Taxon

I wouldn't say exclusively, at least not in Aversa's case. To give credit where it's due, the writers did give her some pretty solid characterization during her A and S supports. Shame all the terribly delivered fanservice that came beforehand overshadowed it. At any rate, IS seemed to have learned their lesson after the Brave Redux and Nifl events, and the supports have been generally interesting since then. I agree that this one should be fun.

After having been notoriously unlucky regarding RNG since I started playing heroes, I was amazed that I managed to pull F!Grima after spending only 10 orbs. I felt like the game was compensating somehow for all the bad luck thus far. I was pretty stoked. Then I realized she has a -DEF superbane. Spent another 100 orbs trying to get a replacement, but no dice. I feel like the RNG extended their hand in friendship only to reel back at the last moment and punch my lights out. XD Still, getting a painful IV is better than nothing. Sure there will still be a way of making her work.

You're gonna have to elaborate. What crap are you referring to?

Well, I can't speak for everyone but my criticisms about Tharja are always about the character herself. I think there is an underlying assumption that if somebody is highly critical of something then they are also negatively judging people who do like the thing they are criticizing. It's especially easy for this to happen through text, where it's more difficult to infer a person's tone. I'm sure a lot of Tharja's detractors would admit to not actively hating her fanbase, myself included. ...'Course, I haven't forgotten about that one guy early on in the thread who immediately called Tharja fans creepy weaboos the moment the topic came up. Now those guys can absolutely go suck a thornberry.

...This is getting out of hand... Look, I apologize if my joke offended you or Tharja. Tell her I didn't mean it. It seemed a bit more provocational than friendly, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt. :P I've been away from this thread since the first round, only coming back yesterday night. I gotta say, things seem to have gotten quite a bit more...er, competitive since then. Not in the good way... Regardless of who wins, there is going to be an insane amount of smugness from the victors. I kind of wish it were possible for the gauntlet to end in a draw just to avoid that.

Oh come on now, I was just making a joke out of the situation. Let's keep it civil over here, yeah? No need to start baitin' me :P If I was actually salty I'd be saying far worse than that.

Indeed. We're all allies based on mutual hatred. Say what you like about Tharja, but it's great that she can bring people together like this.

I think this happened for me when downloading the original template. If I remember correctly I just saved the image as a psd file then imported it into GIMP to edit the layers. Trying to download the new version starts the download of the psd automatically though, oddly enough. Using Firefox both times. Try saving the image and opening it in GIMP or Photoshop.

Absolutely. I would totally be up for having a friendly discussion. Even if we both maintain our stances on the character by the end of it, I will have at least gotten the chance to sample the perspective of someone who seems to have interpreted Tharja in almost the exact opposite way I have. Best case scenario, you might even temper my hate a little. ...Not having this conversation tonight though. Way too tired. ...I'm not sure if I should be interpreting this as sarcasm or not...

You know, I wrote an incredibly long winded reply with why I disagree with what you and the guy who wrote that tumblr post said. Then when I was finishing up I realized that this was absolutely the wrong thread to be writing an essay on why I dislike a character, so I ended up deciding not to post it. Did save it to notepad though, for future use. But yeah, gonna agree to disagree on this one for now.

More Tharja talk here. Don't open if not interested.

Whew, you don't wanna pull the pin on this grenade, trust me. There are plenty of reasons to hate her, but I'll give the simplest answer I can. Fuck child abusers. That's it. I'd be happy to go into more detail, but this isn't really the thread for that.

Let's hope so. After the Lucina and Camilla gauntlets it's easy for me to assume that they are simply attaching at least one hugely popular name to the gauntlet in an attempt to get people interested and pull as many players into the competition as possible (at the detriment of the competition itself). I guess we'll just have to see how it goes next time.

I see. So it's to prevent people from just leeching off of the winner, which is a change I can get behind. Still doesn't address the fact that the contest is horribly rigged in favor of a single character though. Feathers are great, but an unpredictable contest would be nice too, you know what I mean?

Hmm, this catch-up mechanic needs some serious tweaking. I'm not sure how it's been for all the other matches, but I've been keeping an eye on the Linde vs Tharja fight and I can't really see the mechanic making too much of a difference in the long run. The 3x bonus has managed to avoid the fight being an outright curb-stomp by keeping Linde just a step behind Tharja...but it's not actually given her any chance of winning. As soon as the underdog catches up the bonus is removed, at which point the popular character will begin to steadily gain an advantage again until the underdog regains their bonus. This system creates the illusion of better fights since the two competitors are closer in score, but the popular character is still not really in any danger. I guess it's technically possible for someone like Tharja to lose if her opponent gets the 3x multiplier at literally the last possible moment and all of their supporters hoard their flags in preparation for this. But the odds of that are pretty insane. Instead of adding half-baked mechanics to these gauntlets maybe the devs could just like...not add a ridiculously popular character into the contest each time? I mean, they must know how popular these characters are, right? Are they just adding characters like Lucina, Camilla and Tharja because they know these characters all have a huge online presence? Are they worried that no one will care about the contest unless they include one of these hyper popular ladies or something? The voting gauntlet has the potential to be pretty fun if they'd let it be... :(