Sad Puppies Rebuttal
Man, every time I read Larry I admire him more. Seriously, if he would come to WorldCon I would be stoked, I'd love to meet him. He just wrote a long response to the Sad Puppies Victory.
My two big complaints about Sad Puppies are:
1. They replaced the conversation of a couple thousand people with the decree of three men (Correia, Torgersen, Vox Day) and they call it a triumph of democracy.
2. When they're done driving away everyone who cares about WorldCon, they won't take responsibility to keep it going. They will crow about their victory and leave ashes behind, like common vandals. I don't think for two seconds they have the dedication to put in any actual work. And they call this "taking back" the Hugos.
It looks like Larry is aware of Point 1. He didn't expect to sweep every non-Novel catagory (Yes, I'm lumping Sad and Rabid Puppies together here. Same base, even if it wasn't Larry's intention), and thought they'd get maybe 1 or 2 in each, which was why they suggested as many as they did. The full sweep was unexpected. Looks like they fell victim to being TOO successful. He claims that have no interest in becoming the Hugo Pope - "We don’t want to replace one kingmaker with another. We don’t want to replace one dominate clique with another." It sounds like he'll try to do something to remedy this. I am extremely curious as to what. Now that I've calmed down, I'm again excited to see what changes are coming.
I'm still wary about Point 2. It tentatively sounds like Larry may actually be doing the responsible thing and making sure he doesn't destroy the con. "this isn’t just me and a couple of my friends having fun with this anymore. It is bigger than that. There are a bunch of us involved now. For next year, we’ll take a look at how this shakes out and proceed from there. Kate Paulk is in charge next year and will be organizing what we do." That's an encouraging sign. Does this mean the Other Side is going to start getting their shit together and respond in kind? To the ramparts!
Ahem. As everyone knows, there were problems with the Hugos. Many of us acknowledged this, and said it wasn't that bad and it was being handled internally. His most relevant point is that he disagrees. "there wasn’t a green room at any con in the country where you couldn’t find authors complaining about the sorry state of things. But nobody did anything. [...] But still nobody did anything, and it got worse and worse. [...] So I did something."
Now, I'm in the camp of "It was a problem, but not a huge one." But, to be honest, I can't recall of anyone doing anything to fix it. Maybe something was happening? But not so that I noticed. It was mainly swept under the rug. Losing a slot or two per year to these forces didn't feel like a big deal to me, certainly not something I would put a ton of personal effort into fixing, and I imagine most people felt the same way. Larry saw it as a bigger problem. And you know what? He did do something. And I respect the fuck out of that. It didn't work out exactly how he'd like it to, but shit, when does anything? It's not like there's a playbook for this sort of thing, he's flying by the seat of his pants, and that takes tons of guts. What the hell did any of us do? We all said in private "Man, Throne of the Crescent Moon was bad," and some of us said it in public, but did a single person on our side publically raise the point that this should never have gotten a Hugo Nomination? Why *did* it take Larry and his crew to say that?
It sucks that we lose an entire year of Hugos to this Sad Puppies nonsense, but maybe it'll help us be a bit more honest with ourselves in the future. Maybe we'll feel freer to speak our minds without being worried about being called racist. That would be a good thing.
God though, I really hate Vox Day. /sigh