fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3100 ]

[ SECRET POST #3100 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3100 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Dishonored 2]

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03.

[Gaia Online]

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04.

[Brendon Urie, Panic! at the Disco (+P!nk, Teresa Marie)]

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05.

[Winona Ryder in Heathers]

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06.

[Orphan Black]

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07.

[Miraculous Ladybug]

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08.

[The Mentalist]

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09.

[Legend]

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10.

[Spy (2015)]

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11.

[Bridget Marquardt, Girls Next Door]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 043 secrets from Secret Submission Post #443.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Anyone voting in the Hugo Awards this year? If so, are Sad Puppies a factor at all in your decision? I heard somebody yesterday say that because there was so much stuff to read, they were automatically not bothering with anything on the Sad Puppies list.

Am I misunderstanding what Sad Puppies is? Because I was under the impression that it was a group of fairly racist and misogynist people who got tired of all the minorities winning Hugos and decided to support straight, white, male authors. And, I mean, yeah. That's shitty of THEM, but it doesn't really say anything about the authors, other than they're straight, white and male.

Is that enough to discount the virtue of their work? Should they -- as I've also seen mentioned -- be expected to decline their nomination just because this group of awful people picked them to win? Should the Hugos be a platform for minority awards at the exclusion of non-minorities? Or are they even relevant at all anymore?

I'm not sure on any of it, other than yes, there is a massive amount of stuff to get through.

aaaaaaaagh nooooooo not puppieschat

no, no, no, no, no

Brad Torgersen is a twit, but I don't really care whether his buddies win or lose anything. I just want to see John C. Wright go down in flames for working together with and trying to defend Vox Day. (Day himself is a lost cause--as Scalzi put it, if you lit Day on fire and pushed him in front of a train, he'd say it was all according to plan and declare victory.)

P.S. If you want to know what I have against Day, check out his listing here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/FundiesSayTheDarndestThings

Edited 2015-06-30 23:09 (UTC)

My reaction to discovering Vox Day was the same as when I discovered Cathy Brennan.

Vox Day is pro-Spanish Inquisition.

I just can't get over that. I didn't even know that was a thing.

And he thinks he's the intellectual heritor of their cause. Honestly, the bigotry doesn't even bother me so much as the self-importance. (No wonder John C. Wright gets along with him--they're two of the most swelled heads in spec-fic.)

So would you say that...
you didn't expect that?

There's a lot of stuff to get through, but then there always is. I'm not voting, but if I were, I'd read the SP nominations of works that aren't written by SPs themselves. A lot of those authors didn't ask to be put on the SP slate, after all. But anything written by an SP, including John C. Wright? Nah.

Ugh. Sad puppies are the fucking worst. Gamergate, MRA's and literary fratboys all rolled up in to one horrible bundle.

*sigh* This again.

Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are two different things. There were several people who didn't want anything to do with Sad Puppies if Vox was involved--so he wasn't, and went and did his own thing. Arguably, he was more successful at it.

But, yeah, if you want to paint the Sad Puppies as a bunch of racist misogynists when they had several POC and women on their list, you just... keep doing that, I guess. Heaven forbid you flout The Narrative.

If I'd been on Vox's slate and made the ballot, I would, of course, have said, oh, no, a terrible person had the temerity to like my fiction enough to nominate it for an award! I'm totally going to turn down my nom-- No, wait, that would be stupid.

It sort of doesn't matter who you get on the slate if you argue that the slate is a protest against "political" (feminist and multicultural) science fiction. Never mind that this started before any of them were born, except for Wright who was in grade school, or the politics of Heinlein and Ellison, and let's just pretend that Roddenberry wasn't remotely political and utopian.

It was a protest against Message Fiction at the expense of Story. I don't know about you, but I dislike being preached at, even by my own side. Of course there will be a message, because that's the essence of good fiction, but if that's all there is, with the characters being thinly-veiled mouthpieces for the author's viewpoint, then it's not a story, it's a screed.

Full disclosure: I am a conservative female SFF writer. And I'm under the distinct impression that I'd better keep my fuckin' mouth shut as far as my politics go, or the gatekeepers will bury me and send their dogs to eat what's left. I am fairly certain (if my Twitter feed is any indication) that liberal authors feel no such strictures.

If there was any sort of balance, I doubt we'd be having this debate. But there's not. So it skewed a bit to the right this time, and well. That's how the cookie crumbles. Next year will probably be different.

Ah yes, SFF is notorious for not having any conservative writers in it. *snort* I imagine this claim sounds a lot more legit to people who know nothing of SFF's history or SFF authors, anon.

There's no lack of message fiction from either side of the fence. In fact, one of the Rabid Puppy stories (disqualified due to prior publication) appears to have been a thinly veiled gospel piece with the serial numbers filed off.

But frankly, I agree with Martin that evidence of a conspiracy of gatekeepers has been sorely lacking. The Puppy works had equal or better sales with Butcher on the NYT list. Card was on the NYT list last year in spite of controversy. Wolfe got a lifetime achievement award. Tumblr and twitter are a megaphone for cranks (some of which were recruited by the Rabid Puppies), but frankly, I don't think shoppers at Amazon and Barnes and Noble really know or care what you post there. It's tempest in a teapot stuff.

But staying off of twitter is becoming a good PR move, even if you're completely apolitical.

Edited 2015-07-01 01:33 (UTC)

Amazing how the gatekeepers haven't been able to "bury" all those big names of SF who aren't liberal, eh? Robert A. Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, David Weber, Poul Anderson, Orson Scott Card... all poor, persecuted souls who toil away in complete obscurity, thanks to the vast liberal conspiracy. Why, they've even managed to silence modern day prophets like Vox Day, Larry Correia, John C. Wright and Brad Torgersen, right? None of those guys are allowed to voice their views and they don't have any following whatsoever because nobody's ever heard of them. Totally buried by those nasty gatekeepers. Oh wait...

If your work doesn't seem to be getting the attention and accolades you believe it deserves, there may be many reasons for why that is. But being "buried" by these so-called gatekeepers (zero evidence for them, BTW) is not one of them.

Well, no, because the gatekeepers (by which I mean the vast majority of editors, including magazine, ezine, and Big Six book publishers) may be liberal ideologues, but they also have an eye on their bottom line. The people you named above make piles of money for them, so they're not going to shoot the golden geese. That would be stupid. I don't think they're stupid.

Up-and-comers may be a different story. I didn't make a complaint about my own work; it's doing fairly well, actually, and I've got a novel and a few shorts coming out soon, published by people not me. I just said I felt like I needed to keep my mouth shut. I could be completely wrong about this impression. I hope I am, in fact, because I don't like to think that people I respect on a professional level could be that petty.

But why should I take chances? See how anonymous I'm being?

Maybe once I'm sleeping on a mattress made of money in a solid gold house on Yard Moose Mountain, I'll speak up more. At this point, I mostly don't. Because I don't need the personal or professional headache.

First of all, lol, you are not in the SFF community if you think all conservative voices have been silenced, and that only liberal fiction is "message" fiction.

Second, even if there was some silencing going on, do you really think the best approach to solving that is to hold an awards ceremony hostage and try to eliminate all voices from the opposite side? Because that is Vox Day's stated goal, and whether you and they like it or not, the Sad Puppies are helping him in this.

Did I say "all," or that only liberal fiction is message fic? No, I did not. Of course there's pushback. As there should be. But for you to say that I'm "not in the SFF community" based on this is, frankly, laughable.

I'm pretty sure that Vox just wants to watch the world burn. But this year is done, and I'm not sure what the Puppies can do at this point except let the fallout happen. I don't think the Sad Puppies want to "eliminate" other voices so much as "expand the base." I've seen a lot of people say "oh, hey, I didn't know I had a say in this thing, very cool." Getting more people involved can only dilute Vox's influence. We need to invite more people to the pool party, not slam the clubhouse door shut.

Also, you can defend a guy's right to say stupid shit without defending the actual stupid shit he says.

Haha, no lil' pup. The Sad Puppies would very much like everyone to believe that they've got nothing to do with the Rabid Puppies, but this is hardly the case. They're hand in hand with Vox Day and are now scrambling to (sort of) distance themselves, but they're not succeeding because you can't lie down with dogs and then refuse to acknowledge the fleas.

There was a schism right at the start of this, this year. I'm sure that your side hates to acknowledge that, because then you'd have to actually think about the issue instead of having a knee-jerk reaction to it, but neither Brad nor Larry is racist, sexist, or homophobic, and the Sad Puppy reins are being taken over by a woman next year. I know it comes as a shock, but not everyone who wears a Conservative Hat actually fits the narrow perception. Shocking.

In fact, by social theory arguments, it is actually impossible for Larry Correia to be racist, because he is Latino and you can only be racist if you're white.

The poisoned apple hasn't fallen far from the poison tree, and if they use similar tactics and only give a nudge and a wink toward distancing themselves from Vox Day, then I'd say that wasn't much of a schism as it was a PR move. A smart one, since it allows them a small measure of plausible deniability to the uninformed, but obviously it won't fool everyone.

"In fact, by social theory arguments, it is actually impossible for Larry Correia to be racist, because he is Latino and you can only be racist if you're white."

I imagine you think this is quite the fatal parting shot, because of course anyone who doesn't follow the Puppy line is a SJW who thinks racism is something only white people do. That says far more about the legitimacy of your arguments than it does about your incredibly flimsy strawmen.

Hey, "POC can't be racist" is not my argument. But go ahead. Call an African American liberal a racist. I'll be more than happy to watch you get dogpiled.

You and I both know that there is nothing the SPs could have done that would have "distanced themselves" far enough from Vox. And even if they'd said YES BURN THE WITCH, it's not like they still wouldn't be called every name in the book.

Because that already happened long before they were associated with him.

Re: Hugo Awards

(Anonymous) - 2015-07-01 06:49 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Hugo Awards

(Anonymous) - 2015-07-01 20:23 (UTC) - Expand

Torgersen and Correia have deleted a lot of the stuff where they defended Day, but the Wayback Machine knows all, and in any event, enough of it's still up that they can't completely separate themselves from him. https://naomikritzer.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/vox-days-involvement-in-the-sad-puppies-slate/ Besides, Torgersen at least is an ass on his own merits.

Brad may be an "ass," but there is plenty of assy behavior to go around. And it's a long way from being an ass to being a racist sexist homophobe.

Yep, this. The Sad Puppies like to put on a front about how they're completely different, but there's only so much distance the movement can put between them and the Rabid Puppies when you have SP leaders defending one of the most toxic internet trolls of our age.

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