5th Seed Reimu Hakurei (Touhou) VS 21st Seed Tamamo (Monster Girl Quest)
Reimu: 83 votes
Tamamo: 50 votes
With Remilia actually managing to make Samus look somewhat beatable, the Reimu > Samus upset train was back on track – provided that Reimu actually managed a good round 2 showing. And this time the Touhou heroine was up against someone FAR more dangerous than round 1’s Cerberus. Monster Girl Quest Tamamo had displayed great natural strength in the Qualifier Poll, and then proved to have lots of devoted, passionate fans, capable of overcoming even Shantae and accumulating a whopping 109 votes, shattering all previous tournament vote total records in the process. Of course, MGQ Tamamo’s own records had also been beaten soon enough, and the Fox still found herself the underdog going up against a contest favorite like Reimu, but a somewhat close, respectable loss (45-55 at worst) still appeared a likely outcome, with there even being some hope of Tamamo channeling her Shantae-slaying powers to topple the Touhou.
Lolno. Reimu immediately took the lead, and while Tamamo kept things reasonably close at first, Reimu always remained in firm control. After 32 votes, Reimu lead 56% - 44%, but such a lead didn’t satisfy the Mad Miko, who decided to go full Total Youkai Death on the foxy Monster Lord. Reimu began utterly steamrolling Tamamo, pushing her percentages far, FAR down, to the point of approaching, and then exceeding a Doubling, while also flooding the match thread with pics and memes. After 70 votes the score was 66% - 34% in Reimu’s favor, and after 89 votes Reimu had reached a very Nice 69%. Even THAT wasn’t enough for a girl on a mission to put the fear of God in Samus herself, and after 100 votes Reimu had broken 70%. At this point Reimu was actually beating Tamamo even worse than she had beaten the much weaker Cerberus, and was looking like a completely different beast from her round 1 incarnation.
Eventually, long after the match was already over, Tamamo finally did wake up, and actually did manage to inflict a pretty bad percentage bleed on Reimu, bringing her all the way down to 62%. The shrine maiden is apparently quite the lazy girl, so her taking it somewhat easy after securing her Statement win is if anything in-character, and certainly didn’t seriously undermine what she had accomplished – absolutely CRUSHING a legitimately strong opponent, and making her look like pure fodder who had no business even being in this tournament, rather than someone who was arguably the Star of round 1. THIS is how a potential champion is supposed to look, and it reminded us of why expectations for Reimu were so high in the first place, to the point where pulling off the second biggest win of round 1 had looked somewhat underwhelming.
Reimu had by now clearly powered up, and was looking like more than a match for Samus. The one somewhat alarming piece of data was the low vote totals (especially compared to Samus VS Remilia), but that could be explained away by Reimu absolutely killing the match as quickly as she had. The Samus VS Reimu hype was real, and Reimu hadn’t even delivered her most impressive tournament performance yet – which would of course make her actual performance in the semifinals all the more shocking. But we’ll get to that in due time – and after this match at least, Reimu stonks were on the rise, which the poverty-stricken shrine maiden surely appreciated. Tamamo meanwhile would be better off forgetting round 2 entirely, and instead savoring her legendary match with Shantae, which is what will always define her tournament run anyway. And let’s not forget that another Tamamo was not only still in the contest, but was due to bring great glory to all Tamamos everywhere.
#BestVidyaGirlContest
