International Saimoe League

International Saimoe League国际最萌大会
Logo for the latest edition. Font used is Segoe Print.
Information
Abbreviation	ISML 世萌
Founded	January 2008
Languages	Main: English Other languages: Simplified Chinese Traditional Chinese Japanese Korean Russian German Vietnamese Bahasa Indonesia
Website	ISML Main Page (latest edition) Community links +ISML forum +Discord invite link +ISML Tieba (Chinese) +Twitter +Facebook +Instagram(requires account)

The International Saimoe League (ISML) is an online anime character popularity tournament which "aims to find the most moe among anime characters". Originally spun off from the Japanese Anime Saimoe Tournament in 2channel and the Korea Best Moe Tournament in Anizone, ISML was created in 2008 by AnimeSuki forum members, who sought to create a tournament where voters from around the world could participate, as opposed to the exclusivity of the two saimoe tournaments it took inspiration from. ISML's founder is credited to AnimeSuki member minhtam1638.

ISML has many characteristics that make it stand out from other popularity contests, with the most significant being its league system that is similar to major United States sports leagues like NBA and NHL, and gem awards which are given to contestants who perform well during the regular season. Initially contested by females only, ISML held a separate male exhibition tournament from 2011 to 2014, and later added an official main tournament for them on 2015. The female champion is awarded the "Heavenly Tiara", while the male champion is given the "Lapis Scepter".

In 2022, the ISML staff announced that the tournament will undergo its final iteration after 15 years, bringing what fans call "the last major saimoe tournament" to an end.

The tournament is one of the main subjects of the Saimoe Wiki, because the original site in Wikia (now Fandom) was founded in 2010 by some of its key staff members. One of the Wiki's founders, KholdStare88 (aka "Kholdy" and "Chocola"), currently serves as ISML's commissioner since 2016, succeeding Crisu who previously held the position from 2008 to 2015.

Format

The timeline of the ever-changing ISML tournament format.

As befitting of its name, the International Saimoe League has many rules, voting methods, numbers, and other particularities that are likely only interesting to geeks due to its complexity and sheer scale; the entire ruleset of each edition is published through its official Charter.

Naming convention

ISML's official naming convention in English follows Hepburn romanization. Most characters are written in Eastern Order (family name first), and use Japanese names whenever possible. In accordance to Hepburn romanization, macrons are always used for "long o" (ō) and "long u" (ū) vowels. Non-Eastern sounding names follow their own naming convention in-universe (e.g. Edward Elric, Illyasviel von Einzbern)

Examples:

• Rena Ryuuguu --> Ryūgū Rena
• Kyou Fujibayashi --> Fujibayashi Kyō
• Golden Darkness --> Konjiki no Yami
• Squid Girl --> Ika-Musume

Nomination

ISML officially opens through the nomination phase which lasts one week. Voters are given a ballot where they nominate a character by writing their full name and anime series. Naming convention and language does not matter as long as the nominee specified is made clear. Each ballot must comply with minimum requirements and restrictions imposed by the organizers (e.g. maximum 3 characters per anime). After the period ends, a selected number of characters with the highest nominations will advance to the next stage.

Unlike the 2channel Saimoe and Anizone Saimoe tournaments, which limit participation to within one year before a given edition's start date, ISML accepts characters from all anime regardless of airtime, enabling characters to return to the tournament even after their anime has ended. Starting from 2012 however, ISML has imposed a restriction that prohibits characters who appeared in the same year the tournament was held in, and these characters competed in the introduced seasonal contests instead.

In addition, some characters are exempted from nominations (or as the Saimoe Wiki calls it, "Direct Invites"), and will automatically qualify to the next stage when they fulfill certain requirements. Note that the "next stage" varies every edition, and can either mean advancing to the preliminaries or a direct ticket to the regular season.

• From 2008 - 2011, direct invites came from the best performing girls in last year's 2channel Saimoe and Anizone Saimoe, alongside last year's necklace winners and girls who have scored above a certain point threshold in the ISML regular season.
  • ISML 2008 used direct invites from 2channel, Anizone, and Korea Super Best Moe's 2007 edition.
• 2012 - 2014's direct invites were allocated to the top performing girls in last year's regular season. These girls were put into one of two divisions depending on their previous ISML appearances — either Nova (newcomers and sophomores) or Stella (veterans).
• ISML 2015 only invited the two finalists from each seasonal contest in 2014 to its Nova Division, for a maximum of 8 girls.
• With the merging of the female tournament and a new commissioner stepping in, ISML 2016's direct invites were re-assigned to last year's necklace winners, alongside the top 2 finalists from last year's seasonal.
• From 2017 - 2020, males were also given invites by winning a pendant.
• In ISML 2021, seasonal runner-ups were no longer invited. Additional invites were given to all characters who made the playoffs bracket last year, but did not win either necklace or pendant. With the introduction of male seasonals, their winners was also qualified for next year's main tournament starting from 2022.

Preliminaries

The preliminary period consists of several rounds of varying formats; its main purpose is to thin out the nominees in order to fit the regular season's league capacity. Seeding rounds, which determine each character's match-ups for the following preliminary rounds or regular season schedule , are also held at the same time.

Preliminaries were an integral part of ISML since its inception, but it was abolished from 2016 to 2020, which made nominations extremely important as they became the sole method for putting characters in the main tournament. As a consequence, all direct invites from those editions advanced to the regular season instead. The preliminaries returned in 2020 as a result of the tournament combining the elements of 2017-2019's multiple stages and the large groups of 2008-2015's league format.

Regular season & Gem awards

Emblem

ISML's regular season is a league-style round-robin tournament that lasts many months, which will decide the sixteen (16) best-performing or surviving characters that will advance to the postseason. It is notable for being split into seven periods; in order they are:

• Aquamarine, topaz, amethyst, sapphire, emerald, ruby, and diamond.
• These colours are reflected in ISML's emblem, a flower with seven petals representing its periods.

The format has varied throughout ISML's history, but for the first years of its existence, the tournament used a massive single round-robin where every girl plays all other opponents once.

• Between 2012-2015, the female tournament was split into 2 divisions of 36 girls each: Nova (newcomers and sophomores) or Stella (veterans). Both divisions are held at the same time, and are completely separate — in other words, a Nova division contestant will not play any Stella division contestant during the regular sesaon. The male division on 2015 also had a similar 35-man league format.
  • Since the number of matches were reduced, the periods were also reduced to five. Likewise, five necklaces/pendants were awarded during the time: Aquamarine, amethyst, ruby, emerald, and topaz.
  • Sapphire and Diamond were reserved as "circlets", and were respectively awarded to the winner of Nova and Stella division's playoffs bracket. The Saimoe Wiki considers these awards as just necklaces/pendants with a different name.
• In 2016, the regular season saw a return to the original 7-gem order. It used a unique "World-Cup"-style format, where 128 players were split into 4-man single round-robin groups, of which only the top 2 players advance, similar to the football tournament's group stage used from 1998-2022. The regular season was split into three stages: top 128 (distributed in the first four periods), top 64 (emerald and ruby), and top 32 (diamond).
• Between 2017-2019, each period has its own group stage where players are split into groups of 6 (or 4 in 2019), for a total of seven stages. This format also introduced the Wildcard rounds, where the worst (or next-worst) contestants in a given period play a last-chance round in order to avoid being eliminated in the regular season.
• The regular season format from 2020 onward uses the Three Splits format as a hybrid of the 2017-2019 multiple group stages, and the lengthy, large groups of the old league format. Split 1 starts off like a typical 6-man group stage, while Splits 2 and 3 were fought in 16-man groups, and lasted for three periods each. Wildcard rounds were reduced to three (two in 2020), held at the end of each split.

Each period lasts several matches, and the best-performing contestants on that period will participate in a special round to determine who wins that period's necklace (females) or pendant (males). Each period will produce only one necklace and pendant winner.

• In ISML's early years, the necklace was simply awarded to the best peformer in a given period, usually determined by wins, points, and the SDO stat (strength of defeated opponents — the quality of opponents that she defeated.) This allows the possibility of a contestant winning multiple necklaces. Starting from 2011, a contestant cannot win multiple necklaces in a single year, following Shana's record-three necklace wins in 2010.
• The original necklace rounds (2011-2015) were determined using limited voting (vote only a few girls). The vote percentages are then put into various formulas involving the SDO stat to produce the final score; the character with the highest final score wins the award.
• 2016 has a similar voting format, but only votes were used to determine the winner.
• Starting in 2017, the gem awards used Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which is currently in use today. Voters have to rank 8 girls from 1st-8th. The character with the lowest votes is eliminated, and every voter who chose them as their top choice will have their votes transferred to their next highest choice. Eliminate last place, transfer votes, repeat until there are 2 characters left, or someone scores more than 50% of all votes cast.

Playoffs

The final part of ISML is the playoffs (officially called "Elimination"), where 16 contestants will play through one or more elimination brackets to decide the year's champion.

• The original playoffs format was double-elimination, used from 2008 to 2010.
• The current format is single-elimination. The 16-man bracket (with no variations) was first used in 2011, and in 2017-present.
  • 2012-2015 playoffs were divided into two phases: Division playoffs, contested within the Stella and Nova divisions, and the Tiara finals, which combines the top 8 finishers from each division in a single bracket.
  • 2016's format used a 4x4 group stage and 8-man bracket instead.

During the playoffs, consolation matches will be held among eliminated contestants, which will determine their final rankings in the tournament . However, due to ISML's varying tournament rules, the method used to rank the characters has likewise differed on every edition; because of this, some of the contestants' final positions do not necessarily reflect what stage they were eliminated in.

Rules

Character eligibility

To be eligible for the main tournament, characters must appear in a Japanese-produced animated medium: TV shows, Films, Made-for-DVD (OVA), Internet (ONA). Foreign source materials are allowed if the adaptations were produced by Japanese studios (e.g. Korean Webtoons like Tower of God)

• Hentai (R-18+ rated works) is NOT ALLOWED.
• Must be a human / humanoid, or possess anthropomorphic qualities.
• Must have a name or other universal means of identification.
• Must regularly appear in the series, or have a significance to the story's plotline.
• For non-binary characters (sexless, gender ambiguous / unknown, switches between sexes, hermaphrodite) they will be assigned based on which gender traits are more dominant, or which gender the audience assumes them to be.
  • Examples: Houseki no Kuni's sexless gems , Made in Abyss's Nanachi (gender unknown) and Monogatari's Ougi Oshino (apeeared as a boy and a girl) compete in the female division.
  • Otokonoko characters, popularly known in the Western anime community as traps, will always compete in the male division.

Voting policy

Compared to its Japanese and Korean counterparts, ISML's voting is simple and relatively easy to understand. No account creation is needed.

• All characters have icons and names, you just have to click on someone.
• At the bottom of the screen, there are icons for sex and age range. These are optional.
• Before submitting your votes, you must enter a CAPTCHA. To prevent bots, you will have to wait a certain amount of time before you can even submit.
• You must vote on at least 8 matches.
• Voting is only limited to ONE (1) vote per IP address.
• Only one vote per 1 vs 1 match-up.
• A voter may not vote on behalf on another person.
• Voting is limited to certain matchdays.
• Once your ballot is submitted, your votes can only be changed by asking the staff for permission.

Features

As one of the oldest and longest-running online character popularity contests, ISML has many characteristics that set it apart from other competitions besides its league format.

Annual Charter & Constitution

ISML publishes a yearly charter which supplements the basic rules. It stipulates details that are not mentioned in the basic rules, including the specific format of a certain year, detailed schedule, additional restrictions, and so on. This allows the organizer to make some changes every year while maintaining the contest's core values. The contest also provides a legalese document called the "Constitution".

From the website:

• The Annual Charter defines the values and limitations of and establishes a schedule for ISML. The Charter purposes to be the flexible aspect of ISML that complements the static Constitution. It aims to provide ISML with the ability to make the innovations necessary to remain entertaining each year.
• The purpose of the Constitution is to provide a permanent set of guidelines that govern and provide the basic framework for the structure and execution of all ISML tournaments. While staff members may come and go throughout the years, the principles of the League should not change. Supporting the Constitution are the Annual Charters mentioned in Article VIII which fill in the blanks and provide specific details for the particular year's tournament.

Exhibitions

The Exhibition Matches were first implemented in 2010 with the purpose of raising awareness on anime characters who did not appear in the main competition. Users can also suggest exhibition matches in the official ISML forum.

From 2011 to 2013, the Male Exhibition contest was introduced. Its format consists of a multi-man elimination round and a 32-man single elimination bracket. Despite the "exhibition" label, the male champions are considered of equal status to those who won in the male regular season era (2015 onwards). However, their posters are NOT displayed in the front page.
Meanwhile, 2014's male exhibition is replaced by Trap Exhibition, causing former finalist Hideyoshi to ascend into the hall of fame because (s)he's the most popular trap at the time.

Throughout ISML's history, many sub-contests under the Exhibition label have been organized with a poster being awarded to each winning contestant. In addition, several exhibition contests have become an integral part of several editions:

Serial exhibition contests

Seasonal Contest Since 2012, four seasonal contests were held each year, which are contested between female characters appearing in a given year's anime season. The winner of each contest is awarded the seasonal diadem. Starting from 2021, a separate male seasonal contest was introduced following feedback from some users. The name of the award remains the same. At the same time, the seasonal contest was renamed to "Nova League" (not to be confused with the female division on 2012-2015), with its format expanded to allow a much larger inter-seasonal elimination bracket contested among the four best-performing girls from each season. The winner of that bracket wins the "Divine Circlet" (female) or "Divine Crown" (male). Tournament of Champions The ToC is a special tournament contested between ISML's previous champions. The first female ToC happened in 2015, the same year these characters were started to be banned from the main tournament. The first male ToC was held in 2017. Touhou Tournament After several Touhou characters appeared in ISML 2009's regular season, they were subsequently banned from the main event because of their video game origins and the fact that their anime is fan-made. Instead, a contest made exclusively for them was organized in 2013. Two more editions have been held in 2017 and 2020. The victors are unsurprisingly the most recognizable ones: in order they are protagonist Reimu Hakurei, deuteragonist Marisa Kirisame, and meme character Cirno. Jewelry Exhibitions Also known as exhibition gems, these are secondary gem awards with different accessory names, usually contested between the second-best performers in the regular season who haven't won an award yet (or have fewer awards). They were first given from 2011 to 2014. Jewelries returned in 2020 with a fixed name assigned to each gender: female bracelets and male rings. Divine Circlet & Crown A consolation tournament for contestants eliminated early in the regular season and selected nominees who didn't make it in the main event. Its most notable feature is that their posters are made by users instead of the ISML staff. The poster submissions are decided by a combination of popular vote from Facebook, ISML forums and Tieba Baidu, and judging from the staff. The female Divine Circlet was awarded in 2011, and from 2015 to 2020, while the male Crown award was first awarded in 2017. In 2021 however, these awards were assimilated into the reworked seasonal contests, with the awards functioning as the "ultimate seasonal champion" from each year. Couple Tournament (CP) A contest between anime couples (and ships). The inaugural 2019 contest was off-limits to all main tournament contestants at the time; it was won by the Kaguya-sama main couple. The 2020 edition was restricted only to characters outside of the main tournament and champions; as a result it ended with Tonikaku Kawaii's married couple winning due to recency bias. The upcoming 2021 couples contest is planned to have no restrictions whatsoever.

Other exhibition contests by year:

Other exhibition contests

2014: Visual Novel: Self-explanatory. Won by Mare S. Ephemeral from Hoshizora no Memoria: Wish Upon A Shooting Star. A second VN tournament was held in 2021, which was won by Shiroha Naruse from Summer Pockets. 2018: Video Game Exhibitions: Female only. Ended in an all-Nier:Automata final with 2B winning over A2. Pets: Non-human / animal mascot characters, such as Doraemon, Nyanko-sensei (Natsume's companion), Botan (Kyou's pet pig), and eventual winner Pikachu (Ash Ketchum's signature Pokemon). 2020: Idols / Musicians: Characters from idol franchises and females who can play instruments. This is still a moe contest, after all. Despite the abundance of idol entries, the contest was won by a keyboard player from K-On! 2021: Virtual YouTubers: Created as a response to the popularity boom of (mostly female) streamers who appear as anime-styled characters, mostly centered in Japan and China. As the name suggests, they hold their livestreams on YouTube (or Bilibili if Chinese). Kizuna AI, considered the world's first V-Tuber, won the competition.

Dedicated Support

Unlike other competitions, ISML has a dedicated website solely for its contest which supports multiple languages such as English, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Korean, Russian, Vietnamese, German, and (since 2021) Bahasa Indonesia. Since the site is non-profit, it has a donation page to ensure continued operation of the contest. The proportion of Chinese sponsorship is overwhelmingly high.

From 2008-2017, the result pages displayed graphs of each match's hourly vote progress, map of voting percentages from each country/region, and regular season statistics tables. In addition, there were many features outside the competition itself, such as:

• detailed profiles for all main tournament contestants
• Match of the Day (with flavor text)
• Emblems for anime series (Example: the Toaru series' emblem depicts a 5-point star defaced by a lightning bolt, which represents its strongest contestant Mikoto Misaka)
• AMV promotional videos
• During ISML 2019's nomination phase, support for the victims of the Kyoto Animation arson attack was promoted and recommended on the site's front page.

However, due to the manpower and technical problems of the management team, many of these features disappeared from 2018 onwards as the website switched to a different layout. The increasing workload of the staff also led to numerous delays and interruptions of various updates. In particular, there were cases in the 2019 contest where the results were delayed by as many as 63 hours.

In 2020, the ISML staff produced a "Saimoe Podcast" which was published in Youtube. The principal speakers consist of:

• Momento10 - podcast host and mediator, writer of the "Match of the Day"
• maglor - Korean-American, primary tournament organizer. Uses Shirobako girls Erika Yano and Aoi Miyamori as avatars.
• Chibasa - French site administrator and moderator

History

"Where do we go from here? There is nothing afterwards." This section needs expansion.

Conception

In 2006, the popularity of Anime Saimoe Tournament and news of Best Moe Tournament spawned interest in English based Moe Tournament. The format of Elimination period for the Preliminary and Round-robin League Style for the Regular season was first proposed by Psieye on AnimeSuki forums. In 2007 following discussion about Super Moe Tournament results, the talk of English based Moe Tournament was reawakened and minhtam1638 started working on ISML as a reaction to this. After much discussion in the AnimeSuki Forum, the format of having Auto-qualifying entrants based on their records in Anime Saimoe Tournament and Best Moe Tournament was adopted along with free for all nomination phase to fill the number of 64 that was needed for the Tournament league play.

The main reason for the creation of ISML was spawned from the criticisms of two other tournaments, Anime Saimoe Tournament and Best Moe Tournament, for reasons that the single-elimination tournaments held in Japan and Korea were decided at random. To correct this problem, ISML uses a round-robin tournament, which ensure that all participants will face the rest exactly once. After the round-robin phase, the top 16 participants are seeded into double-elimination instead of randomly paired. Because each participant needs to be elimination twice, this process reduces random spikes in popularity that may cause a consistently strong character to fall.

Another goal for ISML is to have its polls open to voters across the world; whereas Anime Saimoe Tournament attempts to block non-Japanese ISPs from voting, ISML is tailored to embrace voters from as many backgrounds as possible. From the first voting in ISML, which was the 2008 nominations, voters were encouraged to submit nomination in any language they were comfortable with. Volunteers promoted ISML in websites based in many different language. By the end of 2008 Regular Season, non-English speaking voters outnumbered English speakers.^{[better citation needed]} As of 2009, ISML is the largest moe tournament in the world. Its layout is user-friendly, requiring no registration and using image-assisted voting for recognition. While international voting is encouraged, ISML has a strict eligibility rule on its contestants. Only characters that are recurring or of significant importance are allowed; simply a cameo appearance does not receive consideration in ISML

Editions

A list of ISML editions.

ISML Main Tournament Editions
Edition	Date	Players (per gender)	Tiara (Female Champion)	Scepter (Male Champion)	Link
2008	2008 Sep 30 - Nov 04	64	Fate Testarossa	Not held	Link
2009	2009 Jan 01 - Nov 05	64	Hinagiku Katsura		Link
2010	2010 Jan 01 - Sep 30	64	Mio Akiyama		Link
2011	2011 Feb 05 - Dec 25	50	Mikoto Misaka	Lelouch vi Britannia	Link
2012	2012 Jan 01 - Dec 16	72	Kanade Tachibana	Kirito	Link
2013	2013 Jan 01 - Dec 12	72	Ruri Gokou	Houtarou Oreki	Link
2014	2014 Jan 01 - Dec 04	72	Kotori Itsuka	Hideyoshi Kinoshita	Link
2015	2015 Mar 01 - Nov 29	72, 36	Eru Chitanda	Accelerator	Link
2016	2016 Mar 01 - Nov 30	128	Shana	Sora (No Game No Life)	Link
2017	2017 Mar 01 - Dec 11	120	Megumi Katou	Koro-sensei	Link
2018	2018 Apr 10 - 2019 Feb 12	120	Rem (Re:Zero)	Hachiman Hikigaya	Link
2019	2019 July 05 - Dec 21	72	Violet Evergarden	Rimuru Tempest	Link
2020	2020 July 01 - 2021 Feb 10	96	Yukino Yukinoshita	Miyuki Shirogane	Link
2021	2021 July 01 - 2022 Feb 12	72	Elaina	Sakuta Azusagawa	Link
2022	2022 Sep 28 - 2023 ??? ??	96	???	???	Link

Winner's Gallery

For the gem award posters, see the necklace and pendant page.

Tiara Winners

2008 WINNER: Fate Testarossa (Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha)

2009 WINNER: Hinagiku Katsura (Hayate the Combat Butler)

2010 WINNER: Mio Akiyama (K-On!)

2011 WINNER: Mikoto Misaka (A Certain Magical Index)

2012 WINNER: Kanade Tachibana (Angel Beats!)

2013 WINNER: Ruri "Kuroneko" Gokou (Oreimo)

2014 WINNER: Kotori Itsuka (Date A Live)

2015 WINNER: Eru Chitanda (Hyouka)

2016 WINNER: Shana (Shana)

2017 WINNER: Megumi Katou (Saekano)

2018 WINNER: Rem (Re:Zero)

2019 WINNER: Violet Evergarden (Violet Evergarden)

2020 WINNER: Yukino Yukinoshita (Oregairu)

2021 WINNER: Elaina (Wandering Witch)

Scepter Winners

2011 EXHIBITION WINNER: Lelouch vi Britannia (Code Geass)

2012 EXHIBITION WINNER: Kirito (Sword Art Online)

2013 EXHIBITION WINNER: Houtarou Oreki (Hyouka)

2014 EXHIBITION WINNER: Hideyoshi Kinoshita (Baka and Test)

2015 WINNER: Accelerator (A Certain Magical Index)

2016 WINNER: Sora (No Game No Life)

2017 WINNER: Koro-sensei (Assassination Classroom)

2018 WINNER: Hachiman Hikigaya (Oregairu)

2019 WINNER: Rimuru Tempest (Tensura)

2020 WINNER: Miyuki Shirogane (Kaguya-sama)

2021 WINNER: Sakuta Azusagawa (Seishun Buta Yarou)

Statistics

For more details, click here.

Navigation

Notes

References

Articles:

• Official website
• Moegirl link (Chinese)
• Namuwiki link (Korean)

Community links:

• ISML forum
• Discord invite link
• ISML Tieba (Chinese)
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram (created and maintained by Ignite; requires IG account)