#don't get me wrong there are SO MANY MORE POPULAR and genuinely obscurer titles I could include

[dragonslaved]

listen as much as I LOVE the current trend of anime OPs being able to stand as their own singles for radio play, anime OPs in the 90s were just built different

"don't make me wild like you" (ranma 1/2)? a bop neverending

"in the night" (key the metal idol)? beautifully atmospheric

"hohoemi no bakudan" (yu yu hakusho)? eternal

"give a reason" (slayers next)? perfect and on almost every playlist I ever make

"catch you catch me" (cardcaptor sakura)? so catchy and so visually iconic it rewired a lot of our brains in middle school

"rondo revolution" (revolutionary girl utena)? don't even talk to me I'll never stop

"moonlight densetsu" (sailor moon)? of course no one can ever forget or ignore the classic

"cruel angel's thesis" (neon genesis evangelion)? (warning for rapid image flashes) so iconic a convention in 2006 I attended had to ban it from karaoke because so many people kept singing it

they do not make anime OPs like this anymore and I miss that. Love the music we have now but it's not the SAME do you undersTAND ME-

[homoeroticbetrayal]

So, I want to expand a bit on my philosophy for tournament bracketing, which I covered earlier.

I created the bracket with the thought to maximize participation value across all contestants, rather than to represent the strongest contestants. (Honestly who cares if your ship is more popular?)

This does mean the bracketing really favoured mid-sized fandoms (joshneku, griffguts, silverflint) and allowed them to advance when they're more obscure than some of the behemoths (catradora, thoschei, akiryo, komahina). This also meant that many finalist materials were pitted against each other and eliminated in round 1.

My thought process is like this. The contestants of this tournaments spans multiple genres. I want to make sure that every participant get at least one chance to make a meaningful decision before their pair is eliminated.

(I didn't choose to seed any pairings into a future round because there's honestly too many strong ones and that's probably a good thing cause I was pretty wrong on a few cases when it comes to what's actually popular.)

Before this tournament started, I did two* small surveys on how people vote. When people only know one character in a match, ~34% will vote for the ones they recognize, and ~54% will vote for the ones they recognize if they think they really deserve the title. This means 88% of the participants won't really make an effort to know the other contestants, which means if I pair randomly, most participants won't make much of a decision at all. Everyone will just vote for whoever they know until two people they know gets to face off.

*Other survey is on how people vote when they know neither characters.

That would be dreadfully boring if you're into major ships, and very sad if you're into obscure ships.

This is why I decided to pair up overlapping fandoms and genres for round 1, hoping to maximize the number of people who knows both sides of each poll. (Some were pairing up the spares. Sorry Shadowpeach fans I don't know what I could have done for you.) For people who had trouble making a decision, they'd at least still have one horse left to bet on for future rounds.

And this means the more obscure ships like curtowen and silverflint either has a fighting chance, or can at least be defeated by a pairing the voters actually recognizes instead of being auto-eliminated.

For the most part, I felt like I did good with the matchups. There was no 90/10 sweeps in first round, which i know some people wanna see, but I don't. I'm an underdog believer.

The only mistake I felt like I've made while seeding was pairing NagiReo against SatoSugu... I genuinely thought they'd be equally matched in terms of popularity. Maybe it should have been narusasu vs. satosugu and 10051 vs. nagireo... I don't think that'd have felt better tho. Hindsight is 20/20.

Finally, I want to talk about my favorite tournament bracketing from an old school shonen, the Demon World Tournament Arc from Yu Yu Hakusho. Basically, major powers of the demon world decided to form government around a free-for-all fighting tournament instead of waging a war. However, leaders of the three major factions ended up facing off and exhausting each other in earlier rounds, and the final winners ended up being a group of nobodies.

To me, that is the charm of single-elimination tournaments. You get some surprising underdog advancements you can cheer on, and some exciting matches at every round.

In a tumblr voting tournament, there's no factor of exhaustion. So it's actually a lot more representative than the scenario above.