𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐃𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐖𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐀𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐃𝐒 𝟐𝐊𝟐𝟒

𝐈𝐌𝐏𝐎𝐑𝐓𝐀𝐍𝐓 𝐀𝐍𝐍𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 pt.2

Hello to all my Grand Masquerade Fam.

Today I'm posting this chapter to clean up the clutter that messed up this entire award. Well, let's just say that the past few days hadn't really been entertaining for me. I spent nights regretting my decisions both off and on Wattpad. I really can't discern whether I'm done with my family issues yet but I'm definitely done with the experience I had on Wattpad recently.

I went through the accusatory comments flooding the result and announcement chapters and I must say some of you turned it into your own battlegrounds, to say the least, and I'm definitely not pleased. But I'll be coming back to it later on.

So first starting with the review that sparked all the controversies:

I'm going to delete it, BUT only the two controversial reviews that were judged unfairly according to some of the Wattpaders over here. The rest of the judgment will remain unaffected. The reviews published in TGM awards are by no means meant to offend readers and fandoms. Additionally, the personal reviews given by the assigned judges don't represent the ideology of the awards or the opinion of the host i.e. me.

Talking of the biased judgment and to again clear my stand on it, I did read the judge's reviews and was very well aware of its wordings, though its impact was vague to me which later resulted in so much upheaval. To answer those who accused me of not having read the reviews and just pasting them here in result chapters without a care, for your kind information, this is not how it really works. Because if I had done so, this unwanted situation would have arisen long ago.

To begin with, I take judgments of the different categories in doc format submitted by judges. After the submission, I 'proofread' the reviews. Yes, you heard that right. But only for the sake of checking any grammatical & spelling mistakes, to check if the scores are given in different criteria and summed up correctly or not, etc.

For real instance, I came across a few reviews where a particular paragraph was repeated twice. Some reviews had punctuation errors like forgetting full stops at the end of every statement. A judge gave marks in BLURB criteria out of 5 which was supposed to be out of 10 which resulted in wrong scores. You may not believe it, but I even received multiple results where the judge had tallied the scores incorrectly resulting in erroneous scorecards with vast differences of even about 15 marks. I won't be mentioning the names of the judges because that's not the matter here, but to come up and say that the host did little to go through the reviews and posted them without any care is simply a false accusation. I remember all these minute details because I've spent hours on the reviews sent by the judges, I still have the docs as proof but I won't be disclosing them.

I proofread the reviews to eliminate the aforementioned issues, not to cut down the statements of the judges as per my wish just because I'm the host. The duty and responsibility of a Wattpad award host is the same as any other real-life award host. My responsibility is to look after the proceedings of the award and make sure everything runs smoothly in a properly determined manner. I still stick to my notion that I've no say in the judgment of a particular judge and I definitely have no right to edit their statements until and unless it uses abusive language. Believe me, no judge would want that to happen without their consent.

Second thing, it's true that I'd initially planned to talk about the review to the judge but later on I dropped the idea and I've valid reasons for that. First would be that I thought it would be better to release it in the public domain, not because I had intentions to hurt or demotivate the talented writers but because the one-sided and stereotypical views of such claimed judges shouldn't be hidden from the public. I needed to know not just as a host but also as a fellow BTS fanfiction writer about the stand of others on such reviews.