Emoji Tournament

A poll bracket to determine Tumblr's favorite emoji!

[emojitournament]

Welcome to the Tumblr Emoji Tournament!

Hi everyone! Inspired by all of the bracket tournaments people have been doing with their polls, I decided it would be fun to make one to determine our favorite emoji!

Which emoji are included?

All official emoji up until Unicode 14.0 are represented! (The 15.0 emoji additions, such as the pink heart, goose, wifi symbol and others, are still unavailable on most platforms at the time of this writing.) However, some of them will be combined as one option. Most notably gender and skintone variants are combined, so that each "person" emoji is included once instead of eighteen times, and national and regional flags are counted as a group rather than separately (both to avoid matchups with political implications and because there's over two hundred of them and it would be repetitive). This leaves us with 1373 competitors.

What is the format of the tournament?

It's a seeded, single elimination bracket. However, of the tools and templates I could find to set up brackets online, none of them supported this many participants, so I'll be keeping track of the first few rounds mathematically, and post a bracket once things get more wieldy. I'll try to get a link to a spreadsheet up soon so that you can be sure I'm not cheating.

How were the seeds decided?

I used the Unicode Consortium's data on the most popular emoji used in 2021 (link in reblog), with more popular emoji given higher seeds. However, as this list doesn't include newer emoji, I added them in at the top of the initial qualifier round. I do expect the natural differences between whether something is your favorite and whether you use it a lot, as well as the specific environment of Tumblr, to make the seeding somewhat unpredictable, but that's what I'm excited about, the opportunity to see what happens.

Let the games begin!

[emojitournament]

Here's the seed list, if anyone's interested!

emoji seeds presentable version

2021_ranked Seed,Emoji,Year,Name 1,😂,2010,face with tears of joy 2,❤️,2010,red heart 3,🤣,2016,rolling on the floor laughing 4,👍👍🏻👍🏼👍🏽👍🏾👍🏿,2

The data is from here:

Emoji Frequency

Emoji Frequency ARCHIVE THIS SECTION CONTAINS EMOJI DATA FROM PREVIOUS YEARS The Most Frequent Emoji -- 2019How does the Unicode C

with more recent emoji added in at the top of the qualifier round!

[emojitournament]

Tiebreaker Trivia Round: "dragon" vs. "water wave"!

🐉

🌊

Voting ended onMay 22

🐉: This is one of the original Unicode emoji that were encoded in the 6.0 update in 2010. These emoji were, as I've mentioned before, added to Unicode in order to establish compatibility with the emoji already in use by Japanese cell phone carriers, so most of them were taken from the three emoji sets those companies were using. The full-body "dragon" emoji, however, was not in any previously used set. On the other hand, another dragon emoji, "dragon face" 🐲, was in one of the older sets, and had been around since 2002. That means that "dragon" 🐉 was one of the ones created by Unicode for the purpose of the Unicode emoji project. The emoji added this way would have been created for specific reasons, usually to fill gaps in the existing set of characters. For example, the existing emoji sets had a handful of moon phases: 🌑, 🌓, 🌔, and 🌕 (and 🌙, accounting for the crescent shape but not necessarily in the style of the other ones), so Unicode added 🌒, 🌖, 🌗 and 🌘 to cover the whole lunar cycle. So then why did Unicode decide we needed a second dragon? If you were around for the tiebreaker a while ago that included "cow face" 🐮, you might sort of know where this is going: representatives from Germany and Ireland felt that the assorted animal faces in the emoji sets were too cartoonish, and therefore not versatile enough, to be encoded as Unicode characters, and suggested that changing them to full-body designs so that they could be used in more serious contexts, but the full body versions were seen as too different from their existing forms, so the full-body animals were added separately. So why does this apply to the dragon? Is the Unicode Consortium's position that a dragon is a real animal? Well, it turns out, one of the contexts Ireland and Germany thought the full-body animals would be useful might be to represent the signs of the East Asian zodiac. (This was relevant in the interest of the completeness thing because the Western zodiac symbols were also already included.) I suspect this is probably why: the dragon is in the zodiac, so the dragon gets a full body version like the other zodiac animals. (Oddly, the document where the full body animals were proposed and the zodiac usage suggested still used just the dragon head design -- it must have been decided later that the dragon shouldn't be left out!)

🌊: This is another one of the emoji added to Unicode in the original 2010 release, but in this one's case its origins are clear: all three of the major Japanese cell phone emoji sets have included this one since the early 2000s. The first version was from SoftBank's "2000" set (actually released at the very end of 1999) which is super cool because, like a lot of the rest of SoftBank 2000, it's original form was animated! It scrolled to the side, and it's not quite seamless if you put multiple copies next to each other, but I feel like it would be with the right spacing or with the timing slightly offset, you know? No idea whether it would have been displayed in a way for that to work in its original context, but I really hope so. Anyway, it looks cool regardless, don't you think?

Tumblr is not allowing me to add this gif here -- I'll try again in a reblog.

[emojitournament]

[emojitournament]

Tiebreaker Trivia Round: "dragon" vs. "water wave"!

🐉

🌊

Voting ended onMay 22

🐉: This is one of the original Unicode emoji that were encoded in the 6.0 update in 2010. These emoji were, as I've mentioned before, added to Unicode in order to establish compatibility with the emoji already in use by Japanese cell phone carriers, so most of them were taken from the three emoji sets those companies were using. The full-body "dragon" emoji, however, was not in any previously used set. On the other hand, another dragon emoji, "dragon face" 🐲, was in one of the older sets, and had been around since 2002. That means that "dragon" 🐉 was one of the ones created by Unicode for the purpose of the Unicode emoji project. The emoji added this way would have been created for specific reasons, usually to fill gaps in the existing set of characters. For example, the existing emoji sets had a handful of moon phases: 🌑, 🌓, 🌔, and 🌕 (and 🌙, accounting for the crescent shape but not necessarily in the style of the other ones), so Unicode added 🌒, 🌖, 🌗 and 🌘 to cover the whole lunar cycle. So then why did Unicode decide we needed a second dragon? If you were around for the tiebreaker a while ago that included "cow face" 🐮, you might sort of know where this is going: representatives from Germany and Ireland felt that the assorted animal faces in the emoji sets were too cartoonish, and therefore not versatile enough, to be encoded as Unicode characters, and suggested that changing them to full-body designs so that they could be used in more serious contexts, but the full body versions were seen as too different from their existing forms, so the full-body animals were added separately. So why does this apply to the dragon? Is the Unicode Consortium's position that a dragon is a real animal? Well, it turns out, one of the contexts Ireland and Germany thought the full-body animals would be useful might be to represent the signs of the East Asian zodiac. (This was relevant in the interest of the completeness thing because the Western zodiac symbols were also already included.) I suspect this is probably why: the dragon is in the zodiac, so the dragon gets a full body version like the other zodiac animals. (Oddly, the document where the full body animals were proposed and the zodiac usage suggested still used just the dragon head design -- it must have been decided later that the dragon shouldn't be left out!)

🌊: This is another one of the emoji added to Unicode in the original 2010 release, but in this one's case its origins are clear: all three of the major Japanese cell phone emoji sets have included this one since the early 2000s. The first version was from SoftBank's "2000" set (actually released at the very end of 1999) which is super cool because, like a lot of the rest of SoftBank 2000, it's original form was animated! It scrolled to the side, and it's not quite seamless if you put multiple copies next to each other, but I feel like it would be with the right spacing or with the timing slightly offset, you know? No idea whether it would have been displayed in a way for that to work in its original context, but I really hope so. Anyway, it looks cool regardless, don't you think?

Tumblr is not allowing me to add this gif here -- I'll try again in a reblog.

[emojitournament]

(Sorry for the delay, everyone -- I still need to tiebreak dragon vs. water wave. I'll try real hard to get it done as soon as I can!)

[emojitournament]

And that's it for round six!

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "seal" vs. "fire"!

🦭

🔥

Voting ended onApr 30

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "snail" vs. "revolving hearts"!

🐌

💞

Voting ended onApr 30

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "pleading face" vs. "crescent moon"!

🥺

🌙

Voting ended onApr 28

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "worm" vs. "cloud with lightning"!

🪱

🌩️

Voting ended onApr 28

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "unamused face" vs. "face with rolling eyes"!

😒

🙄

Voting ended onApr 27

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "rainbow flag" vs. "rainbow"!

🏳️‍🌈

🌈

Voting ended onApr 27

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "dragon" vs. "water wave"!

🐉

🌊

Voting ended onApr 26

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "crab" vs. "milky way"!

🦀

🌌

Voting ended onApr 26

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "smiling face with hearts" vs. "turtle"!

🥰

🐢

Voting ended onApr 25

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "spouting whale" vs. "anatomical heart"!

🐳

🫀

Voting ended onApr 25

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "shark" vs. "eyes"!

🦈

👀

Voting ended onApr 23

[emojitournament]

Round Six: "upside-down face" vs. "melting face"!

🙃

🫠

Voting ended onApr 23