Battle of the Maknaes: Quarterfinals

The quarterfinal round has officially ended, and a big thank you goes out to everyone who voted! With just four candidates remaining in each leg of the battle, competition is about to get fierce. Check back on 9/18 at 8PM KST to vote in the semifinal round!

Welcome back to Soompi’s Battle of the Maknaes, where your favorite youngest members duke it out for the “Best Maknae” crown. Last week, fans took to Twitter to cast a ballot for their favorites in a special social voting round, which totaled in close to 850K tweets/votes and several hashtags trending in countries all over the world! Give yourselves a round of applause for all of your hard work!

After 48 hours of intense battles, several maknaes sadly left the battle arena while others reigned supreme. In the females round, while T-ARA’s Jiyeon dominated a win over A Pink’s Hayoung with 82K votes, other match-ups were relatively close in numbers. In the males round, Super Junior’s Kyuhyun came out on top with an astounding 295K votes, with U-KISS’ Jun following close behind in second with 102K votes. Yugyeom of GOT7 pulled in 97K votes, while BTS’ Jungkook rallied 45K votes. Unfortunately, despite coming in second in total of votes, Jun was unfortunately eliminated in round two as Kyuhyun, his same-bracket opponent, ended up having more votes. But give yourselves a pat on the back, KISSMEs! The purpose of our tournaments is to bring fandoms closer together, so we’re proud of all of the fans who took the time out to vote!

(On a side note, a fan brought to our attention several bot accounts which was programmed to tweet for a certain candidate in Round Two. The tweets in question have been tallied and removed from the candidate’s total. We just want to take this time to issue a reminder that all bot voting is discouraged, and can result in your vote being disqualified from the contest, so please vote honestly!)

As previously mentioned, the winners of each bracket in Round Two had been rounded up and ranked from highest to lowest amount of votes to possibly factor in an inclusion of the competition’s Dark Horse. BIGBANG’s Seungri in the Orange Group pulled in 6.6K votes in Round Two, winning over his opponent with 3.9K votes, CNBLUE’s Jungshin. However, he ranked #8 overall in the tournament in terms of numbers of votes, and his spot was thus replaced by Dark Horse winner, B.A.P’s ZELO, who managed to take in 38.6K votes. ZELO will now be competing in the quarterfinals; congratulations! With just one more round before the inevitable finals, competition will be fierce as fan favorites cling to their spots.

Who will be the eventual “Best Maknae?” As always, you get to decide! From now until September 16, 8PM KST, vote in Quarterfinals of our “Battle of the Maknaes!” Pro-tip: You can vote once every hour, so be sure to get those votes in!

Flip through the pages below and let the battle begin!

Update (9/15): 

It seems like there was a mix-up regarding the closing time of the quarterfinal polls. We had meant for the polls to close at 8PM KST on Sept 16, with all of our promotions on social media directed at this timeframe, but a typo in the article read the closing time as 8AM KST. We struggled a lot with whether to close the polls as-is at 8AM, but with all fandoms still promoting the 8PM closing time and new votes for each side of every match-up still coming in, we felt it was fair to keep the polls open until the latter time to account for the fans still diligently voting.

Just to clarify, the polls will close exactly at Sept 16 8PM KST. Again, we are so so sorry for this confusion, and thank you for your support!

(Click on the tournament brackets to enlarge)