Voting begins for the 2nd Dorama World Awards 2017!

It's time to vote and honour the best of 2017 in the annual Dorama World Awards again!

For those who haven't been reading this blog for long or did not participate in last year's voting, this is an exercise which I first started last year to find out what dramas and actors/actresses and theme songs in the previous year deserve to be called the best according to the readers here.

Note that this is not meant to be a popularity award but rather one which requires your objective assessment of the 2017 dramas which you watched.

The categories which you can vote in are as follows:

- Best Drama
- Best Leading Actor
- Best Leading Actress
- Best Supporting Actor
- Best Supporting Actress
- Best Onscreen Couple
- Best Theme Song

Note that there are some prerequisites which need to be fulfilled before you can choose a certain drama, actor, actress, couple or theme song. It will help me a great deal if you can take note of these issues so that the voting exercise can proceed more smoothly this year:

- The O.A. start dates and end dates of all dramas series should be between 1 Jan 2017 and 31 Dec 2017.

- No drama SPs are to be voted for. It does not matter how many episodes a drama series has as long as it is not a SP. As such, regular season dramas ranging from 4 to 13 or more episodes can be voted for. Likewise for NHK morning dramas or Taiga dramas.

- Note that in Japanese dramas, there is usually only one leading actor or actress unless it is stated that there are double or more leads. As such, if you happen to choose a supporting actor/actress in the leading actor/actress category, the votes will not be counted so please vote in the correct category. For example, in "Keiji Yugami", although you see Asano Tadanobu & Kamiki Ryuunosuke as the supposed leads, the leading actor is actually Asano only so if you want to vote for Kamiki, that will have to be in the supporting actor category. If you put Kamiki in the leading actor category, I will have no choice but to disregard the vote. Please check first before filling your choices as you won't want to waste your votes in this manner.

- Everyone is allowed to vote once only. For those who are following Dorama World's Facebook and Twitter pages, you can choose to use the voting form or submit your choices through the private or direct message function on these platforms. Please indicate the nicknames you use on such platforms in the form if you wish to vote via this channel. For those who do not access to these channels, you should use the voting form only. All anonymous forms will be disregarded along with those who vote more than once.
Your choices should be indicated in the free-text field of the form as such:
1) XXX
2) YYY
3) ZZZ
4) AAA
5) BBB
Do not leave your choices in any part of the SNS channels open to public view or the comments section of the blog as this will affect the "guess the winners game" to be held when the results are tabulated later this month.

- For onscreen couples, the characters concerned must have a romantic relationship i.e. no siblings, friendships or colleagues etc. If there are multiple pairings in the drama, you will have to be specific as to who you are voting for i.e. both names in the pairing will have to be indicated.

- Theme songs voted for can be the main theme, insert song, beginning or ending song. However, please remember to indicate which drama they came from or else the vote will be disregarded.

- If you struggle to fill in all five choices in each category, you can choose to fill them partially. However, for those who have too many to pick, please be reminded that you can only vote for 5 in each category.

- One very critical problem observed from last year's voting is that people just put down the name of an actor or actress without naming the drama he or she acted in. For actors and actresses who had appeared in more than one drama, be it leading or supporting role, I wouldn't know which role in which drama you had voted for if you do not indicate it clearly. As such, for this year's voting, any vote which has this issue again will be disregarded so please be careful when filling your choices.

Upon receipt of your votes at my end, there will be points attributed to each choice depending on the order you have placed them in. The higher they are in your ranking, the more points they will get:

No.1 - 10 points
No.2 - 8 points
No.3 - 5 points
No.4 - 3 points
No.5 - 1 point

By the time the voting exercise is concluded, the "Guess The Winners" game will be held. More details on that will be revealed later.

The voting exercise will close on 21st January 2018 at 2359 SGT. Please submit your votes early so as to avoid a last minute rush.

Without further ado, let's get started! Looking forward to receiving your votes soon!