#WomenInFiction The Final Two Contestants Announced!

WomenInFiction Final Four

When we started this March Madness competition, we had no idea how amazing it would be. With the hundreds of character submissions and thousands of votes each round, we found it difficult to narrow down the options session by session – and our audience clearly had the same heartbreak while voting. Time and again a game would end with one character just barely overcoming the odds and defeating her opponent before moving on to the next round. We’ve had upsets and epic rivalries and more sudden-death tie-breakers than I thought possible.

Still, it is time to wrap this wonderful project up. We now have our finalists. So, to recap last round..

Game 1
Hermione Granger, from the Harry Potter series
Ellen Ripley, from Aliens

and

Game 2
Sarah Connor, from The Terminator
Buffy Summers, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

THE WINNERS: Hermione Granger and Buffy Summers, both with 55% of the vote

Wow. What can I say?

Oh, wait. Something. That’s my job. Um… ok, let’s see.

At first, I took this as the biggest shocking disappointment I felt since Lucy Ricardo lost in the first round. Somehow I saw this as a loss for old-school geeks, and for a moment actually thought “kids today with their hip new characters… we earned our badass 80s heroes by suffering through endless garbage!” I decided that this round came down to a generational gap, with older audiences favoring the more established characters – getting drowned out by younger audiences and their new heroes. But that doesn’t really make that much sense. Buffy trends a lot closer to my generation than to the young folk that grew up with the Harry Potter series – and even that is total bunk. Who can say what “generation” owns which character?

Nope. That was just a confused angry old turd talking. Now that I think on it, I believe the answer is a little more obvious. Hermione and Buffy were both part of a well-developed long-form series, with intricately thought out and interwoven stories to help bring their characters to life. Ripley and Sarah started their careers as little more than victims to seemingly unstoppable monsters. Sure they survived incredibly well considering the circumstances, but it was their sequels (Aliens and Terminator 2) that gave them the chance to shine as heroes in their own right. While you can argue that further chapters in their respective stories did give them more depth, ultimately their stories developed as we went along instead of being with us from the start. Personally, I like that. I like seeing how characters evolve with different creative people at the helm, but I can’t deny that these two heroes lack the consistency of our winners.

Vote now to determine the winner of our Women in Fiction competition!

That’s right, with only a few days left of our competition, we need your vote to determine the winner (and more special awards)! Vote today!

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