As March Madness draws to a close, so does our annual cultural fixation with putting anything and everything into competitive brackets, an online pastime that seemed to reach a fever pitch in 2018. While everything from nonbasketball sports to neoliberal shills have received the bracket treatment, pop culture makes for prime bracket fodder, inviting spirited debate over not just the subject of any given bracket, but the very nature of the bracket itself.
A definitive bracket of pop culture brackets
To celebrate March Madness, we bracketed a month of brackets.
Aja Romano wrote about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
Just look at the Disney vs. Pixar bracket that broke the internet this year, so heinously brutal and weirdly seeded that it’s spawned a litany of do-overs by people who now realize their folly — specifically that the internet is a hellspawn of time-suckage from which no good things arise, only endless emotional labor and exhaustion.
To help combat that exhaustion (or, more honestly, exacerbate it), we’ve compiled this year’s best, weirdest, and most oddly specific pop-culture brackets, presented in, yes, a bracket, to help determine which viral match-up best encapsulates 2018’s Bracket Madness. Enjoy our 64-entry, single-elimination round-up, nonseeded because our masochism only extends so far. And yes, 17 of them are Disney-related. Don’t @ us.
You can download the large version here, and find links to all the original brackets below.
Region 1: Internet Culture & Absurdism
Region 2: Arts & Entertainment
- Hottest Disney Guy
- Parks and Recs 64-Character Tournament
- Pop Queen March Madness
- Best Rapper in the Game (Under 40)
- Anime adaptations of Shounen Jump Manga series
- Nintendo vs. Sega
- Emo Songs of the 2000s
- Kanye Madness
- The Rom-Com Bracket
- The A24 Bracket
- MCU (We’ll let these many MCU brackets duke it out)
- Nickelodeon
- Doctor Who
- Mariah Carey No. 1s vs Singles
- Madonna
- Broadway Bracket
Region 3: General culture
Region 4: Disney/Pixar
- Original Disney vs. Pixar bracket
- Attempt 2: “a 68 movie bracket with seeding based on Rotten Tomatoes rankings”
- Attempt 3, takes the Disney vs. Pixar bracket “to the next level”
- Attempt 4, “correct seeding for the best Disney/Pixar movie bracket.”
- Attempt 5, the “#BetterDisneyBracket,” presented “after much deliberation”
- Attempt 6, the “indisputably correct” Disney vs. Pixar bracket
- Attempt 7, “I’m emotionally drained”
- Attempt 8, “an actually logical Disney/Pixar bracket”
- Attempt 9, “for those of you who are frustrated with poor seeding in other brackets”
- Attempt 10, “The Official All-Time Disney/Pixar bracket”
- The Definitive Disney Bracket (updated from a previous less-definitive bracket)
- The Definitive Disney Bracket, attempt 2, in 64-Movie Single Elimination
- The Definitive Disney Movie Tournament, attempt 3
- The Better Disney Bracket, attempt 4
- The Ultimate Disney Bracket, attempt 5
- Animated Movies That Made People Furries
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