Seasonal Salt 2021

This article will cover /r/anime's seasonal contests for 2021, the 5th year running.

It's the same tournament format as before: 2 days of nominations, 2 days of qualifying/seeding rounds, and 64-player single-elimination bracket. The winner of the final match gets the "Best Girl of [season]" title. In addition, all girls who reach the quarter-finals of each seasonal will qualify for the "Best Girl of 2021" contest.

From Spring onwards, the contest schedules were downsized following a discussion in a nomination thread. While nominations stay at 2 days, the elimination rounds and every bracket round were reduced to 1 day each, thereby reducing the duration of each seasonal to just 8 days (starting from eliminations to winner announcement).

The seasonals were hosted by /r/anime moderator Gaporigo until Summer. In mid-April 2022, user changshiyixia (who later reveals themself in the ISML Discord server as uoiea1998, a user with a prior longtime interest in saimoe tournaments ) decided to take over in organizing the Fall seasonal and Best Girl of 2021 with Gaporigo's blessing, as the latter has expressed decreased interest in hosting and is willing to step down.

Rules
Copied from the website:
 * Only female characters that have appeared in [their respective seasonal] TV anime or that appeared for the first time in a multiple cour show during this period are allowed. They can be animals/creatures as long as they can talk with human characters, are main characters themselves or are part of an anime mostly consisting of non-human characters.
 * Movie characters are allowed as long as its first BD release with English subtitles occurred during the season at hand. Check the /r/anime discussion threads to make sure when they came out.
 * TV Sequels/multiple cour girls that aren't appearing for the first time are NOT allowed.
 * Exceptions: For multiple cour girls, If they failed to make it into the bracket for the previous season, they may be renominated again.
 * For sequels and remakes, if their last TV appearance was over 15 years ago they may be nominated.
 * Characters with Non-TV Animeography in the last 15 years can only have a max of three works since then.
 * Limit to 4 Characters per franchise, these will be determined in the elimination round. Absolutely no exceptions to this rule.
 * Check MAL's lists to see all 2021 TV anime from each season. (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.)
 * Make sure the image links end in .png, .jpg or .jpeg, any other link may not work even if the site accepts it.
 * Please don't nominate characters who have almost zero screentime, if they make it into the bracket they won't be allowed if their show gets a sequel and they get screentime then.

Tournament Format
 * Elimination Round
 * All nominees are split into 1 or more elimination groups (depending on host preference)
 * Approval voting - vote whoever you like; no limit on choices
 * Top 64 girls with the highest Adjusted Votes advance to Bracket Stage
 * If the elimination round is split into 2 or more groups, the votes will be Adjusted depending on the number of actual participants in each elimination group. If there is only one elimination group, the votes won't be adjusted at all.
 * Bracket Stage
 * Single elimination bracket
 * Seeded using Elimination Round votes
 * Top 8 survivors from each season qualify for the Yearly Salt / Best Girl of 2021 contest
 * Best Girl of 2021 has the same format as the seasonals: Seeding Rounds -> 32-man single-elimination bracket

Winter
Rounds 1-4

Elite Eight

Spring
Rounds 1-4

Elite Eight

Summer
Elimination Results (Imgur): Screenshot gallery, Results Before Character Limit

Rounds 1-4

Elite Eight

Fall
Elimination Results (Imgur): Screenshot gallery, Results Before Character Limit

Elite Eight

Best Girl of 2021
A tournament to decide the best girl of 2021, contested between each seasonal's elite eight contestants. Has a seeding round and a 32-man bracket.

Seeding Results (Imgur): https://i.imgur.com/lSqhdnC.jpeg



Reddit threads
Sorted by best (highest ratio of upvotes to downvotes)

Navigation
References