First off, regarding Artakha, I had forgotten about the Ben 10 and CCBS parts, so thank you @Racie02 and @Mesonak for pointing those out. That eases my concern.
As for my other point, community consensus, thank you for correcting me about when Greg approved things. I’m glad you let the community have its say before speaking with him. However I do find an aspect of your latest comments concerning. I want to compare two quotes, one from the top post of the original topic, and one from your latest response.
I understand the danger of taking quotes out of context. Meso, and others reading this, please digest them both in context before reading on, and do tell me if you think I’m misrepresenting them. I’m certainly not trying to. With that said, I don’t see how these are compatible positions. If you care about what the community wants, then certainly you should care about which contests the community wants. And if you don’t care about what the community wants, then by your own reasoning you’re disrespecting Greg.
From what I’ve seen, I believe you respect the community’s desires. You could have announced these contests with no warning and asked for no feedback, but you didn’t. And as you said, some characters are no-brainers! I suspect most of the people who voted yes did so expecting a Helryx contest. Other picks are clearly more controversial. Take Marendar for example: people debated it at length in the old topic, and it’s already come up in this one too. Based on one of Eljay’s earlier posts, the Marendar contest is even controversial among the TTV staff. I, a community member who has tried to follow along, don’t know what the community wants.
So seeing as, again, you seem to care about doing this right, I don’t understand why you’re willing to push through clearly controversial contests without taking the time to gauge community consensus. I find it concerning. If you were in my shoes, I think you’d find it concerning too.
Thanks for reading my walls of text, and for taking everything in the spirit in which it’s intended. I think our discussion so far has already been productive, so thank you! I hope it continues to be. Others with thoughts on this, please weigh in too.