(Was going to fold this into the comments, but meh, if I'm gonna type this much... heh.)

On the topic of voting for Wara Yellow... I'd feel a little bad, voting for characters who have essentially no hope in the tournament, but at the same time, marginal winners being replaced by marginal losers won't affect the outcome much. There's a limited number of really popular characters, and the winner is going to be one of them, in the end.

On the one hand, keeping that in mind, the whole tourney could stand to be considerably smaller. There will be plenty of matches (especially in round 1) where three characters who never had any chance, and who nobody really cares much about, will get matched up only to face an absolute juggernaut in the next round. Reducing the number of entrants by half wouldn't significantly affect the reliability of the results, but it would speed things up by a month or so.

Then again, the one big advantage of the current set of rules is that the organizers can claim to be absolutely impartial as to which characters are allowed to participate. Of all the shows included in the eligible time period, any female -anything- is allowed to be nominated. Last year's voting included Nanoha's magical staff (Fate's was, alas, ineligible due to having a male VA) and a -horse-. Literally, if you can get together a sufficient number of voters, you could get any character you wanted into the tournament, and indeed as far as your persuasive powers can take that character. Which is something of the point, really - the rules explicitly endorse collective voting, encouraging greater participation, log-rolling your votes ("I'll vote for your character today if you vote for my character tomorrow"), whatever floats your boat; the only thing frowned upon is outright character assassination, the occasional "Death to Desu!" comments last year notwithstanding.

Of course, nobody's going to do that sort of stuff for a character unless they're completely flippin' nuts for her, which is also kind of the point; characters who are successful at inspiring this sort of action on their behalf are convincingly more "moe" than ones who are merely cute, sexy, or whatever. In that sense, the convoluted voting process is a kind of virtue in and of itself - if it was easy to do, it wouldn't reflect the voters' devotion to the characters. And indeed, if I don't have a specific reason to vote (a character I care about, or a log-rolling agreement, or some revenge to exact, heh), well, then I won't vote that day.

All that said, it would indeed be hilarious if a concerted effort were made to get one or two obscure or joke characters into the tourney. The only trick is picking one that's obviously a joke, but that's funny enough that we can get a hundred people to do it...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 05:39 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 490 words, total size 3 kb.