Ship of the Month

Main Winners

Ship of the Month ("SOTM") is a bi-monthly, user voted award on the Wiki, first hosted in June 2015. The winner is featured on the front of the page for a month.

The most recent Ship of the Month is Moesings's Cyanea Swann, Deneb Swann and Leda Swann.

The current vote is for March 2024 and can be found here.

Previous winners

For a complete list of the previous winners, see Ship of the Month/Winners

	It is refreshing to get along with your roommate, but a rare delight when you click as genuine friends. Camellia and Thalia work as a symbiotic duo: their trust is shown evidently through how honest the two are with each other, and how they readily share their expertise in sword-fighting and the great outdoors.
—April 2023's description

Sleepyroses's ship consisting of Camellia Cottager and Thalia True, was the April 2023 winner.

History

Ship of the Month was first introduced in June 2015 at the request of users. At the time it was largely an admin pick award, where admins would finalise public votes from a forum thread.

In August 2015 the voting was made private and done via SurveyMonkey, where they would enter a period of inactivity by January 2016.

The OTMs were brought back on April 12th, 2016.

Inspired by September 12th-16th's Navigation Tab Nominations, an OTM renovation began being considered on September 21st, 2016.

On October 3rd, 2016 the SurveyMonkey form reached the maximum number of votes. Two days later on October 5th, the new system inspired by the Navigation Tab Nominations, with user feedback considered, was announced. Public voting was reintroduced and winners would now be chosen based entirely on user vote unless there were complications.

Votes from the SurveyMonkey period were converted to tallies and kept alongside new votes on a Google Doc. In March 2017, the tallies were converted to votes and kept alongside new votes on a Google Sheet.

On July 4th, 2020 a survey asking users about the Of the Months ("OTMs") was released. While the concern was originally Ship of the Month, Character of the Month became involved as discussions increased. The survey results were posted on August 24, 2020.

Winners for September 2020 were picked as normal, but close to their intended release the admins became concerned about posting winners at the height of critical discussion where the characters might become involved, dampening a win. As a result, the OTMs were put on hiatus from September 3rd, 2020 to December 3rd, 2020. The would-be winners have never been announced and are still eligible to win.

The new rules were explained on November 15th, 2020, and the OTMs once again returned on December 3rd, 2020 with a vote for January 2021. These new rules capped the total number of votes for characters at a hypothetical 10 characters, required comments for half of their character votes, and encouraged users to vote with more intention. The new rules were based on user feedback.

In January 2021 the admins announced that the renovations to Ship of the Month hadn't worked as planned and that as a result, Ship of the Month would become a bi-monthly award. It currently alternates with Feature of the Month, a bi-monthly admin choice award.

Rules

As of January 2021, the Ship of the Month rules are as follows:

1. Users cannot vote for a ship that involves their own OCs.
2. OC/Canon ships are viable.
3. All pages involved in the ship must be present on the Wiki to be voted for.
4. Remember that "ships" include non-romantic relationships, such as platonic friendships and familial relations.
5. A ship cannot win if a user involved in the ship won SOTM in the previous month.
   1. This exception applies to “big squad” ships, which we define as groups with 7 or more members. A user involved in this group, even if it won in the previous month, may still win this month.
6. To win, all OCs involved in the ship must have a personality section on their page.
7. If more than 10 ships have been voted for admins will only count the first 10. If some of the first 10 votes are for admins, admins will forgo counting them to bring the number equal to 10.

Voting for Ship of the Month takes place 12 months a year, even in months where there won't be a Ship of the Month award. From the blogpost introducing Feature of the Month:

We hope that by keeping voting the same but changing the frequency of the awards that there will be more votes when we go to pick a winner every other month, as there will be two months of voting counting towards the winner(s), not one.

Trivia

There have been 56 winners of Ship of the Month, though only 55 have been announced. One of these winners, the Admin Team, was an April Fools winner. Overall there have been 54 months of winners.