It may very well be that Vox Day and the desperately clingy coattail riders have drastically – catastrophically! – miscalculated the size, influence, reach and power of the Social Justice League.
How else does one account for the League’s complete dominance of the Locus Poll?
While Day & ilk were running around trying to screw with the Hugo Awards (that tiny, ineffectual old world award only voted on by the members of the Social Justice League and their mindless Message Fictioneer followers – the award no one cares about anymore, the meaningless legacy of old world adventure fiction – a red herring if ever there was a herring that was red)
while the Puppies were distracted, the warriors of the League of Social Justice were taking control of the ONLY truly completely democratic poll of SF readership – the Locus Poll – once again proving the efficacy of Sun Tzu’s wisdom: fight your enemy where you are strong and avoid them where you are weak. Conduct your strategy as water flows – following the path of least resistance. Or as the leader of the League of Social Justice has been known to say “let them see what they want to see while you’re doing something else!”
The leader of the League of Social Justice? That would be me. I’m Batman. And Green Lantern. Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Superman, Martian Manhunter and the Flash. (Hey, why shouldn’t I claim the leadership of a non-existent comic book League of Social Justice Warrior Heroes? No one else seems to be doing it, so, what the heck!)
We all know the story, right? When super villains (well, villains anyway) like the Suicide Puppy Squad (referred to as a bunch of D-list villains by Wikipedia, no less!) decide to violate their get-out-of-jail-free cards, it’s up to the League of Social Justice Warrior heroes to round them up and corral them once again in the Arkham Asylum (or Belle Reeve, depending on your age & universe); there’ll be lots of BIFF! POW! BOFF!, maybe a city or two gets leveled, but in the end the bad guys get put back into their holes until the next suicidal mission comes along. Because whether that mission fails or succeeds, society wins. Lose a few puppies, destroy whatever otherworldly nemesis happens along, pretty much win-win across the board. The Suicide Puppy Squad, used in the name of something and then tossed aside until we need a little more levity and darkness in our comic adventures.
So lets get this straight. Locus Magazine publishes the final ballot for this year’s Locus Poll – a poll of the readers of science fiction and fantasy, one that costs nothing to participate in*, one that doesn’t require special membership in a special organization, a poll of the READERS rather than just a poll of those nasty liberal WSFS Trufans and Message Fictioneers, a poll presumably participated in by the folks who really count – consumers!, the ones untainted by the crushing weight of 75 years of special cabal-think (libprog, social justice creep), the Goodread and Amazon four-star-review-unless-we-don’t-like-you crowd, the great unwashed masses of REAL FANS(tm), the folks who supposedly believe that sales figures and best seller lists are the only markers one needs to confer awards, the readers who the Suicide Puppy Squad claim want nothing more than entertaining adventures (weirdly homoerotic broad chested man adventures at that) is published with NOT ONE SINGLE WORK BY A Puppy of any breed! (Thank goodness for super lungs!)
Huh. Will you look at that. The Great Unwashed Masses have rejected the Siren Call of Suicide Puppy Squadism. Well, they’ve either successfully sailed between Scylla and Charybdis or –
THE SOCIAL JUSTICE LEAGUE OF THE UNIVERSE!
It must be a conspiracy, right? Those dastardly heroes used their super powers to cloud men’s (and women’s) minds (sorry to mix pulp and comic hero metaphors here but – The Shadow KNOWS!) and forced them against their wills and better judgments to vote for Message Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance hiding behind spaceship covers, Non-White main characters from Cultures. Other. Than. Our. Own, non-white translated stories from – gasp! – communist countries! Gender-twisting sequels! Dogs and Cats Living Together! I mean, it would take super heroes with super powers to fly all over the world and threaten thousands of anonymous honest citizens into voting against their own selves, right?
Truly, this is a Twinkie of Ginormous Proportion!
(You do know what happens when Gozar the Destructor takes the form of a large moving Torg, right? Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, that’s what!)
Over the past month or so we’ve watched as the Suicide Puppy Squad has suicided, – withdrawals and disavowals BEFORE the slate’s publication, withdrawals and disavowals AFTER the slate’s publication, withdrawals and disavowals even after the Hugo Award final ballot was published; internecine puppy warfare, the steady erosion of one underpinning of their arguments (Heinlein, no difference between eligibility and voting slates, the erosion of sales argument…) after another and now
THIS.
The vast silent army of all of the reader-fans who could care less about convention fandom, the Hugo Awards, the culture, the traditions, the history, the silent army that the Suicide Puppy Squad claimed stood behind their advance guard, the ones who would storm the dark citadel of diversity in science fiction once the Puppies had breached the walls, has now melted away to the nothingness that it has always been.
Of course they were never really there to begin with.
*The annual Locus Poll confers two votes for subscribers to the magazine and a single vote to non-subscribers.
The list of finalists can be found here.
