second verse, same as the first
Apr. 4th, 2015 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I'm just gonna quote myself from last year:
There are lots of reasons why people don't read things based on their opinions of the authors. Me, if I know that someone holds views I find morally repugnant, or if I personally dislike them, etc., then I can't keep myself from looking for evidence of those disliked traits in the work, which is unfair to the work, and so I don't even bother. Other people refuse to lend support to live authors, but are okay with dead ones. Other people think the author is dead in the interpretive sense to the extent that they don't care. All of these are valid decisions, because the way people read is so personal and because people make different moral and ethical discussions.
[ . . . ]
All that said, I promised agnosticism, which is this: I genuinely cannot find it in me to care whether the Hugos devolve into, as James Nicoll points out with characteristic brevity and asperity, political parties, or whether prior community norms about politicking prevail, or Vox Day et al. get bored, or whatever. Worst comes to worst, a few years of concerted effort results in actual winners instead of mere nominations for hateful trolls, and a few year after that, booksellers and the like catch up and realize that the Hugo is no longer prestigious, and, well, SFF fandom is big, even the bits of it that self-identify as fandom, and WorldCon and the Hugos are only a small part of that. Maybe Locus stops overweighting subscriber votes and becomes the popular award of record. Maybe the Nebulas experience a surge in prestige. Maybe I hit the lottery and endow a juried award in my honor. Who knows? But the Hugos aren't that big a teapot, at the end of the day, and if people want to self-identify with them and participate in the community that votes on them, great, they should do that, and if people don't, great, they should do that too.
(Reference: this year's "Sad Puppies" Hugo slate—hilariously, not even that contained Vox Day; the just-announced Hugo finalists. (ETA: apparently Vox Day also had a slate, but I am not going to his site on principle (see last year's post, linked above, for context.))
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Date: 2015-04-04 08:06 pm (UTC)Oh, good grief.
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Date: 2015-04-04 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-04 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-05 01:24 am (UTC)Also, it would make me laugh a lot to see _Ms. Marvel_ (which is fucking adorable, really must write it up), of all things, win a Hugo this year.
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Date: 2015-04-05 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-05 01:56 am (UTC)Heh. 2017 is a really competitive year for site selection, it seems like! But I support having more WorldCons out of the US and Helsinki has been working really hard on its bid.
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Date: 2015-04-05 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-05 06:25 am (UTC)My take on it (from second-and third-hand info, mind) is that the DC bid got a really good deal for the venue for 2017, and that they had misunderstood Helskinki's intention about 2017 (or that Helsinki was ambigious about those intentions).
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Date: 2015-04-05 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-05 08:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-05 02:46 pm (UTC)(edited to fix typo)
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Date: 2015-04-05 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-05 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-05 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-05 03:43 pm (UTC)I signed up for a supporting membership last year - for a con I will almost certainly never be able to afford to attend - read everything, voted thoughtfully & nominated thoughtfully this year.At some point I don't see the point of paying into a system that rewards Sad Puppy behavior.
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Date: 2015-04-04 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-06 04:47 pm (UTC)