@Autumncomet:
Questions about the character tournament. How are the automatic passes chosen? Are they just the winners of previous tournaments? And what's the deal with the octopus next to Jinbei in chapter 642? Is it just because he looks cool?
Next time when you have questions about the tourney, take them here: http://apforums.net/showthread.php?t=35753. The tournament mods and other knowledgeable people will gladly answer any questions newcomers might have.
This year, five of the autopass guys – Franky, Luffy, Robin, Usopp and Whitebeard -- are former champions. Luffy won in -09, Whitebeard in -10 and Robin took the champion's crown last year. Franky and Usopp won in the earlier years, before the tournament was a regular, yearly thing. The rest of those guys are just characters the mods apparently thought would be funny to see in the running. There's no way any of those three would have made it past the preliminaries with this years level. We also had to have eight automatically passing contestants this year because the number of prelim winners wouldn't have been even without them. How many and which characters receive that status varies every year, depending on how the organizers choose to run the first two rounds. Last year, for example, we had some prelims with only three guys advancing on to the first round.