Hi! Now that the shipping showdown is over I wanted to say something I've been thinking about for a while but I don't want it to sound as criticism or anything like that. I don't really understand why gifsets score so much. I understand there's work behind them. If I understand correctly, a gif scores the same as 30 seconds of a cosplay video when the gif is much shorter and the cosplay video involves dressing up+makeup+maybe even script and obviously filming it yourself. And I understand cosplay has a base of 0.3%/0.1% but gifsets also put on advantage some ships over others. Ships that have interactions in the musical and adaptations have it so much easier than ships that doesn't like JBM, Fantine/Simplice or Jehanparnasse
Not to worry, we're always open to feedback on our scoring - this is especially pertinent as we're now between tournaments so we'd love to iron out any kinks before we get to the Summer of Steal! I've got some ideas of my own for things I think could work better next time out, I'm sure my co-mod does too, and I'm sure you guys have your own critiques and observations as well! Trying to create a fair and objective scoring system for a huge range of creative work is an inherently challenging task and we really appreciate you guys's help and polite feedback in getting it right :)
Funnily enough, gifsets have actually been nerfed since the 2025 tournament, when they were really overpowered. We do want to stress that there is a lot of work involved in making a gif, especially in the editing/recolouring stage, and them being a short looping image is not necessarily indicative of them being lower effort!
As it stands, a standard 8-10 image gifset (which is what we most commonly see) would earn its stealer 2.4-3 points, which is the same as a full colour artwork or 2400-3000 words of fanfiction (i.e. a decent length one shot). This seems fair enough to me in terms of the amount of time and effort the average stealer may spend on any of those and, if anything, my thinking is actually that we've potentially lowballed cosplay scoring rather than overshooting on gifsets! This is something we will look into for our next event :)
As for ships with more adaptations having an advantage - we totally hear you and understand your frustration, but this is sadly an unfortunate side effect of a shipping contest for a work like Les Mis where there are so, so many characters & possible ship combinations that it is not possible to include them in every adaptation (not to mention some characters don't even interact in canon, like Jehanparnasse)! Canon ships, or ships between major characters who have lots of interactions, always have an advantage when it comes to fanwork creation, whether in a competitive context or if you're just doing it for fun. The extra creativity involved in making fanworks for a rarepair or crackship is, in my view, part of the fun!
However, there are ways around this, and I think it's vital to note that ships like Jehanparnasse & Gyriel in particular have done incredibly well on steals this year even without a ton of canon material to go on:
Our goal is always to make different steal types as equally scored as possible when factoring in relative time/effort - obviously we don't always get this right which is why we appreciate feedback when we get our maths wrong! But as we said creating 10 gifs of e.g. one of the five billion Valvert confrontation bootlegs in existence scores the same as, for instance, drawing a full colour artwork of Jehanparnasse (and inb4 "well some of us aren't artists", remember we do not EVER judge on quality and we love to see people trying new things!)
You are also explicitly welcome to use non-canon material in your steals - sorry to invoke this particular media property, but you would be totally welcome to create a gifset à la the Marauders fandom where they infamously make up for a lack of canon footage of their faves by splicing together clips of their faceclaims!
We hope this clarifies our position a little bit - thanks again for your feedback <3
