#notwctpoll

how regardless of seeding, even high contenders can almost arbitrarily be knocked out early on, leaving you with nothing to root for?

if you're feeling that, and if you like any webcomics, you should participate in the webcomic character tournament!

the primary goals of this tournament are:

to celebrate the medium of webcomics as a whole

to find new webcomics to read, and to recommend your own favorites

to highlight indie creators and help them build a wider audience

to have fun rooting for and celebrating your favorite characters!

in order to accomplish these goals, instead of a single elimination bracket, i will be using a mcmahon system inspired tournament structure!

this means that no character will be eliminated, and you can participate in polls rooting for your favorite character throughout all the rounds. characters will also be roughly matched up based on a system that determines how well known their work is, so most rounds should be relatively evenly matched, allowing people to fight for their favorites on their own merits

more details about how the mcmahon tournament will work can be found under the cut!

submit as many characters as you would like to here! the deadline is tentatively next saturday, june 3rd, at 4pm EDT

tagging some other tournaments i like whose participants i think might be interested :) @wlw-webcomic-bracket @obscurewebcomictournament @gaywebcomicsshowdown @autisticgirliesbracket @yuribracket @secretthirdthingtournament @nonyanderepoll @funkylittlebaldcharapoll @divorced-tournament

no submission is specifically banned, but try to keep in mind the spirit of this tournament when deciding what to submit.

under the cut after my more detailed description of the tournament structure, i also ramble in a lot more detail about my philosophy regarding submission eligibility, but it's not necessary to read all that before submitting characters

sorry for taking so long to answer this!

i got really excited about answering this but also am not very good at communicating things clearly, i often get lost in the details in my passion about stuff like this, so i hope this is still interesting to read and intelligible lol!

i dont think there is any one thing that inherently defines what is and isn't a webcomic, it's an amorphous category that i enjoy the ambiguity of. but for me, what first led to my wonder for them as an 11 year old, and what has been a major factor in my passion for them even as an adult, was their low barrier to entry in both making them and accessing them. if you have internet access and time, almost anyone can make a webcomic if they want to! of course, without editors (or often even full story plans) or sensitivity readers or more people on a team to collaborate and contribute to the comic's vision, and the huge effort that it takes to do all the tasks of writing, inks, coloring, lettering, etc. all on ones own often without professional resources to facilitate that, that means that a lot of webcomics are really rough in some way or another. but a lot of people have interesting ideas they want to work with, but don't have the technical skill, desire or ability to market themselves or be beholden to external work deadlines, or connections in some way or another to be able to share those ideas through traditional publishing. regardless of skill or ability, a lot of marginalized people are barred from having their stories accepted by publishers due to bigotry and expectations about what kind of story is profitable.

as a disabled lgbt kid, i definitely read a lot of really bad webcomics i wish i hadn't, but also some of the media i was exposed to that most represented me back then was in the form of webcomics from people a lot like me. and i could read so much of it easily and for free without having to risk much to access it behind my parents' backs!

obviously that isn't the case for every webcomic, but for me and my history with them, them being easily accessible to both publish and read has been really important.

there are absolutely a lot of good points to be made about how publishing free to read webcomics isn't always the most accessible thing for a lot of people, especially for poor and disabled people. making webcomics takes a huge amount of time and effort, and sometimes even if people are passionate about making a comic, they just can't afford to find the time for that around all the other responsibilities of their day to day lives unless it can be a consistent income source. thats why even if paid online comics arent my platonic ideal of webcomics, i absolutely would never exclude them. i want small creators making stories i want to read to get the money they need to survive and keep telling stories without burning out!

it could be argued that online publishers who specifically focus on webcomics don't always present the same barriers to entry as traditional publishers, and many don't restrict the scope of marginalized creators' stories at all or to the same extent as people have struggled in other more mainstream avenues. and from my outside understanding of publishers like hiveworks, i'd absolutely agree with that! i love a lot of hiveworks comics and think its an awesome thing! (of course literally my icon is from a hiveworks comic, tiger tiger!) nonetheless however, part of my goals with this tournament is to highlight lesser known comics, and as publishers like hiveworks help advertise and promote their comics, even if i still want everyone to read all my favorite comics published by them, and certainly there are limits to those advertising resources, they still don't need as much help as other comics without that support. so its not as much 'try not to submit these' and more 'as you submit stuff like this, try to submit stuff with less advertising resources and popularity too!'

going into this tournament i also had a similar sentiment for stuff like webtoons originals. there was an added element to me in how i feel like i know a lot of people nowadays who read webtoons but don't have much awareness of other forms of webcomic, but even if in my love for webcomics i want people to come to appreciate all the breadth of ways they can exist in, thats obviously not something to make a huge priority. it's incredible the amount of forms comics can take (sidenote but reading scott mccloud's "understanding comics" a couple years ago was really formative for me in cementing how much i appreciate that, i'd highly recommend it!!!), and the way infinite scroll comics like webtoon style comics more fully make use of their digital medium, using time scrolling to pace things in place of traditional gutters and panelling, is really really cool. of course they're becoming more popular in a world where more people have smartphones, where webtoon style comics are a lot easier to read than many other forms. i love a lot of webtoons, and id feel regressive to discourage stuff like line webtoon original comics any more than stuff like hiveworks comics, just to go against current trends in what comics people seem to prefer. they have a similar low barrier to entry (through contests) as other online publishers, and it's cool to see creators get the opportunity to get paid for their work and get help from professional editors and stuff

but in the past couple weeks of running this tournament, i ended up reading a lot more about the behind the scenes of what its like to be a line webtoon original creator. line webtoon's expectations for their creators are incredibly unrealistic and exploitative, with grueling deadlines leading to a lot of creators to get repetitive strain injuries, all while working for well below industry standards. obviously a lot of webcomic creators make an inconsistent poverty level income out of it as independent creators, and that shouldn't happen either, but it's absolutely inexcusable for a company to profit off this labor and then manufacture these same conditions. without any organized labor movement surrounding that issue, that of course isn't an argument against reading or promoting these comics on its own, creators are more likely to get more income if their comics get more popular, and despite the promise of popularity by becoming an official comic, they absolutely still aren't all promoted equally. what has made me want to slightly more discourage (but still absolutely not disallow!) stuff like line webtoon official comics has been the combination of that along with learning that much of the editing of webtoons originals carries less of the benefits of having experienced creatives collaborating with creators to elevate their stories to new levels, and very often instead ends up taking the form of 'simplify this plotline and make this character look more attractive and fit this archetype more fully so we can market this better and have readers easily consume each update while they're scrolling their phone without having to think about it too much'. while obviously there are a lot of amazing webtoon official comics in spite of what i've heard anectdotally, hearing that just really went against so much of what i've most valued about my experience with webcomics!

are you thinking 'i won't bother, my favorite character is too obscure to ever make it far in a tournament'? don't worry about that!

this isn't a typical single elimination bracket, it's inspired by mcmahon system tournaments instead! that means:

no character eliminations

characters are initially matched up using a score to determine how well known their comic is, and all rounds should be relatively evenly matched in this regard

points are awarded to characters based on whether they win or lose, and will then be used to determine future matchups

this means you can have fun rooting for your favorite characters all throughout and seeing how many winning points they can score in their matchups!

there are no limits set on what counts as a webcomic character, but considering the makeup of submissions so far i want to especially encourage everyone to submit comics that are not webtoons originals (as they are currently a large proportion of submissions) and to submit characters from the obscurest webcomics you love!

even before tumblr polls were a thing, i thought it was interesting the conflicts presented when doing a single elimination tournament for voting based off of people choosing favorites when the options aren't equally known to all voters.

whether or not people seed multifandom character tournaments, there are still things that hamper my enjoyment. if you don't seed, then it can be frustrating to see a strong competitor knocked out arbitrarily early. if you do seed, then even if you get some strong matchups later on, its disappointing to me to just concede that some characters are meant to be eliminated even earlier than they might be able to make it (especially disappointing when you're a fan of a lot of relatively unpopular media!)

so within the couple weeks of tumblr poll tournaments being a thing,i was really itching to try out a different format!!

i tried to think about which aspects of tournaments were fun for me

it's fun to root for your favorite character and get really competitive about it! it feels good to see them go far!

it's fun to have intense matches where characters feel equally matched!

it's fun to see your lesser known favorites get further than you expect them to! and even if they don't get far, it's fun to bring awareness to them at all!

i pretty quickly decided that elimination tournaments were in conflict with some of my wants. nonetheless though, there's a lot to be said for the silly fun that can come from their fierce competition and surprise upsets

certain voting or tournament systems might not have the arbitrary eliminations of single elimination tournaments, but still didn't feel right for my purposes. for example, (beyond the other concern of popular vs unpopular characters) a full round robin tournament might get exhausting with the amount of competitors i'd want in any tournament i felt like hosting. and there's other types of tournaments/voting systems that would give "accurate" end results, but that i couldn't find a way to gamify in the moment so that each matchup felt like a unique thing worth rooting for with an obvious resulting benefit, which was important to me.

while not as much as other options, i still have a slight worry that even with a points system, a mcmahon style tournament might be a little too hard to follow for people to really have fun with the stakes of each individual match. but in the end i went with it because i thought it'd be really interesting to see how a skill-based tournaments system for determining skill level could be translated to popularity (in the known sense, not the liked sense), and i liked how it was dynamic enough to allow matchups not expected by the original popularity sorting if it turned out to not be as accurate, and how it could adapt to a wide range of contestants, and didn't necessarily need to have any set amount of rounds if it turned out it was more work to get more granular with the results than i initially expected.

but honestly despite having this in the back of my mind for months now, i havent done much active work until the past couple weeks when i finally started to have free time. i definitely still have a lot to consider when it comes to how many rounds i want to do and how many contestants or what exactly this is gonna look like! i'm simulating fake tournaments today to get at least some sense for whats realistic, but beyond that i hope you'll all have fun going along with this experiment with me! :)

for the time being ive had to budget my energy to my normal day to day life, but please know that im still thinking about this tournament all the time and am really excited to get back to it!

~@underrated-adversaries

i realized that with a tournament like this, having even just a neutral description of the character and media might increase people's enjoyment and ability to find recommendations, and at least for me sometimes that can be a lot easier to come up with than convincing propaganda!

also, while i'd love to include every character, with the amount of submissions i've gotten in just this first half day, it seems like i might end up needing to pare them down. i don't want to do that off of number of submissions, so i think in addition to prioritizing stuff like self published comics, i also will likely end up prioritizing characters with submitted descriptions