The Haiku-ed Trannies Ballot

By Philip N. Zeman

Okay, time to vent for just a second. I’m a tiny bit miffed at Robert Jung^(*) and the way he handled the Trannies.

Oh, no, I’m not mad at him for the time it took to get them posted; I’m quite sure he’s been busy with Real Life^TM. And no, I’m not mad at some of the winners; I can’t think of a single category where I thought, "Hey, so-and-so should have won!"

No, I’m mad because I had this outstandingly brilliant idea for this year’s Trannies. In the answer for every question, I wrote a haiku (or, rather, a senryu)^(**). And I mean every question, even the ones for which I had no true answers.

Brilliant, no? Add to that the fact that I started answering the ballot only a few days before the deadline, I felt it was a great piece of work.

Why would I do such a thing? Because, as I wrote in my first answer to favorite character of all time, Sky-Byte, arguably the most humanized character to appear in any American TF cartoon series, knocked Optimus Prime out of first place in my voting. So to show how much I did appreciate the writing of Sky-Byte, I wrote a haiku. That’s when I decided to continue throughout the entire ballot, 113 questions plus 7 in the Free-For-All.

And then Rob has to go and ruin it by only printing 15 of the regular question haikus and the 7 from the Free-For-All. That’s less than 20%, people.

To rectify this grievous error, I’m going to share with you my Trannies ballot, so that you can all read every single haiku, save for two that I wished to keep anonymous in the balloting for personal reasons. I’d just post the haikus themselves, but many of them would make no sense without the context of the question and answer. And there’s a fun game you can play while reading this: "Guess When Phil Gave Up and Just Start Copying and Pasting from Previous Ballots!" (No, this is not an official ASM contest and no prizes will be awarded.)

So here is my Trannies ballot. Think of it as my tribute to Sky-Byte, and not just another way to boost the page count of this issue.

Enjoy, folks.

1 | 2: Characters | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

(*) No, I’m not really mad at Rob. I just thought it’d be fun to write this in the style of an offended artiste. I also thought the haikus would be fun to write, but as the deadline approached, that thought was not exactly true either....
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(**) What's the difference between a haiku and a senryu? I'll explain in the ballot.
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