It's what you might call "Dark Horse season" - the season where we're bearing down on the big US Air Guitar Nationals weekend, and everyone who hasn't already qualified for the national finals is itching to know whether they were invited to the Dark Horse invitational competition. For the uninitiated, this is a "best of the rest" type thing, where people who didn't already win their way into the finals to get another shot - the top 3 or 5 air guitarists at the Dark Horse then get into the finals. The competitors are selected by the USAG brass, based on their performances this year.
This season is also the subject of a peevish and cranky tweet I posted the other day, in which I might have overstated the case, but the general point holds: plenty of people are pretty sure they're getting an invitation and are now waiting for it with varying degrees of patience. But rather than gripe about people's methods of coping with waiting for the invite, I thought I might do better to consider what got us here - why is the Dark Horse now something to expect, rather than a really big deal?
How did we get here?
Partly this is due to the Dark Horse getting bigger and bigger in recent years. Last year there were 25 competitors, which is more than the actual finals. Naturally, if it was that kind of a "you're an air guitarist and you'll be in town for nationals? You're in!" situation, that can lead to expectations. I don't know if they'll do that again this year. I suspect they're going to have to keep the invites down to a dull roar.
There were probably so many because of the new format. Consider: In the old format, USAG was at every regional, watching everyone compete, and the first-place winner advanced to the finals. There was no semi-final level. So they were only choosing from the people who impressed them, but did not win, at the regionals. Last year, though, they were pulling from all the qualifiers AND all the semifinals - and a few people who "just deserved it" regardless of where they competed or if they competed at all.
Possible changes this season or next
I don't think that's going to be the case this year, or going forward. Partly this is logistics - 25 competitiors is A LOT - and partly a qualifier can't count on having USAG decisionmakers in attendance. So if you were good, at your qualifier, but you didn't come in top 3 and make it to the semis, they may well never see your performance at all. That kind of sucks for you, but it's also fair that way: even if someone who has a say in Dark Horse invites is at one qualifier, if they hold off on recommending someone for an invitation, that levels the playing field for the people who are competing in OTHER qualifiers where no USAG people are present. I hope this is the mindset, even though it messes up my own long-term goals as an air guitarist (my goal for next year was to make the Dark Horse, and for the year after to try and qualify to semis... that is backwards, really).
But what does it meeeeaaaan?
It means that if you didn't qualify or get invited to semifinals, do not have great expectations around an invitation. It also means that semis are that much more important. You don't just have to kick ass because you're up against very talented people, but also because this is where you get your chance to advance, one way or the other. And that means that coming in top 3 of your local qualifier is paramount. You cannot count on being invited to the semi based on your past glories. It happens plenty, but you can't be sure they'll have extra space beyond the people who won their way there, so YOU have to win your way there.
Something I'll be exploring in a later post is how this year reverted a bit to the old format's problems in that the winners of each qualifier, and thus the competitors at semis, are more or less certain to be a specific group of people - longstanding air guitarists of renown and talent all, of course, no shade - but that this was supposed to be less the case with the new format. Taking that as a given (maybe it isn't, but from this vantage point in the season, it looks like it is), the pool of prospective people to be selected for Dark Horse is similarly limited. I'm not nuts about that, honestly! I'd love to see the Dark Horse be a venue where new competitors who didn't win but came out with a great first effort - or perpetual tradesmen of a given city who are grinding away every year and deserve to be seen more widely - can get that bigger audience they deserve. But it's less likely they'll be able to make the trip, I suppose, if Nationals aren't in their town. So it's a tough shake either way.
So, to sum up...
- There will almost certainly be fewer Dark Horse invitees this year than last. Some people who totally deserve it won't get the invite, and that's life.
- Those invitees will almost certainly be drawn exclusively from semifinal performers, since USAG doesn't see qualifiers unless they happen to be in that town at that time (so how could they know how good you are?)
- There probably should be some way for qualifier hosts to recommend a local air guitarist to be invited, since it would be nice to see more of a broad spectrum of air guitarists, not just "Family Reunion Night." But without some change of that nature, that's largely what it'll be.
- Getting into semis is therefore hugely important now, since ANY chance you have of making it to the finals will derive from that competition. Either you'll finish the night in the top 3 and qualify all the way there, or you'll be impressive enough to be invited to Dark Horse.
All my griping and nitpicking aside, I love the Dark Horse - maybe even more than the actual finals - it's usually where I get to see people I've been hearing about all season, plus the atmosphere is always joyous since it's the first night and first event of the Nationals long weekend. And really, that's why I'm fussing over it. If you love something, you want it to be the best it can be, right?