#s20

The Concept: You describe your ship* to me, I pick out the submissions which I find most compelling and pit them against each other without revealing who they are, people vote on them, and their identities gets revealed once they’re eliminated.

Every other season, ships from fanon (something unofficial derived from the canon of a work), fanworks, and OCs will be allowed. This is not the case for Season 20.

Something special for this season will be a loser's bracket: the identities of the losers of Round 1 will not be revealed immediately. Instead, they will compete in their own bracket, and the winner will face against the finalists in the main bracket.

Submission Guidelines

*For the purpose of this tournament, relationships do not have to be romantic in nature. (I’m sometimes going to use “ship” as a shorthand, just know I mean “relationships” in general.)

Relationship can be between any number of characters.

Real people are accepted if they’ve been dead for more than 100 years.

Roleplay characters are accepted as long as the description only pertains to the characters and not the players.

Ships based off of fanon depictions of characters (including crossover ships and crackships) and ships involving characters from a fanwork are not accepted. (If a fanon depiction of a character has been accepted before in this tournament, their canon depiction may be accepted if it is different enough.)

OCs and OC x Canon are not accepted.

No overtly NSFW submissions. (Mentioning they have sex or are a sex worker is fine, but try to avoid anything more than that.)

Two submission per person. (Do not submit the same ship twice. I cannot enforce this on Google Forms without forcing you to log in. So just be champs and respect this rule.)

Failure to follow these guidelines may result in all of your submissions being disqualified for this season.

Summary Guidelines

Selection Process: I will read through the list of descriptions submitted without reading their names and pick the most compelling submissions. Then, I will check the name to make sure there's no repeats.

Keep it concise, but also bring something unique to the table. Make sure to describe their relationship, not just summarize the events of the story.

Previous submissions for reference. The ideal submission should be 1-2 paragraphs, but you can make it as short or long as you want. Please keep in mind the longer your submission, the less likely it is to get in.

Tips on what to avoid while writing a summary can be found here.

Descriptions should be based on the canon of the source material (e.g. You can say “they love each other” instead of “they’re lovers” if their romantic nature is debatable.). The characters do not have to be canonically in a romantic relationship to be submitted, only that they have some sort of dynamic in canon.

Avoid author commentary. (e.g. "They're canonically x," "I love them," "Play/watch/read this," etc.)

Use canonical pronouns.

Avoid identifying information or setting specific giveaways. (i.e. ninja village, space necromancers.)

The more popular your ship is the more vague the description should be.

Exclusions

Generally, ships that have been accepted into previous seasons will not be accepted. For a complete list, please look here. (No need to look through the whole list, just Ctrl+F to find the ship you want.)

Due to them winning S19, ships containing the characters Cdotkom, Danno Cal Drawings, and BamBaeYoh from YouTube Short Wars will not be accepted in S20. Ships containing them will be allowed again in S21.

Any submissions from Harry Potter will also not be included.

Notes

I will not vet the ships/pairings for problematic content.

If you participate in this tournament, know that you run the risk of unintentionally voting for your nOTP. The mod does not take any responsibility for any distress that may cause you.

There will be a limit of one ship per media in the bracket. You may submit two ships from the same media, but keep in mind only one ship will be able to get in. (A series or franchise will generally count as one media, but they will be evaluated on a case by case basis.)

Please do not submit ships from media less than one month old at the time of posting so people don't get spoiled. This isn't a hard rule, but it's worth keeping in mind when submitting.

Submit your ships here! Submissions will be open until Sunday, June 14th, at 9 PM EDT.

Like in s19 e23, the patient has a breakdown worrying if her daughter is mentally ill, which prompts Tess to confide in Abs her worries about Sam. Sam's health has been building up in the background and Tess needs to face it at some point, and it's triggered by the patient. As opposed to s20 e8, where Tess has an emotional monologue to a patient not to give up on their child. Yes, it ends with the parent changing, but it doesn't matter as much to me, and it doesn't ring true to Tess at her point in the story. It hasn't added anything to Tess's arc, and I don't care enough about a character who we won't ever see again to feel the moment is worth it.

Even Guppy in s20 e11 is going through the same thing as a patient. Guppy is being iced out by his dad, and now another patient is threatening to disown his son. Guppy goes out and talks to the patient about how the dad needs to forgive the son, but like... what does this add to Guppy's story?

This is a rebuild of the Taskmaster S20 cross-stitch image from the living room of the TM house. It is based on a screenshot shared on Reddit. Feel free to ask if you need a higher-resolution or vector version. Non-commercial use only, of course.

Here’s what I did:

I corrected the perspective in Photoshop and used ChatGPT to remove the moiré pattern. I then rebuilt the image in Illustrator. For the text, I used the font Athene Medium, which came closest to the original, although I had to redraw the N.

The duck, crow, pineapple, whistle, fruit, and pumpkin are modified icons from The Noun Project. The house and animals were created using Illustrator’s Image Trace and then refined by hand. The weather vane and the couple were traced manually. Blurred details were filled by imagination.