#snk popularity contest 2017

[perfectackeracy]

oh so no matter what the results are never accurate wow i thought cheating would be harder in these polls and as usual it's always erwin and eren's fans who cheat -_- in that case characters who deserve to get into the top 5 like armin and reiner would probably not make it.. sighs

But the official poll is hard to rig.

It’s not a poll where you can simply select someone and press submit. The whole voting session extended on two months, covering two BSM issues. The process is a lot more tedious, hence why it’s more accurate than online polls:

Buy a copy of the magazine

Send a card with the character you’re voting for, with your name and your coordinates, and the BSM stamp from the magazine

Rince and repeat with next month’s issue

That’s why we can vote at least twice for the same character. In order to get more votes, you have to use a combination of money and networking: buying more copies of the same issue and asking friends or family members who don’t read the magazine to vote for your fave. I don’t know how extensively checked each vote is (Ie. looking for discrepancies between addresses), but in the best case, you can buy as many copies as you can afford and just make up family members and look for valid addresses on Google Maps. In this case, money alone should suffice.

Anybody in the world can vote, but foreigners are limited by the shipping costs, the delivery time, and the postal services’ cost. I could’ve voted, but wasting something like 30€ in total for a postcard taking approximately 4 weeks to make it to it’s destination point simply isn’t worth it.

People who are more likely to swell the votes for their faves are shippers, who tend to be hardcore fans in general. The popularity trend can be easily predicted by the sales on each character’s merch. The faster a piece of merch sells out and the higher the resell value is, the more popular a character is. That’s why Levi always figures at the top by a significant margin. Levi fans are the ones who are the most likely to vote several times. The most popular ships in Japan are Levi ships (ereri, eruri, levihan) after all.

I think Reiner could level up his game, considering everything that happened in 2017: Marley arc (him getting a lot of focus), Season 2 of anime (covers the Clash of Titans arc), reibert being one of the most popular ships around (reibert merch sells out in minutes)...

Meanwhile Armin... Armin’s more appreciated from casuals. I think his popularity will stagnate because he hasn’t done anything offputting yet. The easiest way to judge is to wait for November 3rd and see how many fanarts Armin is going to get in the 10 first minutes. One thing is clear, Armin never sold well in merch: you have the infamous EML merch trio, and when Armin merch gets sold, it has low resale value. I even think his character song didn’t sell well? Which is a shame because I like Marina Inoue’s voice. Him being shipped with Jean saves his popularity at least. Jeanmin is quite popular but not as big as the other ships, so that can save him a bit.