Meta-Talk: My Little Social Science Experiment in Picking the Best Anime Character

When people say “harem” in this context–our context–they have this preconception in their mind. I presume if I said “Megatokyo” a different set of preconceptions would pop up in their minds… Perhaps my love for Nayuki was the fatal flaw in all of that, as years spent modding a LOL internet forum can do to you…

Alas, I am not writing from my grave (yet), so I decided to put my Saimoe 2006 thoughts into practice. It’s really just an somewhat-annual competition me and a couple hundred other people do, even if maybe 20-30% of us actually contribute in vigor. Yep, we’re doing an anime character competition. You can read about it in this thread.

Vigor is really what makes it the best, that said. It’s a lot of hard work. Even so, I think the hardest part is to “trust” someone you don’t know. I think overall my problem was still one of trust. It isn’t that I distrust anyone, but I just don’t know if things will work out like how I want it, if other people would “behave” in the way I think they should, and even if the way I think they should behave is really the way to go. I love giving people the liberty to make it ‘better’ but I’m not sure what I think is ‘better’ is what they think is ‘better,’ and so forth.

For one, the real problem is trying to be complicated without a concise goal. What am I trying to achieve? What are they trying to achieve? I think even in an unhappy, constrained context (Saimoe 2006 is such an example), people can be happy as long as they can do what they want with the characters that they love.

And so I think this will work, because any nomination system where people can ultimately nominate characters they love will work.

And after thinking about it, a forum community is still an absolute necessity for something like this to work. You need some kind of persistence, yet coupled with a fast turn-around time. A blog community could work, but it means bloggers have to “get into it.” I don’t know about you, but I think I’m too whimsical about the use of my own soapbox to be too serious about it. In other words, it’s not centralized enough for my liking. It made sense, too, because 2ch is very much a forum community at its heart.

But hey. It could work. Maybe give it another year we could have a real English-language Saimoe.