Thinking about it, the Homestuck (I think some other fandoms at least tried it too around the same time?) shipping olympics from like 2012 on here could NOT be done today for anything because it was mostly teenagers and young adults having fun rivalry-focused digital sports basically where there was no real prize or appeal of potentially garnering clout outside the small circle of participants or a ship's fanbase, more just collaboratively throwing their ship out art there against each other on 2010s internet and social media before everything mutated into what it is today
Like yeah it was obviously flawed because more experienced or popular artists would be prioritized, there were friend circles on teams affecting dynamics, and of course some people were being vitriolic about the ship wars (I remember the early 2010s j*hnkat vs j*hndave war....), but I feel like the... colder, industry feel of fandom of things nowadays with fanworks would taint it horribly like it has zines where people expect all high production and 50+ pages long with physical merch from the most popular artists within a fandom and would suck the fun out, and being on a team would be unattainable for anyone not a huge artist. We all know of at least a few zines that crashed an burned because of poor mod management, we'd just see that again. It would be zines 2.0 but it would get the chronically online people behaving like that kid who was frothing at the mouth enraged in gym class when you played dodgeball, except it's over fanart of blorbos done for fun rivalry reasons
there would also be about 3 attempted homicides, 5 different callouts, and 10+ doxxings if someone tried to do it today
