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INTEREST: Super Sentai Fans Vote for Their Favorites on 50th Anniversary

Biggest surprises to me are that LuPat managed to place in the top 5, KingOhger getting second place over giants like Shinkenger, Donbrothers, and Dekaranger, and not having a single female character in the top 30 rangers

Rita did make it to #12 ranger slot actually which is pretty impressive given how unpopular female rangers are in the fandom.

I do find the top 10 a little suspect since with all the recent series recency bias is almost certainly playing a role.

Rita is gender neutral, not female

Blaze_1013 wrote:

I do find the top 10 a little suspect since with all the recent series recency bias is almost certainly playing a role.

Recency bias is pretty inevitable given the target age of the franchise. There's lots of adult sentai fans, but still, a good number of the people voting in this poll would have been kids and that will naturally skew things toward more recent entries that they would have actually been alive to see.

Given that, it's even more impressive to see a relatively less recent show like Gokaiger win the main poll (and Shinken Red, whose show is from 2009, win best hero.)

EmeraldSaucer wrote:

Rita is gender neutral, not female

I remember seeing some confusion over this when King-Ohger was airing and I think the best way one of the writers described it was in-universe Rita does not disclose her gender in order to maintain her "absolute neutrality" because disclosing her gender would give the impression that she might be bias in her rulings as a judge depending on if the person she was sentencing is a man or a woman. Although in the spin-off manga they do refer to her as a girl and as big sister. They also refer to her as a girl in the idol episode but she's in disguise there and no one knows she's really the ruler of Gokkan so it was probably fine. Out of universe the character is treated as female by everyone though which is why a lot of people including her co-stars were congratulating Yuzuru Hirakawa on being named the top Super Sentai heroine and at such a high rank. It led to some broader discussions about what it meant for female representation in Super Sentai for girls who normally had trouble getting into the franchise and how Rita resonated with them compared to other heroines. They even had Hirakawa on the broadcast to read some of the voter comments on why people voted for Rita which was pretty cute.

On the other hand, diversity is definitely one of the themes of "Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger". Because we are depicting six different countries, this is a theme that we absolutely have to go through. So, we decided to proceed with the character of Rita without deciding on a gender. There is no need to emphasize gender in order to have Rita as an individual lead the position of king. We wanted their presence to make us feel that they are a king.

Rita is the king of Gokkan and the Chief Justice of the International Court of Justice, but their gender isn't clearly stated, and their face is almost invisible, being hidden behind their collar and hair. Since this type of character hasn't been seen in the Super Sentai series before, I couldn't predict what kind of reaction we'd get from the viewers. But thankfully, the positive feedback I've received since airing started has made me enjoy filming even more.

"We feel that characters who don't specify their gender are appropriate in the current era."

It's disappointing there wasn't a wider variety of classic titles on this poll but at least Dekaranger made it but I feel like the Sailor Moon and Evangelion mega polls had more interesting results to talk about.

Rita is gender neutral, not female

Recency bias is pretty inevitable given the target age of the franchise. There's lots of adult sentai fans, but still, a good number of the people voting in this poll would have been kids and that will naturally skew things toward more recent entries that they would have actually been alive to see.

How much more variety can there be in polls for shows that ended 30 years ago?

Yeah but "gender neutral" means without regard to gender and is about presentation not identity. That would be x-gender which Rita has never been said to be which is why the character is still being congratulated as being the top ranking female character.