The True Battle of Wits (and Ships) - 2019 E!Online's TV's Top Couple Post
E!Online presents TV's Top Couple Generations Forever (Images used courtesy of The CW, Univision, Freeform, Netflix, Showtime, CBC, SyFy, Starz, and ABC)
Despite a little bit later than usual (the first since the 2016 competition), E!Online's annual TV's Top Couple tournament entered its 2019 edition with a new array of talents and higher stakes, featuring 64 canonical ships from various television shows, including the foreign shows as well, a "tradition" since 2017. The Real McCoy of ship competitions have never disappointed in terms of the participating ships and the way polls are run, as well as the diversity of the participants, with a vast history that dates back to 2010, its first year where Chuck's Sarah and Chuck claimed their title.
This year, it gets even better with a mash-up of things: the competition is home to the most queer ships in the competition's history, and introduces two new Mexican contenders of Aristóteles and Temo and Juliana and Valentina, both from Univision telenovelas Mi marido tiene más familia and Amar a muerte respectively. Other headlining names include the entries from Shadowhunters and Wynonna Earp, better known for their People's Choice Awards wins, and top-flight names such as Arrow's Oliver and Felicity ( last year's runners-up) and Jamie and Claire from Outlander, plus the runners-up from the Zimbio competition Penelope and Josie from Legacies, being one of the debuting names this year. In terms of battles on the other hand, so many stories are to be told with all the interesting matches done and upsets made in a competition which saw over 170 hours' worth of voting as the competition entered its ninth edition.
STATS
First and foremost is always the statistics for this year's competition compared to last year's figures, but this time I also take a look back at the previous years as early as 2015 as well given that I have recognized the competition for five years despite not fully participating in it until a year later (the ranking gallery for the 2015 competition was the main reason and the actual reason why I've monitored the competition for four years). Given that this is indeed a couple competition, it's a good idea to adapt my playbook from the Zimbio competition I previously wrote.
Before proceeding further, though, there's one special reminder regarding the statistics; despite the competition's origin being as early as 2010, I decided that only 2015 competition onwards count towards the all-time statistics. The main reason of this decision was down to the lack of available information which proved to be hard given that polls are unavailable once they end. Going down further, the 2013 season implicitly has all Final 4 competitors named, but the main focus is actually on the first round which unfortunately has no other names that would help form the all-time statistics, and it does apply to the previous years as well. Another factor is the 2014 competition in which the competition was actually absent, replaced by a competition involving love triangles for particular shows. A couple poll however actually existed on the site's vote-based awards in that timeframe, the one that would later be known as TV Scoop Awards as we knew today.
Other than that, clicking the image will give you the full resolution so you can see the bigger picture.
That said, given the above situation, the all-time stats had 99 shows represented prior to this year's competition, along with 341 characters and 205 ships competed. This year introduced 18 new shows, 48 new characters, and 37 new ships, all of which will be covered later in detail. If anyone has that one desire to compare these figures with the one from the Zimbio competition, it'd be the number of total ships competed; 251 ships since 2012 (221 prior to this year) against 242 ships since 2015 (205 prior to this year). There's a chance that E!Online's numbers can surpass the former's by one or two years depending on how many new ships both competitions would introduce, especially with the competition having better diverse canon entries, in addition to the fact that, again, the range for the statistics is 2015-2019, missing only the two editions for the sake of completion for the side-by-side comparison, and four editions overall.
In terms of votes, the figures were mostly unavailable due to the fact that the widgets are always deleted once the round reached the deadline. The method to determine total votes weren't conceived until the final stages of the 2017 competition courtesy of the campaigning team for SKAM's Isak and Even, where it was stated on Magni Onsoien's post that the mobile version of the site stored the value in question. While the numbers for the final round is precisely known (and will probably never be topped in any competition, let alone this competition) at 5,626,143 (!!!), the Final 4 round is a combination between the exact numbers during Evak's outing against Teen Wolf's Stiles and Lydia (being 3.6 million courtesy of @hoyasluv's tweet) and an approximation of Magnus and Alec vs. Jamie and Claire's total votes based on the initial capture from @HeroicPrincessC on Twitter. Given the close nature of the latter despite low voting turnout ( as @vote4evak stated), the author roughly estimated the value between 900K-1 million, bringing the probability of having more than 4.5 million votes (although I would put the lower bound at about 4 million). The 2018 figures were exactly known with the discovery of this method, and the 2019 figures were once again unavailable unfortunately, this time due to the new widget used for the mobile version of which this issue will be addressed in detail way below.
Diving through the old editions however, the final rounds for pre-2015 competitions never departed from the six figures and at most reached less than 300,000 votes, which would be big for its time given that Twitter wasn't used much for the means of vote rallying back then. As a context, the 2012 final was decided in 215K (recorded known) votes, a number almost the entire 2018 rounds surpassed, and probably the entire 2017 and 2016 rounds. Maybe the 2019 numbers consistently reach six figures, or perhaps one or two rounds (perhaps more?) actually reached a million given the intensity of the polls, no? Only them who hold the key to the full totals...
Back to the stats, competing shows for this year remains at 40, the same with the head count of characters being 124 since 2018. This time around, there are way more female characters in contention than there are male characters, and actually matches the highest number of male characters in 2017. Still, the 2017 figures remain unbeaten in terms of characters since there were no characters competing in multiple ships, while the count of 44 for shows remained a staple for three years since 2015. On a positive note, the average of competing characters stand at 124 for three years straight.
Outside the scope, the Twitter engagement for this year's nomination phase were as crowded as ever, with over 4,500 nominations made, an estimated figure that counts both the replies to E!Online's tweets pertaining the nomination and tweets which are not replies but are tagged with #TVsTopCouple, the new official tag that replaced last years' #TopTVCouple. The original tweet also had 826 retweets and 1,583 likes up until the deadline of the nomination, which was Tuesday, April 16.
In terms of shows, there are six shows that have been competing since 2015, among them are Grey's Anatomy, The 100, Outlander, The Walking Dead, and two Arrowverse shows The Flash and Arrow. If we were to count franchises as well though, Pretty Little Liars and The Vampire Diaries could go up there as well given that their newest entries The Perfectionists and Legacies, respectively, debuted this year. Two Chicago shows and Shadowhunters, among others, have participated in four editions out of all five within the scope.
Since there are 40 shows this year, there might not be much number of returning and debuting shows. While this year's figure for returning names is the lowest, it actually has the most composition of shows which hasn't appeared last year, referred as "shows returning from absence". DC's Legends of Tomorrow last competed in 2016 and made its second appearance with Ava and Sara (Avalance), while shows like Chicago Fire, Jane the Virgin, Orange Is The New Black, and The Big Bang Theory were last seen in 2017, all represented by their respective ships. In turn, there are 18 new shows which made their debut in this competition, including the two already mentioned way above, plus shows like Dynasty, Canadian show Schitt's Creek, and English-produced Poldark, among others. If you happen to have voted in the Zimbio competition, then you should also recognize names like Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, One Day At A Time, Roswell, New Mexico, Superstore, and Timeless whose ship Lucy and Wyatt were in fact the winners of the Favorite Couple category in last year's TV Scoop Awards, now making their competition debut this year. The rest of the shows are populated with returning names from the likes of Riverdale, Game of Thrones, Lucifer, and Wynonna Earp to name a few, forming a total of 22 returning names with 17 of which returned from last year.
Another notable inclusion is the two new international shows that officially made their debut this year, both being Mexican-produced telenovelas aired on Spanish-speaking American broadcast network Univision: Mi marido tiene más familia and Amar a muerte. To explain both series' storylines in brief, the former tells about a doctor adopted by a Colombian American family in search of his biological parents while the latter is a complex story that intersect with the soul of a media mogul reincarnated in the body of the hitman after being assasinated, and that the hitman's soul ended up in the body of a professor. That being said, both shows are officially third and fourth additions of the foreign shows in the competition established since 2017, with Norway's SKAM being the first and Turkey's Wounded Love being the second a year later. Existing contenders have been originated from United States, Canada, and United Kingdom, justifying the fact that there are now 6 nations represented in terms of the competing shows' production origin, and that the nation ratio between English-speaking shows and non-English shows are even. Other than that, this is the year there are four nations represented in the competition, while the year with most nations represented was in fact last year: USA, Canada (Wynonna Earp, among others), UK (Outlander and friends), Norway (SKAM), and Turkey (Wounded Love).
We then narrow down to individual characters, a smaller part of its own for the sake of clarity. To recap, the number of competing characters this year is 124, comprised of 58 male characters and 66 female characters. Each gender apparently has most involvements in the form of Barry Allen and Jane Villanueva respectively, of which both competed in two ships at some capacity and has been represented six times. In Barry's case, he mostly competed with Iris West and had a double duty with Caitlin Snow in 2015 as well, whereas in Jane's case her double duty is more common; for two years since her debut she competed with both Michael Cordero Jr. and Rafael Solano, but a year later she scaled down her efforts and competed only with Michael in 2017 before being absent for a year of which she finally returned with Rafael this year. The rest of the list saw five different characters represented exactly five times through their five-year runs.
Barry and Jane however weren't the only cases of characters competing in multiple ships since 2015. There were four other names in 2015 from three different shows, most notably Elena and Stefan from The Vampire Diaries who not only competed with each other but also with another ship of their own as well (Damon for Elena, Caroline for Stefan), along with Reign's Mary Francis and Scandal's Olivia Pope. A year later, there were six names from five different shows, all being teen dramas, with the most notable being Pretty Little Liars' Spencer and Caleb, having the same case as Elena and Stefan as they both competed with each other and with their respective other ships. There weren't multiple characters in 2017 until a year later where Archie Andrews competed in multiple ships for two years in a row, along with other fellow Riverdale contenders Betty Cooper in 2018 and Veronica Lodge in 2019, also with the same Elena/Stefan situation, while the rest of the names were from Stranger Things in 2018 and Sabrina in 2019. Safe to say that The CW shows often has canon ship triangles in their shows competitive enough to enter this competition, and most come from teen titles.
Finally, the ships; we take a look at the all-time figures first revolving them. Grey's had five ships prior to this year's competition while The 100 had four and Riverdale three. With new ships from the shows mentioned made their debut, Riverdale actually made quite a big gain and even in two years of their competition the number of their ships almost matches that of Grey's who has been around for five years (!). If we were to go with character head counts, the ABC medical series has 14 while The CW teen drama has 10, the same number with the post-apocalyptic drama of the same network. Of course the two The CW shows would need to catch up but that's up to their storyline.
Also notable are the all-time participants for the competition for the past five years. Olicity, Jamie and Claire, and Westallen are no doubt the three names still competing today while other active competitors such as Alex and Piper of OITNB (Vauseman), Penny and Leonard from TBBT, two Shadowhunters ships Clary and Jace (Clace) plus Magnus and Alec (Malec), and finally Rick and Michonne (Richonne) from The Walking Dead.
In terms of entered ships, there are 13 shows with multiple ships entered for this year and it isn't that much of a number looking at last year. Conversely, though, Riverdale actually broke the record for ships entered with six (!!!) while traditionally it has been either Pretty Little Liars or any of the TVD franchise in this list, plus Once Upon A Time at one point. Behind The CW show are two critically-acclaimed ABC dramas Grey's and This Is Us with four ships, with two Freeform shows Shadowhunters and The Bold Type contributed three, the same with the debutant Sabrina. Rest of the shows contributed two couples, including Jane the Virgin, Outlander, Sense8, The 100, TBBT, Legacies, and Timeless.
As for representation, the first round's article stated that this year is where the competition had the most queer couples entered, statistically justified with a record-breaking total of 18 couples with the distribution of 7 gay couples and 11 lesbian couples, a record high for the latter and the exact record of 2017's numbers for the former. This is indeed a new record number. No, two different new records. That said, this year actually takes the cake for having a diverse roster of competitors in terms of couples, not to mention the production origins of the shows also helped as well.
Last but not least, for the returning and debuting names, the competition has a ratio of 26:38 in favor of the debuts, which has been a tradition except for 2017 where the ratio were equal. The 26 returning names are broken down into 21 names making their return from last year (e.g., Wayhaught, Malec, Olicity, Westallen, etc.) and 5 returning from last year's absence (for instance, Jane and Rafael last competed in 2016, with Vauseman, Gallavich, Shamy, and Penny and Leonard did so in 2017), while the 38 debutants comprise of 21 ships from debuting shows (e.g., Hope and Landon, Penelope and Josie, Lucy and Wyatt, etc.) and 17 from returning shows (e.g., Bellamy and Echo, Petra and JR, Jane and Pinstripe, etc.). Aristóteles Córcega and Cuauhtémoc "Temo" López (referred as Aristemo from here on) from Mi marido tiene más familia and Juliana Valdés and Valentina Carvajal (referred as Juliantina from here on) from Amar a muerte are the two notable international ships for this year, effectively fourth and fifth additions of the competition's foreign stable since 2017, with first being SKAM's Isak and Even from Norway, followed by Sana and Yousef from the same show and Turkey's Wounded Love duo Hilal and Leon a year later. Aside from being second and third all-time foreign queer contenders as well, this also meant, as @SuntDin_Mexic's tweet in Spanish pointed out, Mexico contributed two ships in the competition in terms of nation origins, tied with Norway.
More detailed stats are available on the spreadsheet I've compiled way below.
ROUND RECAP
64 couples vs. Elimination gremlins
The first round sees the eventual 64 couples fight in a free-for-all competition that would see the top half of the competitors advancing, with the seeding of the couples for the next round's elimination battle determined by votes from this round. Aristemo and Juliantina held a comfortable lead for the remainder of the first round with the former actually came on top after 29 hours' worth of voting. Finishing with 39.1% and 37% percentages respectively, the two couple surpassed the first round percentage of last year's winner HiLeon of 34.2%. Within the Top 10 finish were last year's best finishers Malec, Wayhaught, Olicity, plus Claire and Jamie, in addition to Emily and Alison (Emison) who actually improved their rankings from last year, alongside David and Patrick, Fallon and Liam (Falliam), and Penelope and Josie (Posie). Clace, Deckerstar, and two Riverdale contenders Varchie and Jughead also managed to finish as top seeds, joined with Meredith and DeLuca (MerLuca) and Gallavich. The race for the last spots in the next round was on with Chicago P.D.'s Burgess and Ruzek (Burzek) tried to make their way past from their 0.1% state, soldiering through upon challenges from multiple ships including Alex and Michael from Roswell, New Mexico and recently-married NCIS couple Kensi and Deeks to name a few, which they succeeded. Joining them were Jackson and Maggie (Jaggie), Jon and Daenerys (Jonerys), and debut entries Ava and Sara (Avalance), Lucy and Wyatt (Lyatt), Nick and Sabrina (Nabrina), Vic and Chief Ripley (Vicley), Simon and Izzy (Sizzy), and Cheryl and Toni (Choni) to name a few.
While Jake and Amy (Peraltiago) and Beth and Randall finally managed to make it to the next round after their last year's abrupt exit, things weren't in favor of last year's first round top seeds Westallen, Roger and Brianna, and Kala and Wolfgang (Kalagang) as their percentages weren't enough to secure them a spot in the next round. The Bold Type's Kat and Adena (Kadena) were also out of contention for this year for the same reason, despite showing strength that secured them a Sweet 16 spot last year.
(Image: Gifer)
The second round was where the fun started as the top seeds were drawn against unseeded competitors in the elimination stage, followed by a series of same stages with round winners go against each other for the remainder of the competition. This round in particular saw some easy wins from both Mexican and Canadian contenders, in addition to the Frasers who managed to shutter out Nabrina's opposition. Deckerstar experienced a downturn after almost two hours and a half from the start of the round which caused Jonerys to take a lead advantage, but the Lucifer couple managed to rally votes to catch up after 12 hours and eventually re-took the lead three quarters through the round, maintaining the lead until the finish line where they finally succeeded. Grey's contenders also fought tooth-to-nails against their oppositions; both Jolex and MerLuca barely managed to take the victory with the former jostled against Riverdale's Bughead throughout the entire round and the latter trading leads with Avalance midway through the round, while Jaggie had to concede with Dynasty's Falliam. Riverdale's woes meanwhile didn't stop as Choni failed to advance while Varchie lost footing against Legacies' Handon despite early lead. The rest of the advancing ships include Posie, Gallavich, Emison, and all ships from Shadowhunters with an exception of Sizzy.
The remaining ships battled in the Sweet 16 round with lesser voting time in contrast to the other rounds due to it being posted later than usual. Two Legacies ship Handon and Posie were up against tough opponents in the form of Emison and Malec respectively. The first poll was basically the El Clasico between The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars franchises, a television fandom rivalry that still runs until today, while the second were battle of the runners-up with both Malec and Posie being runners-up in different competitions. Handon's road to victory slowly developed for three hours with a lead that lasted approximately five hours before Emison took over. Despite giving a fight in the final hours, Hope and Landon lost out their berth by a gap of 0.6%, same story with Posie where even the lead exchange was more common and that they had to concede at the last minute, spelling an exit for both ships from The CW show. Deckerstar's journey also ended in this round as Gallavich proved too strong for the fandom that has won various polls last year, with a winning percentage of 62.3%. The rest of the finalists were David and Patrick, Wayhaught, Juliantina, and finally Aristemo who became the second international ship to beat Olicity in the competition's history.
Visual representation of Malec vs. Emison and Aristemo vs. Juliantina (Image: Imgur)
The Elite 8 took the competition to the new heights with confirmed polls being Wayhaught vs. Gallavich, David and Patrick vs. Jamie and Claire, Malec vs. Emison (the "Freeform derby" -ed), and finally Aristemo vs. Juliantina, a ringer to the TVyNovelas awards two months ago. The Wynonna Earp couple easily handed down Gallavich's efforts throughout the round, while the Outlander couple struggled against the Schitt's Creek represent as the Frasers' two efforts to regain lead were thwarted after a short period of time, eventually missing the Final 4 for the first time in their fifth attempt. The Telenovela derby meanwhile featured frequent lead changes as both refused to concede. Juliantina seized their longest lead as the round reached halfway until hours before the deadline where Aristemo landed a surprise attack to secure themselves the berth to the next round, effectively denied the chance for a different third foreign winner despite the chance still opening for the other couple. The Freeform derby however produced an interesting outcome despite the battle being on Malec's favor with Emison's attempt at equalizing way later past the halfway mark, and closed in at the final minutes despite the eventual win to the Shadowhunters couple. The main attraction however was the 50/50 outcome due to the adjustment made ten minutes after the polls were closed which caused confusion to both fandoms, that is until it was revealed that the exact end percentage were 50.04% against 49.96% in favor of Malec, marking it the closest poll in history. From here on, four countries were still represented in the competition in terms of production origins: US, Canada, UK, and Mexico.
Two ships from PCA-winning shows battle in the Final 4 which came an hour later, but they didn't face each other as David and Patrick dealt with the ship from the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Show of 2018, while Aristemo dealt with the show with its series finale on the horizon at the time of this post, with all of the ships were in fact from the show in the GLAAD Awards contention. Again, the telenovela couple had no problems in winning despite the opponent's attempt at gaining to fight, while the Canadian derby provided an interesting fight with frequent lead changes with David and Patrick's long lead during the first quarter of the round and later a longer lead period for Wayhaught that lasted until the final hour with the Schitt's Creek couple pushing in the final stage with a quick gain, winning the poll with an end percentage of 50.6%. With these outcomes, this year's Final Round marked the first time a title duel not involving at least one US-produced show, and secured a history of having a canon male pairing as title holders after Isak and Even from SKAM in 2017.
(Image: Wattpad / Pinterest)
The stage was set for a finale where David and Patrick go up against Aristóteles and Temo for the title. While things may seemed to be too expected, the Schitt's Creek couple had a couple attempts to raise up the bar, gaining up to the 20.x region at most before dropping. Their early lead meanwhile saw them reaching the 21.x mark, but the Mexican couple were quick in extinguishing the lead and make the momentum theirs until the finish line after 29 hours of voting. The Mexican couple managed to secure the title with the Canadian duo finished in respectable second place, despite the round itself being a ringer to the 2018 final in terms of results and process.
With that, Aristóteles Córcega and Cuauhtémoc "Temo" López entered the competition's Hall of Fame with plenty of history; they are the fourth LGBTQ couple winner after 2013's Bo and Lauren from Lost Girl, The 100's Clarke and Lexa from the 2016 competition, and Isak and Even from SKAM a year later. This would also make them the second gay couple winner after the same Norwegian couple, both international and in general, plus the third consecutive foreign winner after Wounded Love's Hilal and Leon last year. At the same time, David and Patrick also became the first ship from a Canadian show to reach the final stage since 2013 and the third gay couple to reach the final stage, together with Malec (as a runner-up) and the eventual winners Evak, achieving it the same time as Aristemo.
SOME THOUGHTS
Comparison of competition's mobile voting layouts; before 2019, it was always a series of blue/purple bars overlaid with names, hiding the exact total votes for every poll, only that 2016 (way above) used a different font than 2017-2018. Click the image for full resolution.
As usual, the Top TV C- err... I mean, TV's Top Couple competition means spreadsheet business as usual. My goal dates back to the 2016 competition with a reason of not even the ranking a la 2015 competition existed, but the actual ranking was posted in the Spreadsheet World Fandom Championship spreadsheet of that season and it was until a year later that I decided to make its own spreadsheet dedicated to the competition. Since then I've delivered this kind of statistics sheet to aid other fandom enthusiasts to show what the competition is about, and it is by developing my methodology and approach through years I've improved my spreadsheet. The fact that the Evak campaigning team showed the way how to determine exact votes from polls further ignited my interest on the competition, and I did test out the newly-discovered approach in another set of competitions on the site before the next year's couple competition came which, by the way, has its own spreadsheet as well.
For this year, however, this is where I began making use of my Cygwin to simply fetch the percentages and vote numbers. After being disgruntled myself unable to fetch the final results past the deadline where the voting widget would get replaced by the "voting is closed" text (in which this resentment came after monitoring the actress competition months ago), I started out exploring this option, especially with Magni's script openly available for me to test it. Given that it'd involve multiple couples in the poll and not specific to just one (in contrast to the original script), I modified it so that it should fetch all competitors' percentages and votes within scope. Through trial and error, using one of the Summer Tournament polls as the desktop reference (being the only competition whose widget isn't deleted even after the competition is ended even to this date), the resulting script is ready to deploy. Take note that this is months before the competition proper, even before I finished my paper...
The heartbreaking story of the morning when I started the first round however is the fact that the widget for the mobile version is exactly the one in the desktop version, as seen in the image above. This way, determining the total votes is impossible since the old widget where there were simply blue/purple bars and competitor's names actually stored the values (refer to Magni's post for more explanation). This, most probably, is exactly the case why the Summer Tournament's widget isn't deleted for eternity and actually also answers why the voting widget is often deleted once the deadline is past in every competition, not just the couple competition, but actor competitions and the TV Scoop Awards as well. That said, this forced me to slightly modify the script, putting the desktop version as the sole focus.
Disappointment aside, the script actually does wonders: It was run every 600 seconds (equals 10 minutes) using the watch command in the Cygwin terminal (or can be referred as the crontab entry) and it worked as I expected. Despite this, I faced a myriad of problems during the course of running this script, mostly through my own in some capacity. The first round had my phone with tethered connection "crashed" at random while I was away, in addition to my laptop's faulty acts which led me to restart the laptop at a different time, and running out of quota at midnight. At the second round, my phone became slow and dead exactly 12 hours after the round was opened, forcing me to forfeit any tracking activity until I managed to use a smaller phone my parents rarely use which only has GPRS connection and could pose connection problems at very unfortunate times. The problems do not persist in the next couple of rounds fortunately, though at the expense of having my phone stay at home (i.e., not bringing it outside), and aside those problems waking up at 3am is the earliest possible time for me, which basically meant that I couldn't able to track the earlier stages of the polls.
By the time the Final 4 came, a new replacement phone is finally used to do the job (and subsequently is my new phone after all), easing off the job save for the fact that it had to stay home during the remainder of the round. While the Final round had me missing the earlier states of the poll, a couple of tweets from @ItWas_MeantToBe came in handy (in which the user posted the state of the poll at a specific interval), as well as Bill Masto's tweet which revealed the percentage for another missing update. What would be an incomplete data due to missing updates actually became complete thanks to these, but that's because it was the finals and it was really easy to focus on the specific state of a poll during a particular update.
As much as I'm sad Juliantina lost, I have to tip my hat to the #Aristemo fandom. Both provided great fights and easily the _best_ in all-time history, this graph showed exactly that. You can basically figure out how many passion they put into this poll #TVsTopCouple pic.twitter.com/MNXCjMLMKW
- [R]endy A Y (@RnTheAndrian) April 26, 2019
Because of this immerse detail, progress for every round is presented in their individual sheets. It's basically something done just like in the Zimbio competition which I also covered earlier, only this time there's a higher level of detail being put, especially given the fact that things are automated from the script and no longer had to be input manually, either by checking the site's percentage or copying the page source code to Excel. It's just unfortunate that we can no longer see the total votes like we used to be, but in turn it is possible to load up a graph view for a particular competitor in the first round and a particular match-up in the rest of the rounds just like Evak's campaigning team did (and stupidly enough I should've done this thing last year). This eventually leads me to create additional sheets to view graphs for different polls, one for the first round and one for all the head-to-head rounds, while learning new Excel tekkers of course. These graphs were deployed after the third round, showcasing Handon vs. Emison and Malec vs. Posie, in addition to Wayhaught's (because it's my fandom after all). Here, the X axis denote the minutes elapsed from the start of the round based on the update per my script, and the Y axis denote, you guessed it, percentage. If only the mobile widget was kept, this would form a graph that goes up instead and may look like one of those power/torque readings.
Outside the statistical point of view, there was a moment where some fans went to my last year's Round 2 stats, courtesy of my notifications. At first, I was confused since they were quoting those tweets in Spanish considering most of my Spanish vocabulary was due to me watching Dora the Explorer when I was an Elementary school student (they didn't dub the Spanish bits there, thankfully) and that they might left out the infamously missing Round 2 poll. Looking closely at both the tweet and interactions in general, the Mexican contenders actually pointed out the one-on-one elimination system used for the succeeding rounds, in which winner of each poll will go against another until the final round, a system that has become the competition's staple since 2017.
Finally, I proudly present you this year's Excel spreadsheet, complete with the entry list, the results, the progresses, the graph generators, and all that stuff. You can head here for the full screen version of the above spreadsheet or you can download the Excel file here for offline viewing. Please take note that, if you download the offline version, you need Oswald and Lato fonts installed to display all fonts correctly, both are available for free on Google Fonts. Also, graphs only work on the offline version as these don't work in the embed/web architecture. In order to use the graphs, highlight the greyed cell on any of the available graphs sheet (either the Round 1 or the Duel sheet) and choose one from the drop down list. This will display the graph of selected poll.
IN CONCLUSION
(Image: Tumblr)
Finally the competition gave birth to its third consecutive foreign winner, but it was a showdown of strength for not just one but two foreign power couples: Mi marido tiene más familia's Aristemo and Amar a muerte's Juliantina, with both fandoms gained traction earlier this year that actually made them the big fandom they are today. This was where different fates intertwined for the competition: whether to have another international gay couple victor or a lesbian couple that would complete the three different international winners. The fact both shows competed in TVyNovelas awards back in March also told the story of the two shows' rivalry, with Amar a muerte getting the upper hand in terms of award wins. However, this competition actually turned the tables as Aristemo broke through brackets and finally came out victorious, the same time they will have their own spin-off later this June. The fandom's enthusiasm and persistence showed through the competition finally paid off and managed to put them in the rightful place where Isak Valtersen and Even Bech-Naesheim, and Hilal and Leon Papadopoulos stood. In addition, this trophy shall be the one to be carried on as they move to Mexico City this June.
As the winner's podium is reserved, Emilio Osorio and Joaquin Bodoni, actors for Aristóteles and Temo respectively in the series, thanked the fans for helping them winning the coveted title. They spoke that the couple has resonated both themselves and fans, breaking the boundaries with their love story, all amidst the season where the LGBTQ portrayals, particularly in Spanish-speaking media, has taken a major progress since last year, and the fact that their show won the GLAAD Awards for Outstanding Scripted Spanish-language TV Series together with Netflix's Elite. Both also stated that the couple "help to be brave to many people who fear to say who they really are," encouraging people to "be free".
However, after this competition, one might wonder what would the competition holds for its tenth edition next year. As fandoms became more diverse with even foreign competitors stood up to the challenge, one can imagine how the level of the competition be raised, and which international couple will stand up to the challenge once more. Challenges always await for fandoms in every year, even in unexpected places, and it'd be a waiting game all over again until the curtain of this ship battle re-opened once more as existing fandoms will have to find a way to expand their powers for next year.
The author would like to thank Magni Onsoien for providing the original script used as a base for the eventual script for this competition. The author would also like to thank various fandoms for interacting with the tables and graphs posted throughout the competition, not just limited to Aristemo and Juliantina fandoms. I have covered the competition since 2016 and the involvement of fandoms for this year in terms of retweets and likes were diverse which actually is the end goal for my job, not just limited to one or two fandoms. Surely I will do this next year, but only God knows whether the poll widget be changed once again or stay the same structure-wise. Last but not least, I want to thank all the people from various fandoms mentioned way above for their contributions in any form which helped the completion of either the spreadsheet or the article in general.
The couple competitions may be over but polls businesses are never over as E!Online's Male Actor Competition will start soon, followed by the TV Scoop Awards this summer, while on SpoilerTV their summer competitions will kick off soon. However, another battle over on TellTale TV Awards also has reached its second round with notable names in television as TV shows fight for wins in show, acting, and ship categories, relying up to you readers to decide who should go to the ultimate round.
From here, the battle still continues...
~[R]