Watching the Hugo Awards Implode · 6:48pm Jul 25th, 2018
Well, this is certainly interesting.
If you’ve been involved at all in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy world for the last few years, you’ve more than likely heard of the Hugo Awards, Worldcons infamous “Best Science-Fiction and Fantasy” award that’s been of more and more dubious quality over the last decade-plus. Which culminated in a social movement to try and wake it up that in turn saw the event show its true colors, with everything from mockery and public bullying (let us hand these “assterisk awards” to authors we don’t like) to witch hunts, statements about the ‘lower economic classes’ not being welcome, and even just plain reality distortion (‘A white male said this therefore—’ ‘That’s a woman, and they’re not white—’ ‘They’re male now, down with the patriarchy!’).
And faced with that and cries of “Go make your own Sci-Fi/Fantasy awards!” people did just that and left the Hugo Awards en mass. If, well, you can count what few numbers the Hugos managed to garner a “mass.” But they left. New awards rose up, and the insulars left running the Hugos and paying them any attention then, naturally, gnashed their teeth and threw little tantrums that how dare anyone try and compete with their legendary Hugos (crud, one such individual even has admitted publicly to trying to skew other awards, just because they can).
Anyway, point being, what I guessed would happen a few years ago (The Ent March) seems to have happened. The public was woken up by the Hugos antics. And guess what? They left. The Hugo Awards are down at low, low voting numbers once again while other awards that aren’t as staffed by the socially virulent are picking up the slack.
Which leads us to today, and what’s happened to Worldcon and the Hugos now that they got exactly what they wanted: Their own exclusive, tiny clique with no outside interference. Where they’re free of all the social injustices and “bigotries” of non-trufans. They got what they wanted.
Problem is … they can’t handle that.
Ah the good old "Sad" and "Rabid" Puppies.Remember things like the nomination of Chuck Tingle.
I think it was the 2015 era where they decided to give out "no award" more time in one year then then they did since the creation of the awards?
Burn it down, its dead and the replacements that were build need to ensure that those responsible for what happened to WorldCon and The Hugo Awards dont be allowed into power to ruing anything else.
Now on to reading it heh.
Few things are quite so fascinating – and at times amusing – as watching SJWs be SJWs. That said, it's a shame how they tend to destroy everything they touch.
Wow just... wow
I've been eating so much notional popcorn watching this. It's hilarious. "This is exactly what you ordered. Eat it. All of it."
Oh, that's just precious! The Sad Puppies looked at the wreckage after the rules changes, said "
this" and started voting on the Dragon Awards and going to local cons. (See also: the attempts to ban Baen authors from various cons this year because NAZI!!!!111one)
The Rabid Puppies, I could believe, but the Supreme Dark Lord hasn't sent his Vile Faceless Minions any orders on that front in several years (I'd know, I'm on the mailing list), as he'd already encouraged WorldCon to punch itself in the face so many times that it was only a matter of waiting until this happened. He's sitting on his throne of skulls and drinking the blood of his enemies while he watches and laughs.
Ah, this insanity. I know this song and dance, and I'm not even remotely surprised at how this turned out. The interesting part from here will be seeing what happens in the aftermath because there are a lot of ways it could potentially shake out. For something as comparatively small as the Hugos it seems likely that they will simply cease to exist, but the larger trends aren't just going to disappear since the nutjobs behind this aren't going to go away. My best guess is that the crowd will shrink as the process of eating their own and knock sense into some people and they'll wind up ignored in a corner like the other crazy extremest groups that pop up from time to time (remember the creationists from about a decade ago?).
4907510
Here's the thing though. The Rabids wanted to burn it down. Personally, I disagreed with them. The Sads had it right: leave them to it, and they'll do the job on their own, without any outside help, and prove what sort of folks they really are.
The Rabids trying to burn it down just gave them ammunition in their defense and a convenient excuse to point the cause at.
4907516
Yeah, the Hugo Award was a respectable award at one point. Now it's kind of become a "do not buy; subpar fiction" list.
I do get a sense of satisfaction watching the ship that fired at everyone that tried to help them sink, though. Now, it might limp on the way Jack Sparrow's little dinghy did, but it's not going to look grand, and they don't have anyone nearly as charismatic or lucky as the captain to stride away either.
4907528
Yup. They got what they wanted ...
4907586
"Out boat is burning!"
"You set fire to it!"
"Yeah but we didn't think it'd burn!"
On a side note I hope the Rabids had nothing to do with it. The Rabids fought fire with fire, but it really did just drag everyone down and give a lot of places more ammunition to defend what the Hugo Awards had become. See the my comment earlier in this same post.
4907695
The real worry is that, backed by some specific publishers who really like having the Hugo Awards as their award, these folks will try to worm their way into other cons and repeat the process, swearing "This time it'll be different! Really!"
Y'know, I've always detested social justice warriors. Not just tilting at imaginary giants that turn out to be windmills, but also trampling bystanders underhoof in their rush to jam their lances into the unsuspecting buildings' walls. Was it one of your blogs that pointed out that outrage-peddling is a self-destructive and ultimately unsustainable act?
Well, at least the fires make for excellent popcorn popping. Does indulging in Schadenfreude make me a bad person?
4907801
Be aware: a few bored Rabid Puppies noticed Scalzi whining about not getting panel slots, and mooted trolling him into thinking it was their doing in Vox's comment section. If you see it come up somewhere, it's explicitly an after-the-fact troll operation.
*munch munch*
Ride's not over yet, folks.
http://archive.is/sFQVc
http://archive.is/R0sgc
Considering that there are tons of Snowflakes there that self-identify as this or that, one can wonder how the "populations" are going to be defined.
Also note that the person offended with the typo is trying to get the offended mob to support on Patreon.
Just need to wait for the usual suspects to start dropping articles doing the blame chain from Rabid to Sad Puppies to GG. They do need to compete for attention now that everything Trump does tends to get more views, after all.
4907919
Oh boy. While she was a non-Puppy-kicking anti-Puppy (she called for an end to the threats and shit being made against them), she's squarely in the "the Hugos are for the Trufans" camp.
In addition to her support for identity politics, she just admitted in that twitter thread that they have a list of thought-criminals who will not be allowed to speak:
This is going to be an IdPol/Trufan shit-show. I need more popcorn.
4907801
It is, but fortunately the world at large has wised up to their shit which is going to make it hard for them to do much more damage. I expect that to be especially true after the November midterm elections, because just like Trump proved there was a reaction against this, I expect the democrats to get wrecked for letting the nuts take over which should help make people more comfortable with telling them to fuck off.
On a related note, I actually saw a very positive sign of this at work recently. There was what looked like the usual "diversity" bullshit campaign going on with them collecting brief bios from employees who were willing to write them to put on a site, and I saw more than one instance of them posting bios a white man who was proud of being a christian. While I personally don't care about that stuff, that's the kind of thoughtcrime these nuts would normally crucify someone for, so it's clear that sanity has reasserted itself at least in my current workplace's HR team and that the employees feel safe in being open with their true beliefs which is definitely a sign that things are getting better.
4907910
4907919
4908336
Scalzi has had a bit to say on the "reasonable" events thus far, going so far as to call anyone who disagrees with worldcon "turds" and declaring that all is well.
Personally, him calling this reasonable, as well as the immaturity of his reaction (everyone who disagrees is a manchild turd!) says a lot about the quality of his books and characters, neither of which have ever been impressive.
4908822
Well, I can't say anything about his books since I never read them, but based on what you have said about him I'd be shocked if they weren't total garbage.
4908823
They're not total garbage, but he never does the research, the characters are flat and wooden, and ... oh, did I mention that they're all fanfiction?
That's right. They're rewrites of other people's stories. ALL of them. Red Shirts gets a pass because it's deliberately a parody of Star Trek, but the rest? Lock-in is literally a fusion of the film and graphic-novel form of Surrogates, which he started writing a month after the first trailers for Surrogates started showing in theaters. Old Man's War is an unresearched, flip-the-politics version of Starship Troopers, where he shows off how bad war is by ... writing war really badly and having no idea how war works. And his latest series that Tor has been pushing so hard has literally been described as "Scalzi's version of Dune" mixed with an allegory about climate change.
Yeah, I think the only reason people are so enamored with him is that most of his audience doesn't actually read anything else. In fact, a lot of his fans on Reddit are quite proud of this fact and point it out.
4908827
I'll be honest, its the first two that kill it, not the fact that it is knowingly derivative. This site and many other fanfiction outlets have plenty of solid proof that you can do interesting things by taking someone else's ideas in another direction. I personally would be happy to read a story that does something like revisiting Asimov's robot work with different laws if it was well written, and the same goes for other ideas as well.
The problem is that good characters and research are a fundamental part of good writing, and from what you've said I'm not surprised to hear he fails horribly at both. Doing good character work requires understanding people rather than lumping them into groups based on things like skin color, and doing research inherently exposes you to different ideas which can challenge your preconceived notions (I personally changed my opinion on gun law after doing research). Both of those run against everything that thought police insanity is built on, so I would honestly be surprised if he didn't fail horribly there.
Vox Day walks through how he used the Rabid Puppies to accelerate the breakdown of the Hugos / WorldCon. Bail after 20 minutes, it's all IRL politics after that.
4907919
So, can we expect any commentary from you on the entirely predictable results and reaction to same?
4922971
Probably not. I mean, the results speak for themselves. As do the numbers. Less than 2000 voters? An award that represents "all of Science-Fiction and Fantasy" and they can't even surpass 2000 voters worldwide?
Plus, she and her publisher have been saying she'd be the first to win three in a row since the first award was won. I'm not sure what one would take away from this except "Congrats? The award is yours? Go play in your little sandbox?"
4922971
Addendum due to a Reddit discussion: The Hugo Awards site has changed their FAQ. They no longer claim to represent all of Science-Fiction and Fantasy, nor do they claim to be the representative of what's best in that genre.
Worth noting.
4923014
Interesting. Can you fire me a link (in PM if you're worried about identifying your reddit username) so I can check out the specific phrasing in question? I'm interested in digging through the Wayback Machine to see when it changed, and how.
4923019
Just wayback the Hugo Awards FAQ page.
4923026
No relevant difference found between the 2009 page (earliest available at that address) and the current FAQ. Ran it through a diff program to make sure I didn't miss it.
4923029
Maybe I was wrong. Looking at the Wayback Machine showed that they have changed some rules, but not the wording. Maybe I'm confusing it with some of the things the patrons said rather than the FAQ.