[hyl]

Originally Posted by MartianMage

One with a small following obviously. And you basically answered yourself in your post. MVC is also played in Japan surely not as much as SF but it is being played and also appears in tourneys and yes it is a cult hit in japan. So what makes SS being in a tourney any different? The fact that it only appeared for 2 years show how minor the support is for the game.

No, i didn't answer my own question. MvC3 is huge worldwide except in japan and there was an incident about it a few months ago.
Kusoru who flew all the way from Japan won earlier this year UMvC3 evo 2012 with his obsecure team of Rocket Raccoon, Frank West and Viewtifull Joe.
After winning the tournament he said that he probably won't be back the next time and there was a huge commotion about what he said in the in American fighting game community saying how bad his attitude was based on those few words (a few days later Kusoru explained why he won't be back though), seeing that japan didn't even take the game seriously at all (it was only played in minor tournaments and even in the local tournaments it's not that common) and yet some "random japanese person" won a major American tournament.

As for samurai spirits, Samurai Spirits Zero Special was still played in last and this years Ura Tougeki and Acho and many other tournaments as well. So stop saying things that you have obviously no clue about.

Originally Posted by MartianMage

Now you're just writing it off as "she's female of course she is popular" :-/

Isn't that the case here? It's the same reason why Chun Li was popular when street fighter 2 (1992) was released, you could actually play as a female character who could kick ass instead of being a damsell in distress. Or the popularity of Lara Croft eventhough the first tomb raider was pretty mediocre.
In 1993 (samurai spirits) it was still not that common to see cute female characters in video games that you could actually control and fight with.

Originally Posted by MartianMage

Of course not but the fact of the matter is character design can spawn that much. Can you say the same for all plain looking characters who do great things in their unknown series?

Stop trying to change the subject to plain looking characters, because we are still talking about how incidental black rock shooter was. You were the one saying that Black Rock shooter was such a good example of a character design made it into animes and OAV's. Yet all of the other huge MAD and AMV icons didn't get any animes.

Originally Posted by MartianMage

... Kind of amusing how I predicted this kind of reply... It's not like I am making some sort of trap but hey since you already posted it...

My reason for watching Madoka Magica does not have any relevance in this subject nor does it contradict my initial post. Like I said I went into the show completely blind... No promos no commercials and whatsoever the only thing I know is that it is made by Shaft and is obviously a magical girl show. Tell me how does this contradict my initial post? What are you going to say if I did see it's commercials and I went into it because I liked the designs? It seems to me you are trying to make an argument out of anything. :-/

Nice contradiction in the same post
You were not going blind into Madoka, because you even said it yourself that you started it because it was made by Shaft. Which is loyalty to a certain studio and that is also a possible factor for watching a show.Thus making your primary reason of watching Madoka in the first place not the character design but rather studio loyalty.

Originally Posted by MartianMage

Even in written works a character's outside appearance is always established first the moment that character is available for scrutiny before delving any further. It does not go the other way around.

You have no idea how much and how many times these comic book characters have changed (both appearances and personality) over the last half century.
This had nothing to do with a first design of outside appearance, seeing that also a huge amount of characters didn't change at all (aside from the drawing style, because it was obviously done by a different artist).
Same designs were changed over the years, for reasons like for example the original super hero left or went missing in action (or dying, but in some cases they ended up being alive or were revived later on. So i rather call it missing in action) and a new one who took the same name replaced him/her or the comic series were canned at some point and rebooted later on.
Those redesigns took into account the current trends and other factors of that time.

edit: i didn't notice that you are also talking about written works as well. In the case of written stories, it's even more important to establish how the characters act and behave. Like for example, my first impression of sherlock Holmes was that he is an excellent observer and deducer rather than how his appearance was discribed. His appearance does supplement his sometimes odd behavior but it's not the most important thing about him.