A Panned Character Reaches B Moe Top 64, and FGO’s Mash Era Isn’t Coming Back

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In the 2026 Bilibili Anime Character Popularity Awards, better known as B Moe, Charlie, the male lead of the anime The Darwin Incident, drew more than 30,000 votes, reached the top 64 of the male character bracket, and nearly made the top 16. The backlash was immediate because, on Bangumi, the character sits at just 2.7/10, a score low enough to turn his run into a community-wide object of ridicule.

That disconnect is why the result landed so badly. Bangumi users had already been hostile to Charlie, yet he still reached B Moe's top 64 with more than 30,000 votes.

It did not help that Charlie is tied to one of the show's most infamous lines: "Why can't humans be killed and eaten for meat?" Even now, it is hard to understand what kind of voting bloc could push a character like this so far.

The more interesting part, though, is not Charlie himself. It is what his run says about B Moe. Back in 2016, when Rem won the title, and in 2017, when Mash from FGO took the crown, these contests still had a degree of sincerity. Fans argued, campaigned, and voted mainly because they liked the characters. For a while, it was easy to get pulled in.

That mood has changed. By 2025, entertainment fandoms outside the core anime fandom had already entered B Moe and started treating it like a ranking war. Paid vote boosting, fake votes cast for rival characters, and other tactics became part of the contest's ecosystem. The old Saimoe principle of "staking your honor on a clean vote for your moe" now sounds less like an ideal and more like a joke from another internet era.

The oddly reassuring part of this round was how many fandoms put aside their usual grudges. Instead of fighting each other, they rallied around the leading characters in Charlie's group to stop him. Kokushibo, one of his bracket rivals, also received more than 30,000 votes, and that was enough to knock Charlie out before the top 16. For once, the result felt like the community had found a limit it still cared about.

The larger problem is that Saimoe-style contests no longer carry the authority they once did. Japan Saimoe ended in 2015, and International Saimoe paused for a year in 2022. The audience has changed, the internet has changed, and these votes are now less about which character people love than which side can win a symbolic argument.

For anyone watching from the outside, that is the real punchline. Charlie's brief surge in B Moe was less compelling as a popularity result than as a snapshot of how strange these contests have become. In this case, the farce around the anime was more entertaining than the anime itself.