“Inspiration” seems too weak a word.
Best Girl
What is a Best Girl?
At its core, the concept of the “best girl” is a pretty silly one. It ultimately amounts to a fandom game, an arbitrary imposition of indeterminate criteria on a set of character for the sole purpose of crowning a champion. And yet, it’s a game I’ve invested myself into again and again. Perhaps, as the saying goes, “the joy is in playing.”
Forging a Community: 4 Lessons from the Crunchyroll 2014 Midyear Best Girl Contest Thread
As some of you may or may not know, I have been running an ongoing Best Girl tournament for the first half of 2014 over on the Crunchyroll forums. The contest ended about two weeks ago, with Stephanie “Steph” Dola from No Game No Life defeating Noragami‘s Hiyori Iki (I voted for Hiyori) by a single vote.
Now, while the final winner of the contest was a bit of a disappointment for me (can you hear the hype train coming ’round the mountain?), there were a lot of cool things I saw and learned during my time acting as the admin of the contest. I was fortunate to have two other Crunchyroll users, sonic720 and LoomyTheBrew (who made most of the graphics for the tournament), assist me with the massive task of running a tournament that recorded almost 1400 votes through all rounds across over 2500 pages, nearly 40,000 thread replies and never left the front page of the forums until just yesterday. I have no stats to back up this theory, but I’m fairy sure the thread was also the fastest growing thread in Crunchyroll forum history, at least in the time that I have been active on the forums there. And it’s ongoing.
The Final Four
Mage in a Barrel 