The Best Worst Fic Tournament · 7:23am Apr 1st, 2019
UPDATE: The tournament is now over! You can see all the rounds at the following links:
First round, matches 1 - 4
First round, matches 5 -8
First round, matches 9 - 12
First round, matches 13 - 16
Second round, matches 1 - 4
Second round, matches 5 - 8
Quarter-finals
Semi-finals
Final
It's April Fools Day! And for this year, I have decided to celebrate with something that will either be totally awesome or a completely terrible idea, I guess we'll find out which in due course. I'm going to make 32 ponyfics fight to the death to see who wins.
But not just any fics! Using the power of the almighty Fimfarchive, I have assembled 32 of the lowest rated fics on Fimfiction. They'll be our competitors in a merciless battle to see which of them is the least-deserving of the scorn they have received. It is time... for The Best Worst Fic Tournament.
How the tournament works
I rated every fic on Fimfiction by taking the net sum of their likes and dislikes, and ranked them all from worst rating to best. I'll be including the rankings in each match intro so that you can see how badly-rated the fic is compared to all others.
My selection criteria imposed a few other constraints:
• The fic must be complete.
• The fic must be limited to between 4000-6000 words in length, for my sanity.
• The fic must be E- or T-rated, to avoid problems with linking to mature content. And also for my sanity.
These simple criteria do actually make a surprisingly large number of fics ineligible for the tournament, and in fact, some of these fics don't even have that many downvotes - only a dozen or so in the very worst case. I guess Fimfiction is nicer than I thought? Or more likely my methodology sucks
The tournament will be a single-elimination tournament consisting of 5 rounds. I have randomly arranged the 32 competing fics into 16 match pairs for the first round. In each match, I will read one fifth of each competing fic, and whichever one I like best will win the match and proceed to the next round. I made a diagram because honestly I just really like tree diagrams.
Also you wouldn't believe how much experimentation I did to come up with an ASCII tournament tree design that looks decent and displays correctly on desktop and mobile
AB CD EF GH IJ KL MN OP
\| \| \| \| \| \| \| \|
\__/ \__/ \__/ \__/
\_____/ \_____/
\___________/
|
WINNER
_____|_____
__/__ __\__
_/ _\ _/ _\
/ \ / \ / \ / \
|\ |\ |\ |\ |\ |\ |\ |\
QR ST UV WX YZ 12 34 56The competitors
These are the 32 competing fics, randomly ordered:
A: The New Bearer by Infinty Blade Brony
B: Going To Equestria by Moony Scratch
C: A Different Time by Gardian Angle
D: Applejack's Homemade Pie by Charliebbarkin
E: The Pony human war by 21latenighter
F: Searching For The Crystal by TwistedCupcake
G: Adventures in Royal Foalsitting (A fic I Extremely Hate) by DakariKingMykan
H: Ten Minutes: Aftermath by Chatoyance
I: Gassy Vengeance by The Dark Wolf
J: Rarity's 5 Spikes by trahzo
K: My Little Dashie 2: My Little Twily by Joshweiser22
L: The reaper file 1 by wolfefang
M: A New Pony In Equestria by vinyl soul
N: Learning A New Skill by TwistedCupcake
O: Please Come Back, Spike by CAPTAIN YOSHI HD
P: Space Mission by TwistedCupcake
Q: Rise of Pinkamena: The Final Book by Raven Star
R: Rumble Grumble by DakariKingMykan
S: Ponydox x Octavia by Count Paradox
T: A Dash of Sprinkles: Another Horrible OC Ship-fic by Pootie D. Trillist
U: Mane Camp by Canterlot Voice
V: The Life of a Merc by FreezeFlame12
W: The Legend of the Knights by AvalonAva
X: The long trip home by musya_musya
Y: Orange Skies Over Everfree by RJTaylor
Z: Rainbow Dash Gets an Abortion by jmj
1: Triumph of King Sombra by anomaly
2: Having Fun With Someone's Dismay by TwistedCupcake
3: Fate of Two Worlds by dbzponyninja
4: My Little Ponies and Me Season 1 Book 1: Mario Kart Wii is Magic Part 1 by Mina the Echidna
5: when i became a pony by justusschultz
6: The Adventures of Dragon Charge and Friends: Attack of the Gargoyles by PonyRob
The matches
In each match, I'll be giving my brief thoughts on each fic based on what I've read so far, and selecting a winner. The win criterion is simply whichever of the fics I would prefer to continue reading in the next round.
I'll be putting up the first few matches later today and try to do a few each day until we have a winner.
Everyone got that? THEN LET BATTLE COMMENCE
"Rainbow Dash Gets An Abortion" made the list? It's bad, but... it's going to be one of the better written ones of the bad ones on this list. I'd expect this to be the spelling and grammar optional zone.
--GabbAI
I see Evictus/Twisted Cupcake owns the list xD Also, I vaguely recall RD abortion story. Was it about Scootaloo?
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)
It's the 119th lowest-rated story of all time by my calculations, which puts it below most others in the tournament - although who knows, perhaps it will win me over somehow! (It's not even the only abortion-themed fic in the tournament...
Why would you do this to yourself?
Heh, a list I didn't make!
...The things we do in the name of science.
I salute you, hawthorn.
-GM, master of haw haw.
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I wanted to say "for science!" but GM stole my thunder
Partly masochism, partly because I think even the worst fics can be redeemed, and partly because I've just always really wanted to run a tournament :)
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There's always next time!
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If you’d kept mature on, you might have hit one of mine.
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Thanks! Didn't expect anyone to return to this silly thing. ^^ I quite enjoyed doing it, it was fun to try to give some redemption to these maligned fics. I have considered doing another one, it's been a couple of years since this one and I'm sure we haven't run out of bad fics yet :)
Thank you for your sacrifice, Hawthorne. I'd guess that all these blogposts you made are all more entertaining than the stories themselves.
And I'm only saying that because I sure as hay am not reading any of these stories to confirm it