This time the subject was not a single man but a recurring season.

Once a year the great bort turns toward the Megapoaster Madness.

It is a tournament in name. In practice it is a temporary rearrangement of the entire page. Names that have been quiet for months are suddenly weighed against one another. Old grievances are reopened for the purpose of ranking. Men who have spent the year ignoring each other begin to argue, with unusual intensity, over who has generated the most heat, the most volume, the most lasting residue. Voats are cast. Alliances form for a week and dissolve the moment the brackets move.

The insanity is not accidental. It is the point.

In recent years the winner’s circle has included names such as ruinous phenotype, with Nippon Professional Baseball close behind and men like ricky and cowgod taking the next places. Earlier seasons produced their own champions and their own disputes. The tournaments themselves have been run by a shifting cast of hoasts — my_dog in some of the earlier years, others stepping forward later — each bringing their own sense of fairness, their own sentimental seedings, and their own capacity to absorb the inevitable accusations of rigging.

The controversies arrive on schedule. Seeding is declared unfair before the first voat is cast. The rules about pumos and quotemos are debated as if the future of the bort depended on them. Write-ins appear. Alts are suspected. Turnout is mocked as proof of decline even while the front page fills with arguments about the meaning of the ranking. A man who has been a background presence can become the temporary center of the board. Another who has dominated the year can find himself measured and found wanting by the same crowd that once followed him.

It is not entirely unlike the class elections that take place in Japanese grade schools. The positions are temporary. The campaigns are earnest far beyond their actual stakes. Children who have spent the year in ordinary rivalry suddenly discover deep principles of fairness, representation, and legitimacy. Alliances form over lunch and dissolve by the afternoon. When the votes are counted, the winners are celebrated for a day and then the classroom returns to its previous order, only slightly altered by the memory of having taken the exercise seriously.

The great bort performs a version of the same ritual, only with older men and fewer illusions about innocence.

I have watched several of these seasons pass.

The great bort does not become wiser during the tournament. It becomes denser. The same men who spend the rest of the year complaining about the decline of the place throw themselves into the ranking of that decline with surprising seriousness. The spectacle is both ridiculous and revealing. It shows, more clearly than ordinary days, how much of the bort’s energy is still available when the men decide that something is at stake — even if what is at stake is only the temporary ordering of their own names.

Somewhere the brackets are still being argued over.

Somewhere a man is refreshing the page to see whether his position has moved.

Somewhere another is already preparing the post that will declare the entire exercise meaningless, while continuing to watch the voats closely.

And the great bort, as it always does, absorbs the temporary fever without being permanently altered by it.

I closed the page.

The tournament will end.

The rankings will be forgotten by most.

The energy that produced them will remain, waiting for the next season.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5893594&forum_id=2:#50070849)