#poll round 0.5

[vocaloid-song-showdown]

hello again!

the songs on the bracket have been finalized and i'm working on the bracket right now!

originally my plan was to put songs against each other by both the time they came out and their popularity to give lesser known songs a chance against some of the super notable classics, but i've been seeing a post go around about matchups that are final round worthy happening round one. while i don't think it's anything worthy of any major (or minor) backlash, i do have to agree that having more challenging matchups so early on can lead to a bit of an anticlimactic ending

the way the bracket is set up now, there's no way to avoid several major matchups so early on (ex :: rolling girl vs. matryoshka or world is mine vs. triple baka)

as much as i want to give songs that might not be as well known a chance (especially considering some only got in w one nomination via a random number generator), i also don't want some of what i at least consider to be the most well known songs to be disqualified round one. those songs are popular and well loved for a reason and i genuinely think they should also have a chance to make it to the end. round two at the very very least

i'll make a bracket for each possibility so it can go up when the pool closes, so please vote for whichever one you think would be the most fun !

also unrelated to this poll, i realize kinda forgot to make a post responding to the bracket song list one ?? since it ended showed up as a tie but wasn't really one after factoring in a missclick vote, the last songs were chosen via a random number generator ^^

there were some nominated but ultimately unpicked songs that i felt were too notable and influential to go unmentioned though??? so there's also a little hand picked honorable mentions bracket (it's very small !! it only has 8 songs total on it) :D

i will admit that some songs on it are more biased than others, but w the exception of one they all have at least 5 million views (counting unofficial reprints). i did try and make sure they're all at least somewhat notable (or were when they came out) in one way or another. so it's a little compromise in a way ^^

[rudolf-polls]

Rudolf photo tournament - Round 0.5

[boatmediatourney]

🌊Sad Soggy Boat Men Tournament🌊

Round 0.5B, match 1

Propaganda and image sources under the cut (warning for possible spoilers)

propaganda for Pip:

image from the 1956 Moby Dick movie

propaganda for Paragon:

art by John Howe

[captainsvscaptains]

Extra Poll Because Your Mod Is a Dumbass

Propaganda

The Eleventh Doctor canonically declares considering himself as the Captain of the Tardis

Thrawn is a strategist and an art lover. He is willing to sacrifice hinself to protect his people and homeworld. A compelling antagonist. Smartest dude in Star Wars, has a southern hick boyfriend (Eli Vanto)

Forgot to make this a day long but the valid results will be the ones we'll get in a day, not a week

Also the second option should read Thrawn, not Star Wars. *Bangs her head against the wall and damages her last neurons*

[ultimate-monkey-tournament]

Round 0.5

[a3songtournament]

ROUND 0.5, MATCH 1

Ichiya Kagiri no Aibou vs Don't Cry...

[thepeopleschampionofchampions]

Charlotte Ritchie has been voted through Round Two into the quarter finals and is one step closer to becoming The People's Champion of Champions!

ROUND TWO (5/8)

[bestanimal]

Round 1 - Phylum Rotifera

(Sources - 1, 2, own work, 4)

Rotifera is a phylum of microscopic and near-microscopic animals, commonly called Wheel Animals or Wheel Animalcules. Many are an important part of freshwater zooplankton.

Rotifers are common in freshwater throughout the world, with a few marine species. They range from 50 micrometres to over 2 millimeters, though most are around 0.1 to 0.5 mm long. Boasting a large amount of diversity, some rotifers are free-swimming, others move by inchworming along the ground, some are sessile and live inside tubes of gelatin attached to the substrate, and some live in sessile or planktonic colonies (seen in gif below). Rotifers are great little recyclers, feeding on detritus, dead bacteria, algae, and protozoans, eating particles up to 10 micrometres in size. They are also prey for many animals, including copepods, fish, bryozoans, comb jellies, true jellies, starfish, and tardigrades. Their fossils have been found in Devonian and Permian fossil beds.

Rotifers are sexually dimorphic, with females always being larger than males, if males of the species even exist at all. Male rotifers’ main lot in life is reproduction: they do not usually have a functional digestive system, and many are already sexually fertile at birth. The female has one or two ovaries, and releases eggs through a cloaca. Male rotifers have a penis which they either insert into the female’s cloaca, or use to inject sperm straight through her skin. Most species hatch as miniature versions of the adult. Females grow rapidly, reaching their adult size within a few days, while many males do not grow at all. Their lifespan lasts from a few days to a few weeks.

This poll also includes the parasitic Acanthocephala (4th image), or “Thorny/Spiny-headed Worms” which was once considered to be a discrete phylum but have since been found to be highly modifed rotifers, so I am including them in this phylum. Acanthocephalans have complex life cycles, involving many hosts.

Propaganda under the cut:

If you’ve ever done freshwater microscopy you’ve probably seen one of these little guys.

Rotifers are a major food source for many species and also contribute to the decomposition of organic matter in soil.

Because they’re so good at recycling detritus, rotifers are sometimes used in fish tanks to help clean the water.

One species, Cephalodella vittata, only lives in Russia’s giant Lake Baikal.

In 2021, biologists were able to restore bdelloid rotifers that had been frozen for 24,000 years in Siberian permafrost!

Some acanthocephalans cause acanthocephaliasis in humans. The earliest known infection was found in a prehistoric man in Utah, dated to around 160 BC.

[webcomic-character-tournament]

are you tired of how many character tournaments just become a popularity contest?

how regardless of seeding, even high contenders can almost arbitrarily be knocked out early on, leaving you with nothing to root for?

if you're feeling that, and if you like any webcomics, you should participate in the webcomic character tournament!

the primary goals of this tournament are:

to celebrate the medium of webcomics as a whole

to find new webcomics to read, and to recommend your own favorites

to highlight indie creators and help them build a wider audience

to have fun rooting for and celebrating your favorite characters!

in order to accomplish these goals, instead of a single elimination bracket, i will be using a mcmahon system inspired tournament structure!

this means that no character will be eliminated, and you can participate in polls rooting for your favorite character throughout all the rounds. characters will also be roughly matched up based on a system that determines how well known their work is, so most rounds should be relatively evenly matched, allowing people to fight for their favorites on their own merits

more details about how the mcmahon tournament will work can be found under the cut!

submit as many characters as you would like to here! the deadline is tentatively next saturday, june 3rd, at 4pm EDT

tagging some other tournaments i like whose participants i think might be interested :) @wlw-webcomic-bracket @obscurewebcomictournament @gaywebcomicsshowdown @autisticgirliesbracket @yuribracket @secretthirdthingtournament @nonyanderepoll @funkylittlebaldcharapoll @divorced-tournament

no submission is specifically banned, but try to keep in mind the spirit of this tournament when deciding what to submit.

under the cut after my more detailed description of the tournament structure, i also ramble in a lot more detail about my philosophy regarding submission eligibility, but it's not necessary to read all that before submitting characters

mcmahon tournament details:

matchups will be decided based off of a survey sent out after submissions are over gauging participants' familiarity with all of the competing characters' source materials. each character will be assigned points based off of how known their source material is, and each character will go up against a character with a similar popularity score for the first round

characters will be awarded points based off of if they lose, win, or tie their match and have that added to their total score, and then they will again be paired against a character with a similar updated score

depending on how many characters are participating, this process can continue either until there is a definitive ranking of all characters, or until just a few top winners are clear

i haven't entirely decided on specifics such as whether points will be awarded by a simple 0 for a loss, 0.5 for a tie, 1 for a win or by percentage of the vote, and if initial popularity points will be counted in the final ranking, or if i will try to rank winners from within their initial popularity categories, but i hope that won't matter too much, because in my opinion the main fun of this isn't the final results, it's for people to have fun in the individual rounds seeing their favorite character's points go up!

submission guidelines:

if you are submitting characters from extremely popular webcomics, try to limit yourself to just characters that are among your top favorites of all time, and maybe try to submit stuff from lesser known works as well

similar goes for webcomics that are more widely known for adaptations into other media forms (one punch man, tower of god, heartstopper, etc.)

i'm not specifically banning any comic for having bigoted content or its creator being a bad person, there's a wide scale of stuff i could decide to include in that definition or not. in the goal of celebrating favorite characters, obviously a lot of people love characters despite flaws in the work they're from, but also keep in mind the goals of recommending works to other people, and helping uplift and promote creators you like, and try to find a reasonable balance from there

what counts as a webcomic:

physically published works that you can find pirated or scanlated online probably don't count

comics whose publication is centered around physical releases, who also have simultaneous online releases by their publishers (comics on manga plus or comixology, newspaper strips with online sites, etc.) probably don't count

comics published through traditional publishers that are exclusively online (such as shōnen jump+ comics) still probably don't count

comics published online through companies that exclusively publish online (such as lezhin) are still discouraged

stuff like line webtoon or tapas official comics are more acceptable, as there are a lot of free comics from independent creators around them and many of these comics started out that way themselves, so they exist within a culture of webcomics more so than the aforementioned comic categories

stuff that is paywalled beyond just having an early release system is discouraged

comics that are no longer online but accessible through archives are fine though, especially in the wake of sites like smackjeeves being deleted there's a lot of stuff in webcomic history that can only be found that way now!

webtoon style comics absolutely count as webcomics, they're an exciting way of fully making use of webcomics' digital format! simultaneously however, i feel like with the rise of mobile webtoon apps, there are many people who read webtoon style comics but who dont further engage with webcomics, so i'd definitely encourage submitting a variety of styles of webcomic!

none of these rules are set! feel free to submit whatever you want, i just list them so you can try to find a balance between the different goals of this tournament when submitting stuff.

anyone can submit as many characters as you want, but just maybe if you find that a lot of your submission ideas are from comics in some of the more discouraged categories, limit yourself in how many you submit from those categories and only submit characters if they're absolute favorites of yours you want the opportunity to celebrate, and maybe try to also submit a character from something that isn't in a discouraged category too!

theres no penalty for not going with this, but i think because choosing characters by number of nominees doesn't really align with my intentions for this, depending on how easy it is to sort submissions i might just go off of vibes, so you might just be less likely to have a character make it to the tournament if their comic is in more heavily discouraged categories is all

[mylittleredgirl]

after spending 29 hours thinking about a canon-ship scale for that poll, i decided i might as well spend another few hours looking through my old livejournal icons folder to rank the collection of ships i have written/am writing (for better or worse)...

we lost so much when we stopped making those 100x100 pixel icons. where are the pretty tiny photos of artfully cropped couples with even tinier text on them. all we know now is the wasteland of youtube thumbnails on google image search. we used to be a society

decryption key:

same canon, never met on-screen: clone!sam/jack (sg-1) (i'm rounding up from 0.5 here since she's an open-source fanon OC, but you get me)

they interact on-screen: jack o'neill/elizabeth weir (sg-1/sga), b'elanna/kes (st: voy)

some charged interactions: daniel/fraiser (sg-1), troi/ro (st: tng), margaret/trapper (mash), hawkeye/trapper/margaret (mash)

important intimate relationship (not labeled romantic): sheppard/weir (sga), hawkeye/trapper (mash)

one-sided feelings in the text: janeway/chakotay (st: voy) (i will hang for this take i know), miles/keiko/kira (st: ds9), talia/garibaldi (b5) (not necessarily proud of this one but i filled sooooo many five-subject notebooks about them when i was a teenager)

they kiss but it doesn't count: hoshi/travis (st: ent), julian/jadzia (st: ds9), riker/ro (st: tng)

mutual feelings in the text (unresolved): doggett/reyes (x-files), picard/crusher (st: tng - 24th century edition only)

unresolved on-screen, word of god confirmed: sam/jack (sg-1), jake/diane (jake 2.0)

they get together on-screen: trip/t'pol (st: ent), julian/ezri (st: ds9), frank/margaret (mash)

they stay together (endgame): mulder/scully (x-files), riker/troi (st: tng), miles/keiko (st: ds9), berena (holby city - somehow??? i hear we won in the end?), chidi/eleanor (the good place), jason/janet (the good place)

[rudolf-polls]

Rudolf photo tournament - Round 0.5

[boatmediatourney]

🌊Sad Soggy Boat Men Tournament🌊

Round 0.5B, match 4

Propaganda under the cut (warning for possible spoilers)

propaganda for Noah:

propaganda for Theon Greyjoy:

[mutual-oc-death-battle]

HERE IS THE OFFICIAL BRACKET

all placements were randomized! because of formatting, four people wont be coming in until round 2. so rest easy, you guys basically got a free pass. all polls will be up within the week! text version under the cut

RULES:

ties will be awarded to anything with a 0.5% or less difference. they will proceed as one combined entity

always submit propaganda forever and ever i will post and reblog anything you throw at me

polls will all be for 1 week

lmk if anything needs to be changed

be nice to eachother

ROUND 1

wyatt brett bayfield (@auburn-cat043) vs. jesse fox-lewis (@patsypsyop)

cathreen (@dyggot) vs. kan komarov (@fightclubgayporn)

norman lee (@bugfellow) vs. trick (@that-plague-doctor)

lucy kogen (@chipadequeso) vs. dr. edmund shock (@motifbf)

cold cut (@basilbytes) vs. asa (@starmachines)

rodya (@mishawoop) vs. pocket (@primmpassing)

petrichor (@vassyflorence) vs. cypress (@dino-anarchy)

banjo (@lbkc) vs. caine butcher (@odeofthecog)

emmett harrison (@jamescarpenterhooper) vs. seafoam (@g0ldengaytime)

RUBY-H34-RTSXX8866 (@carbuckety) vs. roly poly (@oceanicmantarays)

richard banks (@inkycat186) vs. choral (@3nt1ty-3o3)

1-800-CASH-NOW (@thornshadowwolf) vs. valentine constelle (@zoidbrg)

grub (@scribble-punk), wendy (@wendylmao), alex (@mahkari), and austin (@flutterhonk) will all be participating starting round 2!

[ship-colour-scheme-showdown]

What are you going to do about ties?

Good question, and one I meant to make a poll about earlier when I saw the Round 0.5 results, which I promptly forgot to do.

[ultimate-monkey-tournament]

Round 0.5

[a3songtournament]

ROUND 0.5, MATCH 4

Dawn of the Red vs Bouquet