International Saimoe League 2011: Amethyst Period Round 3

Posted: June 23, 2011 | Author: flomu | Filed under: Meta-ish, Misaki Thursday |16 Comments »

Today, I’m going to look at the most recent results of ISML (at the time of me writing this post) and deduce what kind of people are actually participating.  From there, I will go on to predict how badly Tenshi/Kanade will lose to Mikoto Misaka in the finals this year (in hundreds of thousands of votes). In this scientific analysis, I approximate the voter base as falling into four groups:

1. Mikoto Misaka fans
2. Boobs
3. The Moe Mob
4. I-Idiots

The first group needs no explanation.  Any sane, rational being with any tiny semblance of a functional brain would fall under this category.  Of course, if you don’t want to be seen as a totally retarded dumb butt, you could start voting for Mikoto Misaka, but I guess that’s your choice.  I won’t hold it against you, since you probably don’t know any better – poor souls!

Boobs refers to the ecchi-loving community.  These guys are the people who like crappy shows like Sora no Otoshimono and Zero no Tsukaima.  There aren’t many Boobs in ISML, since they’re too busy watching Eiken and stuff to care about the characters whose boobs they’re looking at.

The Moe Mob consists mainly of K-ON! fans who would stop at nothing to promote their shitty characters.  They support characters whose only traits are having really ugly teeth – almost like… beavers.  We must be wary of these sneaky bastards, yet they aren’t our true enemy.

I-Idiots are those demented creatures that love Angel Beats so much that they think Kanade is a good character with feelings and shit.  They are the ones who cried for hours after watching Angel Beats even though nobody is sure what exactly happened in that terrible anime.  Some of them try to get off the hook by claiming that they know Angel Beats has faults but that they love it anyway.  No!  You can’t do that!  Angel Beats doesn’t just have minor faults – it has massive ones!  The entire last episode is a confusing hodge-podge of crap mixed with crap and topped off with crap sauce.  Angel Beats sucks, basically.

I’m just going to go down the line, match-by-match, and assign points to each group.

Match #1: Shinonono Hōki (2788) lost to Seraphim (2933).

Looks like the Boobs are having an internal struggle: Mecha boobs vs. Vampire Ninja boobs!  In the end, Seraphim won because her boobs are bigger.  Plus her name is shorter – the members of the Boobs faction aren’t too bright and can’t remember more than eight letters at a time.

Boobs: -1 point for being dumb and not banding together

Match #2: Tachibana Kanade (4481) won against Saber (2289).

Our fated enemy, the I-Idiots!  Kanade pulls off a big win because most of the I-Idiots mindlessly vote for Kanade, no matter who the opposition is.  It’s like how they write about how awesome Angel Beats is when everybody can see the show’s glaring faults. Kanade isn’t really moe.  She’s like a dead Yuki Nagato who completely changes her personality in the last episode.  Yuki is pretty moe and cool and is a worthy opponent for Mikoto.  Yuki’s rotting, smiling corpse (aka Kanade) isn’t cool and should be thrown out with burnable trash on Monday or Thursday.  Actually, maybe a Yuki corpse should be oversized trash.  I’m not too clear on the trash collection policies of Japan.  All I know is that burnable trash is collected twice a week, non-burnables and recyclables are once a week, and oversized is… I don’t know.  I think 2DT would know.  Maybe I’ll ask him.

I-Idiots: +2 points for winning

Saber: +1 point for effort

Trash: +0 points for lack of knowledge

Match #3: Sengoku Nadeko (2790) lost to Eucliwood Hellscythe (3627)

Demo sonna n ja dame~ Mou sonna n ja hora~

Kokoro wa shinka suru yo motto motto~!

What happened to Nadeko love?  A couple of days before the full version of Renai Circulation came out, Twitter and etc. were crazy about the song, and about Nadeko, and (more importantly) about KANA HANAZAWA. I guess a lot of people saw the picture and were so bewildered by KanaHana (or was it HanaKana?  KanaKana?  Katakana?) that they picked Yuu instead of Nadeko by accident.

It happens, it happens.

Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Nadeko: +3 points for being ~kawaii~!

KanaHana: +1 point

I-Idiots: -1 point because I don’t like them

Match #4: Yui (4610) won against Shiina (1500)

For all the non-Angel Beats groupies out there, these two utterly useless and annoying characters both come from that demonic hell-hole of an anime people sometimes refer to as Angel Beats.  Both characters are completely forgettable.  Admit it – you wouldn’t know them by name unless somebody told you they were from Angel Beats, showed you several pictures of them, and made you watch an episode of the damn show, all the while pointing out where the characters appear.

It’s interesting how Yui got so many more votes than Shiina.  In my opinion, they should each have gotten less than five votes.  I think the Boobs had something to do with this.  Maybe they saw how short Yui’s name was and decided to vote for her.

I-Idiots: +1 for winning, -2 for losing to themselves

Boobs: +1 for sabotage

Match #5: Charlotte Dunois (3774) won against Iwasawa Asami (2494)

Mecha Boobs versus Angel Beats!  Surprisingly, the one white girl with boobs and mecha and stuff beat that angel beats girl who died really early on.  Actually, that could be part of the reason.  Iwasawa wasn’t much of a character, even in the context of such a horrid show like Angel Beats.  I mean, she wasn’t an Angel and she wasn’t a Beats.  She wasn’t even beaten.  And by the time the confusing-as-hell finale came along, she’d already gone far, far away. All the Kanade supporters were probably bawling their eyes out at that point.  Their short attention spans prevent them from remembering a character that only showed up in the first half of the series.

It’s kind of like how nobody remembers Index or Kamina.  Wait, no.  Just Index.

I-Idiots: -1 for losing

Boobs: +1 for winning

Kamina: +2 gar

Match #6: Hirasawa Ui (3114) lost to Konjiki no Yami (3258)

Yeah, I could really care less about these two characters.  Instead, the picture above (one of Crazydave‘s many twitter avatars) reminded me of earwax.

When people talk to me, I often get them to repeat what they say several times before I finally hear it.  Sometimes it’s because I genuinely don’t care about what they’re talking about, but at other times it feels like my ears are clogged. …and they were!  Well, my right one at least.

I was picking my right ear the other day, and I felt something.  Something big.  Something nasty.  It was like casting a line into the water and catching Moby Dick.  The whale of an earwax chunk came right out of my ear, and suddenly I could hear again!  It was the best feeling, on par with stretching your legs after sitting in front of your computer all day (and that sex thing, though Iwouldn’t know about that).

The dry, yellowish chunk of earwax was around a centimeter in diameter and resembled my failed attempts at making a paper frog.  When I stretched the chunk out, it turned out to be a good inch in length. After doing some research online, I discovered that the cause of this enormous piece of earwax was my love for sticking things into holes.  More specifically, I love sticking Q-tips into my ears.  This pushes the earwax deeper into my ears and causes a massive buildup. Now I’m worried about my left ear. More interesting things about earwax (from Wikipedia):

• Asians and Native Americans have dry, grayish earwax and are handsome people
• Caucasians and Africans have wet, yellow earwax
• The dry type is recessive and the wet type is dominant, so if I marry a white girl, my children will have disgusting yellowy wet earwax
• The one base change that results in this earwax difference also affects sweat production… so because I have dry, flaky shit in my ears, I don’t smell terrible after running.  I just smell bad.
• Earwax is tasty.

Mikoto: +5 because she’s cool even while picking her ears

Earwax: +0.5 for getting out of my right ear

Match #7: Huang Lingyin (2361) lost to Hirasawa Yui (4062)

Oh boy, the Boobs are really no match for the Moe Mob!  The moeblobbiness of Yui overwhelmed the boobiness of Huang Lingyin.  Speaking of Lingyin, I’ve come across quite a lot of fanart of her.  Maybe the eyepatch counts as a secondary sexual characteristic?

I just realized that the competition is called the International Saimoe League.  I generally use “moe” as a derogatory term, simply because I tend not to like stereotypically “moe” characters like Yui Hirasawa and that Azusa girl and Mio. Personally, I don’t find Mikoto the least bit moe.  She’s really cool and stuff, but moe?  Not so much.  But then again, who said the ISML was ever actually about moe?  If you wanted a most moe tournament, you gather up all your moeblobs and pick the worst one of the lot:

• Ayu (2006, unless you’re into that kind of stuff)
• Yui
• … Azusa?
• According to Konata, Miyuki.

A note on the last one: I was just watching Lucky Star a couple of hours before typing this, and I still had to look up Miyuki’s name on Google.  Wow, is she an unmemorable and unimportant and utterly useless character or what?

I think the slimiest, gooeyest, disgustingest moeblobbiest moeblob of them all is… Yui.  I really can’t take how her face can get so deformed that it actually turns into a blob.  Hey since I named the moe champion, can I stop this post now?

Yui: +100 for being most moe

Miyuki: -5 for being unmemorable

Match #8: Furukawa Nagisa (3692) won against Shirai Kuroko (2738)

I feel like I could say something about the terrible ending to After Story and Kuroko’s annoying voice, but I don’t want to.  Really, how much commentary can I give about a single match of a single round of a single gem-named period of some stupid online competition among a group of anime characters?

I put in a lot of thought into this blog’s name, actually.  I wanted it to be cool and creative and instantly recognizable.  Since I don’t have a scrap of creativity in my entire body, the best I came up with was “Misaki Thursday.”

The Misaki part is pretty straightforward: My avatar is Misaki Nakahara from Welcome to the N.H.K.  I don’t particularly like her, but she represents Welcome to the N.H.K. very well, and I love the series.  Besides, nobody is going to recognize a picture of Satou.  The guy looks like every male anime character ever.

I came up with the Thursday part in a really stupid manner.  No, it wasn’t Thursday when I made this blog.  I’m pretty sure it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday.  I remember thinking, “Oh man, I should’ve made the blog on a Thursday so I could have an excuse for calling it Misaki Thursday.”  Since I made my first post on a Thursday, it doesn’t matter in the end… but I’m an honest guy, so there you have it: my blog wasn’t made on Thursday.

As for why I named it Thursday, it’s due to a variety of reasons:

• Renton Thurston.  Really.  I’m serious.
• For the longest time, I thought Renton’s name was Renton Thruston – as in, “thrust-on”
• That’s it.

I tried to think of some symbolic meaning of Thursday, and the best I could come up with is: “people have to work hard on thursdays in order to party on fridays, so my posts on thursdays will be twice as good as other peoples’ posts.”

On a side note, I’ve been trying to use the name “flomu” recently.  It’s a five-character combination that hasn’t been registered on a lot of sites online – not something you see too often nowadays.

Renton Thurston: +5 for being a boss

Misaki Nakahara: +5 for being my avatar

Satou-kun~! : -1 just ’cause

Match #9: Laura Bodewig (2635) lost to Last Order (3483)

(continued from match #8)

Speaking of post quality, I’ve found that limiting myself to one post a week has improved my overall post quality.  I think about what I’m going to write all week, write it up on Saturday, and schedule it for Thursday.  It’s great!  I get to filter out all the crappy ideas and end up with a good post.  If I posted whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, I’d get a bunch of uninteresting posts with one good one. …or that’s what I’d like to say.

The reality is that I often find myself stuck looking for post topics or I have too many things I want to talk about… or both!  Take this post for example: it’s a messy hodge-podge of various ideas that started from a basic point (ISML) and evolved into earwax and meta.  My Shiki post two weeks ago started out at Shiki and went to a Madoka critique and some meta on “it gets better, I swear!” before finally ending.

But is this bad? I don’t think so.  My one-post-per-week style may not have produced the post quality that I was looking for, but the sheer quantity of stuff in my posts has increased.  There’s so much in every post and it’s all so unrelated to what the title says that every reader should find something interesting in my posts.

Well, that’s the plan right now.  What’s hindering it is my lack of actual readers.  Not being on AnimeNano plays a big role, but my post titles are also important.  If I saw a post labeled “Ambivalence, or is it ambiguity?’s 300 Milestone Grand Ceremony blah blah,” I sure as hell wouldn’t click on it and read it.  What makes it worse is that the post title barely has anything to do with the post content, and I’m not going to go and label my posts “post 1: stuff,” “post 2: more stuff,” and “post 3: even more stuff, some meta too.”

So in conclusion, you guys should all read my posts despite them having such misleading and overall bad titles.

tl;dr I actually think a lot about meta, but I don’t usually talk about it.

meta: +1000 words or something

Post quality: -5

Match #24: Kōsaka Kirino (2416) lost to Misaka Mikoto (4136)

I’ve been singing Mikoto’s praises since fall 2008, when Index came out.  It’s about time she won ISML (after losing to… Mio last year).  But it seems that all you Kanade-supporting cheaters are too afraid of Mikoto Misaka.  Well, you should be!  She’s more powerful than Tenshi could ever dream to be.  She’s cooler than the driest of dry ice.  She’s just… better.

Better than any other anime character.

Better than you.

The best.

Bestest.

Bestester than Kanade, that’s for sure.

Mikoto Misaka: +10^(10^100)

Spelling: -5 because I searched “googleplex”

Yotsuba: +100 because it is a great manga.

I’ve reached the end of this round of ISML, so let’s tally up the points and get this post over with already.

• Mikoto Misaka: effectively infinite
• Others: less than that
• Yotsuba: 100

Looks like Mikoto is going to win ISML this year with an infinite lead!

hooray gosh this post sucked

P.S.: My post for next week will consist of fifteen words and a picture.

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