#binding blade

First we have the highest average votes (divided by gender)!

This is combining their vote totals from both their game's bracket and the overall bracket, then dividing by the number of rounds they participated in.

Dimitri and Seteth were almost certainly saved here by getting knocked out so early in the ultimate bracket. Claude most likely got his average pulled way down because there were significantly fewer voters for the ultimate than there were for the 3H specific bracket. Pretty much everyone who participated in one of the sudden death rounds with Limstella/Ephidel got their average pulled down a little.

I realized as I was putting this together that my screenshot was just wrong and I'd forgotten to organize the women by average (whoops). As before, pretty much everyone who participated in a death match had their average pulled down a little. And I just noticed that the numbers on this one are out of order, but the characters are in the correct positions I assure you

Ephidel would have wound up dead last and Limstella would have wound up third from last if I'd bothered making a graphic that combined all of these

Second we have the vote totals (by gender)

Like before, these are their vote totals for both their game's bracket and the ultimate bracket

Tibarn is an absolute juggernaut. Zeke/Camus really got a big help from almost winning two separate brackets, because he got to participate in both rather than being excluded from the other bracket like Finn and Eyvel were. And then he got to double dip by being in the ultimate twice. I decided to combine Zeke and Camus because they're the same character, and tbh I probably shouldn't have run them both on the Ultimate, but oh well too late now

Tellius really just dominated in general. Part of that is because the brackets were bigger (that was before I stopped including tertiary antagonists with unique portraits, so the Tellius brackets were like 64 contenders strong), part of it was good timing (late enough in the blog's lifespan that it had picked up quite a few followers, not so late that people started dropping off and getting bored), and part of it is just because y'all *really* like Tellius

Now Limstella obviously got a massive boost from being able to participate in so many rounds. As you can see, their average puts them at third to last, but their vote total would put them in third. Aren't statistics fun?

Third, let's talk about the combined vote totals

As you can see, the female characters tended to perform much worse. They're completely locked out of the top 5, and there's only two in the top 10. That is, however, not entirely their fault. Most of the women's brackets with only a few exceptions had far fewer rounds for the women, because there were just fewer women in the games in general. Most men's brackets could squeeze 32 contenders, some even went as high as 64, but for most of the women's I was struggling to hit 16. Sacred Stones had so few I could only do a bracket of 8. That equates to an extra round per bracket, which is an extra round to accumulate votes that the women didn't get. FEH was the only game in the series to have more women than men. Engage, Three Houses, Fates, and Awakening had equally sized brackets. The rest favored the men.

Generally speaking, the individual women's polls also performed worse in the votes department than the men's polls. I have a few theories as to why that is:

Fewer female characters means there's fewer characters who people might be searching for, which means fewer people stumbling across the polls in the tags and opting to vote.

Tumblr in general just doesn't seem to favor the majority of female Fire Emblem characters. I didn't do any statistical analysis on this, but the pattern I noticed is that women who were less fanservice-y or less traditionally feminine tended to do much better, and while those women are present in FE they tend to be much more scarce than traditionally feminine characters who tend to get a lot of fanservice content. Maybe one or two per game if you're lucky. So that narrows the probable pool of characters people might be searching for even further.

Because people seemed to vote in line with their "type", and there was likely only one or two of that "type" per game when it came to the women (especially the older games), then those people might have only voted in the poll that featured the character they were interested in. E.g. if you exclusively like rough and tumble girlies on wyverns and you find the Awakening polls, then you're probably more likely to just vote Cherche and ignore the rest of the polls.

On the other hand, I'd wager that most people who have a "type" for men will probably find more than one guy among the polls that they're motivated to vote for. Like, if your type is rough and tumble mercenary types and you stumble on the Tellius polls then you've probably got at least five dudes who fit that to potentially vote for.

But that's just my theory. Hope it made sense. Basically give us more well written female characters with variety, IS.

Anyway, fourth, let's see which games got the most votes

Tellius dominated all of these. To be fair for this one, though, 3H was a little bit kneecapped in the ultimate bracket totals because I intentionally set the bracket up so they wouldn't just run through every other game, and it would go up against itself in the first round. So really after round 1 it was more like they had 4 characters, and there was no chance of two 3H characters making it to the final.

If I could redo this then I'd probably have cut the fourth 3H character and gotten another representative from a different game to take the spot. I'd still keep 3H contained to one side of the bracket though. I mean, no one expects 3H to do poorly. Give the rest of the games a chance at the final!

Blazing Blade got a MASSIVE boost from adding Limstella's ~2k votes onto its total. Again, the advantage of being able to go up in so many polls compared to your opponents. Without Limstella, we'd have Fates as the third place.

This one just counts the votes done in the original brackets. This is another chart that's really impacted by the number of rounds that were done for each game. The Enby bracket was obviously hit the hardest since I could only squeeze out enough Enby characters for 3 rounds, but the rest had pretty equal numbers of rounds.

As you can see, Tellius was a force to be reckoned with even before the ultimate bracket, getting over 10,000 more votes than the next highest. I thought my spreadsheet was wrong when I saw that number, but nope! Y'all just loved Tellius

This one combines the original totals and the ultimate bracket totals. The Genealogy and SoV numbers are a little off because I'd initially forgotten to total in Mathilda and Edain's matches against Ephidel into their vote totals, but the difference wasn't significant enough to affect the placement on this chart (you'd be adding less than 100 votes onto each game).

Honestly it's not even fair how far ahead Tellius was here. Maybe I should have quarantined them to one side of the bracket as well, but I didn't realize just how much people favored Tellius when I set it all up

Fifth, let's see the most represented class archetypes!

This came about because I was noticing a lot of wyvern riders in the polls. I guess I should have been calling out the cavs too, because WOW there were a lot of them

3H was hard to figure because most of the characters don't really have a "canon" class. Like, even in Fates and Engage with free reclassing the characters at least come with a base class. So I looked to FEH for them. Personally, I see Petra as more of a Myrmidon than a Pegasus Knight, but she's been a Pegasus Knight twice now in FEH so I guess I'll roll with it. I have no idea how to classify FEH characters because they just kinda do whatever they want for any given alt. I'm pretty sure Malice has been both a Myrmidon and a Mercenary depending on the game. I got the Myrm impression from her appearance in FEH, so that's what I went with.

I read on the wiki that Seforia also rides a wyvern. I do not remember Engage well enough to remember when that's established or if the wiki is just bullshitting me, so I put her in unknown.

And that brings me to my last little set of data...

Something amusing I noticed was that dragon riders, dragons, and other transforming characters tended to really well in their individual game polls. So I decided to take a look back and see just how many made it to the top 6 (top 3 men and top 3 women).

Out of 13 game polls we had 12 games where a dragon, dragon rider, or transforming character made it to the top 6. That's 16 total characters, or 20%! Okay, Lewyn might be cheating a little bit here, but y'know he did make it to the top 3 in Thracia where he is absolutely Forseti'd...