the Hugo awards and sad puppies.

Jhereg42

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Just to clear up a few things in this thread:

1. The puppies were not necessarily against fiction with a message. I think the biggest failing was branding the voting blocks in question a cabal. They were not, it was just a relatively homogeneous group of fans that over time had come to make up World Con. Their tastes all tended to run together, and that is why the vote tended toward certain people.

That being said, Jim Baen (who was the first editor/publisher to start incorporating digital distribution and plans for the computer age as a publisher and Lois Bujold, Eric Flint, John Ringo and Dave Weber were all Baen discoveries whom Jim promoted to stardom.) was never awarded a Hugo which I find a crime, and had the puppies not factored in 4 of the 5 nominated editors would have been from TOR. That is a problem. Toni Weisskopf has deserved recognition for years (and this year got more votes for editor than the last 5 winners combined but still fell to no award) and would never have seen the ballot without the puppies taking part. In those cases, I feel that the myopia of the World Con crowd was as limiting in recent years as the puppies slates were this year.

2. SMOF has been a sort of joke in the background regarding those who run Cons and tend to be heavily involved in fandom. It was never invented as a derogatory term. The people who attend and vote at World Con just generally happen to be from this ground. The word CHORF was coined to categorize a particular stripe of SMOF and leave the others alone. In particular, it was Teresa Neilson-Hayden that prompted the creation of the term after changing their tune from "the award represents all of science fiction" to "the award represents World Con" after nominations were announced and the puppies took a large part of the ballot.

3. Thank you escapist community for keeping the "racist, misogynist, homophobe" accusations out of the conversation. It's been a generally rough ride on that account. Arthur Chu accused Sad Puppy grand master Brad Torgersen of using his marriage to a black woman and mixed race daughter as shields to hide his deeply held racist views this year, so yeah it's gotten pretty ugly.
 

K12

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I think the whole "anti-activism activists" thing is one of the weirder trends to come from the internet recently.

We shouldn't be talking about this issue and I will now spend three pages talking about why we shouldn't be talking about the issue that I am talking about...
 

K12

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My understanding of the Sad Puppies guys is that are basically like those metacritic voters who vote a game 0/10 and then claim the game is 6/10 in their review underneath it but explain they down-voted because the current score is WRONG and must be down to fanboy influence.

Then some of the angrily anti-puppies side go back and vote with hundreds of 10/10 and bite at anyone who votes 8/10 for letting the side down.

Basically nowadays being able to claim yourself as "anti-SJW" means you can do things like shameless self promotion (looking at you Correia) and claim yourself to be the underdog.

Awards should be fun and no one award is going to exactly represent your opinion (unless you started them and are the only voter), this is all just very depressing.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Awards:

1) Don't really mean anything
2) Are entirely subjective, which is why they don't mean anything
3) Are an arbitrary measure of quality as decided upon by the people handing them out, for whatever reasons those people prioritize

Getting mad at Awards because they were handed out for the wrong reasons:

1) Is very stupid
2) Is so incredibly, hilariously stupid
3) Is for stupid babies

Those puppies are sad, alright.
 

Zontar

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LifeCharacter said:
Yes, how could women and writing ever be related to a genre of literature? There's clearly no women or writing involved in that! And yes, Anita Sarkeesian is this and that because some idiot on youtube spent 40 minutes spouting nonsense about it and that's all the majority of people complaining about her need to know to come to the conclusions they do.
I'd like to point out that literature is not a genre, it's a medium, and that the Hugos are not about literature but Science Fiction and Fantasy, which ARE genre and are both never touched upon by Sarkeesian in her videos beyond a one line reference at best, and I'm pretty sure neither where mentioned in the specific video which she was nominated for.

I'd also like to point out that there are over a dozen YouTubers who have broken down her arguments to the point of academic invalidity already, and that no matter what you have to say about one specific one the fact remains that in academic terms her work is worthless and has been broken to the point where if she was in an actual field of study she'd be laughed out of anything she tried to enter.

You may not like it, but facts and her work do not mix, and neither does quality. Opening TvTropes is a more entertaining and academic endeavour since it's all the same information (her script is a copy-paste of it after all) without the terrible audio delivery and boiled down to only what is relevant to the works reference instead of going on 10 minute tangents about social science ideas which social science has already rejected.

Her work did not deserve nomination, it's objectively of a low quality. It's not like Ms. Marvel where it's a mediocre quality work given an award, it's a legitimately bad piece of content nominated for one. It's the literary equivalent of Furious 7 being nominated for Best Picture, only with the popularity of that movie removed and the movie at least having entertainment value in its own right.

And it's my honest opinion that the vast majority of people complaining about inaccuracies and dishonesty tend to have little backing up their complaints other than a link to some youtube video made by someone else and the occasional showing of a single example out of the many she uses that has an actual issue to it.
I know this part wasn't aimed at me, but why would a YouTube series with makes assertions without evidence and claims they are fact require anything more then a YouTuber responding to them as evidence? You're literally saying "You need more then her equal to refute her points" with this statement, despite the fact that arguments are not made based on authority but on the quality of the argument itself.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Zontar said:
Her work did not deserve nomination, it's objectively of a low quality.
Her work did not merit nomination because she's not a science fiction or fantasy author, is my understanding of how these nominations and awards are supposed to work. What the hell was she nominated for, anyway?

The nature of her product is not something that can be declared "objectively" good or bad. One's enjoyment of her brand of pop-cultural criticism will depend entirely on one's predilections.

Zontar said:
It's the literary equivalent of Furious 7 being nominated for Best Picture
Which also isn't something that could be criticized or gainsayed from any objective position.
 

Zontar

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BloatedGuppy said:
Zontar said:
Her work did not deserve nomination, it's objectively of a low quality.
Her work did not merit nomination because she's not a science fiction or fantasy author, is my understanding of how these nominations and awards are supposed to work. What the hell was she nominated for, anyway?

The nature of her product is not something that can be declared "objectively" good or bad. One's enjoyment of her brand of pop-cultural criticism will depend entirely on one's predilections.
In terms of entertainment I guess someone could fine enjoyment from bland, lifeless narration of things no one watching the video for entertainment is actually payign attention to, but from an academic perspective (the place her work's quality, or lack there of, stems from) is abysmal on a level that would have collage juniors getting failing marks.

LifeCharacter said:
Yes, because everyone knows over a dozen youtubers are what make or break one's academic validity, regardless of who those youtubers are and how utterly pathetic and repetitive their arguments are. In academic terms her work is worthless and has been broken down in the eyes of people who don't have the authority nor seemingly the intellectual capacity to do so or declare such with any amount of validity.
The people braking down her work are of equal academic merit to her (hell, at least one of them is of HIGHER academic merit since she's only a social science bachelor while he's a hard science masters) and though some make arguments that are themselves not of good quality, to pretend that her arguments have not been blasted to the point of failing the closest thing the YouTube community has to peer review (her work isn't actually academic after all, it's just mimicking the scientific method without having any of the actual research, references or changes made in light of new (or in this case, actual) evidence).

You are effectively saying we need to hold her critics to a higher standard then we hold her too instead of holding both her and her critics to the same standard.
But don't let me get in the way of this idea of yours that simply repeating something over and over again makes it some academically recognized truth of the world.
Have you thought people keep repeating the same thing over and over again in regards to her may be due to the fact that she repeats the same thing over and over again without ever actually talking criticism? And hell, treating her work academically should be seen as a complement to her given academia sure doesn't. No one with any semblance of academic credibility would source her work after all, but then again she's never done a study and pretty much all of the virtually non-existent work she has herself sourced is either works which failed peer review, never where submitted for peer review, or have been refuted, usually before she ever made mention of them.
Zontar said:
I know this part wasn't aimed at me, but why would a YouTube series with makes assertions without evidence and claims they are fact require anything more then a YouTuber responding to them as evidence? You're literally saying "You need more then her equal to refute her points" with this statement, despite the fact that arguments are not made based on authority but on the quality of the argument itself.
Well, because one youtube series is literally going "here's an example of this trope" which tends to be accompanied by a display of that particular example, while the other is a series declaring that the other is full of lies because there's nothing wrong with wanting to save people and cherry picking examples to take out of context to whine about for a prolonged period of time.
So what you're saying is, because some people cherry pick her work she should get a pass for having cherry picking of things from entertainment to prove her points that don't actually hold water? I mean last time I checked she'd sourced next to no works form the past 10 years, or as we like to call it, "something relevant" when talking about the CURRENT state of the industry. Add to that the fact that she will often lie (re: her Hitman video, there really is no way to defend that, all who have tried have failed) coupled with the fact she is also xenophobic towards Asia in her works and what you get is someone who is saying things as fact without evidence, not backing them up with sources and only sitting so few examples not even the most liberal of statisticians would consider the total works referenced as anything more then statistically irrelevant.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Zontar said:
In terms of entertainment I guess someone could fine enjoyment from bland, lifeless narration of things no one watching the video for entertainment is actually payign attention to, but from an academic perspective (the place her work's quality, or lack there of, stems from) is abysmal on a level that would have collage juniors getting failing marks.
She's a media critic, so I'm not really sure why we'd be applying academic rigor to her work. She's criticizing entertainment media, not writing a white paper on thermogenesis.

As to "bland and lifeless", again, these are subjective statements. It's fine not to like her. I don't like her, either. However my dislike for her, no matter how pronounced, cannot be used as evidence for why she's "objectively bad". Unlike the weasel-word employment of "objective" during the call for "objective reviews", there isn't a lot of grey area here. You can't call a media critic "factually bad", unless they're incapable of basic communication. There are no "facts" to support the conclusion.
 

Zontar

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BloatedGuppy said:
She's a media critic, so I'm not really sure why we'd be applying academic rigor to her work. She's criticizing entertainment media, not writing a white paper on thermogenesis.
I'd say that, given how she openly states she wants her work used in schools and universities, and wants it to be considered academic and educational (hilarious, I know, but she actually means it and isn't joking despite how funny that idea is) I think it's justified to hold her work to the same standards as the work she wants it to be considered a part of.

Plus the media for no rational or explicable reason seems to think she is a credible academic source on... well, something, so that's another.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Zontar said:
I'd say that, given how she openly states she wants her work used in schools and universities, and wants it to be considered academic and educational (hilarious, I know, but she actually means it and isn't joking despite how funny that idea is) I think it's justified to hold her work to the same standards as the work she wants it to be considered a part of.
If she wants to be considered for academia, and academia rejects her work as academia, that's fine. That's not what I consistently see happening. I consistently see the fact that her work doesn't meet academic standards held up as a reason why it's non-functional as media criticism. It would be like dismissing Roger Ebert's film criticism because he was a lousy chef.

I should also note that a great many of the "critiques" I've seen have been just as academically bankrupt as the videos they're attacking.
 

Zontar

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BloatedGuppy said:
Zontar said:
I'd say that, given how she openly states she wants her work used in schools and universities, and wants it to be considered academic and educational (hilarious, I know, but she actually means it and isn't joking despite how funny that idea is) I think it's justified to hold her work to the same standards as the work she wants it to be considered a part of.
If she wants to be considered for academia, and academia rejects her work as academia, that's fine. That's not what I consistently see happening. I consistently see the fact that her work doesn't meet academic standards held up as a reason why it's non-functional as media criticism. It would be like dismissing Roger Ebert's film criticism because he was a lousy chef.

I should also note that a great many of the "critiques" I've seen have been just as academically bankrupt as the videos they're attacking.
This is true, though last time I checked none of her critics where claiming to be doing academic quality work in the form of those videos.

In any event, the arguments she puts forward are, much more often then not, baseless ones which can easily be refuted (and often are) to the point where there really can't be anyone out there who genuinely supports her based on what she is saying, there's just too little of substance stated with arguments that are too weak to rationally explain why they where used in the first place. Just looking back on her Hitman video we see her blatantly lying by stating that one of the goals of the game is to do literally the exact opposite of what the game tries to make you do, going almost so far as to imply necrophiliac and misogynistic elements to a game which actively penalizes you for killing people and that doesn't want you to mistreat anyone who isn't your target.

Then there's the Watch_Dogs video she did where she argued there was objectification to women in a mission where you are literally trying to bust a human trafficking ring. It's almost as if she goes out of her way to make her arguments easy to refute.

And let's not get started on her supporting racial and sex segregation in schools.
 

hentropy

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The whole thing is just an award-worthy illustration of how people confuse "objectivity" with "whatever me and my personal echo chamber thinks is good". The Sad Puppies used this as the base of their argument, that no one can possibly genuinely like these stories and they're just affirmative action awards, and the Rapid Puppies weaponized it by bringing in a bunch of people who didn't give two shits about the Hugos to act as culture warriors.

All of this is built on the *ist assumption that any diverse story or author only gets awards because of diversity, rather than quality. It's an old song that goes back to the Limbaugh class that brands every woman or minority in a government or executive position as simply being a quota hire.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Zontar said:
This is true, though last time I checked none of her critics where claiming to be doing academic quality work in the form of those videos.

In any event, the arguments she puts forward are, much more often then not, baseless ones which can easily be refuted (and often are) to the point where there really can't be anyone out there who genuinely supports her based on what she is saying, there's just too little of substance stated with arguments that are too weak to rationally explain why they where used in the first place. Just looking back on her Hitman video we see her blatantly lying by stating that one of the goals of the game is to do literally the exact opposite of what the game tries to make you do, going almost so far as to imply necrophiliac and misogynistic elements to a game which actively penalizes you for killing people and that doesn't want you to mistreat anyone who isn't your target.

Then there's the Watch_Dogs video she did where she argued there was objectification to women in a mission where you are literally trying to bust a human trafficking ring. It's almost as if she goes out of her way to make her arguments easy to refute.

And let's not get started on her supporting racial and sex segregation in schools.
I don't really want to get into a long discussion of things she does and doesn't say, I might get pushed into the position of defending her and I don't really have any interest in doing that. What she does is make opinionated statements about entertainment media, which are difficult to refute effectively because that relies on making opinionated statements of one's own. For whatever reason, we have people who are uncomfortable just disagreeing with her, and she's been Streisand Effected into a mythological figure with uncanny degrees of clout as a result.

Look how notorious Armond White got for a while. Why are we talking about Anita Sarkeesian? If you think she's a kook, just ignore her. She doesn't have any power her critics didn't give her to begin with.
 

Fox12

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Zontar said:
Yes, this is how democracy works. Sometimes people disagree with you. Did anyone ever consider that people actually enjoyed the works in question? Maybe some voters actually connected with the stories and characters? Besides, people act like there was some secret council of politically correct, ivory tower judges deciding what was allowed to enter the nomination. The Hugo's are a popularity poll where laymen from the fandom can vote for their favorite books and authors. This isn't even like the argument with games journalists in gaming. The Sad Puppies don't have a leg to stand on. The groups that reacted were bad too, of course, but the Sad Puppies started it, so as far as I'm concerned the chief blame lays with them.

Out of curiosity, why is it so important that Anita got less then 7% of the nomination votes for the least respected category at the Hugo's? A full 77 out of 1150 votes to get on the ballot. And, bare in mind, she never got put on the ballot itself. She was never in danger of ever coming anywhere near a Hugo, so I'm not sure why this keeps getting brought up, other then the fact that people hate her. But maybe you think I'm missing the point, and she never should have gotten nominated in the first place. She was nominated for Best Related Work, which is a category for non-fiction. Given that she's a culture critic studying the art of storytelling in video games, which heavily includes sci-fi and fantasy, which she often mentions, why on earth shouldn't she be nominated? She certainly qualifies. Maybe you think she can be nominated, but is underqualified to win? Well, I agree with you, and so does everyone else, since she didn't even make it on the ballot.

Raesvelg said:
Yeah, I remember reading all of that in his blog posts. That's actually what pushed me into reading some of his material. The thing is, as I've stated before, he's not really that talented. Reading about how he lost, and about how he went out to a bar with other losers to mope while everyone else celebrated, left me with an extremely negative picture of the gentleman. His philosophy on literature was also pretty questionable, and I wonder if the problem isn't that he's incapable of understanding what people derisively call "message fiction," as opposed to simple, derivative pulp fiction. I would even argue that Enders Game falls more into the former then the latter. Personally I think there's a place for both, but I dislike his attitude. It screams of a child that not only wants to take his ball and go home, but bust everyone elses ball in the process.

But as for Ender's Game and the awards... I don't think it really matters. This event is little more then an opportunity for the fandom to celebrate. Citizen Kane didn't win any major awards when it came out, and it was a commercial failure. Both it and Ender's Game won the only award that matters. People still care about them.
 

Something Amyss

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hentropy said:
The whole thing is just an award-worthy illustration of how people confuse "objectivity" with "whatever me and my personal echo chamber thinks is good". The Sad Puppies used this as the base of their argument, that no one can possibly genuinely like these stories and they're just affirmative action awards, and the Rapid Puppies weaponized it by bringing in a bunch of people who didn't give two shits about the Hugos to act as culture warriors.

All of this is built on the *ist assumption that any diverse story or author only gets awards because of diversity, rather than quality. It's an old song that goes back to the Limbaugh class that brands every woman or minority in a government or executive position as simply being a quota hire.
This is clearly a biased position and I encourage people to not listen to you.

Joking aside, your point about "affirmative action" is an awesome one. The driving logic behind this being an unfair bias is "people I don't like won for things I don't like," at least, as far as I can tell. This really needs to be addressed.
 

hentropy

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Something Amyss said:
hentropy said:
The whole thing is just an award-worthy illustration of how people confuse "objectivity" with "whatever me and my personal echo chamber thinks is good". The Sad Puppies used this as the base of their argument, that no one can possibly genuinely like these stories and they're just affirmative action awards, and the Rapid Puppies weaponized it by bringing in a bunch of people who didn't give two shits about the Hugos to act as culture warriors.

All of this is built on the *ist assumption that any diverse story or author only gets awards because of diversity, rather than quality. It's an old song that goes back to the Limbaugh class that brands every woman or minority in a government or executive position as simply being a quota hire.
This is clearly a biased position and I encourage people to not listen to you.

Joking aside, your point about "affirmative action" is an awesome one. The driving logic behind this being an unfair bias is "people I don't like won for things I don't like," at least, as far as I can tell. This really needs to be addressed.

The idea that people shouldn't be racist, BUT people should also be hired directly on merit, and that merit should be measured by the white-male gatekeepers of the medium/occupation, is thinking that seems to infect a segment of nerdom. That "outsiders" (minorities and women) can play, but they can't be disruptive or make them uncomfortable, and they have to do things very much like all the white guys that came before them. Even Star Wars could be considered a "message" piece, it just had a really uncontroversial message (evil totalitarians who blow up planets are bad), but people will still bring up this message when they see a black storm trooper. It's not a conscious thing, really, it's the same logic that people who fly the "equalist" banner tend to parrot.

Personally I loved The Goblin Emperor and thought it was better than The Three-Body Problem, but I have a weird incurable brain condition where I can accept the results of an award show without taking it as an affront on my existential being. It's gotten me through quite a few Oscar nights without murdering someone.
 

Raesvelg

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Fox12 said:
Out of curiosity, why is it so important that Anita got less then 7% of the nomination votes for the least respected category at the Hugo's? A full 77 out of 1150 votes to get on the ballot.
People are irritated by it since it has almost nothing to do with SF/F, and that if the Puppies hadn't pushed the slate, she'd have been nominated. Historically, it takes only a couple dozen votes to get a nom for the Hugo; the number of people who bother to submit ballots for the nomination phase is tiny.

Fox12 said:
I would even argue that Enders Game falls more into the former then the latter.
Oh, it is.

But.

Ender's Game is written by Orson Scott Card, who is now reasonably infamous for his opposition to gay marriage. Back in the '80s he was better liked, since he was a bit more moderate and he did the whole "Secular Humanist Revival" schtick at Worldcons, but now...

Fox12 said:
Personally I think there's a place for both, but I dislike his attitude. It screams of a child that not only wants to take his ball and go home, but bust everyone elses ball in the process.
Oddly enough, that's pretty much how I feel about the reaction to the Sad Puppies.

Fox12 said:
But as for Ender's Game and the awards... I don't think it really matters. This event is little more then an opportunity for the fandom to celebrate. Citizen Kane didn't win any major awards when it came out, and it was a commercial failure. Both it and Ender's Game won the only award that matters. People still care about them.
That's not really the question though.

Ender's Game won the Hugo nigh-on 30 years ago. Do you think it would win today, given Orson Scott Card's more problematic reputation?