Open Activity: Animagus Voting Discussion

[caesaria.livejournal.com]

Activity: Animagus Voting Discussion
Points/Knuts: Participation Only - 10 points/5 knuts (2 points for additional comments, 30 points cap)
Deadline: December 28th, 5pm UTC

We know that Animagus Voting can be a time-consuming, complicated thing, with so many animals and species to choose from and so many places to check. It can be especially hard when you really don't know much about animals at all. But it's really, really not that scary! We promise ;-)

So this activity is all about Animagus Voting! If you vote on Animagus apps regularly, tell us how you go on about it! Where do you start? Do you get a ~vibe from an applicant and then go off that? Do you look at their preferred weather or time of day? Do you take their appearance or pictures into consideration? And where do you look? Do you go to wiki straight away or do you know some animal resource pages we might not know about yet?
And if you DON'T vote for Animagus, if you've never tackled it before, tell us what kept you from it and what we could do to help you try it. If you're new at HiH, tell us what you WOULD do, maybe check out some apps for ideas.

Please make your initial comment at least 250 words long, so it can count for points. 10 points per initial comment, 2 points for any substantial additional comment (30 points cap). Don't forget to sign with your name & house! (you don't have to sign with your animagus form, since this is an activity open for everyone).

We know that voting can be intimidating (I didn't vote for Amimagus either at first, until I had former Animagus mod peyton07 help me through my first voting, which made it so much less complicated :D) and hope that this post will result in a lively discussion about how to vote on Animagus, what your different strategies are and what tips you can share. We hope that it helps you and that more of you will tackle Animagus voting in the future :D

(and don't forget to check out the current batch of applications here and apply your new-found voting knowledge that you will hopefully gain from this activity to them :D)

Comments

[whomp.livejournal.com]

I jumped in right away after getting Sorted because I figured that if I was doing something wrong, the mods would simply not pick my votes. I was really happy when my Akita Inu and Appaloosa votes got picked the first time around and then I opened up the Daily Prophet today and _chngingx3lanes decided to become an Akita Inu Animagus :-D

I definitely go with my intuition and a vibe first when I'm voting, so my votes can be a little hard to explain sometimes. I find that the more I elaborate on how my exact train of thought went, the better. I feel like the examples given here (http://animagusmod.livejournal.com/4537.html) of what makes a good vote really helped as a good model.

I read through the app, and start winnowing through the class (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_%28biology%29) rank of species. What helps me here is when the applicant specifically tells us about what types of animals they DON’T want to be, and whether they want to be adapted for land, sea, or air. Using that, I can narrow it down a lot from the class rank (often, a lot of the applicants don’t want to be reptiles, arachnids, insects, etc.). I have to admit, I often confuse what I'm doing for picking out the applicant’s “spirit animal”, like a Patronus or something. But I have to remember that I'm actually picking out a practical Animagus form for them to run around in. I mostly use Wikipedia for research.

From there I tend to rely on my intuition. I think I just respond to certain parts of people’s apps more and prioritize these aspects when deciding which animal’s skins they would feel the most comfortable in. Temperament is key. I find the physical form of the animal in some way corresponds strongly with the applicant's temperament (i.e. how the applicant would use size and presence to their advantage). I definitely think comfort is also an important quality in making a vote. I don’t often see people say that they want to be animals they would be temperamentally unsuited for, like ones that would make them more outgoing, etc. In general, they seem to want to pick animals that they are well adapted to being. So I think adaptation also plays a key role here; they want to pick animals they are adapted to being, and they want these animals to have evolved to conditions they would feel comfortable in.

By now, I usually have a pretty good idea of a form I think would be suited to the applicant. I check it over to make sure it hasn’t been picked yet; if it has, I find a very similar species. I don't like completely changing my mind (like "Oh, spider is taken. Maybe s/he should be a dog instead.") because then I feel like circumstance is just cheating the applicant; she might've gotten that animal as a choice if it hadn't already been taken.

That's about it I think. If I've left out something, I'll add more later.