So: conspiracy theory.
Take this with all the weight you take all conspiracy theories: i.e., practically none, given that it’s all supposition, and simply seems to fit one perspective on the facts. Don’t be fooled just because it happens to hinge on the doings of an actual, existing conspiracy; the conspiracy’s real, but their precise strategy and motives (as opposed to their stated strategy and motives) remain hypothetical to those of us outside it.
That doesn’t mean we can’t spitball.
So: Sad / Rabid Puppies.
The one I call {Moronic Massacre-Mocker} has announced that he’s voted NO AWARD in all categories, including the one where he has a nominee, in part, he says, to make some point about the Hugos being invalid.
John Scalzi has recently tweeted to the effect that this claim has now becoming fashionable among the Puppies. I don’t know. {MMM} is the only one I’ve seen say it, but there may be more.
Let us assume, the operative word being “assume” and the open admission being that it is as trustworthy as any assumption, that Scalzi’s claim is accurate and that a number of the conspirators have indeed voted “NO AWARD” even for their own stories on a ballot they previously did their level best to capture whole.
Given that they have previously said that a No Award in any category is proof that the Hugos have been hijacked by a conspiracy of SJWS and that writers of good-old-fashioned traditional science fiction without imbedded leftist messages cannot get a break, given that they’ve tried so hard to get to this point, why would they do this now? Why would they fly so close to the sun, on borrowed wings, before pulling the feathers out and plunging back to the earth, like Icarus?
This is my theory.
It may not be at all accurate. Again, I do not present this as verifiable fact. But this is what I think and this is what I hope.
They’ve done the math.
They know how many Supporting Memberships Sasquan has picked up since this mess began. And while we have been stuck saying we don’t know how many of those supporting memberships are voters they or their allies have subsidized – quite a few, possibly, given how their allies include the Breitbart organization – and how many have been fans outraged by their tactics who have bought supporting memberships just to vote them down in every possible category, they DO know how many memberships they’ve bought; they do know how many memberships they’ve paid for, and they do know that after all their rants and fulminations and promises to smash the Hugos, they know that the numbers suggest that backlash numerically superior. They have begun to realize that they’re in for a drubbing of historical proportions. NO AWARD in any category dominated by their candidates. Hugos going to the stories and candidates they had nothing to do with.
And faced with this fear (it cannot be a certainty), they have taken the bold pre-emptive public relations step of repositioning that possible result as a victory.
So {Moronic Massacre-Mocker} has said that he’s voting NO AWARD in every category, even ahead of his own story, thus altering the presumed goal of all this unpleasantness from making sure Hugo nominations and Hugo trophies only go to real nuts-and-bolts science fiction for the only science fiction readers who count, to sabotaging the awards completely, making sure nobody gets any, and in that way proving that scorched Earth was always the only option.
This is, of course, if Scalzi is right and anybody other than {Moronic Massacre-Mocker} has said it.
So far I’ve only seen the rant from {Moronic Massacre-Mocker}, who is being given a time-out from Facebook for hate speech.
But if we permit consideration of the possibility that it has become a meme, it represents a serious shift in strategy and a complete rebranding of the desired goal.
We wanted the ship to sink. We always wanted to make a point about icebergs.
We wanted our village to be sacked. It proves our moral superiority to the huns.
Yes, I just slammed myself in the balls with a sledgehammer. I meant to do that.
Maybe they know how many supporting memberships they paid for and how many they did not. Maybe they’ve convened in panic and discussed how to still pull a nominal victory out of all this. Maybe they’ve said, “We have to sell the premise that if we go down in flames, it’s what we always intended.”
Maybe they’re terrified.
This is just a conspiracy theory, mind you. It might or might not have any validity. But the shift from, “VOTING NO AWARD IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!” to “WE ARE NOW VOTING NO AWARD EVEN IN OUR OWN CATEGORIES!” does give me pause….
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
July 18th, 2015 at 9:17 am
Also Glenn Hauman, Keith DeCandido
Comment By: David Gerrold
July 18th, 2015 at 9:18 am
Fascinating.
Comment By: Steven Angel
July 18th, 2015 at 9:18 am
So…the assholes are assholes. And will go to any length necessary to preserve their demented ideals.
Are you sure you’re not writing about the Tea Party?
Comment By: Marc Blake
July 18th, 2015 at 9:18 am
Your hypothesis is, at the very least, intriguing. They have to spin the outcome in some fashion though, regardless of its direction… so this may be less of a deliberate strategy than a likely psychological defense mechanism.
Comment By: Jon Meltzer
July 18th, 2015 at 9:18 am
They’re going to declare victory no matter what the outcome is, so who gives a fuck what they say?
Comment By: Ole Andreas Imsen
July 18th, 2015 at 9:18 am
I think they have realised that their own delusion of (paraphrased)”The majority of fans are with us, and neutral fans will realise we are right when looking at the evidence.” is not holding up outside right-wing echo chambers. And they are trying to piggyback on the fact that no award is something many SFF fans will vote for either for anti-slate, or ant-crap fiction reasons, If they now support no award, they can claim victory when fans are rejecting them.
Comment By: George
July 18th, 2015 at 8:52 am
This sort of lame-ass “Cunning Plan” sounds like just the sort of thing they’d try. This whole thing is all about self-promotion. If they win an award they claim victory. If they lose, they claim victory.
Comment By: Piet Nel
July 18th, 2015 at 9:18 am
Maybe it’s even simpler than that. Maybe it’s that they know they’re outnumbered, and assume that the majority will do the opposite of what they do. So by giving the impression that Puppies will now vote NA, they are trying to reverse-psych the mainstream fans into voting “normally”, thus handing Hugos to Puppy-supported works on the ballot.
Comment By: Nick Sanders
July 18th, 2015 at 9:18 am
From its early days, the attack on the Hugos has been claimed to be a Xanatos Gambit. If so, couldn’t this tactic be viewed as being necessary in order to claim victory from what, to any reasonable outsider observer, would be seen to be a definitive loss?
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
July 18th, 2015 at 10:17 am
“He lay sprawled across the wreckage of his flying machine, bruised and battered, bleeding from the eyes and mouth, broken glass in his cheeks and arms.
“I said, ‘Clearly, your design doesn’t work.’
“He looked at me in pity. ‘I always knew you would say that.'”
Comment By: Fang Van Took
July 18th, 2015 at 11:17 am
So… Assuming that much of their intent has been to get attention to their “plight” even more than to get this year’s awards to go to “deserving” works, and given how much has been said about this year being the year of the asterisk, maybe they’ve come to the conclusion that the “asterisk” represents ongoing publicity for them. Given that, then, they may have realized that in a few years most people looking up Hugo winners will not realize that there is an assumed asterisk. How then to make sure that for all time anyone looking at this year’s winners will see that something was afoot and will then be drawn to find out about their valiant fight? What better way than to have several categories come in as No Award?
Comment By: BW
July 18th, 2015 at 10:45 am
There are people who are voting non-puppy-slate works first and No Award second, third, or whatever. There are also some who are voting for puppy-slate works that appear to be on the slate without the author’s knowledge/approval and No Award above other puppy-slate works. There are also some who are voting strictly on merit and find merit in some of the puppy-slate works and voting No Award above the others.
I’m wondering whether No Award votes by MMM and his ilk might be intended to counter these votes. If I (and others like me) vote for “Worthy Work” first and No Award second but enough of the maybe-possibly-alleged-conspiracy types vote No Award, that could put No Award above “Worthy Work.”
So is this a matter of having counted the likely votes, found that the puppy-slate works aren’t likely to win, and therefore trying to make it so that “if we don’t win, nobody wins”?
Comment By: Paul Crawford
July 18th, 2015 at 11:17 am
I’m honestly not surprised at this, because I’ve watched this behavior among Cat Piss Men for decades. “Gonna get my ass kicked up around my shoulder blades when a vote is taken? Well, time to change semantics and claim we have always been at war with Oceania”. It’s what I like to call the “Produce The Birth Certificate Sliding Asshole Defense”, because there’s no way in hell they’ll concede to anything other than total victory. (I’m not even bothered that the Cat Piss Men behind Sad Puppies think we’re stupid. I’m angered that they think we’re even dumber than they are.)
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
July 18th, 2015 at 11:17 am
I have been had fun coming up with names for them that provide a thin layer of obfuscation over their identities and first make me more comfortable about slamming colleagues , and second prevent their names from coming up on a search of my posts.
The only ones I cite by name are Beale the Galactic Zero and Brad Torgersen, and I demur with Brad because — though his fans enjoy coming here to start their trouble — I honestly can’t bear to take that step with him. (I have a name that I cannot bear to whip out, but it actually echoes things I have said in black and white).
But aside from those two we have {Steely-Eyed McRage Monster}, {Gay-Basher McManlyPants}, {Moronic Massacre-Mocker}, {Hurt-Feelings Harry}, and I must confess, a couple of others I have been holding back so far.
Comment By: Tracey Claybon
July 18th, 2015 at 12:17 pm
Wow. I knew these guys seemed to want scorched earth – talk about a pointless “win”. They are like the drama queen clique leader in school who starts a new fashion, gets everyone wearing it then at the height of the popularity says “it’s stupid, I’m not wearing it any more” – good GRIEF!
Comment By: SMQ
July 18th, 2015 at 12:44 pm
Considering that Mr. Rabid has essentially made a career out of positioning himself so that no matter what happens he can claim to have predicted it and declare it to be a victory, I find this scenario entirely plausible.
–SMQ
Comment By: Julie McGalliard
July 18th, 2015 at 2:17 pm
I think you’re right. It’s hard to know how sincere any of them are, but it’s possible that they really believed the narrative that 1. Hugo nominees and winners of recent years truly reflected the desires of a small backroom cabal, and not the majority of Worldcon fans, and 2. They were nominating terrific, populist works that Worldcon fans, sick of the elitist tastes of the cabal, would enthusiastically embrace.
Instead, Worldcon fans have been asking, “What the hell is this crap doing on my Hugo ballot? Why are you trying to make me read all this garbage?” The nominations didn’t bring the prestige they expected. So of course they’re trying to save face by acting like that was the plan all along.
Comment By: Jay Ramsperger
July 18th, 2015 at 2:17 pm
This shift reminds me of that old line about how arguing with certain people is like playing chess with a pigeon: doesn’t matter what you do, they’ll scatter the pieces, crap on the board, and strut around triumphantly.
Comment By: Paul Michael Anderson
July 18th, 2015 at 2:17 pm
Dude, we all know MMM was banned from FB because of sweet sweet mustache jealousy.
Comment By: David Vineyard
July 18th, 2015 at 3:17 pm
Assuming they think deeply enough to come up with a plot this complex, and if they do it sounds like a better plot than many of them usually write.
Sadly it makes enough perverse sense to be true.
These types are always poor losers. It is never their fault and never the quality of their work or superiority of others but always because someone is actively conspiring to hold them down.
Funny, but when I disagree with the Pulitzer or Nobel committee I never feel the need to complain they should have nominated me instead. I never assume they didn’t because of a liberal conspiracy (actually the Nobel committee is prejudiced against Catholic writers meaning Graham Greene and Brian Moore never had a chance).
I don’t think this epic silliness will hurt the Hugo award. I do think it will backfire on a few good adventure novels down the line who get identified with the Sad Puppy lot, but that will fade.
The problem with creating a tempest in a tea pot is that all you get is spilled tea and a few stains that come out.
But the Icarus syndrome is not that you fly too close to the Sun out of ambition but that you fly to close from ignorance and fall farther because your reach exeeded your grasp.
Daedalus was ambitious. Icarus was a foolish brat too self absorbed to understand the consequences.
Comment By: Rachel Swirsky
July 18th, 2015 at 5:18 pm
That was my thought as soon as I saw the posturing. It doesn’t even matter if it’s an organized effort; clearly, someone just wants to expand their “winning conditions.” (Re: Alexandra Erin, sometimes that means licking the pieces.)
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
July 18th, 2015 at 5:18 pm
Rachel, {Moronic Massacre-Mocker} really needs to go fuck himself. I don’t descend to that easily. But he really does need to. He’s that close to being a singularity.
Comment By: Laurie Mann
July 18th, 2015 at 4:49 pm
Some number of categories, probably 3, will take No Award.
Some number of categories will have winners who would never have been a nominee without the slate but who aren’t puppies.
Some categories will have reasonable winners who would have been a nominee anyway.
More people will pay more attention to the “next 15 nominee list” than have ever paid attention to it before on Saturday night after the Hugos Ceremony.
Comment By: Brian Siano
July 18th, 2015 at 6:18 pm
Good analysis. One trait common to a lot of these guys is that they’re pretty much in love with whatever their own brains cook up. Every clever solipsism is an insight, and every opinion is a truth, and a momentary doubt would ruin their exquisite beauty. If they choose to believe one thing in the morning and one thing later in the day, they can’t even begin to see it as a contradiction.
Comment By: Louann Miller
July 18th, 2015 at 6:18 pm
I am so very bored with those guys.
Comment By: JC Anderson
July 18th, 2015 at 6:18 pm
This theory makes a great deal of sense.
Comment By: Laura Resnick
July 18th, 2015 at 10:17 pm
MZW has blogged about his decision to vote “No Award” on everything, but I had the impression Scalzi was just making a casual joke when he said it was becoming “fashionable” among the Puppies, and I’m not aware of any evidence of any other Puppies planning or advocating it. VD has made threats about what he’ll do if “No Award” beats his nominees (and IIIRC correctly I read a statement a few months ago where Correia also made vague threats about it)… but since I think they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do EITHER WAY, I’m skeptical (unless statements or evidence emerge) that getting “No Award” has become part of their strategy. Whether some of their nominees win Hugos, or they all lose, and/or they come in dead-last, and/or they come in behind “No Award,” =every= and =any= result will be declared by the Puppies as “proving” THEY’RE RIGHT. There is no particular result they need in order to do that, since they’re going to do it regardless of results. (It would be surprisingly nice to see the Puppies all say, in the event of widespread loss, “Well, we put the best work out there we could, the voters have spoken, and we accept their decision,” and move on… but all of their rhetoric to date consistently indicates they definitely won’t do that.)
Comment By: James Ross
July 18th, 2015 at 11:21 pm
Scalzi is a good writer. Is he a good, or bad guy in this fight? I honestly haven’t been paying any attention to it at all.
Comment By: James Ross
July 19th, 2015 at 8:18 am
Wow…the rape letter, just scathing.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
July 19th, 2015 at 8:18 am
And certain elements on the conservative side of the aisle, willfully and consciously misunderstanding it — the kind of misunderstanding that requires deliberate action — have painted that letter as Scalzi “glorifying rape” or “admitting he’s a rapist,” which to me represents the level of their dedication to truth. And which is why Beale the Galactic Zero takes such pleasure in calling him a rapist.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
July 19th, 2015 at 8:18 am
One would not think the poverty essay would anger people — it *is* true, poverty ios like that — but it has; certain conservatives have painted it as Scalzi being a typical bleeding heart, or showing too much sympathy for lazy people, despite the fact that he writes from experience about the WORKING poor.
(I do not for even ten seconds pretend that all conservatives are like this, but it says much of those who are that they hate Scalzi in particular, on principle, for defending rape victims or saying that poverty is bad.)
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
July 19th, 2015 at 8:18 am
Scalzi has also been attacked by the very people he’s defending with that rape essay, precisely because it’s so powerful and triggery — even though he provides a fervent trigger warning; some who proceeded anyway were emotionally affected, and you know, you can’t have that.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
July 19th, 2015 at 6:19 pm
HA! I suspect Scalzi’s blog post, here, is a response to this thread.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/07/19/why-im-disliked-a-ten-point-list/#comment-792783
Comment By: Camestros Felapton
July 20th, 2015 at 6:51 pm
I think the relevant emotion is ‘despondent’. I don’t know if they have crunched the numbers but I think the people actively supporting the Puppies at the start haven’t grown in numbers or spread beyond a fairly small circle of blogs. In comparison the back lash has been large and sustained.
They can also see that the Tor Boycott has gone no further than the circle of Puppies.
The next rationale will be that somehow there were lots of poorly informed moderate fans who would have supported the Puppies if only they hadn’t been lied to by EW etc.
Comment By: CPaca
July 20th, 2015 at 8:50 pm
One day, the {Moronic Massacre-Mocker} is going to give himself a brain aneurysm fulminating against, well, everything.
And when that happens, I’m going to crack open a brew, pat the dog, and ease back in a comfortable chair, content with the world.
Comment By: Owlmirror
July 23rd, 2015 at 9:31 am
I’m reasonably sure that Scalzi was being snarkily facetious.
(“I’m generalizing from one example, here, but everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do.” — Vlad Taltos via S. Brust)
I did think that there might be a tactical reason to vote “No Award” on the Puppy side — it denies information for how many Puppies there actually are. But that’s only if all of the Puppy leaders are willing and able to actually co-ordinate a mass “No Award” vote. And then . . . meh, I dunno.
But the original post (which explicitly states that he’s not advocating anyone else changing their vote) mostly looks like “Those grapes are sour! Sour, I say! I’ll not sully my mouth with them.”