Poll Results + Poll Ramble (Pixiv Fanbox)

The results are in, and I'll be honest. It went basically how I expected.

Kaine won by a fairly large margin, which is what I expected. When I rolled the three, I was like "well that's an obvious victory" and honestly considered rerolling it for something that was more fair... but sometimes you gotta roll with what you're given. And there are some people who probably wouldn't immediately assume Kaine would win, but it's been over a year of polls that I've been guessing on and I'm getting better. I actually wanted to know my success ratio in terms of who I assume would win vs who ended up winning. I went back and checked, and while it's not as good as I was thinking, a 63% successful guess percentage isn't that bad. Especially when you compare it to my personal picks for the polls winning being 25%. That's right, only 25% of the characters I'd pick on all my polls have successfully won. So for all those out there sad when their picks lose, know that I'm right there with you more often than not. (っ◞‸◟c)

But this isn't to gripe and complain. Just wanted to talk a little about the polls to give some perspective on things. The polls are intended to just be a bonus where people can select what they want to see. Because, as the polls show, my choices aren't always what most people want to see. I have my biases and character picks, and they're all stuff I want to do and not necessarily what others want me to do. I'd say that more than half of the characters who have been selected through polls are characters I would never touch if I were just picking what I wanted to animate. Last poll is a pretty good example of that. Sorry, XIV and Ryne fans, but I just don't like her. I didn't like her when I did the Anniversary, and it's still true when I did the poll animations. It was an honest struggle to just make those three animations of her. I kept procrastinating and working on other stuff instead. If not for the fact that she won the poll, I'd have never finished them. I'd 'put it off' until the project is dropped altogether... or rather, it wouldn't have even been a project in the first place simply because I have no desire to animate her.

So, the point being, the polls - while often disappointing for a lot of people - are kind of the only way I'll actually work on some of these characters. My favorite characters aren't necessarily your favorite characters, and vice versa. It's best to not view the polls as a "thing that's preventing Lazy from doing y character" and more as a "thing that gives Lazy incentive to do x character". See, when I have some characters planned in a project or animation set that I'm working on, I will actually automatically veto them if they get randomly selected when I'm making a poll. If they were to win, that'd be taking the opportunity away from characters that I am not working on, and that's not particularly fair. Obviously there are some polls, like this one, where things aren't totally fair. Kaine was too strong, obviously. Which leads me into the final thing I wanted to talk about.

From now on, every third month, I'm going to host two "loser's poll". Since there's two polls each month, with two loser per poll, that'll leave eight losers in total. For a chance of redemption, on the third month I will host two polls featuring the previous two month's poll losers with respect to which poll they appeared in. Obviously there will still be some losers(6 super losers), and eventually I may have a super loser's poll, but for now I'm just leaving it as the loser's poll. This will actually help me in some way, as it means I'll have less characters to potentially rig up each month, while also giving some characters who never really had the chance to win in the first place a possible redemption arc. And as much as I'd love to give everyone something, I am but one man. I can't do everyone. Not without sacrificing what I want to work on in the process, and this all started with me just making what I wanted to make, so yeah. Gotta keep doing what makes me happy, otherwise there's no real point in me animating.

So yeah, that's about all I've got on the poll side of things. Polls will still be had, but there will be a loser's poll for a second chance for one of the four losers. Unless people want me to make a single animation for the top three instead of three animations for the winner. That way there'd be only one final super loser who can be put into a year end poll against three other super losers to determine who is the biggest super loser. That's just a half-brained idea, by the way. I don't know if it'd be possible, considering some months do get some wacky polls. Like October. But hey if people like the idea, let me know I guess.

Oh yeah, and - https://gofile.io/d/aol3kN