So, the big news of the last couple months was that the fifth-season opener, The Cutie Map, was nominated for a Hugo Award. The Hugos are considered the top prize in Science Fiction. They are nominated and voted on by fans of the genre and awarded each year at the World Science Fiction Convention, as they have been since 1953. This year's WorldCon will be held in Kansas City in August. That's the good news. The bad news is how they came to be nominated. In 2013, a group calling themselves the Sad Puppies formed with the intention of getting certain works nominated for Hugo Awards. The works they wanted to see nominated, however, were ones they described as not attempting to be taken as serious literature, or to be pushing a particular social message to the reader. Over time, however, this came to be seen as just about any work that was male-driven, ideologically right-wing, and borderline misogynistic. The other slight problem with the works the Puppies suggested were that they generally weren't that well-written either, which is a bit of a concern for a largely literary award. Last year, the Sad Puppies and a splinter group, the Rabid Puppies, managed to get large numbers of candidates nominated through bloc voting. Other voting fans pushed back, however. Not a single Puppy-suggested work won (except for Guardians of the Galaxy, which many conceded would have been on the ballot and won even without the Puppies' involvement), and in those categories where Puppy candidates were the only nominees, the fans voted to give out No Award, in an unprecedented five categories. For whatever strange reason, as My Little Pony:Friendship is Magic seems to directly contradict their usual thinking, the show appeared on the suggested nominee lists of both the Sad and the Rabid Puppies this year. (The Sad Puppies only named the series, the Rabid Puppies suggested The Cutie Map specifically.) Once again, large numbers of their suggestions were bloc-nominated onto the shortlist for this year, also, which is already not sitting well with a lot of Science Fiction fans. In short, you can expect a huge amount of controversy, drama, and caps-lock typing over this issue across two fandoms. None of us should let it get under our skin - it wasn't our fault, after all - and we really shouldn't be surprised if MLP doesn't win its category, either (it is up against Doctor Who). But if any of us are faced with the inevitable accusations of rigging the vote, we can at least point to the facts.
