Rant: Sad Puppies vs. Anti-Puppies, as the Kilostreisands Pile Up
Yes, I've been scarce in recent weeks, but bear with me: I'm off doing something difficult but important, which I'll tell you about later.
Although it's been going on now for three years, I hadn't ever ( Read more... )
A friend of mine told me in an email a few days ago that nobody would have noticed the Puppies at all except that the American Left is losing on a number of fronts and sees this as another attack from the right, hence the shitstorm that descended to incoherent obscenity pretty quickly after April 4.
He may have a point. I have noticed this: Every single Anti-Puppy whose politics I know leans left, sometimes very left. I'm sure there are exceptions, but it certainly seems like a strong trend. So this may be nothing more than another proxy for tribal political hate. I certainly hope not, but it's not up to me.
What people seem to be missing (and there's another entry or three to be had from the insight, which I intend to write at some point) is that textual SFF fandom is splitting again like it did back in the 90s, when media fandom went its own way. I'm still trying to discern the fault lines there, but politics is only a part of it, and not (in my view) the most significant part. It may cut down to the very definition of what fiction (all fiction, not just SFF) actually is.
It may also be generational. Look around at the next con you attend. We're going from fifty shades of gray to fifty shades of white. And the list of SKs just keeps getting longer. The Sad Puppies are not Boomers. Even their leaders are young enough to be our children. The key to the whole business is buried there, and if I figure it out, you'll read it here.
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My take it that it is all about politics and the worst of it. I directly disagree that it's the Left's reaction to losing on a number of fronts. It's the Right's reaction to losing. That's the entire point of the slate. They lost and lost and lost. It's the last violent tail spasm of a dinosaur who has had a spear put in its head, but the rest of the body hasn't figured it out yet. Everyone would just stand back but for the destruction that tail wrecks.
The conservatives always lose over time. George Will used to observe that the world has a left turning ratchet. Women get the vote. Gays will get married.
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It may not matter. What's actually happening is that fandom is forking, like it forked when the media guys left and started having conventions that 100,000 people attended. The media guys won, by a factor of 10. I'm starting to hear about SP meetups, and there will eventually be SP conventions, though I'll bet it's under another name. Meanwhile, traditional fandom gets whiter, sicker, and deader. I'd worry about that more than anything else. The Puppies trend young. Why I don't yet understand, but they do.
US politics is cyclical, not linear. There is no "over time." Conservatives take a bath when voters get tired of them, and liberals take a bath when the voters who elected them get sick of them in turn. Handing political tribalists their own asses on a platter with Bearnaise sauce is our national sport, one that I myself greatly enjoy. Political independents now dominate the electorate. Political parties are a sad, impotent shadow of what they once were, and these days border on self-parody. Something is winning. It isn't the Republicans, and it certainly isn't the Democrats.
Americans are fundamentally good-hearted libertarians, and gay rights is a libertarian issue, not a left/right issue. A clear majority of my Republican friends support marriage equality. The ratchet is toward freedom, not toward any single ideology.
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