Korean city mascot characters in "Our Neighborhood Character" competition

I got an alert from my local city government that apparently there is a yearly contest where residents of various Korean locales can vote online for who their favorite Korean city mascot character is. 

I can't tell exactly what the point of this is; what do the "winners" get other than just recognition? I thought perhaps the public are choosing which are their favorites and those will go on to become official mascots, but the more I look, the more it seems that these are already official mascots. So, maybe just publicity for the Korea Creative Content Association.

If that's the case, why not throw them a bone. Because I apparently have no other pressing work to do right now after lunch, I went ahead to the voting page. The 6th annual competition is going on right now, and I can choose the 3 characters I like most. You have to log-in via your Kakao account to vote (makes sense) and to view them (why?). So if you're curious and want to look at cute characters, I'll repost them here for your pleasure. 

I don't want to sit here trying to translate every character's "correct" English name and organization they represent, so forgive me for just screenshotting the Chrome auto-translation. 

Take a look and see if you can spot your own city's representative character. You may not even have realized that you have one. Or you'll see it, and think "oh, that's that thing I saw on the trash cans, sides of local buses, and walking around at my local festival."

 

Some of those really got mangled by Chrome. The little characters from Namyangju are called 크크&낙낙, so Chrome clearly just assumed that 크크 was the Korean "lol" (which it sort of is, I suppose) and stretched it out. And the Bucheon guy named "Hand... job" (get your mind out of the gutter) is really named "핸썹" which I am assuming is supposed to mean "hands up!" as in a DJ shouting for the crowd to put their hands up, to show excitement and the "helping hand" nature of this little walking hand character. 

Believe it or not, every single character has a full backstory listed too. So give the site a visit if you're curious.

https://ourcharacter.co.kr/sub/voting.php

Of course you can see all their actual Korean names and more accurately see which regions and organizations they represent.

I think my personal favorite is 매돌이 (Maydooli) from Gwangyang City. He's a little plum who never ages. His name seems like a cute wordplay on "plum" too (매실). I had 매실차 the other day after dinner so maybe I was primed to pick him anyway. 

If you're interested in seeing the characters live and in person yourself, or taking your kids there because it sure does look cute and fun, the award ceremony will be:

Place: Yongsan Children's Park
Date: October 14/15

Here a pic from last year's parade to give you an idea of what to look forward to: