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silveradeptThere was much giddiness at the announcement that the Archive of Our Own won a Hugo Award at the 2019 Worldcon in Dublin, Ireland. AO3, and the OTW behind it, are a prominent voice in the conversation about the legitimacy and legality of transformative works.
An admin post went up on AO3 a little while ago conveying a reminder from the World Science Fiction Society, who administer Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, that the win by AO3 does not mean every work in the Archive, and every creator, is a Hugo Award winner.
The most immediate and common reaction to the post seems to have been, "We know. We were having fun. Stop harshing our squee."
Aside from those responses, though, there is a more serious question that goes along with these reactions. What did AO3 win a Beat Related Work Hugo for?
One of the strains of argument is that AO3 won because it is a tremendous technical achievement, managing near-sorcerous abilities in wrangling tags, having robust search, consistently providing relevant results, and otherwise excelling at its chosen purpose.
AO3 is a massive proof-of-concept and regularly does things thought impossible or resource-expensive without showing the strain on the performance or returning garbage results because the search system doesn't understand, not to mention keeping the folksonomy organized and eventually migrating it into an official taxonomy.
But the reason everyone's jaw drops any time someone says "AO3 did it" is because they're doing it with a corpus of five million works and counting without the servers falling over and crashing or experiencing severe slowdowns as they struggle to try and serve, store, and index all those works. It's text, which is relatively bandwidth-light, but there's still scaling issues to think about when the corpus is that big. AO3 is a technical achievement precisely because it is dealing with a massive store of data and metadata and making it Just Work. OTWArchive is an excellent application and could potentially be deployed in other settings, with hopefully similar results for large corpuses. But each new work added to the Archive that doesn't break it is one more reason why AO3 deserves the award on technical merits. Which means all of the creators that have used AO3 as their Archive share in the responsibility for the Hugo, if it is a technical achievement, because they provided the material that AO3 is using to demonstrate their wizardry.
Several of the "you're not all Hugo winners" responses I've seen say variations on "Well, if I wrote a story for a magazine, and the magazine won the Hugo, I didn't transitively win the Hugo by writing for the magazine that year." That may be true, but that argument suggests the stories in the magazine aren't important criteria for consideration for the Hugo. That argument reduces the available space for "why did the magazine win the Hugo?" to the things that are unique to the magazine. Generally, that's stuff like layout, formatting, possibly pairing images with the text, and the cosmetic and presentation aspects of the magazine.
I am fairly certain that a lot of people don't get magazines full of stories because they want to enthuse about the pretty layouts and the brilliant kerning and typeface decisions made. (There are some people who do. Please keep doing it! I often learn a lot when people enthusiastically gush about things I don't know much about.) They want to read the stories. And so, at least some part of a Hugo decision has to be "has this magazine consistently published high quality and/or entertaining work in the eligibility period?" The authors and editors themselves may not individually win Hugos when the magazine does, but they are certainly an important part of it.
AO3 scales this up massively. Sure, Sturegon's Law applies (and is vastly different for each Archive contributor or viewer), but even if 10% of the Archive's works are objectively Good by Sturgeonian standards, that's still at least one half-million Good works on the same site, gathered in from all the years that AO3 has been in existence. That's a lifetime of reading even if no new works arrive, which they are, and at accelerating speeds. So AO3 already contains works that could win Hugos individually, at least theoretically, were they nominated by people who support WSFS monetarily.
This leads into something also worth mentioning, although it's a little tangential to the main question. Digging a little, and reading some comments, suggests that this reminder post is concerned with "Don't do things that engage in unauthorized use of our service marks for profit," which is a far different thing to say than "Stop saying you're Hugo award-winners." The first is reasonable, because marks have to be actively defended or they lose their ability to be exclusive.
The second, in the other hand, is what was said, and it invokes an idea that fanfic creators shouldn't consider themselves Hugo Award-winning because they're not really worthy of it. Whether the threshold of "real worthiness" is getting paid for your original works, getting nominated individually, being published traditionally, or some other criterion that translates to "keep those icky fic writers out of my fandom." Nevermind that several creators who do meet whatever criteria they can throw out have also contributed works on AO3 or other transformative fic archives, or posted their interpretations of other characters to art showcases. Or had prints made and sell them. Or, or, or. The point is to make sure that whatever that person considers to be part of the respectable science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction community, it definitely doesn't include the works of AO3.
There's some of that going on in the comments of the AO3 post, and mostly by setting things elsewhere, I'm guessing there's a lot of gatekeeping going on at File770 as well. This, despite the Astounding Award winner from this year putting not-too-fine a point on the history of the science fiction community as a place where being obviously a woman wasn't welcomed, where being obviously a minority wasn't welcomed, where being obviously queer wasn't welcomed. Transformative creators have, historically, been at least one of minority, queer, or woman, and while there have been a lot more of all of those people getting into the business, getting published in a profitable way, and winning awards while they are at it, there are still more than enough people standing in their way and telling them that this space is not for them. Because those gatekeepers have consistently failed to understand that SF/F is a place where, by its nature, all works have questions of politics and social justice attached, and that by asking "what if?" in your own work, you implicitly invite others to do the same.
elf points out that AO3 is a community composed of people who were tired of being gatekept, building on and complementing fairestcat pointing out there is no abstract thing that is AO3 that can win the award so that the community can be safely excluded from having won the award. In both cases, the gatekeeping and the arguments intended to exclude the community ring very strongly of other historical efforts from the SF/F community to devalue and exclude fic writers from the lofty heights of the fandom.
For the gatekeepers, accepting that AO3 won both on its technical merits and for the stories contained in there means accepting that stories you don't love and don't think are of high quality are just as worthy of consideration for honors as the things you do like and think are high quality.
Because fic with the names changed to protect the copyright gets traditionally published and becomes an international hit.
Because Dr. Chuck Tingle, World's Greatest Author, exists and does a brisk business in Tingler sales, so much so that people already well-known for projects like Welcome to Night Vale were commissioned to read them aloud for a podcast.
Because sometimes, what you want to do is revel in terrible tropes and improbable things and pure id, and that makes a work worthy of honors (or at least kudos).
Because Batman '66 is the best Batman.
And, of course, in the tradition of good fic, fic as example of the absurdity of a position chastising fans for celebrating. Involves Lord Stanley's Cup and hockey. There are other examples in the comments of the post, some as commentfic, some as standalone works, a lot as poetry filk in the comments (including breadliks and Chaucer and icebox plums).
The Archive wins because it is a technical marvel.
The Archive wins because the stories there fill so many needs that traditional publishing won't.
The Archive wins because representation matters.
The Archive wins because transformative works are an essential part of any and all fandoms, a conversation running mostly in parallel to their source works. People can choose their level of engagement with that part of the fandom, but they can't pretend that it doesn't exist.
The Archive won, and that means all the contributors to the Archive share in the win. Collectively, everyone who contributed to the Archive are Hugo Award-winning creators. To state otherwise is to ignore reality.
At this point, realizing that my voice is but one among many, and I'm not even to the level where I'm pulling out any citations, I'm going to leaveelf's roundup of the Hugo Things here so you can get more perspectives, including some solid roastings of the position that the Mark Protection Committee needs to be aggressive in enforcement (synecdochic brings the citation game to the yard, for example.)
An admin post went up on AO3 a little while ago conveying a reminder from the World Science Fiction Society, who administer Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, that the win by AO3 does not mean every work in the Archive, and every creator, is a Hugo Award winner.
The most immediate and common reaction to the post seems to have been, "We know. We were having fun. Stop harshing our squee."
Aside from those responses, though, there is a more serious question that goes along with these reactions. What did AO3 win a Beat Related Work Hugo for?
One of the strains of argument is that AO3 won because it is a tremendous technical achievement, managing near-sorcerous abilities in wrangling tags, having robust search, consistently providing relevant results, and otherwise excelling at its chosen purpose.
AO3 is a massive proof-of-concept and regularly does things thought impossible or resource-expensive without showing the strain on the performance or returning garbage results because the search system doesn't understand, not to mention keeping the folksonomy organized and eventually migrating it into an official taxonomy.
But the reason everyone's jaw drops any time someone says "AO3 did it" is because they're doing it with a corpus of five million works and counting without the servers falling over and crashing or experiencing severe slowdowns as they struggle to try and serve, store, and index all those works. It's text, which is relatively bandwidth-light, but there's still scaling issues to think about when the corpus is that big. AO3 is a technical achievement precisely because it is dealing with a massive store of data and metadata and making it Just Work. OTWArchive is an excellent application and could potentially be deployed in other settings, with hopefully similar results for large corpuses. But each new work added to the Archive that doesn't break it is one more reason why AO3 deserves the award on technical merits. Which means all of the creators that have used AO3 as their Archive share in the responsibility for the Hugo, if it is a technical achievement, because they provided the material that AO3 is using to demonstrate their wizardry.
Several of the "you're not all Hugo winners" responses I've seen say variations on "Well, if I wrote a story for a magazine, and the magazine won the Hugo, I didn't transitively win the Hugo by writing for the magazine that year." That may be true, but that argument suggests the stories in the magazine aren't important criteria for consideration for the Hugo. That argument reduces the available space for "why did the magazine win the Hugo?" to the things that are unique to the magazine. Generally, that's stuff like layout, formatting, possibly pairing images with the text, and the cosmetic and presentation aspects of the magazine.
I am fairly certain that a lot of people don't get magazines full of stories because they want to enthuse about the pretty layouts and the brilliant kerning and typeface decisions made. (There are some people who do. Please keep doing it! I often learn a lot when people enthusiastically gush about things I don't know much about.) They want to read the stories. And so, at least some part of a Hugo decision has to be "has this magazine consistently published high quality and/or entertaining work in the eligibility period?" The authors and editors themselves may not individually win Hugos when the magazine does, but they are certainly an important part of it.
AO3 scales this up massively. Sure, Sturegon's Law applies (and is vastly different for each Archive contributor or viewer), but even if 10% of the Archive's works are objectively Good by Sturgeonian standards, that's still at least one half-million Good works on the same site, gathered in from all the years that AO3 has been in existence. That's a lifetime of reading even if no new works arrive, which they are, and at accelerating speeds. So AO3 already contains works that could win Hugos individually, at least theoretically, were they nominated by people who support WSFS monetarily.
This leads into something also worth mentioning, although it's a little tangential to the main question. Digging a little, and reading some comments, suggests that this reminder post is concerned with "Don't do things that engage in unauthorized use of our service marks for profit," which is a far different thing to say than "Stop saying you're Hugo award-winners." The first is reasonable, because marks have to be actively defended or they lose their ability to be exclusive.
The second, in the other hand, is what was said, and it invokes an idea that fanfic creators shouldn't consider themselves Hugo Award-winning because they're not really worthy of it. Whether the threshold of "real worthiness" is getting paid for your original works, getting nominated individually, being published traditionally, or some other criterion that translates to "keep those icky fic writers out of my fandom." Nevermind that several creators who do meet whatever criteria they can throw out have also contributed works on AO3 or other transformative fic archives, or posted their interpretations of other characters to art showcases. Or had prints made and sell them. Or, or, or. The point is to make sure that whatever that person considers to be part of the respectable science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction community, it definitely doesn't include the works of AO3.
There's some of that going on in the comments of the AO3 post, and mostly by setting things elsewhere, I'm guessing there's a lot of gatekeeping going on at File770 as well. This, despite the Astounding Award winner from this year putting not-too-fine a point on the history of the science fiction community as a place where being obviously a woman wasn't welcomed, where being obviously a minority wasn't welcomed, where being obviously queer wasn't welcomed. Transformative creators have, historically, been at least one of minority, queer, or woman, and while there have been a lot more of all of those people getting into the business, getting published in a profitable way, and winning awards while they are at it, there are still more than enough people standing in their way and telling them that this space is not for them. Because those gatekeepers have consistently failed to understand that SF/F is a place where, by its nature, all works have questions of politics and social justice attached, and that by asking "what if?" in your own work, you implicitly invite others to do the same.
elf points out that AO3 is a community composed of people who were tired of being gatekept, building on and complementing fairestcat pointing out there is no abstract thing that is AO3 that can win the award so that the community can be safely excluded from having won the award. In both cases, the gatekeeping and the arguments intended to exclude the community ring very strongly of other historical efforts from the SF/F community to devalue and exclude fic writers from the lofty heights of the fandom.For the gatekeepers, accepting that AO3 won both on its technical merits and for the stories contained in there means accepting that stories you don't love and don't think are of high quality are just as worthy of consideration for honors as the things you do like and think are high quality.
Because fic with the names changed to protect the copyright gets traditionally published and becomes an international hit.
Because Dr. Chuck Tingle, World's Greatest Author, exists and does a brisk business in Tingler sales, so much so that people already well-known for projects like Welcome to Night Vale were commissioned to read them aloud for a podcast.
Because sometimes, what you want to do is revel in terrible tropes and improbable things and pure id, and that makes a work worthy of honors (or at least kudos).
Because Batman '66 is the best Batman.
And, of course, in the tradition of good fic, fic as example of the absurdity of a position chastising fans for celebrating. Involves Lord Stanley's Cup and hockey. There are other examples in the comments of the post, some as commentfic, some as standalone works, a lot as poetry filk in the comments (including breadliks and Chaucer and icebox plums).
The Archive wins because it is a technical marvel.
The Archive wins because the stories there fill so many needs that traditional publishing won't.
The Archive wins because representation matters.
The Archive wins because transformative works are an essential part of any and all fandoms, a conversation running mostly in parallel to their source works. People can choose their level of engagement with that part of the fandom, but they can't pretend that it doesn't exist.
The Archive won, and that means all the contributors to the Archive share in the win. Collectively, everyone who contributed to the Archive are Hugo Award-winning creators. To state otherwise is to ignore reality.
At this point, realizing that my voice is but one among many, and I'm not even to the level where I'm pulling out any citations, I'm going to leave
elf's roundup of the Hugo Things here so you can get more perspectives, including some solid roastings of the position that the Mark Protection Committee needs to be aggressive in enforcement (synecdochic brings the citation game to the yard, for example.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-19 02:44 pm (UTC)