Oh wow, looks like it'll be a shake-up of things for next year. I have to say though, seeing Stella have so few nominees makes it feel estranged/cut off. There are, what, ~110 nominees altogether to go into 84 slots for pre-lim? That seems really small. Any reason for cutting off at 2009 for single year previous ISML participants?

And that's not even considering the fact that Kanade, Kuroneko and Eucliwood aren't auto-qualified. That blows my mind. Unless I understood that wrong. With 6 nomination slots, and those 3 likely to feature heavily (that's not even considering Yui, Yuri and Kirino), there might be a lot of ties at the bottom. And with the tendency for low voter turn-out in the early stages, hopefully no one relevant gets left out.

Nova on the other hand looks solid with its auto-qualified slots.

As for nominations itself, I don't have a definite list. I'll wait til it opens before properly making my list.

The rules, while sounding very different, doesn't really affect the end result for regular season. For example, if the rule were to apply for this year, only Shinobu and Hecate would change division.

The rule changes emphasize that Stella is a veteran division. Kanade, Kuroneko, and Eucliwood are only in their 3rd year of ISML should they make it in, so it makes no sense for them to be auto-qualified. That is indeed our intention and one of the main things we want to make very clear on the Nova/Stella idea.