Today is the last day of Saimoe 2009. It's the finals, the last round.

The showdown between Taiga Aisaka of Toradora and Yui Hirasawa of (not P-Model) K-ON is, at a glance, just another day on the luls-filled BBS of 2ch. But what is interesting is that the Korean version of Saimoe, 2009 Best Moe, also had Taiga going all the way.

I run a tournament, somewhat annually, on the anime board of Megatokyo Forums. We call it the "Anime Character Grand Prix" (AGP). Our games are held usually during March, and this year Taiga also swept that. The turnout for our games this year is usually ~120-200 votes per match. In comparison, Saimoe, despite their super-weird-PITA voting method, draws upwards of 2000+. Just to get you an idea...

The International SaiMoe League (ISML) is still running. That thing is crazy. So don't talk to me about it :3 But I don't think ISML particularly predictive, even if it is probably the most prescriptive of all of these contests that I know of as far as who is moe.

But what is moe? Who knows? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?

Anyways, Taiga is going to make history if she wins Saimoe 2009, simply because KSaimoe and Saimoe have never produced the same winner. Coincidentally my little AGP never correlated with either of the other two contests, too. It might not be a big deal, but for people who follow all three scenes over the net--Japanese, Koreans, and the west--it's a notable curiosity. Saimoe always produces oddball winners, where as Korea tend to produce very "mainstream" winners, and the west is ...well.

Stick around and watch the making of moe history! Or not, if Yui has anything to say about it.

I'm rooting for Yui by the way. (And I would post a cute Yui ascii art whenever the lovely Modern Method webdev superheroes support unicode on the blogs~)