(image: rezi)

Well, it’s true that I’ve dropped off the written scene of ISML for a long time, and that I’ve probably got many things to apologize for. For drifting away from the denizens of #ISML, for having to nuke my sub-blog Saimoe is very serious! from orbit (due to some really bad database infections), for not getting Shiori that one more win she needed to make it into the relegation tournament… humans are always filled with regrets.

Still, that’s not to say, for the silence and the sorrow, that I’ve fallen out of my somewhat romantic affair with the moe tournaments of today; although my return to college resulted in an unceremonious block on J-Saimoe voting (the infamous proxy issues), I still followed the results of it and ISML on a daily basis, having many days made upon seeing who had triumphed and who has fallen, in the latest battle of moe, popularity, and occasionally, image-board engineering.

Well, how else would you explain such an event as surprising as the seeming moe kingpin Mio Akiyama getting trashed by the BOSS Kana Minami, an upset of enough magnitude that it caused my co-writer kevo to have to eat several feet in backpedaling? (I had to immortalize it now that SIVS is sunk.) Certainly, it is amusing imagining the Minami sisters as some sort of assassins, who only rise to prominence as they drop big-name targets (as in Haruka’s upset of Rika Furude in 2008), only to fade into the background in the next round, as if they had never recieved such a vote surge.

And this is the sort of thing, this is the sort of imagination, that makes moe tournaments probably what they are today, so centric to people like me. We imagine the roles our favorite girls play, the battles they fight, as we face off against each other, feel the passion as we campaign for a girl in seven locations across the internet, and do little dances when we wake up and find that Taiga has put an exclamation point on the sinking of the seemingly invincible ships that were Saki and K-ON, capturing two out of three moe championships in one year.

That’s Saimoe, isn’t it? The the strangest courtship dance the world has seen.

(image: sakurato tsuguhi)
It’s some sort of ‘constructive warfare’. True, the girls go to direct combat, but when most people are speaking in positives and superlatives about their girl rather than trashing their enemy with hatred and venom, it’s a curious sort of battle. A strange politics, where you have some people voting on purely tactical means, others on purely emotional means – many positive, yet a few negative – and so you never really are sure whether a girl wins because she is more moe, more popular, less hated, or just because she’s an easier punching bag for Kyou to take out with the trash in the next round.

I suppose, you say, the same could go for real politics, except here, the candidates never do the speaking. Only the fans speak for the girls here. There’s no one impassioned speech that you’ll see someone deliver, that will win them a thousand votes. Saimoe competitions are small-scale enough that there’s probably not one source with enough reach to tip the balance more than a few votes each way, given that ‘moe’ is such a subjective thing that it’s hard to make an argument that will change the minds of the committed – at best, you can only convince the apathetic to vote.

But still, of course, the people write, and write, and campaign, and campaign, until their word-count-to-vote ratio is something in the thousands (if not infinite), because they know that there’s that possibility, just maybe that Ushio and Ritsu will tie and that any vote they convince people to make could be the deciding one, and how could they let their character slide into the black, unforgiving abyss that is J-Saimoe elimination –

And that’s when you know Saimoe’s got you.

(image: nyama)

It’s when you’re just finishing up a 1000-word blog post after writing a few hundred-word posts for four different forums, posting a link to Facebook and Twitter, and dropping lines in three IRC channels (one which contains people who could go over and punch you in the face in real life), and you realize that this is just one match and you still have to campaign and make sure Minori wins EIGHT more.

It’s when you refresh the ISML home page and see that Taiga’s bid for a triple crown just got violently ended, that instead of ragequitting, you mentally put a little memorial picture of Taiga on the wall (right next to the ones for Nagisa, Minori, and Shiori), put on your Nagato fanboy cap, and head back into the crowd to raise some love for your next-highest favorite. And after Nagato loses, you set all guns to Hinagiku, all the while trying to drum up votes for relegation favorite Reimu on the side. There’s no time for mourning, there’s voting to be done and battles to be won.

Yeah, it’s when you know that Saimoe has that strange appeal that every sport should have had – maybe does have – that it’s got you.

And that’s what Saimoe’s really about, right? Not just the girls, but the passion. That forging, that resolidfying of the connection between you and some abstract personality with some eyes and a funny hair color. It all sounds horrendously escapist, but it’s rather interesting, in that you get to learn a bit about your tastes, your beliefs, and your passions; nothing says ’self-exploratory’ like ‘1500-word essay on why people should vote for Shiori’. Since if you don’t come up with some good reasons why you believe that Shiori is one of the most inspiring characters ever to walk the 2D Earth, you’re going to be writing for a long time.

You could say, more precisely, that Saimoe is what you make it. Together, it’s what the fans make it.

(image: nyanta)
It’s the same as more ‘real’ sports. Some people just check in, browse the scores, muse about how their ‘home team’ (favorite girl, perhaps, here) won, and move on. Others buy all the team gear, get the season pass, go to every game, being the loudest one in the crowd. Sometimes, you have those in between, who tune in for only the exciting parts of the season, or just discuss it around the water cooler.

And so, I can probably imagine that I’m painting myself as someone who’s dressed in a Kanon uniform in some snow-filled stadium somewhere, hugging my plushies and chanting team chants. Whatever those may be. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s not. But certainly I wouldn’t have made that analogy if I hadn’t thought about Saimoe as I gazed down the barrel either the last or the second-to-last match of the Saimoe season, in ISML’s Revelation of the Heavenly Tiara.

And I wouldn’t have had been able to put out another 1200 words on how at least I believe that Saimoe has been a positive experience, if I hadn’t put myself into it, lose myself in it, waste my time in it.
I wouldn’t be able to explore my own heart and, just maybe, touch those of others if I hadn’t put to press so many words for Shiori, Chinami, Minori, and everyone else.
And maybe I wouldn’t have met some of the people I did, if I never decided to get into ISML in the first place.

Who knows. It’s not in a human’s ability to look into the past and see what would have happened if they did something different. It’s only their job to keep moving on into the future.

And so, after the curtains close and either Hinagiku or Shana is crowned, I’ll be waiting outside the gates of the ISML battlegrounds with a truck of vanilla ice cream, waiting, for when the first flowers of spring have begun to bloom, and the procession of passion begins again.

-CCY

(image: hane riu)
(Incidentally, here’s some curious numbers from my vote-tracking program, about who were the top 16 girls I voted for the most in ISML’s regular season:
54 Misaka Shiori
53 Furukawa Nagisa
52 Furude Hany?
52 Ichinose Kotomi
49 Furude Rika
49 Kinomoto Sakura
47 Mizunashi Akari
47 Patchouli Knowledge
46 Kawazoe Tamaki
45 Kamio Misuzu
45 Kasuga “?saka” Ayumu
43 Alice Carroll
43 Ry?g? Rena
41 Chii
40 Aisaka Taiga
37 Nagato Yuki
The bottom numbers are omitted as they show more of a lack of knowledge more than a particular dislike for most characters.)