Fandom, Recognition, & Community

[renay]

The Mark Protection Committee of the World Science Fiction Society, whether they intended to or not, did the equivalent of reminding people that even though the Hugo voters chose the Archive of Our Own to receive a Hugo Award for Best Related Work, they get to set the parameters of how we talk about it amongst ourselves in our own community. Their opinion is more important than the will of voting WSFS members. If they dislike that presentation of their motives, then maybe next time they should run their ideas for lecturing Hugo Award winners on Appropriate Behavior by someone not so close to the issue before they open a new document to write a condescending statement. Because they've done more damage to the Hugo Award and WSFS reputation than any fan celebrating and making fun jokes with each other, or even selling merch, by being joyless and deciding to rules lawyer people who contributed to a Hugo Award winning project into oblivion instead of being mature and just issuing C&Ds.

They created an environment that made fans feel ashamed of being happy and that created space for people to compare fans celebrating with literal fascists. I started the actual campaign for the Archive of our Own to be on the ballot and I was very patient and methodical to avoid treating the Hugo like the fascists did, so to whoever is out there calling me and mine fascists: screw you.

In 2014 I started talking about how the AO3 was eligible for the Best Related Work Hugo Award. Yes, the fact that it's a multi-million dollar content management system built by marginalized fans was part of it. But it was also because we built it to host the things that kept getting us targeted and booted off third party platforms.

Disclaimer: I'm not unbiased.

• I joined Tag Wrangling in October of 2009.
• AD&T helped us turn Tag Wranging into its own committee.
• I served as chair and later, staff of that committee.
• I served on staff on Volunteers & Recruiting, which helps recruit volunteers to the committees that support the OTW and the Archive.
• I both chaired and co-chaired Volunteers & Recruiting.
• I took a break because I was exhausted, but not too exhausted to go...."yes, a campaign to see if people think AO3 is award-worthy! SOUNDS GREAT!"

I've seen the back end of the AO3 project. I've seen how the OTW committees work. I know how people contribute to making the archive function, from the tag wrangler with the least amount of fandoms all the way up to the Board. I've watched coders get up in the middle of the night to fix things and create features out of thin air or on a whim that go on to be incredibly popular. I've run exchanges on it and uploaded work and left comments and kudos. I've shared invite codes and urged friends to get accounts. I've wrangled tags and worked with Communications and struggled to support my colleagues, many of whom were also my friends, because it's work, sometimes really hard interpersonal work, that I wasn't always good at and had to work to improve. And writing fanwork is work, too, of a different kind. The win was for everyone, and I always meant for it to be. If you're mad I used the WSFS rules to recognize a community—knowing how that community would react—instead of the Brilliant Lone Creator, fine, feel free to change the rules.

If a segment of fandom wants to come and tell me that my campaign to see the Archive of Our Own recognized as a marvel, a miracle of collaborative international action from thousands of fans across the world, after watching Livejournal blast my communities into nothing and AVOS rip del.icio.us to shreds, was somehow antithetical to what the Hugos stand for, come on. Bring it to me and make your case. If you want to compare my work promoting the Hugos to other communities outside the tiny circle of WSFS voters to the work of Nazis and fascists, come on, you bloviating fleshbags. I'm waiting. If you want to tell people that joking around about a Hugo Award win is somehow robbing the award of something irreplaceable, it's on you to convince me how some fans jokingly writing ".0000000001% Hugo Award winner" devalues the Hugo Awards sitting on my mantle for the work I've done on Lady Business. Come on, if you're so certain, so sure, that the joy and pleasure I've watched fans experience after being recognized by other fans, is somehow harmful to the Hugo Award—tell me just how the undermining of the award is going to go. Show me where other Hugo Award winners have expressed the dire prediction that their award is now worthless, just worthless! I expect citations of where they've tossed it in the trash. I've read lots of your very sad internet tears already and haven't been convinced, and I'm pretty sure I have more Hugo Awards than most of the people complaining.

Oh, I'm sorry—was that gauche? Well, I'd rather be gauche than a moist, wobbly bag of negativity and jealousy stomping on the joy of a shared victory, a shared cultural moment that will even out and should have become a fond memory, a funny story, a cute joke, that was not at all assured in 2007 when fandom was struggling to find a home that wouldn't try to erase us to appease fascists, evangelicals, and shareholders.

I'm a .0000000001% Hugo Award winner, and y'all can die mad about it.

Comments

Note

[renay]

I'm not saying only people with awards can have an opinion (sorry that my original post does so). But I can't pretend that I'm not viewing this debacle through the lens of both someone who invested heavily in AO3 and the Hugo Awards (financially and emotionally), and has also won the award twice because my fellow fans were like, "yeah, y'all are doing cool stuff!" I'm saying, perhaps awkwardly (what else is new?), that it feels like this treatment of AO3 users as a whole due to a few bad actors is "acceptable" because AO3 users aren't actually winners by the cultural standards of the Hugos, and there's seemingly no room for nuance on the part of some of the critics of the AO3 users. I cannot imagine anyone saying some of the things I've seen said to AO3 users being said to Hugo winners, because once you start saying them to someone who straddles both groups, they become ridiculous.

[naye]

*standing ovation*

[azurelunatic]

Well said.

[sweet_sparrow]

[applauds]

[kass]

Thank you for this post.

*tongue in cheek*

[po8crg]

Since the award was for work done in 2018, presumably only the authors of fanfic published that year are actually Hugo Award winners? :P

Yes, if someone were to seriously advertise themselves as a Hugo Award winning author on the cover of a novel, or something like that, then that would be out of order. But doing it unseriously, like people put "Time Person of the Year 2006" (You) or "Nobel Peace Prize Winner 2012" (the EU), is exactly the sort of joke that fandom normally enjoys. I really don't get where the Mark Protection Committee are coming from. They need to grow a sense of humor.

Re: *tongue in cheek*

[erinptah]

I would say, anyone who contributed to the AO3 during or before 2018 is A Winner. Same as how, if an award-winning novel takes 5 years to complete, the author wins the Hugo for the whole novel, not just the parts they wrote in the final year when it won.

And, wow, can't believe I forgot about when I was TIME Person Of The Year.

More seriously, I think people understand the scope of "You" or the meaning of the European Union, but a lot of the dying-mad-about-Hugo-jokes folks don't really grok the AO3. (Expecting the site newsposts to reach more than a fraction of users, for one thing...and there was a File770 comment where someone earnestly explained that the AO3 has a community of "thousands of people"...)

[ridicully]

Hell yes.

I wanked that rocket, I have pictures to prove it, they can try to take it back all they want, a tiny part of it is MINE.

(I'm not even a writer. Its the freaking community of everyone together that makes the AO3. How is that rocket science to understand.)

Dear Mark Protection Committee of the World Science Fiction Society:

[clevermanka]

Thank you for this post. I'm linking to it on my DW.

[minoanmiss]

Truly and gloriously said.
(here via Clevermanka)

[xparrot]

*applause* and also thank you, and congratulations for getting this to happen; it's so very deserved, for everyone!

[jesse_the_k]

+1000

[china_shop]

Thank you! <3

(Also here via clevermanka.)

[cynthia1960]

Thank you!

[starlady]

Hear, hear. And THANK YOU. ♥

[pandarus]

I am APPLAUDING MY ASS OFF.

Thank you. This is beautiful, and reassuring. All of this is just so damn tiring and disheartening; nobody wanted our nomination or win to damage the awards, and if that is genuinely a possible outcome I wish to God that had been discussed ahead of time, because OBVIOUSLY if you give an award to an extremely active (much-mocked, marginalised) community, its members ARE going to celebrate.

My impression is that the sentence “The AO3 won a Hugo” parses very differently in the two fannish areas: that to WSFS people it means “a thing” won the award, while to AO3 people it means “a community” the award. Because we see ourselves as The AO3, because our corner of fandom is so intrinsically about shared texts, shared reading, shared writing, shared creation, shared responsibility, and the AO3 is our endeavor in a sense that Twitter is certainly not my endeavor, nor Facebook nor YouTube nor whatever other platform WSFS Mark Protection Committee people are conceptualising the AO3 as resembling.

It’s a 24-7 virtual, communally built, communally funded, communally translated & communally run Library of Alexandria to replace the ones we have had burnt down by angry mobs, and it’s full of our own art and words and ideas and discussions. If you talk about the AO3, for good or ill, you’re talking about US, not an abstract intangible thing.

Whereas I think that in a fannish space largely built around adulation of stand-alone works made by individuals, there is an assumption that only those things have genuine worth, and only that kind of victory or achievement is a genuine victory or achievement - and hence calling oneself a “Hugo Award Winner” wrt a group project is de facto either moronic or disingenuous, because one does not receive a physical award, or indeed a physical 0.000000000000001% chunk of the award, and therefore one is not a winner.

I have tried quite hard to see their perspective, after my initial “they can fuck all the way off” response, but at this point I am just tired and sad.

Reading your indignation was rather lovely.

[juniperphoenix]

*applause*

[msilverstar]

Thank you for incubating the idea and fostering the award! Fuck the haters.

[katarik]

Bra*va*. I also remember Strikethrough and Nipplegate. The OTW does truly incredible work and the AO3 does a ton for sci-fi fandoms and fannishness. This was a fantastic post to read.

(Also thank you for your consistent use of cut-tags.)

[ilyena_sylph]

+applauds So. Fucking. Much+

Also, thank you very much.

[fairestcat]

*cheers and applauds*

[dolorosa_12]

*stands up and applauds*

Thank you for this. Thank you for the work you did in advocating that Ao3 should be nominated for a Hugo, and thank you for your efforts over the years it took for it to receive that nomination, and then the award.

I was in the audience for the ceremony. It was my first time at Worldcon, and I was there next to two friends (and my not-transformative-fannish husband) who met and fell in love with each other through transformative fandom, and who both met me through transformative fandom on Dreamwidth. When Ao3 won, and Naomi Novik's acceptance speech invited all who felt part of the Ao3 community to stand up, and my friends and I stood up, with so many others (including some people who, incidentally, were professional original fiction authors who had been nominated for, and won, Hugo Awards in other categories), it was like being welcomed home. It was one of the highlights of not just the ceremony, but the entire convention, and it was part of what made me feel at home there, and keen to continue participating in Worldcon, and engaging with the Hugo Awards in years to come.

To be told my joy was unwelcome, my sense of community and belonging was misplaced, and my friends and I were behaving like wreckers, was incredibly upsetting. My only reassurance is that this whole kerfuffle has made the Hugos old guard look ridiculous, and that (given the numerous panels on fanworks and times fanworks were mentioned in panels that ostensibly were only about original fiction, by industry professionals, at the Dublin Worldcon), is that we are witnessing a sea change. The resistance from the grumbly old guard seems to me because they realise this.

[An icon with a quote from Anne Rice arguing with fans/reviewers seemed appropriate here.]

[dragoness_e]

I'm busy changing all my social media profiles to add the phrase "Proud Hugo-Award Winning Member of 2019 Hugo-Award Winning AO3". I hope to see some apoplexies.

Thanks for your work, and I'm glad I'm not the only one to say "Fuck that shit, I am not appeasing a bunch of patronizing mansplainers for the crime of existing!" What goes around comes around; respect is earned, not demanded.

[kore]

Fantastic!

If you don't mind me asking?

[grimmhill]

Since you were the initial spearhead of nomination for AO3. Did you find most of your support in existing WSFS members, in relatively new members who were recruited during the Puppygate years, or in even newer members recruited from AO3 and/or DW circles? Did the Old Guard (TM) support the nomination or is part of the wank inter-WSFS wank between Old Guard and new membership?

Of course, please feel free to ignore if you don't want to talk about it.