Here we go, time to start voting for the competitors. The first voting round will last 1 week, 10 character submissions per person and 32 villains total.

The rules:

1. I write all the fights based on my analysis of a given character and their strengths and weaknesses. I stand by my decision on who wins and who does not win, if you're just going to troll the thread, don't bother reading it. Nobody's forcing you to do so.

2. Only bet on the upcoming fight. Again, it's too much of a pain to track a bunch of bets for fights that I won't be writing for awhile.

3. Discussions of the fights and matchups are welcome and encouraged. I have no problem with people thinking I'm wrong, so long as it doesn't turn to trolling (covered in rule 1). People may change their bets based on discussion up to the point of the fight being posted (I will refresh right before the fight itself is finished and take all of the bets I see).

4. Those with money carry all their accounts over. Those without start with 10,000 and may jump in at any time.

And now for the protocol:

1. This is fantastical realism. I let people bend and break rules, but they're still bound by certain laws (if you get stabbed, you'll be hurting. Likewise if you get shot, you'll be hurting). All characters are going to be used at their peak potential, although they may not use all of it in fights if they don't need to. Generally, the more of their abilities they use, the later in the rankings it is.

2. Seeding will be random. I will either draw lots myself or have a friend do it.

3. We are on the second bracket of the tournament, which means 32 villains. The victor of the tournament will get to face Laharl, the victor of the Hero Tourney in the final round. Characters can be taken from any video game or anime series. Please specify the series the character is from in the post so that they are easier for me to find if I do not know who they are. I reserve the right to reject any characters who have ill-defined levels of power (this especially applies to anime villains where the full extent of their power has not been revealed within the series). And, just so I don't get any submissions, any Lord of the Rings character with access to the supernatural (in this case, Sauron, Saruman, etc.) is forever banned from the tournament. Gandalf was a pain in the ass to write and I'm NEVER doing that again.

4. Voting is open now. You may vote on 10 villains to be included in the tournament. Voting will close Monday morning, August 13, at 12:00 AM (so, Sunday night). There may be several rounds of voting until enough characters are available. You may not use more than one vote on a character, each vote must go to a separate character (but you do not need to use all votes).

5. Grahf barred from this because he has already won a tournament. All victors will be barred from future tournaments.

Adjusted Accounts:

Triumphant Hero: 1,410,000
Eiko Guy: 20,100
Rase: 1,120,000
Hazzard: 41,800
Zante: 271,900
Firo Volondé: 127,258
TyphoonThaReapa: 74,750
Mercen-X: 12,000
Rocket Edge: 22,000
Chaos Is the Key: 10,000
Ninja Ryu: 59,988
professor_scissors: 183,000
Studder: 19,000
ZauberSternerin: 24,000
Dynast-Kid: 10,000
RedXIII13: 10,000
LunarWeaver: 10,000
Cookie: 10,000
f f freak: 10,000

Well, there you are. Have at.

General Rules of Thumb for Character Nominations:

1. Protagonists = Heroes. Always. If a protagonist appears opposed to another protagonist in another game, go by quantity of games the character is a protagonist in (this involves any character that is with the party for a reasonable part of the game/by endgame and does not turn traitor) and the dates the games were released. For example, Donkey Kong has been the protagonist or at least on the hero's side (kidnapped or what have you) for several game iterations now. He's a good guy. He goes with the Hero tournament.

2. Event joins are variable. This is more determined by the good/evil spectrum. Beatrix is obviously a force of good, thus she counts for the Hero tournament. Edea and Seifer are villains, so although they do join your team for awhile they are not eligible as heroes, but instead as villains.

3. Under the current rules, only characters from Video Games and anime are allowed. This is for two reasons: the first is that this is a site devoted to a video game series. The second is that as Final Fantasy and many other video games are Japanese, the only other medium that tends to keep up with the upper-end villain power-levels is anime, which is fairly closely related. I am flexible in that I will allow characters from various books/American television shows, but I reserve the right to deny any that I choose. Basically, if it's a book series I know well that has a nice power gradient (say, Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms) it'll likely get allowed, I've read the series before. If I've never heard of the books before, they probably won't make it.

4. I can and will bar any characters that just won't make fights interesting for me to write, even if they are within the guidelines. For example, Michael Jackson made it into the Hero tournament on a few technicalities. That wasn't a fight I wanted to touch. Further examples would be characters from Death Note. Write in a notebook before they kill you and win. Not fun at all for me to write.

5. With regards to books, determining if the character is the villain or not comes back to the protagonist. Traitor-characters can be considered villains, as can somewhat ambiguous ones like Raistlin Majere, who's obviously a big bad in his own right but is a major protagonist in both of the original trilogies (he also fulfills the terms for "traitor").

6. This is a high-powered tourney. More mundane characters really don't have a place here.