Some notes on Saimoe

Yay, finally done with exams, mostly done with unpacking, so on to other things. Every year 2ch hosts an internet popularity contest to in some way determine which female (mandatory) character had the most moe showing in anime that year. This year is interesting in that I know so little about who’s who, but at the same time, there is a return of a plethora of characters from around the 2006-07 years.

One fun thing to note is the lack of K-On! characters to break round 2. Prior to yesterday with Azusa getting a solid 650 votes, not a single K-On character made it through. I suspect Mio will win her respective bracket, but only one of them will move onto the 4th round as the two face off in the next round. I’m personally not a fan of the series, so I’m quite amused that K-On!! didn’t dominate this tournament like Saki did last year, even riding on a recent second season appearance.

We also saw the second extremely close bracket with biribiri beating out hidamari sketch’s Miyako by two votes. Not quite as dramatic as Saki’s Hisa beating out Railgun’s Uiharu by a single vote, but a testament to the idea that every vote counts. It’s a common saying among economists that voting is a waste of time (for any particular individual) because the probability that your vote will matter is so incredibly slim. In an involved community however, with this style of competition where you can actually see the votes as they come in, it is very possible to rally up votes when your favorite candidate is behind. If the votes were all private until they were counted, I suspect such narrow margins would be much rarer.

And finally…

good lord…(click to zoom)

911 votes on Nadeko in a bracket where over 1700 votes were cast. Over the ridiculously popular Yui. While number of votes in a particular bracket don’t really reflect on future performance, as more people vote when there is greater competition, it should be noted that on the other side of the bracket, Nanoha has about as many votes from both rounds combined as Nadeko got in round 2. Fun stuff.

As a whole, due to my relative lack of interest in shows this year, Saimoe isn’t particularly interesting, unlike last year’s hilariously awesome spectacle of Saki kind of stomping over everything, but there are some interesting events to happen so far. I’d like to see Hitagi and Koromo to take a few more rounds, and I suspect Kanade is quite a favorite to take the whole thing.