ladybusiness | (Reply)

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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.