Cantina Figures Remain Popular With The Fans, But It’s Not Readily Apparent

We will be doing a deep dive of the Last Figure Standing data during the finale livestream this Saturday (you can bookmark the stream now HERE if you'd like). I don't want to spoil too many of the insights ahead of time, but there are a few things I'd like to talk about in advance. The first is that we had six new figures in the top twelve this year, but it's not because the community suddenly rallied behind these characters. Their vote totals did not go up. They got roughly the same amount of votes as last year when they did not make the cut for the voting rounds. Instead, the threshold for entry in the top twelve came way down this year. The 2025 Last Figure Standing is less top heavy than it's been in the past. Perhaps that's why the engagement is down this year. It lacks the figures for which the fans are highly passionate.

During the data cleaning process, it was clear early on that the bar for entry into the voting rounds was going to be down. I found this curious. Also during this process, it's natural to get a vague sense of trends. What I suspected was happening is that those votes that were at the top in previous years, were getting redistributed among a wide variety of Cantina characters. Those names just seemed to be coming up a lot. But I'm not willing to proceed with an article such as this on a hunch. Fortunately, getting ready for the finale livestream forces us to write some aggregating reports. I could then mine those reports to test my theory, and it was telling. First of all, you may have said "no duh" when seeing the article based on the fact that Arleil Schous is in the finals for the second year in a row, but for the purposes of this article, I excluded all Arleil votes. Here's what I found:

Last year, non-Arleil Cantina characters got 405 five votes during the nomination phase. This year, they got 550 votes. Non-Arleil Cantina characters got 145 more votes this year, and this is despite the fact that we actually had 188 fewer submissions than last year. So the number of ballots went down, but the number of votes for Cantina characters went up. I feel that's pretty telling, and clearly spurred on by the fact that we have the Cantina HasLab in hand, but the problem is that these votes get spread over too many candidates. The community naturally focused around the Tonnika Sisters and the long overdue O96'er, Hammerhead. Then Hasbro focused us on Arleil by showing him and then taking him away. Now, we're shotgunning our votes over the remaining candidates. My main reason for this article was in the hopes that someone from Hasbro would see it. The Cantina is still popular, but after Arleil, there's no one character that a majority of the community is backing. To me, this says Hasbro shouldn't rest the source, but continue to "complete the crew" over time (just like every other crew, unfortunately).

My secondary reason for writing it is to reiterate something I said last year. I feel like the community should rally behind a handful of glups each year instead of fanning the votes across a few hundred backgrounders. Unfortunately, these type of grassroots efforts are hard to organize, and even more difficult to enforce. It's like consumer boycotts. They typically last a week. I don't want to fan poll the community to death, but perhaps a lower effort "Last Cantina Denizen Standing" would be helpful.

---

comments powered by Disqus