Your pop culture bracket is seeded incorrectly and it's killing me

Sit down, Pop Culture Twitter. We need to have a talk. Specifically, about this recent rash of pop culture brackets.

Look, I get it. They look fun and simple and there's nothing more deviously pleasurable than watching your friends squirm as you make them pick sides between two things they love.

But most of the ones in circulation are very, very bad, and mostly all for the same reason: They're seeded incorrectly. Or, more likely, not seeded at all.

If you're not super familiar with the concept of sports brackets (and I understand there are huge swaths of sports fandom and pop culture fandom that don't overlap at all), you might dismiss seeding as an unnecessary step that complicates the easy elegance of the bracket.

After all, if your Disney hottie of choice is Aladdin, what does it matter if he faces Flynn Rider or John Smith first? If you already know your favorite Netflix show is Stranger Things, who cares if it beats out your second-favorite Netflix show in the first round?

Well, I do. Because bad seeding is bad storytelling, plain and simple.

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(Above: An example of a correctly seeded bracket. No surprise it comes from a sports site.)

Different competitions have different ways of approaching this process. But on a basic level, "seeding" just means ranking the contenders before the tournament begins, so that the weakest players are knocked out early and the strongest ones don't face off 'til later.

This provides a narrative structure to the tournament, laying the groundwork for both foretold victories and stunning upsets. It ensures that the competition starts out interesting and stays interesting. A really well-considered bracket will also have thought about which competitors should be forced to meet, and be designed with those hopes in mind. Like so:

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It's not that different from the way other kinds of stories are structured. You know Harry Potter will have to face Voldemort eventually, but that it'd make no sense for Harry to kill him off in the first book and then putz around for the next six. You know the big birth or the big death or the big wedding tends to come at the end of a TV season, not in some random middle episode.

There are subversions to this structure, of course – Game of Thrones shocked the world in Season 1 by killing off the man we'd assumed was the protagonist. But even there, the twist only worked because there was a structure in place to begin with. Without that structure, there are no expectations, and without any expectations, there aren't any surprises.

The same is true with all these pop culture brackets. Pitting Chris Evans against Michael B. Jordan in the first round of an Internet Boyfriends bracket makes about as much sense as pitting the Avengers against Thanos in the first act of Infinity War, and then having the heroes spend the rest of the movie lazily dispensing with his third-tier minions.

The final outcome might be the same (or not! a good bracket includes some curveballs!), but the journey there isn't nearly as much fun. I'd go so far as to say a poorly seeded bracket defeats the entire purpose of a bracket – at that point, you might as well just pick your favorite romcom or Beyoncé song from a list and be done with it.

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In contrast, the well-seeded brackets are laid out so that the exercise gets harder and harder as you get closer to the end. (The MCU versus Jaws is easy; the MCU vs. Harry Potter much less so.) They delay the inevitable (it took until the Final Four for the 1 seeds to meet in this year's Fug Madness), but make room for bizarro matchups and unpredictable twists along the way.

And yeah, okay – at the end of the day, none of this really matters. My coworkers and I still printed out the Internet Boyfriends bracket and argued about it, even as we huffed and puffed about the nonsensical order, and our eventual outcomes mattered not a whit to anyone, anywhere, ever. (For the record, though, I'm apparently #TeamJohnCho.)

But if pop culture is gonna borrow from the language of sports, it behooves pop culture to make sure it knows how to speak that language first. Especially when it pertains to storytelling – which, after all, is what pop culture is all about.

And now if you'll excuse me, I've got to run. There's an A24 movie bracket floating around that I need to weigh in on, iffy seeding be damned.