Hey! Hallie here!
If you’ve been keeping up with our Twins in Media posts, you know that we’ve been putting twins from famous media head to head in order to determine which fictional twins represent real twins the best. And, as of now, the first round is over! However, we did leave out a few sets of twins we had originally intended to include in the battles. So let’s go over which twins are moving on and which ones aren’t competing at all. For this post I won’t be including explanations for why the winners were chosen, so be sure to go back to our other posts to see what the battle was like! Along with that, round 2 is going to look a bit different than round 1, so if you want to know what these guys need to do to win for the next round, I’ll explain it in a moment.
Winners (Bolded):
Hikaru and Kaoru vs. Fred and George
Sharon and Susie (‘Parent Trap’ 1961) vs. Hallie and Annie (‘Parent Trap’ 1998)
Janice and Jessica vs. Sumire and Kasumi
Wanda and Pietro Maximoff vs. Luke and Leia
Dipper and Mabel vs. Poppet and Widget
Jacob and Evie Frye vs. Robert and Rosalind Lutece
The Tweedles vs. Thing 1 and Thing 2
Liv and Maddie vs Zack and Cody
Twitches vs. Annalise and Erika
Who Won’t be Competing:
Firstly, you’ll notice one of our groups above has no winners. That’s because both Janice and Jessica (‘The Suite Life of Zack and Cody’) and Sumire and Kasumi (‘Persona 5 Royal’) are absolutely awful representation. Sumire and Kasumi were declared winners by a slight margin, but with the caveat that they would lose against anyone we put them up against. To keep the competition more interesting, we decided to eliminate them altogether. Also, we previously considered Phoebe Buffay and her sister Ursula from ‘Friends’ to compete, as well as Yubaba and Zeniba from ‘Spirited Away’, Flora and Fauna from ‘The Addams Family’, and The Grady Twins from ‘The Shining’. We made posts about all of these sets of twins individually if you want to see our reviews of these characters. The main issue with these four is that they are very minor characters compared to all of the characters listed above. They are also all bad representations of twins. Phoebe and Ursula, as well as Yubaba and Zeniba, all fall under the Evil Twin trope which will never be good representation. Flora and Fauna are simply an offensive attempt at making conjoined twins seem both unsettling and overly similar. And The Grady Twins, along with getting nearly no screen time, started the Creepy Twins trope. In order to avoid another battle like Janice and Jessica vs. Sumire and Kasumi, we have disqualified these groups.
New Battle Rules:
For round 2 we’re simplifying things. Instead of the four previous categories, we’re going for two. These categories will be Audience Perspective and Twin Perspective. In the Audience Perspective category twin characters will be judged based off of character development, storylines, and anything essential to any character in media. The Twin Perspective category will judge twin characters based off of tropes, realistic characteristics, and anything that counts toward or against twin representation. This way we get to judge characters based on everything we notice as fans and as twins without having to stick to four specific categories.
We’ll be back next week with the next round of battles, so make sure to check back to see if your favorite twin representation makes it through to the end. We’re quickly approaching a declaration of a winner. Even I don’t know who’s going to win at this point. I do know that there are several twin characters I’ve loved for a long time on the list of twins moving on to our next round, so this will definitely be interesting.
Don’t do anything fun until I get back!
Hallie
Oreos & Peanut Butter 