I thought I understood the Hugos... · 7:51pm Apr 26th, 2016
But upon seeing my little pony on the potentials ballot this year, I was scratching my head.
I thought they were specifically for science-fiction fantasy stuff, and I guess MLP qualifies under fantasy, but has there ever been a kid's show nominated before?
I looked at everything else on the ballot and it feels very much adult-focused. Or young adult focused, as opposed to aimed at children.
Don't get me wrong, I love pony and think it's awesome, but I find it strange to imagine it having a place in the Hugos. Maybe I just have the wrong impression of them. In my defense, I've never been an avid follower of them. I knew of them sure, but it wasn't til the puppy thing occurred that I took much notice of them.
Can someone who knows the Hugos better than me explain how this makes sense? I know there are really smart folks who read these.
Though throughout it all, I can't help but feel Bad Horse is somehow responsible.
(The episode nominated is The Cutie Map part 1 & 2)
You're wrong. The Hugo is clearly for a short story about MLP that Cold in Gardez must have written.
I remembered Boaty McBoatface, and decided to google for how Hugo gets nominated.
And here's what I found...
Hmmmmm. :)
Well, "The Cutie Map" qualifies as Alternate History (and time travel).
But then by that standard, the Ian McKellan Richard III, in which the Spanish Civil War of the 1920's takes place in England instead, should have been on the Hugo ballot. And I wouldn't have been displeased with that because it was a damn clever bit of Alternate History.
Interesting that you bring up Sad Puppies. Apparently The Cutie Map showed up on their slate-except-not-an-actual-slate-wink-wink.
EDIT: Their more-political splinter group, the Rabid Puppies, also included The Cutie Map in their slate. Gawd, that logo is cringe-worthy...
EDIT 2: Still, correlation is not causation.
Still, this is saddening. A Hugo nomination should be an impressive accomplishment for the writers, but already we're getting dragged into this Gamergate-tier drama. The Guardian mentions MLP's nomination in its reaction of knee-jerk dismay.
3898509 After the fiasco of the hugos no-awarding half the slates last year, it seems that the rabids have adopted a "burn it down and salt the earth" approach to the whole thing. To a degree I can't blame them; the Hugo voters chose to deny awards to authors on the basis of who nominated them rather than the quality of their work. That isn't a healthy attitude by any measure.
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Ah, it's that thing again, is it? Well then that explains it.
Actually, we all helped him. Unintentionally, of course. You know how he is. More slippery than an eel. More conniving than Rommel. More bad than Bad Ass. More demonic than... I dunno... the demon goat from Goat Simulator. Sure.
You realize, Ferret, that you making a blogpost about this will undoubtedly draw the eyes of those that are most relevant to this. This helps further than Bad Horse's plans, for this teeny tiny distraction is more than enough time for the Bad Horse to go and wreck shit. Lotsa pillaging, poisoning, and more than likely pooping (he likes those poop jokes too much. You know one his plans will involve poop one day). Because that is how evil do.
Also, what are the Hugos? I have no idea dum dee doo :B
Also also, Ferret, you should realize this post is in and of itself a distraction and that the Bad Horse will be upon you. I dunno. I bet he's gonna spam your phone or something. Because evil.
EVOOOOOL.
*makes whooshy ghost noises*
Oh great, now I can't be happy about this anymore. :(
3898930 I'm sawwy
I... buh... wha?
I'd have posted a comment about this earlier, but it took most of the afternoon to write up all the necessary context.
3898509
Yeah. :( The best we can hope for is the actual Hugo voters giving it a watch and a fair shake, on the basis that it's a reasonably solid episode of a good show. But I suspect the wider community is going to treat it as a punchline, because MLP.
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The flip side of that is that the Hugo finalists have historically been the product of organic collective decision (write-in campaigns or an author's vote-begging might have gotten individual works on the ballot, the way they did in Sad Puppies 2, but if you felt that was unfair you could ignore it and vote for the other ones in the category). But in the No Awarded categories last year, the only works available as a choice were those dictated by Brad Torgerson and his voting bloc. The process of slate voting itself was so toxic to the Hugos that voters' only defense was to make a hard-line statement that works voted in on the basis of an organized bloc should be disqualified on principle, no matter their quality, because it stopped the majority of voters from having any meaningful voice.
Frankly, this year's nominations proved exactly that point. The Sad Puppies shifted tactics to a recommendation list, joining the accepted mainstream practice among other Hugo-involved groups, and voted the same way that the vast majority of fans did. The Rabid Puppies, representing less than 10% of voters, doubled down and continued to slate-vote (with a stated goal of burning the Hugos down, but that makes no difference to the argument). The result was that the Sad Puppies, participating in good faith, got shut out of the process just as hard as the non-Puppies did, and in 6 categories, the only people who had any say in the nomination process were the Rabids, <10% of voters.
I, for one, voted a hard no-slate policy last year on those grounds. This year, I consider works from the Sad Puppies list to be legitimate nominations despite the group's history. Anything from the Rabid Puppies list is literally the product of vandalism, so I'm going to consider it if and only if it's a work that's mainstream-popular enough that it could have made the ballot without them.
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Out of curiosity, how much overlap was there between the Rabid Puppies list and the Sad Puppies' recommendation list?
It may be that stories that appeared on both were being basically "doubled down" on.
Though I can't imagine that Raptor Butt story got many real votes.
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I don't have an immediate answer to that question, but yes, MLP did appear on both lists.
For many of the downballot categories -- the ones that the Rabid slate swept -- it simply didn't matter if there was doubling-up. The blog Chaos Horizon did a numerical analysis of last year's voting results (and is digging into what can be inferred from this year's results; a lot more will be known in August, when the full nomination list is released after the awards are announced). Here's a starting point. The bottom line is that Vox Day controlled a block of about 500 votes last year, all of whom were eligible to nominate again, and who appear to have a high level of slate discipline. Even if only 60% of them chose to participate in nominations this year, that gives all works on his slate a floor of 300 votes, in a category whose most-nominated work in 2015 (a year with slates!) had only 132 votes.
Nominating ballots jumped hugely this year (by roughly a factor of 2x-6x depending on category), but because there's such a huge range of possible candidates to nominate, a guaranteed 300 votes is still enough to lock many down-ballot categories, and that's what happened. Dramatic Short is in that weird middle ground where the numbers aren't so clear. Chaos Horizon (which almost exactly predicted the Novel ballot) says that the Sads had a major spoiler effect, so the doubling-up seems like a reasonable theory.
(The name similarity is an amusing coincidence.)