Last Saturday, the 2013 Awwnime Girls Bracket opened for business for the second year. The first phase of the brackets always sucks because it means a lot of tedious labor for me.

Phase 1 consists of people nominating the characters they'd like to see make it to the actual voting. This year, I put a lot of additional rules in place, limiting the time span from which somebody could enter a character. This was done to give new characters a fighting change, keep things fresh, and also (hopefully) shrink the pool.

Well, that didn't work.

As of me writing this, three days into the seven day long nomination period, there have been over 1500 nominations. I have had to go through each and every one of those and, for the 830 nominees that were eligible and not duplicates, clean up the name and create a thumbnails. A few things have made this slightly easier this year than last.

• Better admin tools
• A requirement that the user provide an image of the character so I don't have to go hunting for one
• A type-ahead field that pulls data from MyAnimeList that will prefill character name, media source, and image.

The MAL images always come in a 225x350 size, so I've gotten the cropping down to muscle memory; I can complete an entrants record in under 10 seconds. Which is good, because even at ten seconds per, that's over two hours of solid work. But, the average is much higher because I still sometimes need to find a better picture, figure out if the character is eligible if I'm not familiar with the source, etc and so forth. I've probably put five to six hours into just cropping those fucking pictures.

But, still, I'm happy with the turn out. To give you a bit of comparison, last year when there were no restricting rules, there were a total of 797 nominations of which 473 made it into the elimination rounds. I suspect part of that is due to the fact that this bracket is starting out with the traction we had at the end of the last one. But also, a lot of people are just nominating every female character from their favorite shows, regardless of how much actual screen time they may have had. I personally think this is a silly approach because only 256 characters will make it to the actual bracket and those will all be the heavy hitter characters. I mean, who seriously thinks that this will win against this on a battle based upon cuteness?

Not me, that's for sure.