Unterganger of the Month

The Unterganger of the Month (UotM) award is a title given to an Unterganger who has stood out during the month for various reasons. The UotM is announced monthly in the same video used to present the winners of the Unterganger Awards.

Nominations & Winner selection
The UotM contest have had many different rules in the past, but the current system is as follows: Anyone can nominate an Unterganger for UotM on the nomination site for the Unterganger Awards. Up to three Untergangers can be nominated by the same person. All Untergangers who have parodies nominated for the UA are automatically also nominated for UotM. No self-nominations are allowed. This also means that self-nominated parodies do not make an Unterganger a candidate for UotM. If a judge is nominated, the judge can not vote in that category, and another judge will be called in as an "emergency judge". An Unterganger can be nominated for a number of reasons, such as loyal commitment to the community, for making extra good parodies during the current month, and so on.

History
The UotM contest was founded by Benad361. The first nomination round was opened for October 2010, around the time of the DMCA takedowns. The aim of the award was to reward Untergangers who had made excellent contributions to the meme during the month, who deserved some promotion and recognition.

Benad361 resurrected the series on January 31, 2012 after it initially fell away in late 2011 due to a lack of viewer interest and a lack of zeal on his part. The new rules were that it would be on the last day of every month and nominees had to send videos to be reviewed. Three nominations were allowed; one for each Unterganger. The most impressive video out of the three would lead to victory for the creator.

Following the Unterganger Awards's (UA) inception in October 2012, the UotM was initially planned to be announced under the UA. The plan proved problematic in terms of coordination, and the first UA award series was announced without either the UotM or PotM, leaving both to be announced separately by their own main judges. From January 2013, the UotM operated under the UA, as a semi-autonomous award system (as did the PotM). However, this policy was largely reversed in April 2013.

After the system became somewhat stagnant, Benad361 revamped the award systems of both the UA and UotM in January 2014, due to his return to parody work. He later opened an election during July 2014, making his resignation from the UotM official. An election took place on the Downfall Parodies Forum to choose a new leadership team. Ako675 took over the contest briefly, only to discover he didn't have enough time for it after all. So, he asked JennieParker87 to take over and run it alongside the UA. Thus JennieParker87 became the new main manager. The UotM is now a separate category in the UA. Winners are presented in the same result video as the UA, and nominations are made on the official site for the Unterganger Awards. In December 2016, JennieParker87 announced that she would be on leave until June 2017. She placed the management into the hands of Ako675.

Hanif837
Attempts have been made in the past to fool the system. In May 2012's UotM, a user named Hanif837 created many accounts and posted nominations for his channel from them on the nomination thread for May's contest in an attempt to make it look as if his "friends" had nominated him, and not just himself. However the suspicions of other untergangers (including Benad361, Johnnomonster and mfaizsyahmi) were raised when it was noticed that the accounts were almost 600 members apart and all with the same level of poor spelling and grammar, leading to the foiling of the attempted antic/s. mfaizsyahmi later released a parody showing the events on the forum which led to the exposure of the attempt. The culprit made another few futile attempts (it is known that he is 12 and seems to be a somewhat slow learner) resulting in Hitler Rants Parodies slapping him with a ban.

According to Evilrobottolhurst, he may have used as many as five different accounts in his futile (and somewhat pathetic) attempt to get himself nominated. HRP put the total at as high as ten accounts. The tiresome fakery continued and resulted in an IP ban being requested by Benad361.

As of the 18th of May 2012, Hanif837 is officially barred from participating in, or being nominated for, any future Unterganger of the Month award until he is 13 (the minimum age) and mature enough to behave properly on the forum. He then, to the incredulous exasperation of the community, tried to nominate himself again on the June thread (although with no fake accounts this time) despite having released a somewhat pathetic apology beforehand).

As a result of these actions, he is greatly looked down upon by the Unterganger community. However Master Studios tried to rehabilitate Hanif (to the extent that he actually tried to nominate him in the contest for June) and acted as something of an apologist for his actions. This resulted in a somewhat polarized debate that monopolized much of June's thread, to Benad361's displeasure.

This in turn led him to announce (via the June announcement video) a set of new rules, such as a ban on self-nominations and three strikes given to topic derailers. If any Unterganger should use up their three strikes given as warning, then they will no longer be able to participate in the contest.

Charizard
In February 2015, Charizard was nominated and eventually won the UotM. However, it was later revealed (around June 2015) that Charizard was none other than AlphaSkyRaider, when the latter confessed of being the owner of both accounts. Subsequently the February 2015 UotM was revoked, and ASR officially changed his account to Charizard's. However AlphaSkyRaider retained his UotM of January 2015.

Charizard's case is different from Hanif's because of the convincing way ASR handles the personas, and Charizard genuinely receive support by others under ASR's manipulation.