Now, let’s get to the actual fun part of this recap – the matches! Though I do want to get a bit of housekeeping out of the way first, namely how I choose to run these matches:
- When getting match pictures of the girls, I wanted something that made each girl look her best (the competition was largely about celebrating idealized femininity and female beauty after all), while being SFW, showing the girls in their most iconic outfits and also accurately representing their personality (or how I interpreted their personality at any rate, keep in mind, I was unfamiliar with plenty of these characters). After the first couple of matches I also tried to make sure the two pictures had somewhat matching dimensions, so that one picture wouldn’t accidentally dominate the other. I do feel that in *most* of the matches, the pictures were pretty well-balanced.
I also wanted to use new pictures for every new round just to change things up and make things more enjoyable, the exceptions were Tamamo (Fate) and Momiji, whose most Powerful pictures (Awoo and Spaghetti) were famous memes. Because of that, I went with same picture for every single round in the case of those two specific girls, because doing otherwise would mean effectively nerfing them.
- I generally reposted every statement in support of either girl in the match topic, both as a way to increase engagement surrounding the poll, and to reward the girls whose fanbase actually showed up and really supported them. The exception was posts of art I just found plain unappealing (like excessively thicc crap, let alone fatfaggotry), lewds that were just a bit too spicy, posts that were just purely hateful towards the competing girls (be hateful towards Jews, niggers and trannies, not cute anime girls, and if you HAVE TO hate on the Waifus, at least be clever and/or funny in the process) or just spread misinformation about the girls (some people might actually come to believe that Samus is a tranny or that Tifa has a history of being Blacked). Obviously, I’d also repost stuff of my own from my Baest account, which is the one I used to vote and participate in the polls as any other fan following the contest.
- In what I consider a somewhat inspired move, I ended up adding a direct DRC poll link to every match thread, so that even people that are not on our instance (the vast majority of people following the tournament) could still have easy access to full, accurate and update poll results, rather than whatever jank results showed up on their instance. I actually think this is a really nice addition to any type of Contest poll, even for contests hosted on big instances like Poast, since it levels the playing field and means that everyone can easily follow how the match develops.
And NOW, we can finally move on to the actual matches!
