A polling blog focused on whether or not you (specifically) like the VISUAL design of a character.
Polls will be posted five times a day between 18:00 and 18:12 BST (UTC+1) (subject to change & barring extenuating circumstances), and will last one week. Results happen when they happen, usually somewhat weekly (I'm a busy woman).
SUBMISSIONS
Submissions open on the first of every month, with 150/155 slots being available. These will be posted from the 1st to the end of the following month.
Spreadsheet for previous posts, statistics, and rejected submissions here.
TAGS
#Active Vote - Currently running polls
#Closed Vote - Closed Polls
#Re-Poll - Polls for designs that are being judged again
#Results - The Results of closed polls
#Not a Poll - Anything that isn't a poll or results of a poll
#Asks - Answering your questions!
#Admin - Posts about or relating to the admin, or about the running of the blog
#Yes - Polls where You like the design
#No - Polls where You dislike the design
#Mixed - Polls where You can't make your mind up (polls where yes and no are within 10% of each other, or where 'it's complicated' wins)
Q&A (Below Cut)
Who runs this account?
Hi! I'm Consul (she/her) and I have always loved character designs. Please be nice to strangers on the internet and try to remember that all of this is for fun. My personal blog is @stultiferanavis.
My reblog / reply isn't showing up in the notes, how can I fix this?
Send an ask on anon with your URL and I'll get it sorted out. I have had my main blog for 6 years (I've been on Tumblr for almost 12 at this point. Scary) and block somewhat liberally, usually because there's no mute function on this website. It's nothing personal.
What should I do if there's a factual error with a character's information or design in one of your posts?
Please feel free to either send me an ask about it, or reply directly to the post in question! I'm always more than happy to make corrections. I do not know everything about what gets submitted, my media knowledge is very limited to be honest, so I am bound to make mistakes. I can only go off of what has been submitted to me and sometimes things get missed.
Do you endorse the media that you put on this account?
Designs will be posted regardless of my personal feelings about any specific piece of media. I do not know every piece of media that exists, however I will not knowingly post anything that exists to endorse harmful ideologies. I truly hope this won't be an issue but I am covering my bases.
How many submissions can I make?
With the new monthly submission schedule, try to limit it to 5 submissions tops. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but now that only 150 designs are being accepted per submission block, it'd be considerate to let other people submit things too.
Can I submit Original or Fan Characters to be judged?
No, only designs that are from publicly released sources are acceptable to be submitted. If a design's source has an official, public release (be that web comic, video game, software mascot, or otherwise) it's fair game.
Can you add more poll options?
Unless it becomes obvious that further nuance is needed, no. This is not about whether or not you recognise the design so I don't think that's really needed. If anything, I kinda wish there wasn't the nuance button.
I feel like people are just clicking yes because they like the media / character regardless of their feelings about their designs.
You and me both brother!
When will my submission be posted?
Send an ask off anon with the design's name and I'll let you know!
[Character/Design] is a spoiler! Why didn't you mark it?
I sincerely apologise if I've spoiled anything with this blog, it's never my intention to ruin anything for anyone. I can't be aware of what is and isn't a spoiler for media that I do not personally know, nor do I really know how to go about marking that. If you want me to mark something as a spoiler, tell me and I’ll tag it as #[media name] spoiler
I think someone else did this concept first.
When I made this blog there wasn't anyone else doing this specific concept to my knowledge. And if there is now, send me their @ and I'll explode them with my mind
Why are there so many gacha game characters here?
I run off of submissions and I prioritise them based on the order they are submitted. If someone decides to send me twenty characters from the same thing then that's what we're getting for a while. It just so happens that gacha games have a Lot of designs and they're what tends to be submitted. I don't mind this personally, but if it bugs you then you should submit your own characters (WINK)(PLEASE).
Why are there so many Arknights characters here?
People Keep Submitting Them, I don't know what to tell you. I like the game a lot but I don't make submissions here (and I make it obvious when I do. Coughing). These polls tend to get high ish votes consistently, so it might just be that more people are seeing them and submitting more characters as a result?
Who is the thang in your icon?
A bunny version of Thorns from one of the official arknights stickers, one of my personal Guys. Until Hypergryph sends me a cease and desist for making this the mascot of the blog it stays. The Babbit.
"Close enough welcome back Squigly Contiello. She's actually super cute! She actually looks like she picked her outfit out herself, which is a bar that Mihoyo characters fail to hit way too often. She's mostly symmetrical which is honestly refreshing looking at some other Mihoyo designs (I guess the designers thought that Magus created enough asymmetry in her design that they didn't think to really add much of it to her outfit? They were so right for that, thank god). And her colour scheme is simple and leads you around the design very well; the orange leads you to her face, hands and feet, and the silver accents add visual intrigue that's not distracting.
Also, in her animations, Magus yanks her upwards to right her up out of her settled poses, great characterization, very endearing"
"I've heard a lot of complaints that her design is too sexualized. I personally don't see it, but I'm curious what people on this blog think about it."
"it really sucks that she's from a game by this particular creator because i absolutely hate everything this creator stands for but rawberry is so, so, so extremely cute to me. even if she eats bugs. i'm sorry girl we'll get you out of there"
Mafuyu Asahina - Abyss Knight from Project SEKAI COLORFUL STAGE!
"girls with short hair and swords who look like they could kill me 👀
unfortunately the haircut did not survive the transition to 3D (a common issue with hairstyles in this game)"
your spreadsheet DELIGHTS me as an autistic person and CONFOUNDS me as a fellow poll blog runner. i cannot comprehend how much work would go into keeping it this detailed and up to date but gosh do i wish i could do it
Aww thank you! Spreadsheets have always been my preferred method to organise things as someone who is autistic and needs to categorise information as much as possible, and having a consistent form of data that can be categorised brings me a lot of joy.
As for the upkeep of it, it's actually quite simple! I'm going to put this under a read-more for the sake of not cluttering up people's dashes but I figure it might be interesting to at least a small handful of people!
To run this blog, I actually have three spreadsheets. The first is the public one that is linked in the pinned post - it's the tidiest of the sheets and contains the majority of the raw data for the blog.
The second is the spreadsheet that's connected to the submission form. This is the simplest by far and exists purely to make data entry easier.
The last is the 'backend' of the main sheet, so to speak. This is where the data processing happens for the statistics, as well as where I organise submissions in order to plan out grouped submissions, spread out submissions from the same franchise, and check off submissions that have been queued and then, eventually, posted.
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Almost everything you see on the statistics page of the public sheet is actually an import formulae from the private one, a few months ago I took the time to organise and automate everything via a few simple functions in order to have everything running smoothly with minimal effort.
In the top left corner of this sheet, there's a very small =sum function that totals up all of the votes for yes/no/complicated and compares them to the absolute total votes that have been cast. If these numbers are different for any reason, the total votes for 'yes' has conditional formatting set up in order to alert me so I can fix it (this was a major problem in the past lol).
Another check against this is (again using conditional formatting and sum functions) present in the results section of the sheet - which is actually fairly automated as sheets go. If the numbers for votes yes/no/complicated do not align with the total number of votes, the entire row turns orange to alert me. This happens if I misinput the percentages, as the number totals are actually calculated for me with a very simple percentage function! All I need to do these days is input the percentages from the poll and the total number of votes, and it'll automatically calculate how many votes each one got. The only issue this presents is if there's a result that's '00.0 %' or '0' for whatever reason because of how I hide the formulae from the general public, but that's a really fringe case that's easy to solve. The percentages are all formatted via the number format function to be in the same 'XX.X %' style, so I don't even have to worry about formatting that properly any more.
Now, this public sheet does get pulled from for the private one, which is much less pretty but gets the job done - this is extremely unoptimised and I need you to be nice to me about it.
^ There are a lot of tabs that go into sorting all of the raw data, pulled directly from the sheet, into what you see on the stats page.
Tackling the ones that are visible first, All submissions is my own version of the 'design by source' tab that is on the public sheet. Here's a greatly zoomed out version of it:
This helps me keep track of previous submissions, what number their poll was, and helps me know if I need to reject a submission on the basis of being too recently submitted. These are organised by source alphabetically, and each one has the post number / character name / franchise, with the columns being sorted by franchise alphabetically within each one. This is the same as on the public sheet, minus the links to the posts. Here's a better look at that.
This is made possible by another tab, 'Submissions/Posts'. This is where I pull the post numbers, character names, and source media (+ post links for the posted column) from all of the individual tabs on both the public and private sheet using the =importrange function. Every time I make a new tab for each 100 polls, I add a new formulae to the sheet to make it into one continuous thing.
'Submissions / Posts' gets pulled into 'sorted sub post', a sheet that sorts everything alphabetically by franchise through the =sort function. I won't lie, this one is a little redundant but I like having it.
This is then pulled into two sheets - 'Submissions (messy)' and 'posted (messy)' which both function in the same way, using the =query function, I pull everything from sorted sub post that has a franchise starting with a specific letter and repeat this for every letter of the alphabet + special characters. I feel a little bit like the tweet that's like 'there has got to be an easier way to do this'.
This then gets pulled onto either the private 'all submissions' tab or gets import ranged into the public sheet under the 'designs by source' tab.
Now. Now. The statistics themselves.
There is a tab on DYLTCD PRIVATE called 'All Results'. This is where the top 5s of every category comes from. Similarly to how I pull the post number / name / franchise / link from the public sheet, I pull everything from the public sheet onto the 'All Results' tab.
For each category, I simply sort this data using the =sort function and hide the irrelevant data, then I pull the top 5 of each onto the stats page of the public sheet. I could technically make this pull as many as I wanted, but for the sake of simplicity it's currently pulling 5 per category.
Now for the final thing, the totals of votes and results! This is, to put it bluntly, done far less efficiently and far more redundantly. Someone smarter than me would have done 'all results' first and then pulled data from that, but all of this is the result of continuously building on things rather than planning from the get-go.
You'll notice immediately that this is not formatted nicely.
Each of these categories comes from individual rows of data that is very messily pulled from the public sheet, below is the results data. Imagine this is being done for all of the numerical data, too. This is all, for some reason, completely unlabelled and every time I need to trouble shoot back here it's a nightmare.
Similarly to how I have conditional formatting to validate the data on the public sheet, I actually have it back here too to help with problem solving!
At the bottom I have the totals for each individual 100 polls tab and a manual sum of the yes / no / complicated votes at the bottom to compare against, and if these numbers are not the same then it yells at me so I can fix it
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There are likely a few more things I'm missing, but in general all of this means that upkeep is extremely simple. Because I format submissions into the private sheet, I can keep track of what has been posted and queued with ease as well as when I need to schedule them. I can also just copy and paste this list onto the main sheet once it's been posted properly!
Then I go through and add the links to the polls on the public sheet - once the polls end I add the percentages, total votes and outcome and the sheet does the rest (including the conditional formatting for the result colours)!
I love my spreadsheet, I love maintaining it and I love improving it when I can. I'm not a spreadsheet genius or anything, I've had to search for a lot of tutorials on how to do things and even then I'm likely doing things very inefficiently, but it brings me a lot of joy and I hope it's at least interesting to look at!
Thanks for reading all of this if you have, I hope this helps in some way with your own poll blog!
I do personally (As a gitano) prefer payos to not use the word without asking first to whoever is part of the community, but it's probably harder to gauge when it's referring to a character in media. I've very rarely seen the word used in an accurate or respectful way by non-travellers in social media, so I (personally) appreciate the caution used here!
But as said by the other anon, your mileage will greatly vary based on who you ask, since a lot of us do actually have little in common with other travellers across the world
Hi Anon, thank you so much for providing further input on this topic, it's really appreciated. I hope you have a wonderful night, too, and thank you again for taking the time to send this in.
Hi, friend! I just wanted to share my thoughts after looking at the spreadsheet and seeing you meant Gypsy when you said an ethnic slur had been used. I want to point out that many of us do not consider Gypsy a slur. As someone who grew up in the community and lifestyle and am both ethnically and culturally a Gypsy, many of us still use the term and encourage others to refer to us this way. As well as the fact that many Romani identify with the term, Romani are also not the only group of travelers, and many of us cannot be described as Romani (I can personally, but I know other Gypsies who would not refer to themselves as Romani). I completely understand if you would not personally be comfortable posting something with it for the sake of the groups who do consider it a slur towards them, but to describe it as disrespectful and demeaning towards us in a blanket sense is wrong and something we've been trying to push back against. It's an important word for many of us and our backgrounds/culture.
The general rule we try to tell people to follow is that it is completely okay to err on the side of caution and not automatically refer to travellers with the word, and if someone does say they consider it a slur towards them and do not want to be referred to that way you should always respect their feelings. However, it's not really correct to refer to it as a slur as a whole and to tell others to avoid using it at all.
Please know I'm not saying this as a criticism towards you and this misconception is incredibly common! Unfortunately non-traveler people online have run with it and it's become a very widespread thought, and so I completely understand why you thought this! I just wanted to let you know and maybe others can learn from this as well. :)
Hi Anon, thank you for taking the time to explain your side of this, I greatly appreciate feedback on matters like this. I promise it doesn't come across as being critical, and if it was it would be warranted in this particular situation. I've changed the wording on the rejection note to reflect your input. I was going off of my own outsider knowledge of the topic and I apologise for contributing to the misinformation. Thank you for taking the time to educate me on this subject.
You're right in saying that I am personally uncomfortable with publishing it in the context of anonymous submissions, as I would be with most other terms that are either explicitly derogatory or are contentious in how they can be taken to be harmful to others, and in general I feel it's better to err on the side of caution than to accidentally put my foot in my mouth and cause genuine harm or upset to others.
Thank you again for the correction and for providing a learning opportunity, I hope you have a wonderful night.
I've had a chance to go through the submissions from July and there were a handful of rejections; two were because I could not source any images for them and one was because I could not use the propaganda submitted due to the use of a contentious and potentially harmful word, and did not wish to re-write it myself.
Please check the spreadsheet and send in links to images or new propaganda via the ask function, the forum will re-open at some point on Saturday and if I do not receive any asks pertaining to these rejected submissions, they will be replaced with new submissions. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
