working on the final episode of a show that I'd never seen any other episode of, just as a test project, and that's not the first time the job has forced me to learn about the end of a series before I've seen it.

Of course, it's not unusual for a series to have a bunch of doujin associated with it, but FSN's unusual in that it's got a lot of comedy stuff, not just the normal ero, and that people have been translating them for a while, so there's plenty available in English. Stories about Shirou and Saber? Shirou and Rin? Shirou and Ilya as big brother, little sister types? Caster as moe-moe housewife? Harem jokes? Archer as Santa Claus? They're all out there.

So stick with it if you can; the show itself has a light at the end of the tunnel, but beyond that there's all sorts of fun things to check out.



(Thanks to the artists, writers, and translators behind "Mougen Tasha" and "Beat Your Fate".)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:33 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Sorry about the slow posting. Been a bit hectic this week, what with the parents getting hit by a hurricane and all. (They're okay. But they're not coming up here unless their power is out all week...)

Finished Ayashi vol. 4, so now we're down to two volumes left in that series. I kind of liked the last volume, but the show's provenance (as a planned 52-episode series that got cut short) is starting to show; we're still doing short character arcs when we ought to really be in the swing of the general plot.

Saimoe's still chugging along. Steven posted a comment observing that Nanoha was moving an awful lot of characters to the second round. Indeed it is; what Nanoha fans there are seem to be enough to push Nanoha characters forward against anything but serious opposition, and there's just not that much of that this year. The only Nanoha characters that have lost their round so far are Rein (close match with Konata) and Signum (first round against Nanoha, heh). No other shows have that kind of response, excepting Hayate the Combat Butler (and Aria is doing pretty well in the early rounds, as usual).

It's not that no other shows have popular characters, just that they tend to only have one or two of them, so they aren't standing out at this point. Ah well, let's wait until the first round concludes, and things should get more interesting with most of the no-hopers out of the running.

Edit: and of course, as soon as I post that, Subaru loses her round. Well, snap. She's probably my favorite of the new characters... though she's more rambunctious than moe, exactly. (One of the illustrations from the new drama CD that was released, a "three years after" story, had Subaru performing a rescue despite having shrapnel and rebar sticking out of her leg. Awesome, yes, but not moe...)

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Turned in Lucky Star vol. 4 subtitles. Whew! That was one hell of a formatting run...

Just for the interested, generating volume 4 involved creating almost 4,200 .tif images, 20 MB compressed, 1.69 GB uncompressed. (Ah, uncompressed .tifs...) Of the two Minoru Shiraishi extras, one of them came in at a measly 400 or so finished subtitles, whereas the other one was a much more robust 500 subtitles. That's for less than 15 minutes of video, folks. An "average" episode of Lucky Star, after all the overlapping is taken into account, is between 550 and 650.

The reason why? Tons of little captions that pop up. You see more and more of this kind of stuff in Japanese productions... maybe they're getting influenced by Nico Nico Douga? But when you're subtitling, every time one of them comes up or goes down, that's another subtitle picture (and they tend to come up and go down with total disregard to the audio that's under them... or worse, they just say what's in the audio but are timed differently!)

Unfortunately, you can't just ignore them. Seeing text flash up on the screen in a language you can't read, and then NOT having that text translated, is pretty distracting. You can't just ask the viewer to assume that you're only dealing with the "relevant" or "interesting" text. (It's a little different in the body of a show, when you have background captions like menus or random store fronts that you can ignore freely.)

When I was working at ADV, I had a little utility that could take two subtitle tracks and fuse them into a single track, combining the subtitle images into a new image stream and producing a new navigation file. I'd give... well, not any part of my actual anatomy, but it'd be worth some considerable cash for me to lay hands on something like that again...

Saimoe's been off and on through the first half of the first round. Nanoha survived an assassination attempt (at the hands of a True Tears character, I kid you not) by a margin of twenty votes, along with two or three hundred fake votes (first time this year that that's been significant...) Maria lost to Rena with each breaking 1000 votes, but other than that day, vote totals haven't come anywhere close to that, and there's even an example of a round being won with a winner under 400 votes (admittedly, when the competition is a Gundam 00 character and a cat, it's not hard to see why people didn't bother...)

Upcoming rounds of interest include Rei tomorrow, Ranka vs. Mayu vs. Kokoro the day after, and Karen from Geass versus Nagisa from Clannad -and- Kanata from LS. Hey, happy thought, I still haven't reached the Kanata episode... Most of the "big" matches from the first round are behind us, so it's going to be a couple weeks before the also-rans are cleared from the table. Ah well...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:26 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I'm not much of a drinker. A big part of the equation is that I hate bad-tasting beverages; I cannot stand conventional beer, or anything with that sour alcohol-y taste. So when I drink, it's mixed drinks, vodka with mixers, or flavored malt beers.

Picked up a six-pack of Smirnoff Raw Tea the other day on a whim, and... it's surprisingly good. A little sweet, with the taste of the green tea almost totally masking the alcohol taste. It's not very alcoholic, of course, but overall it's one of the better random purchases I've made lately.

Also randomly, I'm mulling over whether to go to Anime Fest this weekend. It's not a long trip (I'd probably take the train, just to avoid parking issues - worked surprisingly well with A-Kon). However, the entry fee's pretty steep for just showing up to shop for a bit, and I don't know the people there, so no free badge for me. On the other hand, if I don't go, then this weekend is nothing but Lucky Star DVD subtitle formatting, which is always a little likely to drive me into a homicidal rage...

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Sorry about missing a few days. Lucky Star's gotten busy (volume 5 uploads even as I speak) and I came down with a minor case of crud, so things have been kind of full. Dunno if I should go back to the full reporting thing, to be honest - it takes up a good amount of time and I don't know if it's really useful, especially with the right sidebar having an auto-updating chart for anyone who's interested. I'll probably back off to commenting on the stuff that interests me, and leave the rest to go hang.

It was a tough volume of Lucky Star to get through. Most of the new characters don't quite have the flavor of the main four (well... they've got the flavor of Miyuki, maybe, each good for a couple of types of jokes... but that's a problem for her too!) The show's splitting time between everybody, and it drags here and there. Often, Konata becomes too much of a mouthpiece for the writer, and complains about stuff that's kind of otaku-centric; it's like, okay, I chuckled, but I'm in no danger of falling out of my chair. Minami and Yutaka are cute, in that kind of "quiet big girl and sickly little girl" way that they have, but we don't need Hiyori trying to keep herself from slashing them every five minutes. High points of the volume are dealing with the killer entrance exam studying load (classic Konata/Kagami, with plenty of room for Tsukasa to be funny too) and a Gundam scene which contains a subtle slam at Seed ("It's not a real Gundam if you can't call it by a letter," Soujirou says...) Low point was probably the Hiiragi family scene from 17, unless you're just a fan of tsundere Kagami; low humor quotient.

I would have hated being a student in the Japanese educational system. They wouldn't know what to do with someone who just doesn't need to study. ;p

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Mikan did fairly well in her round over nobody much, Kirino gets the high score of the day as she polishes off Ume-sensei. But the real surprise was in B1, where Potemayo split the two Geass girls to squeak out a victory. Looks like poor coordination within Geass fans (or maybe they just backed the wrong girl - between the two, wouldn't the poor crippled blind girl in a wheelchair be more moe?)

However, if Potemayo and Guchuko are to have any chance at their epic showdown, the latter is going to have to get out of her first-round match first... and she's up against Yui from Lucky Star. That's not necessarily the end of the world - Yui is probably the least moe of any of the Lucky Star characters in this tournament. But at the same time, there's a lot of Lucky Star fans out there, and the Potemayo vote is going to have to increase a little if they want to beat out Miss DWI.

B10 is a bit more of a showdown - a fairly-strong Hidamari Sketch character against the princess from Familiar of Zero. Too close to call at this point, really; Ume-sensei's vote was low, but that was a joke character to start with, and we have no idea how well actual Hidamari characters will end up doing.

Can't comment much on B2 - didn't see any of the three shows involved.
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Very low voting yesterday, as Ginga ekes out a victory over Shiika, San has a surprisingly close vote against Sumomo, and Hanyuu romps to victory in her round. The only real surprise is San's low total; last year she was a much more formidable competitor. On the other hand, well, while she's very different, the yakuza-movie lines aren't ordinarily associated with moe...

Today should be a little bit more interesting. B9 is another "who cares?" round, but Kirino from Bamboo Blade versus Ume-sensei from Hidamari should be interesting. (However, I still can't take Hidamari - wide screen is wiiiiiide - so it'll be Kirino for me.) And B1 pits two high-moe Geass characters against each other... with Potemayo waiting in the wings. Against either Shirley or Nunnally, I wouldn't give the mochimochi much of a chance, but against both of them at once, splitting the Geass vote, it just might happen. ;p
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Not much excitement yesterday. Rika won her round, though by a relatively small margin (and with a vote total that's not up to former-champion status... either the Higurashi fans all went south for the winter, or they're hiding in ambush for later!) Yami from To Love, and Rima from Shugo Chara, both won their rounds, Rima clocking in our first sub-500-votes victory.

Today's a little blah as well. San, of course, is going to annihilate everyone else in A8 (can't discount that mermoe). Hanyuu should run the table in A12. The H2O characters have a better chance than normal, with one in two different rounds, but up against a cute lil' horned girl from Higurashi, and Ginga on the other end in A4, I don't think it'll amount to much in the end. Gotta go with Ginga personally, because it's a Nanoha character and that's in my contract. (No, seriously, it's not. And of the Nanoha girls, Ginga isn't particularly moe at all, though unitard plus spinny fist plus roller skates is never a bad combo.)
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Fun day from yesterday's voting. Totals were up a little, as you'd expect with a relatively big match. Fate ended up winning her round against unexpectedly heavy opposition from Kotonoha, who actually held the lead for a little while before falling behind in later voting. Mion, a strong performer last year, turned in the most pathetic performance of the day. Sorry, Mion, but open carry isn't moe!

In the other matches, Kiri easily beats both contenders in her match, and CC wipes the floor with a split To Love vote.

Higurashi fans have a chance to get revenge today, as last year's champion Rika goes up against Touma from Minami-ke. I found Touma to be cast in the same mold as Tomo from Azumanga, but three times worse, so I wouldn't particularly care if she were beaten with a bag of hammers. On the other hand, I'd really like it if Rika were to be thrown off a cliff, resurrected, then thrown off again... "Murderous loli" doesn't quite do it for me, however justified.

(Update: It's been pointed out that this is cousin Touma, the inoffensive and manly cousin, not Kana the bag-of-hammer-beating-prospect. Hey, neat, now I can vote for someone in this round. ;p)

I've got to favor Miyako from Bamboo Blade in A7. Something of a gimmick character - the "I am a nice person except actually evil and violent when nobody's looking" shtick is always good for a comedy - and her taste in men is not merely questionable, but sad. If she was up against real moe, she'd be toast. But against a Gundam 00 character (there is no moe in that series, unless you count Haro) and another forgettable To Love entry, hey, why not? I'm rooting for Bamboo Blade to do well in the tournament as a whole.

A11's a dumping ground. Maki's a one-note joke, Konomi is definitely second or third fiddle to other girls from To Heart 2, and I avoided Shugo Chara like the pneumonic plague. Ah well, they can't all be nail-biters...
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Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 11:06 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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And the first round went more or less to order, with Haruka coming out on top of the four in A1 and Fuuko powering over the other two in A5. Murasaki from Kurenai had a closer call against Chizuru from Kanokon, but still won with a margin of 74.

Feel free to log-roll votes here. For rounds in which I don't have an express favorite, I don't mind plugging in a commenter's preference. At the same time, if I do happen to care, and you have an empty vote in that round, plug mine in there! ;p

Two throwaway rounds today. To Love hasn't really caught on here (oh, joy, yet another harem show with a succubus... we've been there and done that, right?) On the other hand, CC isn't exactly... well... moe. Not unless pizza consumption counts, and apparently all the Pizza Hut ads got censored out of the US broadcast, so the Pizza Butt jokes have fallen by the wayside...

A2's no big deal for me either. Kiri's a one-note joke (not that many of the Zetsubou characters got any development, heh), and I didn't see True Tears or Kimikiss.

But A6 makes up for it, with the first big match of the series, and one of the best of the first round. Mion did quite well last year, Kotonoha has a definite claim to the yandere vote as well, and Fate... Fate wuz robbed! ;p I've got to give this one to Fate, honestly. She's not quite as moe as she was when she was a little kid, but all the fan works and the recent announcement of the movie should help refuel that. Mion is going to have to buck all the anti-Higurashi sentiment that was built up from last year, and Kotonoha is hitting the exact same fan niche; it's quite possibly a worst-case scenario for Mion.

On a related note, I'm thinking I might do well to design a Saimoe-related blog widget for the sidebar. Might be a productive use of my time today at work, if it's slow. On the other hand, so would coming home and starting on Lucky Star vol. 5...
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Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 11:02 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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And the voting begins... with nothing much. I'm handicapped here by not having seen a lot of the shows we're looking at today; Kurenai was on my "get around to it sometime" list, as was ef, and I stayed away from Idolmaster and Shugo Chara.

The only popular characters we're looking at here are Haruka in A1 (maybe too much of a mom-replacement for moe, but still worthy of a vote), and Fuuko in A5 (sad girl with starfish - found her annoying somewhat, but the show used her as comic relief, and that worked). Both Minami-ke and Clannad have large voting blocs that should push these characters through, especially against no-big-deal opposition. A9 is anyone's guess.
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It's that time again, folks...

Here's the bracket for the tournament. I'm going to reserve detailed comments for each day's rounds, but this could be some fun. Good mix of early matches and late matches. Draw was pretty even, though Lucky Star is spread out pretty far - it has serious potential to put two or even three into the quarterfinals...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:36 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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The first preliminary round is over (after a month...) and the winners are in. It's REALLY unlikely that characters from the second preliminary have much of a chance at the tourney, either, so the characters that are in are the ones to watch.

So, who's riding high? Here's a run-down...

Several of last year's series are back for another hurrah - Saimoe puts its cutoff in the summer, so 26-episode spring series get two bites at the apple. Lucky Star is still riding quite high, qualifying the whole main cast, Kuroi-sensei, and all of the friends introduced in the second half of the season. Oh, and Konata's mom...

Nanoha Strikers qualified a good chunk of characters, though nothing like last season's pile, and the vote total isn't nearly as dominating in the prelims. Fate and Nanoha themselves are still popular, and there's enough of a fan base to get a lot of the secondary characters into the top nine, but I wouldn't expect a whole lot from the others. One exception - Vivio, who hadn't really been introduced for last year's voting, but ought to be formidable this year.

Higurashi is still doing well, as is Minami-ke; pretty much all of those characters pose a threat.

The Hayate girls are doing even better than they were last year; well, that's what having 52 episodes (and more coming!) gets for you. Voting was concentrated on the main cast, though, with only the Hamster squeaking in from the secondary characters.

Plenty of characters from Aria and Code Geass qualified as well, though the track record for both shows isn't that great. Figure that most of those girls will be eliminated in the early rounds of the tourney.

Familiar of Zero didn't do nearly as well as in times past, with only Louise, Henrietta, Siesta, and the elf chick garnering enough votes to qualify. Vary the formula, guys!

New this year is Clannad, which really tore up the rankings (no shock there). Any of the main cast could end up going quite far, though I myself prefer Tomoyo and Kyou. ;p Bamboo Blade is another new show with a good number of female entrants and a good fan base behind it, as is Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, though not as strongly.

Some of the other oddball qualifiers are Dokuro-chan, Yin from Darker Than Black, Chihiro from ef, the two Ninomiya girls, the Hidamari bunch, Fubuki from Maid Guy (but not the female lead! Gotta be the maids...), Ranka from Mac F, Nena from Gundam 00 (what?), a whole passel of characters from Shana and Seto no Hanayome, Horo from Spice and Wolf (first place, too), and Potemayo. (The lack of Guchuko indicates that the Japanese really don't know what moe is...)

Thanks to Aya Reiko from the Asuki forums for compiling the whole list. Four days off, then second prelims, which will be (mercifully) shorter...

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