#we need a turnchetta/eposette final in this

[lesmisshippingshowdown]

Welcome to your LMSS Stealing Wrapped!

It's what you've all clearly been waiting for: the Stealing Stats Dump, taken from every round of stealing in the Les Mis Shipping Showdown Proper plus Steal Off 2!

GENERAL STATS

In total, you submitted a grand total of 209 steals across 16 different ships.

The most stolen round was the quarter finals, largely due to the epic steal war between Valvert and Eposette - there were 67 different steals submitted in this round!

The most common types of steal submitted were art (80 steals), fanfiction (61 steals), and gifsets (21 steals)

In total, you submitted 325,998 words of fanfiction - for context, the Brick herself sits somewhere between 540,000 words and 650,000 words depending on which enshittification-riddled Google link you choose to believe when you search "les miserables word count". Nice going!

SHIP & CHARACTER SPECIFIC STATS

We all know that Eposette had the most steal points overall, with an impressive 170.4 points, but did you know that Enjolferre had the most individual steals submitted (42)?

We also have to give an honourable mention to Valvert in the above category, who submitted the 3rd highest number of individual steals (behind Enjolferre and Eposette) despite missing out on a whole round of stealing opportunities due to being eliminated in the Quarter Finals!

Éponine/Montparnasse was the biggest climber in Steal Off 2, ascending 5 places on the leaderboard, and also received the most steal points for any ship eliminated before we even started stealing.

Speaking of Montparnasse, he was the most multi shipped character in Steal Off 2, receiving a total of 26 steal works and 43.8 steal points across 3 different ships.

A few other characters also received steals across 3 different ships when you take the entire tournament into account - namely Combeferre, Cosette, and Enjolras!

Based on total steal points, and largely due to Eposette's monster effort, Cosette was the most stolen-for character with 177.2 steal points!

The biggest offset between original seed in the bracket & overall Steal Leaderboard standings was, of course, Turnchetta, who were a wildcard entry but finished an impressive 6th on Steal Points!

CREATOR & FANBASE SPECIFIC STATS

The ship with the most individual stealers was Enjolferre - 18 of you produced at least one steal work for this ship!

Our ship's captain award for most works submitted for a single ship goes to @granhairdo, who submitted 12 different works for Éponine/Montparnasse over the course of Steal Off 2 (plus a cheeky newcomer steal)!

This also makes her our most prolific stealer - by works submitted - in a single round of the contest, and across the contest overall!

Our biggest points earner was @21stcenturyjolllly, largely due to a penchant for coming up with full multi movement pieces of classical music in a timeframe that makes me, as a musician who dropped composition after one year at uni, genuinely a bit scared.

And our biggest multishipper was @piierogis, who submitted works for 6 different ships across the tournament!

Even if you weren't mentioned here, there were so many recurring names across the bracket who impressed us greatly with your dedication and creativity, and to name you all would take years and probably get this post marked as spam from the sheer number of people we'd need to tag. Every single one of you has been a cherished and valuable contributor to the stealing cause, and we hope to see you back in a couple of months when we launch our next steal event.

In the meantime, I've got a couple of slightly less time consuming ideas to tide you over and give you your fix of Les Mis ship war polls, so be sure to watch this space...

[melannen]

Turnchetta playlist for @lesmisshippingshowdown

This is for @lesmisshippingshowdown which allows fanworks to give extra points in the polls. We are trying to get the very canonical and important pairing of Turning Woman #3 (a chorus member from the 2012 movie) and Musichetta (Joly's never-onscreen girlfriend from the book) onto the next round.

Even if you don't have a clue what Les Miserables is, can you vote Turnchetta here? As a favor? And if you're not sure, maybe this playlist will convince you of their deep canonicity and long-term importance to the fandom. Or just do it for chaos. Either one as long as you do it.

Spotify playlist:

Tracklist

Three Coins in the Fountain - Connie Francis

Musichetta stupidotta, scanzonata, innocente - Commenti Sonori

My Baby Loves A Bunch of Authors - Moxy Fruvous

What's Love Got To Do With It - Tina Turner

You Turn The Screws - Cake

Turn, Turn, Turn - Dolly Parton

Who Will Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet - Tennesse Ernie Ford

The World Spins Madly On - The Weepies

Sunday Bloody Sunday - U2

飛哥跌落坑渠 (Teddy Boy in the Gutter) - 李寶瑩, 鄧寄塵, 鄭君綿 歡場三怪

Turn Around - They Might Be Giants

Tangled Up In Blue - Indigo Girls

Heartaches by the Number - Cyndi Lauper

Three Times a Lady - Sissel

Let's Face The Music And Dance - Diana Krall

Turn The World Around - Womansong

Liner notes and Youtube links under the cut. (Fanmix liner notes means "write a synopsis of an entire hypothetical musical" right? That's how I've always done it.)

These are largely old standards, which meant I had a range of cover options, and I went with women's covers most of the time.

Three Coins in the Fountain - Connie Francis

This was the first song I thought of for a Musichetta and Three mix! You can read this either as the three being Musichetta, Joly and Bossuet, and only one of them gets a happy ever after - or you can read it as Musichetta, Three, and one of their other working woman friends, and only one of them ends up marrying rich.

2. Musichetta stupidotta, scanzonata, innocente - Commenti Sonori

We needed an actual musichetta on this mix. The title translates as "Musichetta stupid, carefree, and innocent" - this is her in her early days, working, spending time with the girlfriends of her youth like Three, dreaming of a superb future.

3. My Baby Loves A Bunch of Authors - Moxy Fruvous

Here she is as she gets more involved with the students, gets drawn into the artistic world, goes to fancy parties, becomes someone's mistress, falls in love with literature and books.

4. What's Love Got To Do With It - Tina Turner

That world of surface romance and semi-transactional sex starts to harden her, even as she has one (two?) boys who delight in her and she in them.

5. You Turn The Screws - Cake

In the full musical version this would be a duet between Three and Musichetta where they are growing apart as she draws further into the political, literary, and bourgeois world of her students and Three commits to staying as she is and they both become scornful of each other's priorities. They see each other in passing around the Corinthe and don't speak but don't forget. (This is probably happening around the time of the July Revolution, with red, white and blue everywhere.)

6. Turn, Turn, Turn - Dolly Parton

And time passes and everyone gets older, and maybe it can go on like this forever but time passes and it won't, but it's always been that way. (This song is a quote from the book of Ecclesiastes which is very good poetry to read when you're disillusioned with the world and not sure what the point of keeping going is when it's just more of the same and always getting worse.)

7. Who Will Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet - Tennessee Ernie Ford

There start to be ominous undertones in Musichetta's world. It feels like July 1830 only somehow not the same. Her sweet boys fuss over her but at the same time start making noises about what she'll do when they're gone (but with very little understanding of what she *will* do if they're gone. She doesn't disillusion them of course.)

8. The World Spins Madly On - The Weepies

This song plays while both Musichetta and Three are holed up in their separate apartments across town from each other, hearing the gunshots go off and staying in bed, Musichetta thinking about how she's abandoned her boys to fight without her and Three thinking about how she's let Musichetta get involved in all that without her.

9. Sunday Bloody Sunday - U2

They wake up and go down to the Rue Chanvrerie and get blood all over their pretty little feet and their eyes meet while they sing and work together but separately.

10. 飛哥跌落坑渠 (Teddy Boy in the Gutter) - 李寶瑩, 鄧寄塵, 鄭君綿 歡場三怪

This is a reprise of the first song, courtesy of 1960s Cantonese cinema which rewrote the lyrics as being about a girl of the town finding her boy stinking and disgusting in the gutter. I think it's supposed to be a scathing parody and he's just drunk and wearing too much perfume, but to the extent of my ability to translate the Cantonese, I think it also works here, as Three and Musichetta find the remains of her boys and Three is scornful of her squeamishness while hiding her compassion for her grief.

11. Turn Around - They Might Be Giants

Trauma. They don't deal well with the survivor's guilt.

12. Tangled Up In Blue - Indigo Girls

This is the key to the whole love story, I knew this song in the Indigo Girls cover first, so it's always been a song about star-crossed lesbians to me; they knew each other once, and they weren't even that different in class, but one of them ended up drifting and taking whatever manual work she could to get by, and one committed to spending time with college boys and reading medieval Italian poetry and doing sex-work adjacent work when she couldn't get anything else, and they keep coming together and separating again because they can't stay apart but they can't compromise with each other either. This is Three's song for Musichetta (how the specific incidents in the song line up with the plot is up to the person who ends up writing the book.)

13. Heartaches by the Number - Cyndi Lauper

This is Musichetta's song for Three - from her POV Three keeps leaving and breaking her heart while she stays still, even though at the time Three left she thought it didn't matter and she didn't care, looking back from this end she can't stand it, and she's determined the next time she sees Three she makes it clear how much it hurt her.

14. Three Times a Lady - Sissel

And here she finally meets up with Three again but instead of pouring out her hurt she ends up pouring out her love instead!

15. Let's Face The Music And Dance - Diana Krall

Well, says Three, the world is awful and nothing we do matters, so we might as well keep trying to make it better (this is Three admitting that she loves Musichetta too, and her boys and their lost causes weren't all wrong.)

16. Turn The World Around

(Couldn't find the version on Spotify on Youtube, so this is a random women's community chorus.)

With Musichetta's and Three's views reconciled, they realize that the key is to forget everyone's old grievances and come together in solidarity to make the world better for everyone with everyone's skills and resources together, and it does matter even though it doesn't matter, and they lead the Turning women (who have also all paired off now) in this song instead.

Curtain call!

[lesmisshippingshowdown]

not trying to sound like a salty Valvert fan, but look at the amount of votes on the poll compared to your other polls. there might be some rigging and sock puppet votes involved on the eposette side.

hiya, thanks for raising your concern.

i do want to point out that eposette vs. valvert also has considerably more notes than any other quarter final which directly correlates with more votes - the more people reblog a post, the more people see it, the more people vote on it. it's also been a trend throughout the tournament that the closer the match up, the more notes & votes it tends to get (largely because people keep reblogging it to ask for votes, which you don't really feel the need to do if you're winning 80-20): both turnchetta polls had 1000+ votes in rounds where most other match ups were averaging between 500-700, and the courferre vs. courfius sudden death round got over 1000 votes in just 24 hours. eposette and valvert are both extremely popular ships in quite different sections of fandom so in my view it's not especially surprising that it's the poll that has generated the most traction.

additionally, as per our rules, both of us as mods have been around in terms of fandom poll drama. we know that completely trying to stamp out sock puppetry/vote rigging/bot votes etc is essentially pointless, which is why we are basically saying live and let live unless it's "excessive, malicious, or against the spirit of the tournament." essentially, if somebody spots eposette suddenly gaining 20% on valvert in the space of an hour then yeah, absolutely bring that to our attention and we will consider what we want to do about it. however, a large number of votes on a poll that's currently sitting at 50-50 (and which has been hovering around that ratio since it was published less than 24 hours ago) is not something that strikes me as immediate cause for suspicion and concern. if anything, if we're using the large number of votes as proof of sock puppetry, that would suggest that valvert fans are also getting in on the act, in which case i say if both sides want to play that way then let the best puppeteer win ;)

tl;dr thanks for raising this, at this moment in time we are not concerned, but we will of course keep an eye on every match up in case circumstances do arise that make us genuinely suspicious.

(p.s. it's also worth pointing out, if anyone is thinking of using nefarious vote rigging tactics to win any match up in this tournament, that we have quite literally gifted you a nefarious vote rigging tactic that has been proven to work in the previous round and is also much more fun and collaborative than getting your ms scribe on. so, yknow, if you want to play dirty at least give the rest of us some good fanfiction to read about it)