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

[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.