2015-middleearthmadness-bracket-rd1The 2016 edition of Middle-earth Madness officially starts today! We’ve split our field of 64 characters and objects into four divisions: Brains, Beauties, Brawn and Baddies.

This is another new format for the competition this year – a la a certain reality show – Survivor if you don’t watch it; and what better show to emulate for our annual March Madness competition! This year, a few past winners are missing -notably Sam and Thranduil. But, as you can imagine, with hundreds of wonderful Tolkien characters to choose from, every character can’t make it into the competition every year.

A note on how the bracket combatants were determined. TheOneRing.net created a document containing all combatants, sub divided into divisions. We asked staff to cast sixteen votes per division, with the votes having a weight of 1-4. Each staffer cast four 4 votes, four 3 votes, four 2 votes and four 1 votes in each division. We then totaled all the votes from each division to determine their rank, and ultimately placed those into our bracket for seeding.

As you can imagine, our staff is diverse and the results were very interesting! Not only are there some great match-ups in this first round, the final four will be an amazing round to see with the top brain, beauty, brawn and baddie going up against each other.

Voting in Round 1 will remain open until March 21st at 10pm ET. At that point, we’ll calculate the winners and post the next round on March 22nd. Follow after the break for a complete bracket image (download it), and to vote on all of our Round 1 match-ups! [Round 1 Bracket]

 


Beauties – Round 1
March 19th – March 21st 2016


 


Brains – Round 1
March 19th – March 21st 2016


 


Brawn – Round 1
March 19th – March 21st 2016


 


Baddies – Round 1
March 19th – March 21st 2016