(2)Joker vs (15)Claire Redfield 2018

Ulti's Analysis
For those playing the home game, you might be wondering why I'm calling him Joker in the PCA and having the page name on the Wiki named "Joker" instead of "Ren Amamiya".

To the surprise of everyone and for the first time in my entire life, I'm going to agree with Persona fans. Now in the interest of full disclosure, I wasn't planning on it originally. I was actually fully prepared to come in here, act as obnoxious as possible, and aim my most scathing possible rant at you people. You were going to get compared to the worst parts of our culture, you were getting the Election 2016 crybaby treatment, you were going to get absolutely shit on about how Claire pulled off the greatest upset possible due to Allen fixing his mistake and calling him Joker in the poll instead of Ren, the works. It was going to be awesome, and you would have deserved every second of it for how you act in every single Persona match in these contests. There is no fanbase more obnoxious in contest history, and there have been a ton of bad ones.

And then this happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67xaZRZZ568

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFgF6wkP2iU

And it wasn't just that. I actively tried looking for anyone, literally anyone, to call the guy "Ren". I didn't find a single example. Not one. So you know what? You guys win. With being in Smash, you're in the big time now and I'm going to give you a fair shot to redeem yourselves. I know exactly how happy you are right now, and I'm not going to take that from you. Plus with me having never actually played a Persona game and only going on contest behavior, for all I know those games deserve their fandom. Who really knows. You have a good thing here, Persona honks. Don't fuck it up. I don't change my mind on people very often!

So with that said, let's go back to the beginning and give a fair rundown. When the bracket first came out, Joker was foolishly listed in the bracket as "Ren Amamiya". For those not aware of how absolutely stupid this was, imagine Revolver Ocelot listed as "Adamska", Lightning listed as "Claire Farron", The Boss listed as "Mercury Lady", or Big Boss listed as "Ishmael". It was laughably, unforgivably dumb.

On top of that, look at these match pictures.

http://www.gamefaqscontests.com/gallery/albums/cb10/95.png http://www.gamefaqscontests.com/gallery/albums/cb10/96.png

This was the biggest mess of round 1 by a mile, and Allen knew it. By the time the match happened, it was more or less confirmed without being directly confirmed when Allen changed the name to Joker in our brackets that the poll would have his name on it. But by then, the damage was done. People had long since made their picks, and as you can see by the prediction percentage Claire had just enough support to get just enough bracket/early/registered votes to win this match if it was close. I have no doubts this would have been a closer match if things were named correctly from the jump and Joker were given a proper picture. That doesn't forgive the laughably awful Claire picture either, just for the record.

Then the match started and all hell broke loose. Well by 2018 standards, anyway. Things were dead even at first, then Claire took a small lead, then Joker erased the lead before falling a bit. Then in a flash, Claire just buried the guy. Two hours in, these two were separated by 97 votes. This match was stone cold over 30 minutes later, and with how close this was to start we can chalk this thing up to the margin of error.

Does Joker win with a fair shake in naming and picture? Probably not, actually. Claire's picture was also trash and she has RE2 hype behind her. But the fact we can even have a gray area argument about this entire result is not good. Sure the winner was destined to lose to Sub-Zero anyway. So what? The guru was only won by 3 points. I won a contest on a tiebreaker. These points matter. You can't have doubts about results like this, and well-run stuff makes sure this happens as little as possible. I'll give Allen credit for correcting his mistake but it was bad to make this mistake in the first place.

I made a bunch of polls mid contest asking people how important the match pic was when voting. I was expecting virtually no 'yes' votes. To my shock, something like 35-40% of people vote based on picture! What in the actual hell?

So yeah, Joker got robbed and the Persona fans are being given one great writeup and one fair shot to be mature moving forward. Don't let me down, bros! Also, level with me. Are the games any good?

Oh last point before I forget. Before this contest only one 2 seed had ever lost to a 15. The Boss beat Nathan Drake. In this contest it happened THREE TIMES. This match, Aeris > Waluigi, and Bomberman > Kazuma Kiryu. The seeding in this contest was so messed up.