Indeed. Quite decent.

See, Chinese fandom is relatively isolated from western fandom. And the convention committee didn’t realize that there was this thing called the WSFS Constitution which set out rules for stuff they had to do. I gather they didn’t even realize they were responsible for organizing the nomination and voting process for the Hugo awards, commissioning the award design, and organizing an awards ceremony, until about 12 months before the convention (which is short notice for two rounds of voting. commissioning a competition between artists to design the Hugo award base for that year, and so on). So everything ran months too late, and they had to delay the convention, and most of the students who’d pitched in to buy those bids could no longer attend because of bad timing, and worse … they began picking up an international buzz, which in turn drew the attention of the local Communist Party, in the middle of the authoritarian clamp-down that’s been intensifying for the past couple of years. (Remember, it takes a decade to organize a successful worldcon from initial team-building to running the event. And who imagined our existing world of 2023 back in 2013?)

The organizers appear to have panicked.

ringo and the sad puppies were only “acknowledged” because of the mass backlash. Otherwise, it was business as usual.

That is why I think the issue is less the works and more the venue. Because having a racist piece of shit present is one thing. People get mad. They move on because they need the blurb to get another printing from their publisher. But if the CCP gets angry? People start disappearing faster than Jack Ma.

I mean, they almost always are. You just have to understand that, much like with the Oscars (?), it is the SFF (mostly SFF writers) community voting on themselves. And, memes aside, good movies usually win at the Oscars. Sure they favor period pieces and character studies but those are generally well acted and directed. They may just not be “entertaining” to the masses.

That said, ever since Martin decided he should talk about how great a bunch of transphobes and racists were while butchering the names of up and coming authors because he couldn’t be bothered to read a pronunciation guide, a lot of great authors have started doing their own “awards” blog posts. Which are always nice.

No, China didn’t have anything to do with Corbyn. Just, right before he took control of the party, the party leaders tried to vote him out. There are over 10 million labor voters, but at the time there were only 100,000 paid labor memberships, who were responsible for voting in the party leader. Corbyn got 50,000 (out of the 10 million) new paying members on the rolls and went over night from being on the edge of being expelled to becoming the party leader.

Same thing happened here: a very large group (all scifi readers) assuming that paying members would have ideals proportional to the larger group - but that smaller group can be manipulated through a large influx of single issue voters.

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We kind of are? Although, it is mostly at the same level the US has been. Mainstream movies aren’t going to have things that will anger significant markets. Similarly, a decent number of the long living live service games have “china” versions that do stuff like get rid of skeletons and so forth.

It is obviously speculation, but a LOT of what went wrong with Rise of Skywalker has strong hints of being about the Chinese market.

• Even the people who hated TLJ with every fiber of their being kind of noticed that Rose Tico almost completely disappeared. And… part of that is speculated to be because Kelly Marie Tran was getting a lot of traction due to the constant bigotry and hatred thrown at her for being asian in a “white” franchise. Except… she is ethnically Vietnamese.
• The force ghosts don’t have their blue tint which is speculated to be about making it less obvious they are spirits/ghosts
• TLJ literally ended with “Our elders fucked up and the world is possibly a worse place than it was before The War. But now we are rallying behind a former slave, a scoundrel, and some homeless chick all while force powers are being spread among the proletariat”. ROS IMMEDIATELY retconned all that to “The slave is a goober who belongs with his own people and that homeless chick has a direct connection to the ruling class. Also, the real heroes are our ancestors”.

Which… again, kind of mirrors how the US and its holy concepts are treated. Take a look at mainstream action movies from basically the 70s to the 10s. The enemy might be a rogue general or CIA operative but you’ll have a heroic US soldier/marine around to counter that out and show that the vast majority of the military are good people (and we still see the impact of that with people trying to reconcile the US military waiting to see how Jan 6 would shake out…). Same with how Democracy is good and amazing and only ever fails because of outright fraud rather than gerrymandering and stupidity/bigotry.

Just… the main difference is that you can still watch a movie about a squad of US Marines raping and murdering their way through a warzone in the US. Whereas that gets outright banned in China and can lead to a visit to the reeducation camps if the creator lives in China.