FANDOM BRACKETS: Round 1a

[melannen]

First round of the double hexadecifinals! Vote below. This poll will close when I post Round 1c, sometime tomorrow.

The criteria you should use for voting is which fandom in each pair you would rather see advance. If you have particularly good and/or bad reasoning as to why, you should share it in the comments!

Poll #27262 Which fandom would you rather see advance?

This poll is closed.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 182

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In a world full of people with special powers, our protagonists choose to use theirs to fight crime, solve mysteries and save the world.

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DC universes
108 (74.5%)

Bungou Stray Dogs
37 (25.5%)

A group of theater kids with good voices form a club, create epic drama.

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Critical Role
102 (71.8%)

Glee
40 (28.2%)

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

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Star Wars
124 (72.1%)

No Fandom
48 (27.9%)

Don't underestimate our hero just because they're young, naive, spunky, and have a name that rhymes with 'fluffy'! They have powers you never expected and enough determination to do anything.

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One Piece
27 (17.3%)

Buffyverse
129 (82.7%)

Teens must learn to use their powers and juggle their identites in order to defeat a friend's evil rich dad.

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Miraculous Ladybug
27 (17.6%)

Avatar: The Last Airbender universe
126 (82.4%)

A lifetime spent as agents in secret magic wars doesn't always prepare you well for being a person.

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Naruto
25 (15.2%)

Good Omens
140 (84.8%)

In this immensely popular, long-running fandom, champions engage in intense battles in intricate settings among fortifications and dystopian cityscapes.

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Shingeki no Kojin/Attack on Titan
51 (44.3%)

League of Legends
64 (55.7%)

If you don't know this fandom well, the main character may not be who you think it is!

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Legend of Zelda
92 (62.2%)

Teen Wolf
56 (37.8%)

n.b. I am not sure I'll be able to keep the descriptions up for all 32 matches, especially as we get to more fandoms I don't know at all, so if you have any ideas for upcoming match descriptions feel free to drop them in a comment!

Comments

[sophia_sol]

loving your descriptions for all these! and so far no difficult choices for me :P though I was tempted by "no fandom" but star wars compelled me

[rionaleonhart]

Wonderful descriptions; I love the parallels you've drawn! If you're struggling for Dangan Ronpa vs The X-Files, 'The truth is out there' could work on its own, or, if it feels like favouritism to use a direct quote from one canon:

What's the truth of the outside world? Sorry, I meant 'outside the world'.

[quailfence]

Somehow for all of these except Attack on Titan/League of Legends, I ended up choosing the most popular option

[lannamichaels]

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

Voting no fandom just because I currently think it would be hilarious if a fannish bracket matchup was won, Odysseus style, by no fandom.

[schneefink]

Sadly not looking good for Naruto... I wouldn't say canon is good, but it has a fantastic amount of time-travel/fix-it fic and fandom is great at fleshing out all the minor characters and actually exploring the things canon brings up in passing, there is something for every taste.

[primeideal]

Can you remind us about what we're voting on, other than the canon itself? How much we enjoy making/consuming fanworks? How crazy the fans are? Something else?

My "Legend of Zelda" story is that a friend "Evan" from another site I'm on has Link as his avatar. We've played several rounds of "telephone pictionary" where you write a sentence, someone draws it, someone writes what they think the drawing is, and so on. A mutual friend almost always uses some variation of "Evan" as her starting prompt. And basically people tend default to representing people by their avatars so the depiction of Evan is just Link, or just the triangle-within-a-triangle shape. And it's become kind of a meme now. Anyway, we all know who Link is and that he is also not Zelda, thanks to our main man Evan!

Good and Bad Reasons for Votes

[silveradept]

Good and bad reasons, indeed:

DC universes - mostly because I want to get to see people talking about the less great decisions DC has made about Batman's love-making technique and the fic that's been made to specifically mock them. (Or any other bad decision of that kind that's been made and needs mocking.)

No Fandom drew a bad random number, being out up against one of the big two sci-fi fandoms. Maybe if it has been scoped to something smaller, like the sequel trilogies or the prequel trilogies, where all the "George Lucas doesn't know how to let a good thing stay good" hate could come out or the "these are generic action movies with Star Wars names on them" annoyance, bit Star Wars as a whole includes both the original trilogy and good shows, and that is often with being a fan over by itself. (I wanted No Fandom to win some rounds, honestly, because there's some things on that list that have enough issues with them that they might lose to No Fandom.)

Buffy - For as much as Joss is persona non grata, the people he was directing did great stuff on the Buffyverse, and it's one of the holy triumvirate (or more) of people's awakenings to their queer identity with Willow and Tara (and also one of their first experiences of being laughed at by a creator for thinking they might have representation on the page.)

ML v. Avatar-verse is unfair as a first-round matchup. I like them both, but I have to go with the Avatar-verse because they actually had a goddamn lesbian kiss on screen, even if it was basically the last shot of Korra, on the website instead of on the network. Astruc and company keep making it as obvious as they can that not everyone is straight at the Collège, but they always come up short with anything that fully, unmistakably confirms it, so Miraculous Ladybug gets a rating of "COWARDS!" (The fandom more than makes up for it, of course, but there's a fair amount of Ship Discourse and other things rumbling that makes me not want to move them forward until they can get their issues sorted out.)

Good Omens beats ninjas before the television adaptation, but after that, there was no way that filler could beat an averted apocalypse. Also, who knew there could be so many variations on "angel and demon fall into love/queerplatonic relationships?"

And finally, gotta go with Link. All of these games where he saves the world with nothing more than a few kiais for vocalization. (And his increasingly improbable bag of tricks and artifacts, of course.)

[kiezh]

The match descriptions are great! I'm especially amused by "A group of theater kids with good voices form a club, create epic drama." for Critical Role vs Glee. :D

"A lifetime spent as agents in secret magic wars doesn't always prepare you well for being a person." illuminates some surprising common ground between Naruto and Good Omens! That's the only match that I seem to be in the minority on; while I think Good Omens has more thematically coherent canon, if we're voting on *fandoms*, I've spent far too much time reading Naruto time travel fix-its and immersed in Dreaming of Sunshine recursive fic fandom to not stand up for Naruto. (Though now I am imagining Shikako from DoS and Aziraphale discussing causality and fate in Aziraphale's bookshop, which is a delightful image.)

[caramarie]

I am voting for Bungou Stray Dogs because whenever I see it mentioned I am like wait what who is solving crimes?? and then I feel delighted despite knowing nothing more about it. Whereas I am familiar with many DC properties, but I am also familiar with the wank, and therefore seeing 'DC universes' I am overwhelmed with a feeling of tiredness. So much tiredness.

[sheliak]

Oh no, Naruto! It's not the fandom I'm most passionately into, but I love the time travel fic it has, Sakura is my favorite power fantasy character, and Dreaming of Sunshine recursive fic is amazing. (Basically its own fandom at this point, but it wouldn't exist without Naruto so for the purpose of this poll...)

... It's also my safety fandom for exchanges. I can almost always match on Naruto (and/or Dreaming of Sunshine).

(I do mean to read the book of Good Omens eventually, but angels and demons are always a hard sell for me, and live action is worse.)

[satsuma]

Star wars is the only fandom I’m in that I also voted against — in part because I have a genuine affection for No Fandom & in part because the main fandom is incapable of chilling for five minutes ever. It’s a big and sprawling enough canon that one can easily find a nice little niche to hang out in, but…

Besides that I got fairly lucky with the matchups, not too many torn loyalties this round

[mecurtin]

If you don't know this fandom well, the main character may not be who you think it is!

Every time I see this again, I laugh. omg Teen Wolf, that's the fandom in a nutshell.