#BestVidyaGirlContest Post-Tournament Analysis (Round 1 Matches)

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!

ROUND 1, MATCH 1:

1st Seed Samus Aran (Metroid) VS 32nd Seed Yuri (Doki Doki Literature Club)

Samus: 60 votes
Yuri: 19 votes

In hindsight, this match obviously cemented Samus as the big favorite to win it all, though I initially only viewed her victory as good, but not great. I was used to the GameFAQs Character Battles, where it’s common for top seeded characters to at the very least break 80% on their opponents. Not always of course – Mario still made the finals in 2002 after doing whatever the hell this was supposed to be in round 1:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/940-north-division-round-1-mario-vs-servbot

But monster-blowouts are USUALLY how these things go, and my pre-match stance was that Samus would have to break 80% on Yuri to TRULY impress. 76% - 24%, getting more than triple the amount of votes as Yuri, was still a strong performance, but good enough to truly intimidate the competition? At the very least I expected Reimu to put up bigger numbers against Cerberus.

However, it turned out that Samus not only had scored the biggest win of the competition in this match, but it wasn’t even close – outside of bonus matches, no other girl even broke 70% on her opponent! I later on realized that I had failed to take quite a few things into account – first of all, this was only a 32-character tournament, whereas most GameFAQs tournaments featured at least 64 entrants, meaning that even judged by those standards, this was effectively a *Round 2* match, where scoring 76% suddenly looks pretty damn beastly. Case in point:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/983-south-division-round-2-strider-hiryu-vs-link

Yep, that’s Link, someone who’s so overpowered that he should have been permanently banned from the character battles 15 years ago, *almost* scoring 76% against absolute Fodder in Round 2. Oh, and on that note, apart from Seele (and we’ll get to her stillborn contest run eventually, don’ you worry), I’d argue not a single girl in this tournament qualified as outright Fodder. Look at Yuri for example – she’s a cute Yandere with long hair from a pretty famous meme game well known for its cute girls, and she has over 1K pictures on Gelbooru. Some people will just vote for the girl they find hotter (which is 100% legitimate in a Waifu competition like this), and Yuri arguably had the match pic advantage. Not to mention, Fedi is a pretty contrarian place, adoring all things niche and meme-worthy, while often being very hostile to Normalfag favorites.

And yet despite all that, Samus STILL more than tripled the DDLC girl! You could argue that this was partially due to the low vote totals at the start of the tournament, but honestly, do you think *Samus* of all people would be hurt by more people voting? If anything, the fact that Samus could get 222 votes in the contest final, AND so utterly dominate a poll where only 79 users voted shows, yet again, that the bounty hunter babe always excels REGARDLESS of what circumstances she finds herself in.

As for Yuri – yeah, suffering by far the biggest loss in the tournament is not a good look, but it being against Samus takes off some of the sting. I still have no doubt that Yuri easily beats someone like Seele 1v1, and she did well just to qualify for the tournament. That said, I *do* wonder how Monika would have performed in this competition, because I definitely suspect she’s a fair bit stronger than Yuri overall. Not saying she’d avoid getting her ass whooped by Samus, but with a slightly favorable draw, I’d at least expect her to reach Round 2.

#BestVidyaGirlContest

@ChristiJunior 222 is why personally I’d be okay with Samus retiring from future tournaments in the interest of making them more interesting. I got to see her fully powered and she rocked, my curiosity’s satisfied. ⚡

@MusicVideoGuy Unless something happens to weaken her next year, the only chance to see Samus get seriously challenged would be for a brand new competitor (like Princess Zelda or Marisa) to turn out to be even stronger than the likes of Tamamo, Reimu and Remilia. But even that would probably not be enough.

Samus is eerily similar to GameFAQs Character Battle Link in many ways, and the thing with Link is that he has suffered pretty much no normal losses, ever, over 16 years. His only losses were to Cloud (once, and probably only because of his much-loathed Wind Waker picture), L-Block from Tetris (total Joke character that the entire internet rallied around) and Draven from League of Legend (thanks to insane levels of Reddit cheating).

Translated to Fedi terms, it would seem to me that Samus will only lose if facing a girl with incredible natural strength, whose fans also cheat/alt-vote like crazy. At that point it's better that she just be retired, though I'd like a wider discussion about this when I finish my tournament writeup.

@ChristiJunior @MusicVideoGuy I don't think Zelda would stand a chance.
Maybe I'm just underestimating the power of BoTW's buttshot.

@DrScarGazer @MusicVideoGuy I think Zelda would do really well, and that Midna only flopped because she veered to closely into Furry territory for Fedi's liking, meaning that it doesn't really reflect unfavorably on the Zelda series as a whole. Characters like Riju and Mipha were at least nominated, so Zelda might just have been assumed to be such a safe pick that there was no reason to vote for her.

@ChristiJunior @MusicVideoGuy I think of her as a character without much identity.
More like she's always "A Zelda" rather than a cohesive thing.
Makes her hard to judge, or even consider when I think of my own favorite vgGirls. Could be off base since I stopped at SS, but since the newer side characters had more support maybe this isn't too unique.

@DrScarGazer @MusicVideoGuy All the different incarnations of Zelda could either help or hurt her as far as I'm concerned, tho in a Waifu competition, I suspect that effectively being many girls in one would become a selling point.

@ChristiJunior @DrScarGazer The irony of making Skyward Sword Zelda so down-to-earth. During the cozy prologue with their scenes together I kept thinking, Link’s incarnations have been through so much it’s nice one of them gets the childhood sweetheart arc. Until destiny knocked at least.