#BestVidyaGirlContest 2024 Post-Tournament Analysis (Round 1 Matches)

ROUND 1, MATCH 1:

1st Seed Samus Aran (Metroid) VS 32nd Seed Etna (Disgaea)

Samus: 103 votes

Etna : 77 votes

For the second year in a row Samus would get the (morph) ball rolling, being the most obvious #1 Seed ever after her incredibly dominant tournament run in 2023. Samus was also the obvious favorite to win this whole tournament again, so bottom-seeded Etna was hardly expected to even constitute a speedbump. Even if Etna’s Wild Card status had forced her to work harder than many other girls to qualify, all it effectively meant was that the Disgaea demon possessed contest strength equivalent to a low-seed instead of a bottom-seed. I expected this to save Etna from suffering an outright Tripling, like what Yuri underwent in 2023, and that she might even be able to keep Samus below 70% on a good day, but a Doubling or worse still seemed inevitable.

Those were my expectations. What ACTUALLY ended up happening was Etna pulling off a reality-defying performance and outright embarrassing the Champion. Sure, she still won in the end, but out of all of Samus’s 10 contest matches, this was by far her worst showing.

The tone was set right from the beginning of the match, when Etna came out and took an early 5-4 lead, but whatever, that’s just opening minutes weirdness, right? It sure seemed that way, as Samus quickly came back and went up in a 10-8, but then something insane happened: Etna absolutely steamrolling the normally invincible Samus Aryan, scoring 8 straight unanswered votes and going up 16-10! Keep in mind, throughout her entire tournament history prior to this, the most Samus had ever trailed an opponent was her brief 3-vote deficit against Tamamo in the tournament final, and yet here this niche SRPG girl was up by 6.

Obviously Samus would come back, but nearly 60 votes into the match, she had only managed a 3-vote lead, in a match she was supposed to effortlessly dominate. After that Samus finally seemed to be pulling way, as she quickly went up 37-28, but again Etna just refused to let Samus push her around, and even by the 100-vote mark Samus had only managed a pitiful 55-45 lead. The match was definitely out of Etna’s reach by this point, but she just kept tripping up Samus, dominating the match thread and making herself the talk of the town, even in defeat. Samus would briefly seem to be pulling away, only for Etna to again and again put a stop to the Metroid momentum and continue to utterly embarrass the top seed. By the end up the match, Samus hadn’t even come close to breaking 60% on Etna, seemingly only reaching 58% - which either meant that Etna was on par with the likes of Momiji and Reimu, or that 2024 Samus was dramatically weaker than her 2023 counterpart. And as if that wasn’t already bad enough, a late update to the DRC poll further lowered the bounty hunter’s margin of victory, down to 57% - 43%, meaning that Etna had somehow matched Tamamo’s performance in the 2023 final.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how AWFUL this match made Samus look. Not only did she no longer look like Champion material, she didn’t even look like a contest Elite – failing to blow out a bottom seed quite frankly made Samus look more reminiscent of a fraudulent top seed like Alice than an authentic contest powerhouse like Pyra, Tamamo or 2B. Suddenly Samus’s round 2 encounter with Tifa was looking mighty threatening – and even if Samus managed to survive that match, her old foe Remilia (who brought a WAY stronger Samus down to 54% in 2023) awaited her in the quarterfinals, not to mention the winner of Pyra VS 2B blocking her path to the finals. For a while at least, Samus defending her title looked like something of a longshot, presumably due to people anti-voting her for being such an overwhelming favorite, because she had already won the tournament once before, AND because she arguably should have been banned after winning so effortlessly in 2023.

As for Etna – DAMN GIRL, what a killer showing! The good thing about facing the single most dominant entity in Fedi Waifu Contest history is the fact that the redhead demon brat had absolutely NOTHING to lose, but Etna was clearly not going to settle for just a respectable defeat – she was out there to make Samus bleed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Fedi poll before where the winner looked like absolute crap, while the loser came out smelling like a million roses.

Of course, this match looks all the weirder in retrospect, after it turned out that Samus was actually still just as overpowered as ever, capable of easily crushing the likes of Tifa, Pyra and Zelda. So what the hell happened here? Even discounting Etna’s poor showing in the Tiebreaker poll (where even SAYA beat her), her 9 votes in the Qualifier Poll still point to her being weaker than the likes of Lara Croft and Mitsuru, in which case Samus should easily break 70% on her. Was this somehow the only match where Samus got seriously anti-voted? Did Etna doing what Hitler could not and successfully Removing Bagel by taking Negev’s tournament slot gain her a lot of brownie points with rightwing Fedi? Or are Lolis actually Samus’s Kryptonite? Whatever the explanation, we end up with this truly bizarre situation where Etna somehow ends up looking stronger than the likes of Zelda, Misty, Tamamo, Tifa and 2B. Brat Summer might have been a forced meme to push that horrible cunt Kamala Harris, but in the case of Etna the demon Brat, that summer really DID become one to remember.