Saimoe Tournament 2008
The Saimoe anime tournament is BACK! You may remember the coverage of this event from last year, a Japanese tournament where cute anime girls from TV shows (that have come out during the past year in Japan) all compete against each other to see who's the most moe of them all.
During the 2007 finals, Rika Furude from Higurashi beat out Nagi Sanzenin from Hayate the Combat Butler. Because both those shows continued on long enough to have aired in the past year, both girls (along with every other girl in both series) will be competing again this year. Luckily however, the Rozen Maiden girls/dolls will NOT be competing this year (thank god).
One thing that I think is unfair though is that any anime girl who was in a series for even a second is qualified to compete. As a result of this, the one & only Miku Hatsune is qualified to compete this year due to her brief appearance in "Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei." This means that she'll probably go on to win the whole thing considering how popular she is, & all because of a short cameo. Haruhi Suzumiya is also qualified to compete again this year due to her brief cameo in Lucky Star. As much as I worship Haruhi, I do think it's unfair that she gets to compete because of that, since she'll probably make it pretty far as well. Because these two will likely do very well in the tournament, they should really consider changing it to main characters only.
All in all, there's about 300 anime girls competing this year. As a result, I'm not sure how much of the early rounds I'll be covering. Maybe I'll wait for the weaker ones to be weeded out first & then take over, but we'll see what happens. In the meantime, check out the coverage Kurogane’s Anime Blog, along a complete bracket of the tournament with all the characters competing in it:
http://kurogane.animeblogger.net/2008/08/17/saimoe-tournament-2008-group-stage-listing/