Yes, I’m a little pissed, how can you tell?

Fuck this shit!

Up to now I’ve been pretty quiet about this, but you all have finally pissed me off. I’m seeing all sorts of grandstanding, self-congratulatory, “I’m so fucking proud of fandom,” nonsense all over the place. This is some sort of high-water mark for the genre. Schadenfreude for everyone! Crush the puppies! See them driven before us, and hear the lamentations of their women! Yay us! We won!

If you’re part of that cheering squad, fuck you.

This is what you’re cheering: A bunch of guys came to the game trying to get people to win. A bunch of other guys came to make people lose. The latter was victorious. So you’re all cheering, “Yay! People lost!”

Applauding “no award” means nothing but your own profound joy that everyone in the category lost. It means you are celebrating their defeat.

It means you celebrate the fact that a pair of women editors who’ve done fantastic work in the genre for decades, who managed to pull in record setting numbers of votes, were successfully blocked from getting an award because mumblemumble-hate-mumblemumble-misogyny-mumble. It means you are okay that, given the traditional meaning of “no award,” fandom pretty much up and said to Sheila E. Gilbert and Toni Weisskopf that, “no, really, we don’t think you should have this Hugo, and furthermore, we really think you aren’t worthy to be on this ballot.”

That is what you’re cheering.

So fuck you.

If you start saying “collateral damage,” Fuck you.

If you start saying “but the puppies…” Fuck you.

If you start saying “if they distanced themselves from…” Fuck you with a rusty chainsaw.

All of the above is an attempt to deflect responsibility. Fandom decided that voting “no award” across the board was a reasonable response to the Puppies, and that’s what they did. The people who did so, the people who encouraged them to do so, and the people cheering the results, are all taking a massive steaming sour-burrito dump on the careers of two women who’ve probably done more for the genre than the whole lot of knee-jerk puppy kickers put together.

So, yeah, if you’re blabbing on Facebook about how proud you are about all this, I’m pretty much losing my respect for you.