#me when msr beat destiel.......

[finalwoman]

#do you remember #me when msr beat destiel.......

[ao3topshipsbracket]

Is there a pairing that most surprised you?

Round 1 had some surprises (most notably we thought Cherik vs Percabeth would be a much closer race than it was) but I think the pairing that's surprising me most is MSR vs Destiel!

We seeded based on number of works on ao3, because that was what we had data for. We knew going in that some ships would fare much better or much worse than that number would suggest, but we couldn't really see any other way to do it— none of us had enough familiarity with enough fandoms to reseed the whole thing on that basis, and we didn't want to adjust just the ones we knew anything about, that wouldn't be fair. So, given that "which BTS ships, if any, do we think would beat Beeduo? Who would come out on top, do we think, Stony or Merthur?" was a nonstarter of a question unless we ran a whole second bracket just to seed the thing, we went ahead and went to war with the numbers we had...

And it wasn't until it was definitely too late to change that decision that we realized that Mulder/Scully, the ship that coined the term shipping, would be up against Destiel, the Destiel, as early as round two.

There was some wailing from the pollrunners about how MSR was definitely going to be crushed when it deserved to be a semifinalist, and then we comforted ourselves that it would at least be an honorable fight, and what a titan to be crushed by— but then it put up a fight! Like, an actual fight, not just "honorable struggle gets us to 40%" but a real genuine fight! And now it's winning? It's winning by over 1700 votes?? That's wild! Holy shit!

#not a poll #asks