The tournament kicked off with a 294-278 victory for Saki over Maho of Ro-Kyu-Bu. There will be no Homura this year. Cure Beauty won her match over Cecilia of IS, showing further suprising strength for the cures and embarrassing weakness from the old and busted Infinite Stratos.
8/14
8/15
8/16
8/17
8/17 was an interesting day. Miyuki Tsubakino, a minor Saki character, got 140 votes. Reports say that 90 of her fans voted for Miki and only 32 for Tomoka. That 58 vote difference is much larger than the 323-299 gap between them. It looks like we have a case of tactical voting: Saki fans anticipated that the basketball loli could be used by their enemies as a sniping platform against Koromo (she's even from the same show as the girl that was close behind Saki on opening day), so they decided to slam dunk her pre-emptively.
In the other match, Ghutatan was slapped senseless, dropping down to a distant third. Why did this happen to a character picked as the winner by about two thirds of the competitors in the
Saimoe Fantasy competition? In addition to the fact that it's pretty much the same thing that happened to poor Ghutatan in the show, this is a case of Saimoe voters fooling around with a silly character for fun in the preliminaries, and then turning serious business in the main round.
8/18
The B block opens with the debut of Akarin~. Let's take a look at the initial votes:
Let's caption this one "How many hilarious things can you find in this picture?"
Now here's the final results:
As expected, Izumi was being propped up by fake votes, but it turned out to be a lot more fakes than I thought. Akarin~ more than doubled Izumi's score, and both I*umis lost despite the double Hayate synergy day. This is a total humiliation for them. You can blame Akari fans for voting double anti-Hayate, but clearly, Nagi and Hina fans aren't going to help out the other girls from the show.
8/19
Only a day after Akarin~'s triumph, Toki gets an opportunity to counterattack. Riichi has been declared, but will she show the same level of one-sided domination? The Misaki Mei/Ayano Sugiura match promises to be a hard fought high-volume battle, and it featues a Yuru Yuri girl whose voters could see Toki as a rival. Since Saki and Yuru Yuri appeal to similar types of fans, this should be a revealing day regarding faction tactics and allegiance. Mei could be groomed as a sniping platform for round 3 against Akari, and Yuru Yuri fans could take a shot at Toki to look for weaknesses, or maybe they'll just make out and vote Toki x Ayano.
The results are in, and Toki dominated with 417 votes. Akari's 325 are unnoticeable by comparison, but Toki only just barely beat Akari in percentage of votes cast. However, the real story here is the Mei vs Ayano match. The curves were unusual (look at those bumps in the middle) and characters switched places throughout the day, but Mei went on a killing spree in the last hour, expanding her lead from the tiniest of margins to a 64 vote murder. Those who remember previous years will recall that last hour rushes are a trademark tactic of the Saki faction. Mei still would've won without the help, but this means Akari's fans can't afford to be complacent when they face Mei.
8/20
The next match pits Yuno of Hidamari Sketch against the former champion Azusa and Yuru Yuri's Sakurako. While none of these are pushovers, the overly tsun Sakurako is likely to languish in third. This will be a test of K-ON's strength. Yuno has been incredibly consistent in past Saimoes, so Azusa won't pass if she can't extinguish the returning champion curse. Update: about two hours in, Azusa is narrowly leading Sakurako and Yuno has fallen behind. The voters have awful taste today, picking Sakurako and Yozora over Yuno and Nazuna.
Shinobu took off with the rising sun in Japan. Apparently people who vote during the day feel safer around vampires. Yozora and Sakurako are both performing well, while Hidamari has disappeared into third place, so my predictions were laughably wrong this time. Azusa maintained a narrow lead over Sakurako and expanded it to a solid victory by the end, so we can officially declare K-ON to be back in business in Saimoe. Yozora was solidly ahead of Chihaya for most of the day, but the card player mounted a fierece comeback attempt right at the end. However, she fell short by just 4 votes.
8/21
Ritsu was narrowly defeated by Run even though it was Ritsu's birthday. This is advantageous for Azusa but disadvantageous for Akari in next month's showdown, which would have been a K-ON split vote if Ritsu advanced. Either Yuru Yuri was tactically outplayed, or nobody cares because Akari will win anyway.
Prediction Record: 17-7 (See the fantasy list; I'm too lazy to cover every match)
No comments:
Post a Comment