The purpose of these awards is to honor the most beautifully written stories in the Magnificent 7 fandom that best use true canon characterization. Our aim was to go "back to basics" and honor fiction that depicted these flawed action heroes in a way that resonated with the characters created by the synergy of the actors, directors, writers and producers of the original series.

We want to emphasize that these are not "all purpose" Mag7 awards. We focused solely on stories that would leave the reader who loves the actual series thinking:  "Yes, that's how B-C-E-JD-J-N- and/or V would act, react, feel and speak if they were fighting an alien invasion as the members of a starship crew, were taking down gun runners as members of an ATF team, were tracking down a stage robber who was holding one of their own hostage, were (or wanted to be) in a sexual relationship with another of the seven, were turned into master vampires protecting mankind from their own kind, were facing a possibly permanent crippling injury, were . . . "  Well, you get the picture.

There are many beautifully written stories in this fandom we didn't consider for our awards. We hope the best of these will be winners in the next MoM contest. In fact, some of them were winners in past MoM contests and were given very high scores by some of our site owners who participated as judges. We had no problem in the context of those awards with giving top scores to well written stories completely focused on development of ATF background fanon or which took place in a domestic rather than action setting or which used some of the less extreme variations on canon characterization. However, for the purposes of our awards we looked for the stories that best used the original characters in old west stories or adapted them to some of the seemingly endless supply of action AUs that have grown up in this fandom. (There were a few innovative authors who managed to do both in one story.)

So here is our criteria:  Our award winners are stories about a group of courageous, diverse, flawed, action heroes without blood or legal ties who ultimately become a loyal band of brothers. The stories all have exceptional literary merit and are faithful to canon characterization. Of course, as in the series, these action heroes take on a somewhat different demeanor in a comedy.

A few of the authors we honor might be surprised at which of their stories have been selected. We've found that certain conventions, characterizations and fanon have grown up around some slash pairings, on some character specific lists, in genres such as H/C and in AUs such as ATF, L/B, etc. Readers expect to find these elements when they read a story and that may lead writers to conform their stories to satisfying those expectations. Often the resulting characterizations resonate more strongly with fanon than with canon.  However, some of these same authors, when writing stories outside these restrictive genres, have come up with great stories that more closely resonate with canon. Those were the ones awarded here.

It was inevitable that some authors would be multiple award winners (though we did try to limit the number of awarded stories by any single author). However, almost 60 authors are represented here and they are not dominated by any particular cadre or members of any particular list. Some of the stories are the first ones written by an author in this fandom. Others are classics written by authors who have since left for another fandom, to try their hands at profic or simply to cope with real life.

Sometime later this month all the winning authors will be getting an award gif as part of a congratulatory email.  I hope any author who doesn't get one by New Years will let us know - a few servers in the past have bounced our email as spam even though we have no advertising.

We'd love to hear from you after you review our awards list. Do you think the chosen stories hit the mark?  If not, why not?  (Criticisms will not be shared with the authors.)  Did we miss the boat by omitting some of the stories you know were nominated (perhaps because you or a friend nominated them)?  Are you inspired to read an author you've never read before?  Do you think our view of canon characterization as represented by the awarded stories is really screwed up?  Shows brilliant insight?  Is likely to incite arguments?