Flipping through the channels on the communication device of your choice, you hear a lovely female voice talking about a whole lot of prize money and a retreat for one very lucky couple. It’s to that place you and your sweetheart have always wanted to go to! The lovely lady is now also telling you that you must call now and send in examples of you and your beloved as a couple, so that you can enter to be eligible for that special prize. All you’ll have to do is show how, as a couple, you handle a few situations. Then the nice lady begins speaking very quickly about rules and guidelines and then the commercial is over, with a flashing telephone number and the words “At absolutely NO COST to our accepted contestants!” Well, what are you waiting for?

First and foremost, this is an OC competition. Original characters only! Fancharacters and established characters are not allowed.

Secondly, and just as importantly, this is a team competition. A team of OCs AND a team of artists. You MUST work with someone else, and EACH of you MUST contribute a character towards making a couple. Beyond having a contribution of a character, how you split up the work is between you and your partner. One wants to write and the other draw? Totally fine. You want to alternate drawing panels? Whatever works for you two. Want to pair up with your real life better half and enter yourselves in the competition? Not only allowed, but wholly encouraged!

The medium in which you choose to enter is wide open. Comics, series of photos, animations, short videos, all are fine! Literature, sadly, is not allowed in this competition because the visual arts will have a noticeable advantage. Single illustrations, while allowed, will suffer from not having the storytelling power of a comic. The idea is that you want your entry to tell your story, not your artist’s comments, and if the judges have to rely on your comments to understand your entry, it will reflect negatively in their minds.

Once you are accepted in the tournament, I will request that the two of you make a DA account for your couple and submit entries through that. The audition is fine being submitted in either one (or both) of your galleries until you hear from me that you are in the tournament. At that point, please make an account and submit entries through there. Though the account will not be considered in the judging, I do encourage you to take full advantage of it: make an ID, update journals, ect. It’s part of the fun, after all!

This of this less as an Endzone competition and more like a Miss SDL one. For those unfamiliar with these terms, I encourage you to become familiar with both, but I will also explain what I mean in more detail here.

There will be 25 couples accepted. There will be five rounds. Each round, the couples will all be posed with a hypothetical situation and your task will be to show the judges how the couple would handle this situation. You will then be judged on how close to your presented relationship dynamic the resolution was (in other words, believability) and, of course, the overall story. Note that the fact that story is stressed does not mean you must weave and epic tale of epic and tragedy and woe. Have fun with it. That is the point, after all :3

The judging will be based on a ranking system. The judges will be asked to rank each entry against every other entry, with 1 being the worst and 25 being the best. The rankings will be averaged out and will be lined up accordingly. (When the journal goes up, it will be reversed: 1 will be the best, 25 the worst.) Five couples will be eliminated each round, and 4 in the last round. So in the second round, the judges will rank the couples from 1 (worst) to 20 (best). In the event of a tie in the rankings, the two entries will be judges alongside each other and the one deemed “better” will have the higher ranking. The points you earn each round will carry over so that the finalists are judged on the entire competition, and not just the final round.

Each round will be 3 weeks. Extensions will be given ONLY if there is a significant amount of people asking for one, and only if the requests come in 2 days before the deadline or earlier. Three weeks is the period because most other OCTs have 2 week rounds, and this allows people to participate in more than one competition (having a partner should also, theoretically, help this). At the end of the three weeks, the judging period will begin. The aim is to have this period last 1-2 weeks, allow you guys a bit of time to recover. We will, of course, try to judge quickly and efficiently, but you will have at least a week of rest time.

Extension rules for the rounds and for the audition are non-negotiable. I was pretty lenient with LoT because I treated it a bit differently from other OCTs due to its original purpose of wanting to have a tournament between friends. This is a public tournament, so I will be considerably stricter on the rules, especially for the extensions. This is your one and only warning.

The audition is one of the most important things in this competition. Beyond determining who will get in the big leagues and who won’t, the audition sets the tone for what the rest of the competition will be judged on. Therefore, there are very strict guidelines.

The audition presents your relationship dynamic. The relationship dynamic is what the future entries will be compared to. So it is super duper ultra mega important that the couple is given the right introduction. As such, you will have 4 weeks for this process, from finding a partner to making everything you need in way of characters and storyline. The help with this, you MUST present these scenes in your audition:

• The way you met. This can be as short or as long as you want, but it must be in there.



• The first fight. This is especially important because it shows how far you can be pushed and how you handle yourselves in anger.



• The make-up. How you reconcile after a fight is just as important for your relationship.



• One more scene of your choice. Something that’s really important for your relationship. First dates, engagements, weddings, anything along those lines will be perfect for this.

You are welcome to include more in your audition, but you must have these four things. While all these things must be presented in the visual medium you plan on using during the competition, the audition is the ONE time that the artist’s comments will be read and taken into consideration as background information. However, they cannot be used to explain any of the four required scenes, merely to give more background to the couple.

There is a possibility for a one week extension for the audition period, but I must have a sizeable amount of people contact me 3 days before the audition period ends or before that. Any request for extra time after the 3 day until the deadline mark will not be taken into account, and the extension can only be one week.

No reference sheet will be needed, as you will be drawing your own characters.

Be nice. Be respectful. And most of all, have fun. This competition is first, foremost, and only a fun, silly project to help people relax without the possibility of drama. I will not hesitate to kick people out if they are not responsible, respectful, mature adults, because that is what I’m going to treat all of you as. Drama in an entry is fine. Drama coming from an artist will not be tolerated. We want to keep this fun and relatively low-stress, and I’m confident you guys can do that. :3

A team of judges has been assembled, and one of their avatars will be introduced each round. There are 5 in all, including, obviously, myself. I will reveal each identity of the judge along with their avatar, as well as in the journal announcing those in the competition itself.

Prizes will also be announced in full along with the contestants. What is announced right now are the prizes coming from the host herself. If anyone would want to contribute a prize, please let me know via a note with an appropriate title. Any kind of a contribution will be appreciated.

• A year’s subscription to DeviantArt.



• A full color commission of the couple at their chosen retreat.

(More prizes to be determined)

Yep, that’s right, in the good old OCT tradition, here is a chatroom that will always be available for contestants, spectators and whoever else to come in, chat, hang out, and relax! Also, might be a good way to find yourself a partner if you haven’t got one yet

[link]

That's right, an extension has been asked for and granted. It's actually a week and a few days, to make it a nice, neat Friday ending date. Hopefully this helps you guys out enough to get your entries in on time!

THE DEADLINE FOR AUDITIONS IS 23:59 EST, JULY 16, 2010.

The submitted auditions will be displayed here until the contestants are decided on and a new journal is created to announce them. Please note me completed auditions with an appropriate title and the names of the collaborating artists.

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