Supernatural Rarepair Shipfest 2013

 The following rules and guidelines apply to everyone involved in the SRS, and should be read by everyone before signing up for the competition.

What The Supernatural Rarepair Shipfest Is

The Supernatural Rarepair Shipfest 2013 – or, as it is more usually known, the SRS – is a fanworks competition for underappreciated ships of the Supernatural fandom, accepting just about everything except Destiel, Wincest, Sabriel, and Samifer. It will run from late September to December.

SRS is designed as a friendly competition and as the inspiration for a lot of new fanworks, in whatever form participants wish to make them – writers, artists, musicians, cosplayers, vidders, fanmixers, creative bakers, arrangers of meaningful flowers, we’ll take anyone. Or, if creation isn’t your thing, you can sign up just to watch the entries roll in and vote on your favourites.

Everyone who wants to take part or vote in SRS must sign up during ???. Everyone who signs up should be aware that this is not a serious competition about finding the best ship! We want SRS to be about having fun, making friends and creating cool things.

With that in mind, read on to learn more.

Ships

For the purposes of this competition, a character is “a unique canonical intelligent entity not corresponding to a real-world equivalent.” Different iterations of a character still count as that character, so girl!Dean or 2014!Dean or anyother!Dean will all be treated as Dean. However, demons and their hosts are considered separate characters, as are angels and their vessels.

Following from this, a ship is defined as a romantic and/or sexual relationship between two or more characters. A rarepair is any ship apart from Castiel/Dean, Dean/Sam or Gabriel/Sam, because these are, statistically, the three most common pairings in the fandom.

So, in summary, when we say rarepair, we mean the following:

• No Destiel, Wincest, Sabriel, or Samifer.
• No selfcest.
• No object shipping.
• No RPF or actor shipping. (Including ‘The French Mistake’ characters.)
• No crossover ships.
• No original character ships.
• No platonic ships.
• Everything else is good to go.

Teams

Every person wishing to be involved in SRS 2013 in any way must signup to a team. Those wishing to vote for entries without producing anything themselves should sign up for Team Chuck, which will have as many members as wish to join.

All other teams are known as participant teams. They are limited to between three and five members, including a team leader who will be responsible for organizing the team community and submitting entries. Each participant team is expected to produce one piece of work for each main round which is focused on a rarepair. There are two forms of participant team: ship teams and monster of the week (MotW) teams.

Ship teams are focused on a single rarepair, and their entry for every round must focus on it. Only one ship team can exist per rarepair. Ship teams are the standard form of team, and will be officially named by alphabetical first names separated by forward slashes e.g. Team Adam/Bobby, Team Anna/Bela/Charlie.

MotW teams can choose a different rarepair for each round if they wish, but are limited to rarepairs with no existing ship team. Multiple teams will be created if enough participants sign up to MotW teams. MotW teams act as a wildcard, for multishippers or shippers of very rare pairings, and will be named after various canonical monsters as chosen by pre-competition poll.

All people who sign up, regardless of team, will be able to vote on entries for the Main Rounds, and produce Bonus Round entries if they wish to do so.

Team Organisation

The distribution of work and any temporary leaves of absence should be arranged within the team without the need to alert the mods. However, if any participants wish to leave the competition the mods should be informed. You should also contact the mods immediately if your team leader stops responding to the rest of the team for more than three days consecutively without prior warning.

During the competition, participants may transfer to any team with fewer than the maximum member count provided they first approve it with that team’s leader, and alert their present team leader and the mods. Participants who transfer teams after the first Main Round begins will not take any previously earned points with them.

Any team which, due to absent or transferred members, falls below the minimum member count after the Main Round One prompt is released will be allowed to continue if they wish to do so.

Teams may disband at any time if they wish, provided an effort has been made to contact all team members and the team is in favour after at least 72 hours of discussion. Disbanding teams should contact the mods, and arrange to move to new teams if they wish to do so. The team’s existing points will not be transferred.

Main Rounds

Main Rounds are the main focus of the competition and the major system for receiving points. Each Main Round will be prompt-based, with the prompt being released three weeks before the deadline for entries. Every participant team is expected to produce a single entry for each Main Round based on their rarepair.

Main Round entries must be produced solely by members of the team, but within the team members can work collaboratively or individually. The creator of each entry should be kept anonymous to those outside the team until the de-anon post at the end of voting. Even if a potential entry is not chosen as the final team submission, we ask that you do not de-anon until this time.

Voting will open as soon as possible after the round deadline, and will last for two or three weeks. Voting is open to all those who signed up for the competition, regardless of team. When voting, you will be asked to consider how well the entry portrayed the ship in question and how well it suited the prompt given as well as its overall quality.

Entries

Main Round entries can be in any media or combination of no more than two media, but to ensure approximately equal effort, the following restrictions apply:

• Written entries must be between 1000 and 4000 words.
• Graphical entries may have no more than 10 images or panels.
• Combined written and graphical entries with more than 1000 words may contain no more than 4 images.

Entries which exceed these limits will be subject to a point penalty. There are no restrictions on any other media.

Within an entry, any images or videos containing text – for example, captions or speech bubbles – should be followed by a transcription of the text, which will count towards the wordcount.

For consistency, we will use http://www.wordcounter.net/ to calculate all word counts.

Bonus Rounds

Bonus Rounds are optional and open to all who signed up, including Team Chuck members. They are intended to be a fun chance to score extra points. Bonus Rounds begin every two weeks and last until the opening of the next round. 

Prompts will vary in form, but generally, the prompt for the bonus round will be a layout for more specific prompts given by participants. Some points will be earned for providing prompts, but more will be available for filling the prompts of other participants.

This year, bonus rounds will be for rarepairs only. Requests for the four forbidden ships (Wincest, Destiel, Sabriel, and Samifer) will be deleted and no points will be given.

Scoring

Bonus Round prompts receive 5 points per prompt up to a maximum limit specified on the round. Fills receive 15 points for the first three fills per prompt, 10 for the next three, and 5 for the three after that. Fills for prompts with nine or more previous fills will no longer receive points. In the case of differently formatted bonus rounds, the point allocation will be listed in the round description.

Main Round entries will automatically receive 75 participation points if they are submitted before the deadline. The top ten entries voted for will also receive placement points as follows:
600 points for first place
500 points for second place
400 points for third place
350 points for fourth place
300 points for fifth place
250 points for sixth place
200 points for seventh place
150 points for eighth place
100 points for ninth place
50 points for tenth place
During voting, 25 points will be awarded to every team in which all (non-absent) members cast a vote.

Point penalties will be applied in the case of voting fraud (10 point penalty) and main round entries which violate the media limitations (10 point penalty per additional image, 5 point penalty per additional 50 words after a 50 word buffer to account for word count software errors).

Additional point penalties may be introduced at the mods' discretion.

Schedule

September 7: Signups open. Bonus Round 0 (BR0) opens.
September 21: Signups close. BR1 opens.
September 28: Main Round One (MR1) prompt.
October 6: BR2 opens.
October 20: MR1 deadline. BR3 opens.
October 27: MR2 prompt.
November 3: BR4 opens.
November 17: MR1 voting closes. MR2 deadline. BR 5 opens.
November 24: MR3 prompt.
December 1: BR 6 opens.
December 8: MR2 voting closes. MR3 deadline. BR6 closes.
December 15: MR3 voting closes. Competition ends.

Behavior Policy

Everyone who signs up for the SRS is subject to the following behaviour policy: don’t be a dick.

For general advice on this, we recommend Wikimedia’s essay on the topic, but for the purposes of this competition, please be aware that we will not tolerate hate towards any ships, characters, actors, Supernatural writers, teams, works, participants or mods. Having opinions is fine, but they should be communicated politely and with respect for the differing opinions of others.

If anyone involved in the competition is behaving unacceptably, please do not respond yourself, directly or otherwise. Instead, alert the mods via email to srs2013mods@aim.com with the words BEHAVIOR POLICY in the subject line.

Incidents will be dealt with at the mods’ discretion, and may result in a ban from the competition.

Contact Us

For participants, the first point of contact about the competition should be your team leader. However, anyone signed up for the competition is welcome to contact the mods directly if they have any questions or concerns. There are three ways to do this:

Via an ask on our official Tumblr, which functions as an askblog for the competition.
Via a comment on this or any other post on our official Dreamwidth.
Via email to srs2013mods@aim.com