So the boffins over at 2chan are starting up this year's Saimoe tournament. Never heard of it? It's pretty obscure and being run in another country, almost entirely in a language I don't speak, so it's more like, how'd I hear of it?

Basically, it's the "Saishu Moe" contest - same abbreviation style as Saikano, so "Saimoe". It's an attempt to find out which female character of the last year's anime was the most moe through polling. But a single poll would be boring, and the Japanese magazines do that anyway, and measuring a single poll question doesn't really give anybody an idea of the depth of people's devotion to the characters. The Saimoe tournament takes the question to the opposite extreme.

The entire month of July will be spent on the preliminary rounds. Six days a week, 150+ characters from a random selection are presented, and voters place ten votes; the top eight advance, while 9-32 go on to a second round of preliminary voting. All in all, 288 characters actually advance to the tournament bracket, which is in groups of 3 for the first round and then one-on-one until the finals, which are scheduled to occur in November.

Last year, foreign participation was okay but not exactly welcome - part of the fun is the insane politics, revenge voting, bloc voting, preemptive strike voting, wedge voting, and general silliness involved whenever a few thousand otaku do something like this, and if you can't speak the language you aren't really going to be interested. But this year, they've basically invited English-speakers to join in the fun, so it'll be one big polyglot mess. They even set up a rules page which is almost totally un-Engrishy, here.

It's not exactly easy to vote - you have to go to a page, refresh it 2 hours later or so, and copy a text string along with the voting string (the character name in Japanese, so the parsing software can read it), and whatever cheering-on text you feel like adding in. But it's pretty fun to follow along, even if you're not motivated to vote for anybody that particular day, and it can run pretty close - the early rounds last year generally had only a thousand voters a day or so, and there were plenty of times when popular characters ran very close to each other - I think that Eri from School Rumble ended up winning over one of the Sonozakis from Higurashi by five votes, heh.

At any rate, I won't bother relaying results from the prelims (oy, the text spam!), but I'll probably be commenting from time to time. Should be a big, fun mess this year - the Rozen Maiden characters are still eligible, what with the new OAV, new Nanoha, more School Rumble, Zero's Familiar, the return of Kanon (!), plus stuff like Lucky Star and Hidamari Sketch.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:11 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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