Once again, thank you so so much to everyone who participated in the tournament! This has been a blast to run, and it's great to see everyone come together to play dress-up with Ethan.
Someone asked if I could post the nomination tallies, so here they are below, along with some notes:
Unsurprisingly, the top five in terms of nominations all made it decently far in the bracket.
Grand Palais suit was eliminated surprisingly early! Same with Lawyer get-up. I really expected that one to be a potential semi-finalist.
I did not expect Husband sweater or Green button-up to make it as far as they did lol
There are a couple other outfits that I expected to go much further, like White undershirt and Infiltration suit.
The movies that were represented the most in the bracket were MI2, MI5, and MI8, but overall MI8 outfits got the most nominations, followed by MI4 and MI2. Despite the high number of total nominations, MI2 did the worst overall in the bracket - almost all MI2 outfits were eliminated in the first round, and the furthest an MI2 outfit got in the main bracket was Round 2 of 6 (Green button-up); the furthest one got in the loser's bracket was Round 4 of 8 (Green button-up again).
This is likely in part because of how I seeded the bracket (i.e., how I determined the match-ups) - I had to estimate which ones would be heavy-weights and which ones would be eliminated quickly so we didn't end up with big contenders facing off in the early rounds, and so I biased the seed against MI2 by pitting those outfits against ones I knew (or at least, thought I knew) would go further, as I assumed MI2 would be the least popular overall. The next time I run this I'm going to spread them out to give them a more fair shot at competing.
The top three polls in terms of total votes were:
Grand Finale (Blue Sweater vs Booty shorts): 415 votes
Main Bracket Round 2 (Booty shorts vs Burgundy dress shirt): 332 votes
Main Bracket Round 1 (Bruce Springsteen tee vs Dorky suit): 284 votes
Finally, here are some tips if anyone else wants to run one of these in the fandom, because I've never run one before and it was a lot of work:
I used Challonge to build the bracket.
The number of contenders have to be in powers of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc).
If you solicit nominations prior to building the bracket, you're going to have to do some data-clean up to standardize the outfit names and eliminate any repeats. If you do that, google forms is the easiest option because you can generate a linked google sheet that automatically updates with new form responses, and then clean up the data from there.
To make it easier on yourself for nominations, I would include two separate questions on the form asking people what movie and what scene the outfit they're nominating is from (sometimes people forgot to include those in the nomination responses i got, so it was sometimes difficult to find them).
I recommend manually pairing up the match-ups as opposed to letting Challonge seed the bracket randomly, so you can spread (what you think will be) heavy-weight contenders far apart on the bracket itself so they don't face off too early. I made a whoopsie where Blue sweater faced off against Lawyer get-up in Round 2 because I placed their initial match-ups too close together. The downside of that situation is that powerful fan favourites get eliminated too early.
Double elimination (which is what I ran) is a LOT of work and can get a little confusing. Challonge is very helpful in keeping track of all that for you, but single elimination is definitely easier overall.
By far the most time-consuming part was getting screenshots of all the outfits and resizing them to 800x820 (you can probably get away with them being smaller) so they looked nice and neat on the posts. There's a free online version of Photoshop I use that's pretty good for photo editing if that helps at all. You could also just collect the photos off google search if you want lol, it's a lot less work but doesn't look as nice imo. With the way tumblr formats photosets, if photos are radically different sizes, tumblr resizes them in a wonky way that cuts off parts of the pictures.
People might know all of this already, but if you don't, hopefully it's helpful! It would be great to see more tournament brackets in this fandom in the future. An outfit bracket for Benji would be really fun, since I think he wears the most outfits outside of Ethan.
Thank you again to everyone for participating!
