After the Hugos (or: Did I Hear You Say That This Is Victory?)

Last week, fans in Spokane, Washington and around the world gathered to watch the presentation 73rd Annual Hugo Awards, one of the greatest and most notable honors bestowed for achievement in the genre of science fiction. It’s been a tense year. Two separate but linked reactionary movements, the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, made substantial gains in the nominations, successfully crowding out the sort of nominees that would generally be selected by the community at large. The Rabid Puppies enjoyed particular success due to a cult of personality centered on Theodore “Vox Day” Beale, who encouraged his followers to vote in lockstep. This practice was meant to counter the machinations of an imaginary cabal of liberal elitists who had been corrupting the soul of science fiction. In fact, it succeeded so dramatically because most fans not involved in the slates were already voting their conscience and nominating works they simply liked. Against this scattershot approach, lockstep voters were bound to succeed.

But the practices that allowed the Puppies of both houses to overwhelm the nominations could not allow them to carry the voting on the awards proper, particularly not after a record number of people bought supporting memberships in Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, and voted according to their consciences. For some, this meant ranking No Award – always an option, in ANY year – above nominees placed by the Puppy slates, whether because they disagreed with the reactionary politics or because they disliked slate voting on principle. For others, this meant reading all the works and judging them on merit. For myself, it meant rejecting some works that stank of particularly odious politics and personalities, or of obvious self-promotion (I rejected nearly anything published by Castalia House as Vox Day leveraging his political rhetoric to feather his own cap, for example), while attempting to review the rest fairly. I covered the nominees I considered worthy of consideration in The Dogcatcher Post, though due to limits on my free time and revised opinions on some of the nominees, I did not live up to my own standards as set out there.

In the end, No Award was given in five categories, doubling the number of No Awards given out in the entire history of the Hugos. The tension between the Puppies and the community at large did not abate. Victory was declared by some, defeat by others, and bad feelings continue to simmer all around. I have a few thoughts on how things shook out. The short version is that I’m not pleased, and worried about the short term, but optimistic for the long term. I’ll get into more detail, but before I do, I’d like to share my own final Hugo ballot, as registered on July 31st, noting the nominees in the order of my ranking (top to bottom) and the winners in bold.

Best Novel

1. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu; Ken Liu, translator
2. Skin Game by Jim Butcher
3. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
4. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
5. The Dark Between The Stars by Kevin J. Anderson

Best Novella

1. No Award

Best Novelette

1. “Championship B’Tok” by Edward M. Lerner
2. “The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale” by Rajnar Vajra
3. “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart
4. “The Day The World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt; Lia Belt, translator
5. No Award

Best Short Story

1. “Totaled” by Kary English
2. “On A Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli
3. “A Single Samurai” by Steven Diamond
4. No Award

Best Related Work

1. No Award

Best Graphic Story

1. Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt (Marvel Comics)
2. Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick, written by Matt Fraction, art by Chip Zdarsky (Image Comics)
3. Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery, written by Kurtis J. Weibe, art by Roc Upchurch (Image Comics)
4. Saga Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)
5. No Award

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

1. The Lego Movie, written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, story by Dan Hageman, Kevin Hageman, Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, LEGO System A/S, Vertigo Entertainment, Lin Pictures, Warner Bros. Animation (as Warner Animation Group))
2. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, concept and story by Ed Brubaker, directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Marvel Entertainment, Perception, Sony Pictures Imageworks)
3. Guardians of the Galaxy, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, directed by James Gunn (Marvel Studios, Moving Picture Company)
4. Edge of Tomorrow, screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth, directed by Doug Liman (Village Roadshow, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, 3 Arts Entertainment; Viz Productions)
5. Interstellar, screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, directed by Christopher Nolan (Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures, Lynda Obst Productions, Syncopy)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

1. The Flash: “Pilot”, teleplay by Andrew Kreisberg & Geoff Johns, story by Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg & Geoff Johns, directed by David Nutter (The CW) (Berlanti Productions, DC Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television)
2. Orphan Black: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried”, written by Graham Manson, directed by John Fawcett (Temple Street Productions, Space/BBC America)
3. Game of Thrones: “The Mountain and the Viper”, written by David Benioff & D. B. Weiss, directed by Alex Graves (HBO Entertainment in association with Bighead, Littlehead; Television 360; Startling Television and Generator Productions)
4. Doctor Who: “Listen”, written by Steven Moffat, directed by Douglas Mackinnon (BBC Television)
5. Grimm: “Once We Were Gods”, written by Alan DiFiore, directed by Steven DePaul (NBC) (GK Productions, Hazy Mills Productions, Universal TV)

Best Professional Editor (Short Form)

1. Jennifer Brozek
2. Mike Resnick
3. Bryan Thomas Schmidt
4. No Award

Best Professional Editor (Long Form)

1. Sheila Gilbert
2. Anne Sowards
3. Jim Minz
4. Toni Weisskopf
5. No Award

Best Professional Artist

1. Julie Dillon
2. Kirk DouPonce
3. Nick Greenwood
4. Alan Pollack
5. No Award

Best Semiprozine

1. Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams, Stefan Rudnicki, Rich Horton, Wendy N. Wagner, and Christie Yant
2. Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison, editor-in-chief
3. Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Association Incorporated, 2014, editors David Kernot and Sue Bursztynski
4. Beneath Ceaseless Skies, edited by Scott H. Andrews
5. Abyss & Apex, Wendy Delmater, editor and publisher

Best Fanzine

1. Journey Planet, edited by James Bacon, Christopher J Garcia, Colin Harris, Alissa McKersie, and Helen J. Montgomery
2. No Award

Best Fancast

• Did not vote in this category, as I did not have time to properly listen to the nominees.

Best Fan Writer

1. Laura J. Mixon
2. No Award

Best Fan Artist

1. Spring Schoenhuth
2. Elizabeth Leggett
3. Steve Stiles
4. Brad Foster
5. Ninni Aalto

The John W. Campbell Award*

1. Kary English
2. Wesley Chu
3. No Award

*The John W. Campbell Award is, as has been repeatedly mentioned, not a Hugo, but it is awarded with them and selected by Hugo voters. The nominees must be writers who have enjoyed their first professional publication within the last two years.

So. What have I learned? Well.

Lesson One: The Puppies Nominated A Lot Of Garbage

All right: it would, perhaps, be fairer to say they nominated a lot of material I simply didn’t care for. Not for political reasons, mind. What I read was simply…not enjoyable. I ranked plenty of their nominees in many categories regardless, because I wasn’t really thinking in terms of anything beyond the pool of nominees I was given, to be quite honest. But the best I can say about the majority of the slates’ nominees is that they were competently written. I had an awful time even attempting to read through most of them, and while the reactionary politics do them no favors, at this point, I’m mostly angry with the Puppies for making me read that dreck.

The bright spots were the Best Dramatic Presentation categories. Even the Puppy nominees in those areas were generally pretty good, and I actually think both The Lego Movie and the pilot of The Flash were excellent and deserving of awards. I am not terribly broken up about Guardians of the Galaxy and Orphan Black winning, though I don’t feel the episode nominated was the most Hugo-worthy of the lot.

The low point was Best Novella. By a long shot.

Lesson Two: I Should Not Have Given Lou Antonelli The Benefit Of The Doubt

Between harassing a critic of his actions at his workplace, writing the Spokane police about David Gerrold, setting his fans on Carrie Cunin, and generally whining and complaining in the aftermath of Sasquan (surprisingly, if you go into a convention where everyone thinks you’re an utter prat, you should not expect sweetness and light from those around you), he’s shown himself to be an absolute ass who cannot be trusted to conduct himself in polite society. This post goes into more detail on his rather disturbing pattern of behavior. I actually thought his short story mildly interesting, if not the best I’ve ever read, but now that I see him revealed for the bully he is, I shan’t be ranking him again. If he’s nominated in the future, in any category, I will rank him below no reward. Someone who goes around trying to call hell on other members of the SF community does not deserve one of its highest honors.

Lesson Three: I’m Mostly Happy With The Results…

I’m glad that Best Novel went to a worthy author, and that it was a historic award to boot. I’m absolutely stoked that Lightspeed Magazine took Best Semiprozine (and “I’d like to thank the patriarchy” was one of the best lines of the night). I can’t tell you how happy I am that Ms. Marvel‘s first volume took Best Graphic Story, in part because it’s a genuinely good book that I thoroughly enjoyed, and in part because I hope John C. Wright’s face looked like he’d just eaten a whole raw lemon. If anyone happened to snap a photo of him in that moment, I’d pay good money for it.

I love Orphan Black, I love its writers, I love its cast, I especially love Tatiana Maslany, and the show deserves a Hugo, even if that specific episode wasn’t my favorite. Guardians of the Galaxy was, while not my first choice, a great, fun film, and the fact that it won despite being a slate nominee shows that the voters were willing to set their feelings aside to reward quality work. At least in one case. More on that in a second.

The No Award to Best Novella was well deserved. I think the No Award to Best Related Work was, too. The No Award to Best Short Story was, perhaps, slightly less so, though I can see how many voters thought the quality of the nominees sub-par compared to the stories pushed off the ballot by the slates.

Lesson Four: …Except When I Wasn’t Happy At All

In retrospect, I think Best Novelette should have been No Awarded. I hate to say it, because Thomas Heuvelt is clearly so happy about his victory, but I didn’t think The Day The World Turned Upside Down was very good at all. As I look back on the nominees, none of them felt like the best work of the year. There were differences in their relative quality, but I wasn’t thrilled with the choices I was given. That’s my personal opinion, of course, and hindsight is 20/20, but in future years I think I’ll put a lot more thought into whether or not nominees deserved to be on the ballot in the first place.

But the hardest blows of the evening were, to me, the Best Editor awards. I don’t think either of them deserved to be No Awarded, and here, I think, the Puppies have a point about voters voting for political reasons. That said, there were a lot of new voters this year, and Best Editor is a tough category for the layperson at the best of times. It is somewhat easier with short form editors, because they are not only responsible for helping an author improve a story, but (perhaps more importantly) they are curators, assembling material into anthologies and magazines. A short form editor can be judged by their good taste.

In the long form, an editor’s work is invisible to the reader (at least if they’ve done a good job), and they may or may not have been responsible for selecting material for their publisher. The nature, level and impact of their input can vary widely. I make a point of reading authors’ acknowledgements, so I knew that Sheila Gilbert (my first choice) had edited Seanan McGuire’s work, and Seanan had expressed her deep gratitude…but not everyone bothers to read such things. I’ve seen a couple proposals to remedy this, and a couple calls to remove the Best Editor (Long Form) category altogether, but I haven’t made up my mind on the issue yet.

Regardless, though both categories were filled with Puppy nominees, they were worthy nominees who do excellent work. It is not just that no award was given in either category. It reflects poorly on the community. I do not celebrate these results.

Lesson Five: No One Likes Sore Winners Or Sore Losers

I think the cheering and applause for No Award was out of line.

I was shocked the first time I heard it, and mortified as it happened again, and again. I can understand the instinct to applaud each announcement on general principle. I can understand getting caught up in the moment, the feeling of victory as the voters rejected the Puppies’ agendas again and again, and breaking out into cheers and applause. I can’t honestly say that I would have resisted those impulses entirely. But it was obnoxious. It was rude. There were nominees sitting in the audience who, rightly or wrongly, believed in their work, hoped for a win. They did not need anyone to rub their losses in their face.

And, more to the point, I do not see a No Award as a victory. I see it as the least objectionable outcome under the circumstances (with the exception of Best Editor, as noted above). The appropriate response feels like a somber silence.

Fortunately, the Puppies have conducted themselves abominably in the wake of the Hugos. Mike Glyer at File770 has been rounding up a lot of it. Let me address a few arguments.

• The Asterisks were a slap in the face! So, riffing off remarks that this year’s Hugo winners would have asterisks next to their names due to the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the nominations and voting, ‘official’ Worldcon asterisks were made out of wood and sold at the con for charity. In addition, each Hugo nominee got their own wooden asterisk. Was this in poor taste? Perhaps. But David Gerrold made some beautiful remarks at the ceremony that turned them into more of a tongue-in-cheek symbol of pride at being part of SF history, and fandom has a long and distinguished history of taking the piss out of things, lightening the mood when tension is hanging in the air. This was just another part of that tradition.
• How dare Robert Silverberg joke about Hare Krishnas when ‘offensive’ jokes made by the ‘wrong’ people are roundly scorned! Robert Silverberg spoke near the beginning of the ceremony about a similarly tense Worldcon back in Berkeley, and fondly recalled stepping outside now and then to seek peace by listening to the soothing Hare Krishna chant. He then produced a tambourine and led the audience in said chant, urging serenity and patience for the night ahead. It was an amusing and oddly reassuring experience. Was he insulting the Hare Krishnas? Maybe. I’m not a Hare Krishna, so I suppose I wouldn’t know. But then, I don’t think any of the people crying foul (particularly the Puppies) are among that distinguished number, either.
• George R.R. Martin rented a mansion for an exclusive party and left out Hugo nominees and gave out the ‘real’ awards and conspiracy robble robble robble. George R.R. Martin is entirely within his rights to throw any kind of party he likes. He frequently threw parties for those who were nominated but failed to win Hugos back in the old days; these parties, as he himself has explained, eventually turned into a formal reception that he found rather stuffy. In the wake of the Puppies’ giant stinking mess, particularly in light of the people pushed off the ballots by slate shenanigans, he decided to resurrect the losers’ party, and to give out tongue-in-cheek awards named for Alfred Bester (the Alfies) and made quite literally out of hood ornaments of various rocket-like shapes and sizes. It was a way of honoring friends and colleagues he felt had been shafted. It’s true that some Hugo nominees were not invited to the party, that he had a list of ‘assholes’ he left out, but then, at least one of said assholes has demonstrated repeatedly that he is highly deserving of the label, and again, private party. So I can’t fault George there. It wasn’t a conspiracy. They weren’t the ‘real’ Hugos as awarded by the Secret Liberal Cabal of Social Justice. It was George R.R. Martin demonstrating the sort of kindness and good humor that lures you into a false sense of security before he brutally kills off characters you truly, desperately liked, George R.R. Martin, you unforgivable wretch.
• No Award invalidated my vote! I’m launching a class action suit! I don’t…but…elections don’t work that way…
• THIS WAS A SECRET VICTORY FOR THE PUPPIES! WE GOT THEM TO BURN IT ALL DOWN! Wiser people than I have already compared the Hugos to the climactic scene of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, where Christmas comes without presents, et cetera and so forth. Yeah. It’s a lot more like that. A couple significant bumps in the road, but quite a lot like that.

Lesson Six: It’s Always Darkest Before The Dawn

The Puppies, both Sad and Rabid, have already promised to pull their crap again next year. They will probably succeed, to be honest. There may be more categories going to No Award. More unworthy contenders. More garbage I’ll feel honor-bound to read. The only effective way to counter them would be an anti-Puppy slate nominated in lockstep. I refuse to do that. I won’t take part. I will nominate stories I enjoyed and editors my favorite authors have praised. I will not vote in lockstep with anybody. Because lockstep slate voting is a repugnant concept to me. It ignores everything that makes the fan community great. It replaces word of mouth and the cultural zeitgeist with an organized political movement.

I will not abuse the spirit of the Hugos on a misguided quest to ‘save’ them. Even if it means I have to vote No Award in every single category next year.

But I’m not going away. I’m grabbing a supporting membership for next year’s Worldcon. I’ll be participating in nominations and in final voting (and in site selection, as I’d quite like a New Orleans Worldcon in 2018). I’m just one person with one vote, but I can be part of the effort to resist the Puppies.

Here’s the thing: I agree with many of the Puppies’ most superficial stated goals. I want science fiction to be fun again. I am tired of dystopias, tired of endings, tired of the apocalypse. I want hope for the future. I want inspiration. I want fun. I want the fandom of today to look to science fiction and see ideas they can incorporate into the solutions of tomorrow. I want us to dream of turning our world into a paradise and sailing outward among the stars. We have never needed the hope and promise of science fiction more than we do now. It is as Isaac Asimov said:

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

The problem, of course, is that few if any of the Puppies’ nominees offered that promise – and that my idea of the utopia we can and should build here on Earth is a place where everyone is allowed room to grow and change as they must, and pursue what happiness they can find in this life, provided they do no harm to others. I don’t think the masterminds behind the Puppies of either camp want a world where I would belong. And so they fight to drag SF back into their idea of a golden age, while the rest of us fight to expand its boundaries into a new one of limitless promise, endless challenges and infinite opportunities. The culture war goes on, and this is just a minor skirmish.

Still. There is hope everywhere, and the Hugos are no exception. Two proposals to change the nomination system were ratified at this year’s Worldcon. If they are ratified again next year, they will be implemented. One, E Pluribus Hugo, creates a multi-round system which should diminish the impact of lockstep nominations. The other, 4 and 6 (sorry I don’t have a link), creates a system where each voter selects four nominees, but six finalists are selected; this could still be exploited by some mildly clever maneuvering, but combined with EPH, it might be quite effective. Though Vox Day in particular insists he has enough support to overcome any effort to block his slates, preliminary data crunching on EPH alone indicates that it would limit the damage lockstep slate voters could do. Data on EPH combined with 4 and 6 is not yet available.

So, in the short term, none of us are going anywhere. We’ll all be watching the entire Hugo process, not to mention next year’s Business Meeting, with great interest. We’re in for another tense and difficult year full of rhetoric. Many suggestions have been made to the Puppies of both camps as to how they might make more reasonable arguments and avoid alienating Hugo voters; I expect them to take none of those suggestions. The new leaders of the Sad Puppy crew seem even more reactionary than their predecessors. This will be unpleasant.

But science fiction is all about the future just beyond our grasp. The best of it is about finding hope there. And I think there’s reason to hope here. The reactionary elements of our community may gain some traction. But, to quote Angels In America, the world only spins forward.

And to paraphrase Firefly, no power in the verse can stop us.

The Dogcatcher Post

It’s been nearly two years since my last post here. Sorry about that. Every time I had an idea and thought about getting back into the swing of things, something came up to distract me. I have lots of updates and lots of ideas for posts, and all of that will follow, but this particular post needs to come first.

In the wake of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaigns, I’ve gone ahead and purchased a membership to Sasquan, the 2016 Worldcon, so I can vote in the Hugo Awards. I’ll be doing this with every Worldcon I can support from now on, because if I have the ability to raise my voice and be heard, I should probably do it. With a bit over a month left before the voting deadline, it’s time for me to decide who I’m going to vote for…and that’s a problem which has required a certain amount of research and soul-searching.

It would be easy for me to vote NO AWARD in every Puppy-influenced category, in protest. Some have called for this. It would be just as easy for me to eliminate all the Puppies’ nominees and vote only for those who were not on the slates; some have called for this also. But I don’t in good conscience feel that I can do this. Not everyone on the slates knew they were on them, or knew what they were getting into. There are works that were on the slates which I personally find worthy of consideration despite the ugly politics behind their nomination. (Skin Game comes to mind; while the Dresden Files books can be problematic, I am a fan, and I thoroughly enjoyed Skin Game and thought it was a real return to form for the series.) So I have settled on threading the needle, and I’ve found a distinct lack of resources geared toward voters interested in that strategy.

I’m a documentation nerd, which has been a useful trait in my professional endeavors. If a document doesn’t exist, I’ll dig in and create it. So here it is: my attempt at a guide to threading the needle. The Dogcatcher Post. An attempt to point out Hugo nominees who actively participated in Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, or (in the case of works from Castalia House, Theodore “Vox Day” Beale’s publishing house, especially) whose publishers did, as well as nominees who are thoroughly morally repugnant due to racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc. Anyone highlighted in bold is someone I urge you to eliminate from your consideration, and I’ll explain why at the end of each category. Of course, if you want to use this list to vote only for the nominees I’m calling out for elimination, I can’t really stop you.

This list is constructed based on two principal rules:

The Card-Wright Rule

This is a long-standing personal rule of mine. Simply put, I don’t give money or support to living authors who hate me or mine. I will absolutely not consider people who have engaged in virulent bigotry, called for violence against me or people like me or people I care about, called for us to be openly oppressed and rounded up, and so on and so forth. Am I eliminating all problematic creators under this rule? No. I won’t even pretend to try. This is intended for the worst of the worst, those whose bigotry cannot be ignored or dismissed.

The Beale-Torgenson Rule

This rule is a new one, and in direct response to Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies. I don’t think people who actively campaigned for these slates and used political ideology to get themselves or creators they publish or profit from nominated should be rewarded. Period. It’s one thing to offer up a list of works you were involved with that are eligible for Hugos – many authors have done this, many publishers have done this – but it’s quite another to incorporate your own work into a moral panic and deliberate crusade. Torgenson gets a little credit for treating the Sad Puppies slate as a set of suggestions…but not enough to escape this rule. Beale told his followers to vote in lockstep. No Hugo for him.

Obviously, there may be information I don’t have. If I come across any new information regarding the character (or lack thereof) of certain nominees, or their participation in Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies, I’ll update this post accordingly.

Now let’s look at the nominees by category.

Best Novel

Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US/Orbit UK)
The Dark Between the Stars, Kevin J. Anderson (Tor Books)
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) (Tor Books)
Skin Game, Jim Butcher (Orbit UK/Roc Books)
The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator (Tor Books)

Ancillary Sword, The Goblin Emperor, and The Three Body Problem were not on either the Sad Puppies slate or the Rabid Puppies slate. This leaves Jim Butcher and Kevin J. Anderson.

I cannot find any evidence that Kevin Anderson directly endorsed the Sad Puppy slate. He is acquainted with Brad Torgenson and has published some of his work, but I’m not going to base my decision solely on guilt by association. I don’t think I agree with Anderson on everything, but that’s not a prerequisite either. I can see no compelling reason to exclude him from consideration.

Jim Butcher does not seem to have been an active participant in S/RP either. He did call Irene Gallo unprofessional for her personal comments on the S/RP crowd (and, well, she was, a bit, but I don’t feel she deserved the goddamned Sword of Damocles crashing on her head), and he’s not without his problems. But I enjoy both the Dresden Files series and the Codex Alera, and I quite liked Skin Game, so I’m going to keep him on my list.

Best Novella

Big Boys Don’t Cry, Tom Kratman (Castalia House)
“Flow”, Arlan Andrews, Sr. (Analog, 11-2014)
One Bright Star to Guide Them, John C. Wright (Castalia House)
“Pale Realms of Shade”, John C. Wright (The Book of Feasts & Seasons, Castalia House)
“The Plural of Helen of Troy”, John C. Wright (City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis, Castalia House)

All of the nominees in this category were on the Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies slate. Most of them were published by Castalia House, which seems like a blatant grab if I’ve ever seen one, and John C. Wright is just absolutely awful. However, I can find no evidence that Dr. Arlan Andrews, Sr. was involved in campaigning for either slate, and he seems like a decent enough fellow. Through SIGMA, he’s associated with many people I admire. “Flow” should be read and considered.

Best Novelette

“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium”, Gray Rinehart (Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, 05-2014)
“Championship B’tok”, Edward M. Lerner (Analog, 09-2014)
“The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed, 04-2014)
“The Journeyman: In the Stone House”, Michael F. Flynn (Analog, 06-2014)
“The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale”, Rajnar Vajra (Analog, 07/08-2014)

Gray Rinehart did accept a place on the Sad Puppies slate and appears to be connected to members of the S/RP community; that said, he does not seem to have campaigned on the slate’s behalf, he did not nominate according to the slate himself, and he does not seem particularly repugnant. I do not believe his work should be rejected out of hand, and I will be considering “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” in this category.

Edward M. Lerner appears to be casually acquainted with Brad Torgenson and gave his assent to a recommendation. However, he does not seem to have known what he was getting into, he had nothing to do with Rabid Puppies, and, once again, he does not seem actively repugnant. “Championship B’tok” should, in my view, also be considered.

“The Day the World Turned Upside Down” was not on either slate.

I haven’t quite worked out where Michael F. Flynn stands, except that he seems to view the whole brouhaha as a conflict between a ‘settled’ SF community and outside underdogs who have just realized they can buy memberships and vote, and his sympathies are somewhat with the underdogs rather than those who want to condemn Puppy-nominated works sight unseen. Again, however, he hasn’t set off any alarm bells for me. From reading his blog, I doubt I’ll enjoy his work much, frankly, but I’ll read “The Journeyman: In the Stone House” nonetheless.

I’m not sure where Rajnar Vajra stands on any of this. I will note that he’s one of the diverse writers the S/RP crowd are using to counter claims that they were interested in nominating only white, straight, heterosexual men. Nevertheless, I will be considering “The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale”. I quite like golden age SF, actually.

Best Short Story

“On A Spiritual Plain”, Lou Antonelli (Sci Phi Journal #2, 11-2014)
“The Parliament of Beasts and Birds”, John C. Wright (The Book of Feasts & Seasons, Castalia House)
“A Single Samurai”, Steven Diamond (The Baen Big Book of Monsters, Baen Books)
“Totaled”, Kary English (Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, 07-2014)
“Turncoat”, Steve Rzasa (Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House)

All nominees in this category were on one or both slates. “Turncoat” and “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” were both published by Castalia House. “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” was written by John C. Wright, who is a proud and outspoken bigot and has attacked (among others) Marvel for introducing Kamala Khan, the new, Muslim Ms. Marvel, and the creators of The Legend of Korra for making a same-sex relationship canon within the series.

Lou Antonelli has defended the slate, describing himself as proud to be on it, and stating that he doesn’t see any problem with it. He has also characterized critics of S/RP as hateful, scolds, Nazis, and claimed that the S/RP crowd has only been vicious in its own defense. He has described the slates and their supporters as a peasant revolt against an SF elite. Prior to the official release of the nominees, he appears to have plugged only his own work (as is fair), but did mention that he was part of the Sad Puppies slate in at least one context. Frankly he’s raising a lot of red flags for me. That said, he has also criticized those elements of the Puppy crowd who want to destroy the Hugos, and his story “On a Spiritual Plain” has been praised by people outside the Puppy community. So I’m still deeply ambivalent on the man himself, and disagree with him on many of the arguments he’s made, but I personally am going to read his story and give it due consideration.

I cannot find any indication that Steve Diamond campaigned for either slate. He seems like an okay guy. I’ll be reading “A Single Samurai” with pleasure.

Kary English agreed to be part of the Sad Puppies slate. Prior to the official release of the Hugo nominees, she did connect Sad Puppies to her discussion of her own nominated work. I disagree strongly with her characterization of the genesis and intent of the slate and with her continued defense of it. However: she seems like the sort of person I would like very much (even if we might disagree on certain points). She does not appear to be a virulent bigot. Her work seems interesting. So I will be reading “Totaled” and giving it my full consideration.

Best Related Work

“The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”, Ken Burnside (Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House)
Letters from Gardner, Lou Antonelli (The Merry Blacksmith Press)
Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, John C. Wright (Castalia House)
“Why Science is Never Settled”, Tedd Roberts (Baen.com)
Wisdom from My Internet, Michael Z. Williamson (Patriarchy Press)

All nominees on this category were on one or both slates. “The Hot Equations” and Transhuman and Subhuman were both published by Castalia House, and there’s our friend John C. Wright again. Hi there, John.

I’ve discussed Lou Antonelli above. He’s an S/RP defender but doesn’t seem as virulently awful as some others (though I disagree with much of what he’s said, and strongly disagree with his characterization of a woman who kicked him off her blog as a Nazi).

Tedd Roberts has defended the slate and attacked its critics (to be fair, he seems angriest at the most outspoken and strident people, the ones calling for categorical rejection for all nominees on the slate). Once again, though, he doesn’t seem awful. He seems angry, and justifiably in my view, that people would reject him for his association with controversy, that they would immediately judge and dismiss him out of hand without even reading his work. Fair enough. “Why Science is Never Settled” is on my reading list.

Michael Z. Williamson seems entirely irreverent and snarky toward just about everyone. I suspect I’d find prolonged contact with him infuriating. I don’t think I’ll like his book very much. But he’s not awful enough for me to strike him from consideration, and he doesn’t seem to have actively campaigned for Sad Puppies – as he tells it, Brad Torgenson asked if he wanted publicity, Williamson said yes, and then he promptly forgot about the whole thing. So I will give Wisdom from My Internet a chance.

Best Graphic Story

Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt, (Marvel Comics)
Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery, written by Kurtis J. Weibe, art by Roc Upchurch (Image Comics)
Saga Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics))
Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick, written by Matt Fraction, art by Chip Zdarsky (Image Comics)
The Zombie Nation Book #2: Reduce Reuse Reanimate, Carter Reid (The Zombie Nation)

In this category, only The Zombie Nation Book #2 was on either slate. As far as I can tell, Carter Reid was not involved in campaigning and is not an awful person. I’m not going to endorse him over the other nominees, but don’t feel he should automatically be eliminated from consideration.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, concept and story by Ed Brubaker, directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Marvel Entertainment, Perception, Sony Pictures Imageworks)
Edge of Tomorrow, screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth, directed by Doug Liman (Village Roadshow, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, 3 Arts Entertainment; Viz Productions)
Guardians of the Galaxy, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, directed by James Gunn (Marvel Studios, Moving Picture Company)
Interstellar, screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, directed by Christopher Nolan (Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures, Lynda Obst Productions, Syncopy)
The Lego Movie, written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, story by Dan Hageman, Kevin Hageman, Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, LEGO System A/S, Vertigo Entertainment, Lin Pictures, Warner Bros. Animation (as Warner Animation Group))

Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Edge of Tomorrow were not on either slate. I’m actually a bit surprised about Captain America, but maybe it’s more subversive than I realized.

The rest…look. Films involve a lot of people. Actors, directors, producers, writers…Brad Torgenson, at least, claims he contacted everyone on his slate and included those who gave him an affirmative response. I don’t know whether or not that’s true (there has been at least one nominee who refutes the story, but Torgenson claims that was an oversight), but I find it difficult to believe that he managed to reach out to everyone involved. And a lot of these movies were very, very good. The Lego Movie was better than it had any right to be. Interstellar wasn’t my favorite film, but it was very well made. Guardians of the Galaxy was tremendous fun. I haven’t seen Edge of Tomorrow yet, but I will. And I’ve heard surprisingly good things.

So I’m not striking any of them. They’re worthy nominees. All of them.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Doctor Who: “Listen”, written by Steven Moffat, directed by Douglas Mackinnon (BBC Television)
The Flash: “Pilot”, teleplay by Andrew Kreisberg & Geoff Johns, story by Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg & Geoff Johns, directed by David Nutter (The CW) (Berlanti Productions, DC Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television)
Game of Thrones: “The Mountain and the Viper”, written by David Benioff & D. B. Weiss, directed by Alex Graves ((HBO Entertainment in association with Bighead, Littlehead; Television 360; Startling Television and Generator Productions)
Grimm: “Once We Were Gods”, written by Alan DiFiore, directed by Steven DePaul (NBC) (GK Productions, Hazy Mills Productions, Universal TV)
Orphan Black: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried”, written by Graham Manson, directed by John Fawcett (Temple Street Productions, Space/BBC America)

“Listen” and “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” were not on either slate. I’m actually a bit surprised about Doctor Who, but I guess it’s gotten a bit too socially degenerate for the Puppies. Lesbian lizard women and all.

Again, I find it difficult to believe that everyone involved in these productions gave their permission to appear on the slate. At most, maybe the director or a publicist was contacted. And again, a lot of these episodes were quite good. (I don’t watch Grimm. I suppose I’ll be watching one episode, anyway.) So I’m not striking any of them out without giving them a shot.

Best Editor, Short Form

Jennifer Brozek
Vox Day
Mike Resnick
Edmund R. Schubert (Withdrawn; has asked voters not to consider him)
Bryan Thomas Schmidt

All of the nominees were on one or both slates. Theodore “Vox Day” Beale is the man behind Rabid Puppies.

Jennifer Brozek did not campaign for either slate. She seems like a cool lady who does a lot of great work. I will happily consider her.

Mike Resnick, as far as I can tell, only plugged his own work, as you can expect authors and editors to do. I have my issues with him, but do not feel strongly enough to strike him from my consideration.

Edmund R. Schubert withdrew after the ballot closed. He has asked that people refrain from voting for him. I will honor that request.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt seems…all right. He has stated that he was unaware of his presence on the Rabid Puppies slate and would have demanded his removal if he had known. He was aware of his presence on the Sad Puppies slate, but does not seem to be wrapped up in the politics of it. Bit of an asshole and perhaps unprofessional, at least according to Jim C. Hines (who, to be fair, has butted heads with him), but if I refused to have a thing to do with common assholes I’d never get anything done. So, again, I’m going to consider him in this category.

Best Editor, Long Form

Vox Day
Sheila Gilbert
Jim Minz
Anne Sowards
Toni Weisskopf

All of the nominees were on one or both slates. Theodore “Vox Day” Beale is the man behind Rabid Puppies.

Sheila Gilbert has been highly praised by authors I like rather a lot. She has worked hard at DAW and doesn’t seem like a bad person in the slightest. I can’t find her own take on the S/RP brouhaha but I feel she is worthy of consideration.

Jim Minz has edited a wide range of authors and also done fine work.

Anne Sowards edits Jim Butcher and Kat Richardson, among other people. That makes her pretty okay in my book.

Toni Weisskopf has been a consistent Sad Puppy nominee but, again, a fine editor and Jim Baen’s heir over at Baen Books. I’m not going to dismiss her either.

Best Professional Artist

Julie Dillon
Kirk DouPonce
Nick Greenwood
Alan Pollack
Carter Reid

Julie Dillon was not on either slate.

I can’t find a thing about the other artists’ views on S/RP or, really, anything else. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Best Semiprozine

Abyss & Apex, Wendy Delmater, editor and publisher
Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Association Incorporated, 2014, editors David Kernot and Sue Bursztynski
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, edited by Scott H. Andrews
Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams, Stefan Rudnicki, Rich Horton, Wendy N. Wagner, and Christie Yant
Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison, editor-in-chief

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed Magazine, and Strange Horizons were not on either slate.

I can’t find a thing about the views of the Abyss & Apex staff in general or Wendy Delmater in particular on the S/RP kerfluffle, so once again, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.

The people behind Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine have stated that they were unaware of their presence on the slate until the last moment, and would have asked to be removed if they had known. Therefore, I am happily including them in my consideration this year.

Best Fanzine

Black Gate, edited by John O’Neill (Withdrawn; has asked voters not to consider the magazine)
Elitist Book Reviews, edited by Steven Diamond
Journey Planet, edited by James Bacon, Christopher J Garcia, Colin Harris, Alissa McKersie, and Helen J. Montgomery
The Revenge of Hump Day, edited by Tim Bolgeo
Tangent SF Online, edited by Dave Truesdale

John O’Neill withdrew Black Gate after the Hugo ballot closed. He has asked voters not to consider him. I will honor his request.

I’ve already addressed Steve Diamond above. In short, I don’t think I’ll end up caring for him, but I’m going to give Elitist Book Reviews my consideration.

Journey Planet was not on either slate.

Tim Bolgeo has been at the center of at least one convention controversy when he was invited and then disinvited as Fan Guest of Honor at Archon. The Revenge of Hump Day is reportedly full of racist, sexist and generally offensive humor. I’ll take a look at it but I don’t expect I’ll like it one bit. I haven’t been able to find anything from the man himself on this or other matters.

Dave Truesdale seems quite clueless, frankly. He circulated a petition against ‘censorship based on political correctness’ in the SFWA Bulletin last year, following its suspension in the wake of a controversy over some problematic language and a problematic cover. He claims that he’s never seen an incident of sexism or racism in the SF community. But he doesn’t seem to be terribly malicious, and he’s well respected. Tangent seems decent. Truesdale described himself as flattered that Tangent was on the slate, but doesn’t seem to have campaigned for the slate at large. So I’m giving it a shot.

Best Fancast

Adventures in SciFi Publishing, Brent Bower (Executive Producer), Kristi Charish, Timothy C. Ward & Moses Siregar III (Co-Hosts, Interviewers and Producers)
Dungeon Crawlers Radio, Daniel Swenson (Producer/Host), Travis Alexander & Scott Tomlin (Hosts), Dale Newton (Host/Tech), Damien Swenson (Audio/Video Tech)
Galactic Suburbia Podcast, Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Presenters) and Andrew Finch (Producer)
The Sci Phi Show, Jason Rennie
Tea and Jeopardy, Emma Newman and Peter Newman

Galactic Suburbia Podcast and Tea and Jeopardy were not on either slate.

Adventures in SciFi Publishing was knowingly included in the slate and had Brad Torgenson and Larry Correia on the podcast to discuss Sad Puppies prior to the release of the Hugo nominees. That said, they seem to have done their best to prevent all sides of this and many other issues in the SF community. I’m going to give this podcast all due consideration.

Dungeon Crawlers Radio was included on both the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies slate, but I haven’t found anything regarding their views on the matter. Plus their podcast seems pretty cool. I’ll be listening to a sample.

Can’t find a thing on Jason Rennie’s views regarding The Sci Phi Show‘s inclusion, either. I will note that he put the podcast on hiatus earlier this year. He has promised to return, but hasn’t yet. Frankly, this makes me less likely to vote for it. but I’ll try an episode or two.

Best Fan Writer

Dave Freer
Amanda S. Green
Jeffro Johnson
Laura J. Mixon
Cedar Sanderson

Dave Freer called for people to put pressure on Tor and its parent company to discipline or otherwise ‘address’ Irene Gallo for her (admittedly inflammatory) personal comments against the S/RP slate. He also called for a boycott of any Tor author who was not either a Sad Puppy or speaking out against Tor’s inaction if they did not respond. This is the tip of the sword. I’ve been reading through his posts on the subject and find his strident defense of S/RP and his refusal to see the slates’ problems absolutely repugnant. So I’m refusing to consider him. I do not believe he has conducted himself well and I have little interest in handing him any accolades.

Incidentally, Freer is also part of the Mad Genius Club blog collective, which also includes Brad Torgenson, and the next nominee on the list, Amanda S. Green. Who wrote her own open letter to Tor, criticized them for keeping John Scalzi (a ‘straw man’) in their stable apparently based not on the artistic merit of his work but on his personal views, said much the same about N.K. Jemisin, and also called for a boycott. I also find her conduct repugnant and her association with Sad Puppy Central suspect. I will not be considering her for an award.

Jeffro Johnson writes for Castalia House and has been pretty goddamned outspoken against critics of the S/RP slates. He does not appear to have called for boycotts, however, which is a point in his favor. His obsession with File770 and his critics there puts me off, but I’m going to read his material in the voting packet and try to judge it on its merits. I will, however, note that he is just barely on the ‘will consider’ side of the line for me, as Freer and Green are just barely on the other side.

Laura J. Mixon was not on either slate.

Cedar Sanderson is associated with the Mad Genius Club, endorsed the Sad Puppies slate (even as she qualified her statement by urging voters to vote for the BEST works and use the slate as a guideline), and chose to highlight some posts by other writers seemingly calculated to piss off the left wing elements of fandom while endorsing the slate at large. I don’t really care for any of this.

Best Fan Artist

Ninni Aalto
Brad W. Foster
Elizabeth Leggett
Spring Schoenhuth
Steve Stiles

This category was not included in either slate.

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (not a Hugo but administered alongside the Hugos)

Wesley Chu
Jason Cordova
Kary English
Rolf Nelson
Eric S. Raymond

Wesley Chu was not on either slate.

Jason Cordova is affiliated with the Mad Genius Club, helped campaign for the Sad Puppy slate, and has been laying on some serious denial about what the slate actually entails. Some of his anger is justifiable. But I just can’t get past his involvement with core elements of the Sad Puppy effort. So I’m not going to consider him.

I already addressed Kary English above, but in short, I do not find her ties to S/RP deep enough or her personal views repugnant enough to strike her from consideration.

Rolf Nelson is a Castalia House author who participated in the call to boycott Tor. Frankly, I consider his nomination to be a direct result of Vox Day’s self-interest and tendency toward self-promotion. I am not going to consider his work.

I have not been able to find anything on Eric S. Raymond’s views regarding Sad/Rabid Puppies. While I do not find his libertarian politics repugnant (though I would certainly disagree), he, too, is a Castalia House author. I’m just not giving Vox Day the satisfaction.

*****

So that’s this year. What comes next?

Well, like I said: I’m going to buy a membership to every Worldcon moving forward, as long as I’m able, as early as I can, so I can participate in the nomination process. I’m going to recommend works and creators that I consider worthy of an award, for whatever good that will do. I’m going to share the recommendations of others. I’m not interested in slate voting. I’m not interested in agenda voting. I’m just interested in good SF. And I’m interested in not rewarding people who grab at political zeitgeists for their own gain, or who want me or mine to suffer.

Look, I agree with some elements of the Sad Puppy crowd on one thing: SF needs to be about optimism again. It needs to be about a brighter future, a better future. Our world sucks. We are murdering it. It may be too late to save it. But science fiction has inspired so much already. Isaac Asimov put it best:

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.

I love dystopian fiction as much as anyone. But I’m tired of washed-out grays and browns. I’m tired of oppression and depression. I’m tired of antiheroes and moral ambiguity and shellshock. I want to dream. I want to blast off. I want to soar into an infinite universe full of possibility. And I want the next generation, and every generation after, to dream just as freely.

It’s just that I reject any future that clings to racist, patriarchal standards, and I reject anyone who wants such a future. The world only spins forward. And it should only spin forward.

The Darkness That Claims Us

TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of suicide, violence, transphobia, depression and forced outing.

Let me start, selfishly, by saying that this is not the post I wanted to write.

I’ve been away for a while. You may have heard about this little game I worked on. I was absolutely swamped with testing duties for a few months, and then the project wound down and I was let go (in keeping with the cycle of game development), and somehow I still ended up with more on my plate than I expected. I’d been thinking, over the last week, about writing about trans issues again; it seemed especially relevant because I’m preparing to give a talk at Women in Games Boston in July on the subject of treating trans people with respect, and because the whole Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival controversy recently flared up once more, leaving me with all kinds of thoughts and feelings. So my triumphant return to blogging was going to be a Ranting Fangirl post on women’s space and trans inclusion and letting me pee in peace, for the love of God, in a bathroom where I won’t be harassed and insulted and…this is not that post. It’s not a Ranting Fangirl post, either. I suppose it technically qualifies, but it didn’t feel right to slot this into my own silly little categories.

Last night, my friend Amy pinged me on Steam to ask me what I thought about ‘that IndieGoGo thing’. And that was how I first heard about Chloe Sagal.

That link goes to Quinnae Moongazer’s post on the subject, which you should read. Quinnae explains the facts of the situation well and says a lot of stuff that I largely agree with – enough that I initially thought this post would be redundant. Maybe it is. Still, I’m moved to speak.

If you’re really not going to read that post, then the basic facts are these: Chloe Sagal is an independent game developer most famous for the game Homesick, which is available for free. Recently, she launched a campaign on IndieGoGo seeking to raise funds for, as she claimed, medically necessary surgery to prevent potentially lethal metal poisoning. The campaign was canceled by IndieGoGo after she’d raised $35,000, and all the donations were refunded. Afterward, in the face of transphobic abuse from at least some commentators, Sagal posted a link to a Twitch.tv channel where she attempted suicide. Emergency services came to her aid, and she’s reportedly in the hospital recovering.

Following Sagal’s suicide attempt, Allistair Pinsof, who had covered her IndieGoGo campaign on Destructoid, published statements on Twitter and TwitLonger claiming that Sagal had misrepresented herself and her goals for the IndieGoGo campaign, and that she was actually trying to raise funds for genital reconstruction surgery, (or sex reassignment surgery, or SRS). He further stated that he had agreed to conceal that information following a previous suicide attempt on Sagal’s part as well as threats that she would try again if he revealed the truth. After hearing that Sagal had in fact attempted suicide again, survived, and been hospitalized, Pinsof felt empowered to share all the information he had. He did this in direct violation of Destructoid’s social media policy and the instructions he had been given by the site’s staff. In doing so, he forcibly outed Sagal as a trans woman to the entire world.

I hesitate to spread this information any further. I don’t like airing anyone’s dirty laundry. But frankly, it’s already out there. The damage has been done. Allistair Pinsof has caused grave, irreparable harm to Chloe Sagal and, as a secondary consideration, to his own career. He’s been suspended without pay from Destructoid, his staff access has been frozen, and they’re currently investigating the matter and deciding whether or not they will allow him back. Chloe Sagal is in a hospital somewhere, and I can only hope she’s getting the help she needs, though Pinsof claims she complained of mistreatment the last time she was in the hospital. When she returns, it will be to a web full of strangers talking about her. Some will be sympathetic. Many, too many, will be hostile, to varying degrees. Already, if you search for Chloe Sagal on Google, even if you add the title of her game, Homesick, many of the first results lead you to articles about the IndieGoGo campaign, about the scandal and controversy that has erupted as a result, about how she lied and deceived people into showing her sympathy and human kindness. I hesitate to add to the noise. But I find I can’t stay silent.

I don’t know Chloe Sagal. We have never met. I haven’t even played Homesick, though I’m going to have to fix that. I confess that I would never have heard about this situation at all if Amy hadn’t told me about it. I’m not as into the indie game scene as I should be, I don’t follow most gaming news sites, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. But here’s what I think, and feel, and I apologize if it’s all a little disconnected.

First: you never, ever, ever out someone without their consent. I’ve had it done to me more than once. Sometimes it was done with the best of intentions. Sometimes it was done with deliberate malice. It was awful, every single time. I wasn’t always as open about my history as I am now, and I still feel the impulse to run and hide sometimes. In the last couple of years, I have made a conscious choice to speak openly about this part of my life. Nevertheless, I don’t want to be outed to random people. I don’t go around wearing a neon sign that says TRANSSEXUAL. I don’t bring it up in job interviews or casual social situations if I can help it. I discuss it if and when it becomes relevant, or when I feel comfortable speaking about it, and otherwise I leave it alone. Because, simply put, trans people are among the last acceptable targets. We can be mocked and abused with relative impunity. Discrimination laws often fail to protect us fully, or protect us at all, even in states with comprehensive gay rights legislation. In the wrong time, in the wrong place, being trans could get me fired. It could get me thrown out of any business or organization you care to name. I could be assaulted. I could be killed. I am lucky to live in a state where, by and large, trans people are protected under the law, though that law excludes public accommodations (including public restrooms, restaurants, and movie theaters, among other places). I am lucky to spend most of my time in cities like Boston and Cambridge, where municipal legislation provides greater protections. And, as I said, I have chosen to be open about all this, to say it all on the web where a cursory Google search for my name could give the whole game away. It’s still not okay to out me to anyone without my consent. I may not be comfortable revealing that information in all circumstances. You may think that you have my implied permission to out me, based on a talk I gave or I post you read, but you would be mistaken. You need my direct permission. And you need it every time. To out me without my knowledge or express consent is rude at the least and life-threatening at the worst.

And in the case of Chloe Sagal, whose trans status may not have been so widely known (though it does seem she was at least somewhat open about it), and who was already struggling with suicidal depression, it’s unconscionable.

Second: yes, Sagal lied about the precise nature of the medically necessary surgery she needed. But make no mistake: SRS is medically necessary surgery. It is the recommended course of treatment for transsexuals like Sagal and like me. Not every trans person feels the need to get it; some are comfortable between genders, or are fine without the surgery as long as they can present themselves as the gender they identify with. But in my case, I want it, and I need it, and it’s obvious that Sagal does, too. I’ve managed to get along without it, for the time being, while I try to find some stability in my life and carve out a path to completing my transition. Not everyone is capable of that. And thanks to a concerted campaign by people who had no business interfering in the first place, most HMOs don’t cover SRS or any transition-related medical care. This is beginning to change, but only gradually. If you don’t have insurance at all, you’re pretty much screwed. When you factor in all the costs involved, SRS basically costs as much as a car (either new or used, depending on where exactly you get it). It’s true that the body alone is capable of surviving without SRS, but the cognitive dissonance is so overpowering that the stress alone can cause complications, and suicidal depression can result. As it did in Sagal’s case, and as it could have done in mine. Saying ‘well, you can survive without SRS’ is so true-yet-inaccurate that you might as well start with the assumption that we’re all frictionless spheres floating in a vacuum.

Let’s discuss depression for a moment, actually, because depression is another condition that people consider largely psychological even though it can involve physical medical treatment. As some of my friends know, I suffer from chronic depression. For the last few years, I’ve taken medication to treat it – specifically Celexa. I tried seeing therapists, but I found that therapy alone wasn’t effective. Celexa allows me to manage my condition. Without Celexa, I’m not necessarily in a horrible state of mind all the time, but I can fall into profoundly bleak depressive episodes that leave me seriously contemplating suicide or self-harm. In the grips of these episodes, I have acted irrationally. I have threatened to hurt myself. I have attempted to hurt myself. I’m lucky to have survived, and fortunately I was inept enough in my previous attempts at suicide that I didn’t cause any lasting damage.

With Celexa, my moods even out. It’s not that I never feel sad or depressed on Celexa – I do. But the depression doesn’t run as deep. Instead of feeling suicidal, I feel sad, or angry, or bored, or restless. My extended depressive episodes become bouts of ennui, and they don’t generally last as long without outside stressors. It’s unpleasant, to be sure, but it’s manageable.

So many people think depression is all in the brain. And that’s another true-yet-inaccurate statement, though actually there are a lot of factors involved and it’s not necessarily all in the brain. The fact that depression is a psychiatric issue doesn’t mean it’s a purely emotional problem that can be overcome through sheer willpower. It doesn’t mean it’s not a biological problem. The chemicals in my brain don’t work properly. I take medication to manage the symptoms of that problem, just as I take medication to manage the symptoms of my other health problems. The medication is not the only part of my health regimen, but it’s an important part. I would probably get very sick (maybe not physically so, but there would be some physical symptoms and a lot of emotional suffering) or die without it. Similarly, my gender dysphoria is a psychological issue that probably has at least some physical basis (current theories include differing brain structures, hormone washes in the womb, body chemistry, all kinds of things) and is treated, in part, through medication and surgery where indicated. I take hormones to adjust my body chemistry to something my brain can live with. Eventually, I hope, I’ll have surgery to further ease the cognitive dissonance. It won’t be a cure-all, but it will make things better. It will keep me alive, and healthy, and relatively happy.

A few months ago, I was speaking with my father about the various prisoners who have sued to get hormone therapy and SRS while serving their time – most notably Michelle Kosilek, who likewise has attempted suicide while awaiting treatment. I said then that we shouldn’t be asking why prisoners should be getting medically necessary care, including SRS, on the taxpayer’s dime. It would be cruel and unusual treatment to let prisoners go without the medical care they require. We should be asking, instead, why our health care system doesn’t give the same care to free trans people. Why so many trans people have to scrimp and save and jump through so many hoops to get the treatment they so badly need.

That’s a bit of a digression, but here’s my point: we shouldn’t be asking why Chloe Sagal lied to try and raise funds for SRS. We know why: in part, because she obviously suffers from depression and wasn’t acting rationally (and I’ll circle back around to that), but more importantly, because I doubt she would have raised $35,000 if she had told everyone it was for SRS rather than surgery to remove a metal fragment and prevent lethal metal poisoning. The stigma surrounding trans people, our bodies and our needs is just too great. We shouldn’t be asking why Chloe Sagal lied. We should be asking why our society made her feel forced to lie. We should be asking why, when the emerging medical consensus is that SRS is necessary treatment for transsexuals like Chloe Sagal, like me, that it saves and improves lives, we have to work so hard and reach so far just to try and snatch that brass ring.

Third: A related point. All the rhetoric surrounding this feeds into the stereotype of the trans person as a deceiver. You know this stereotype. You’ve seen it play out in commercials, TV shows, movies, plays, books. The cheeky commercial about the ‘man posing as a woman’ who keeps hinting at some deep, dark secret. The comedians’ rants about picking up girls at the club and finding out they had Adam’s apples and body hair. The murdered trans woman who lied and seduced poor, insecure straight men who ended up putting her into a shallow grave, and oh, no, it’s horrible that she died, but if she hadn’t lied, surely it wouldn’t have happened. (Never mind that blunt honesty can also kill us, when someone is already pathologically, homicidally repulsed by the very thought of a trans person.) And now, the trans woman who lied to the whole Internet to get surgery she didn’t really need – I mean, no one really needs that stuff, right? It’s all in our heads, isn’t it? We could get therapy and fix it if we really wanted to, but oh, no, now it’s all trendy to be trans (never mind that we have records of transgender people going back to the ancient world) and everyone wants to mutilate their genitals. Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth.

Yes, deception was involved. No, that’s not good. But it’s wrong to play up that aspect, to sensationalize this story, to feed that stereotype. Not all trans people are like that. Chloe Sagal probably isn’t really like that. In her desperation, she made a mistake. She made a number of mistakes. We are human. We err. She still didn’t deserve to be outed. She doesn’t deserve our scorn or derision. She deserves our sympathy.

And on that note, let me state again Chloe Sagal was clearly under intense emotional strain. As I said, I have experienced episodes of profound, terrible depression, and I have done desperate, irrational things in the throes of it. I do not believe Chloe Sagal can be held responsible for her actions in this case. She deserves our sympathy. She has mine. The IndieGoGo campaign was canceled. Everyone got their money back. And now she’s in a hospital after her second suicide attempt in an alarmingly short span of time. Her reputation is forever tarnished. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. But I doubt it will be easy for her. We don’t need to make it harder.

Fifth: Allistair Pinsof probably violated journalistic ethics at some point (possibly multiple points) in this whole ordeal. He chose to conceal information that might have been of public interest; he later chose to reveal private information that wasn’t of public interest in what I can only read as a fit of pique.

Pinsof may have killed his career in revealing this information. I don’t know if I would honestly wish that on him. As much as I condemn his actions, as much as I think he made some grave mistakes, I have to acknowledge that he, too, may have been operating under emotional duress. Someone he’d spent a great deal of time speaking with, someone he talked down from suicide, had attempted to kill herself live on the Internet. He was upset, he was angry, and he did some profoundly stupid things as a result. He seems to understand that, now, though I still think some of his thinking on the whole matter is flawed. He’s made a decently heartfelt if slightly flaky apology. I don’t know if that’s enough. I don’t know what I want out of any of this. It’s really not my place to want anything to come of this, save perhaps for greater understanding and greater sympathy among the general public. I wish none of it had happened. I wish this wasn’t a story I’d heard too many times before.

This is such a difficult thing. The world makes it so hard to be trans. Even now, as open as I am about all this, I know that if I could go to bed tonight and wake up in a world where I had always been female, where I grew up as the little girl I should have been and blossomed into the woman I should be today, and I could just forget about all this transgender business, I would. I would never have chosen this, had I been given the choice. Every day, I and others like me have to walk this tightrope, no wider than a bit of dental floss, really, and keep our eyes raised to the heavens and pray we don’t fall. Too feminine and we’re a caricature. Too butch and we’re just men in women’s dresses. Too quiet and we’re invisible and easily trampled. Too loud and we’re read and ostracized or castigated or assaulted or killed. Too shy and we’re alone. Too flirty and it’s our fault if we’re assaulted or raped or murdered. Too close-mouthed and we’re liars and deceivers; too open and oh, God, are we really on about all that trans activist stuff again? Too much of anything and we could be destroyed…but, if I may borrow from Audre Lorde, our silence won’t protect us, either.

We face verbal, mental, emotional and even physical abuse every day. We get all kinds of shit from clueless cisgender society at large, from right-wing zealots, from trans-exclusive radical feminists, from religious fanatics who think we’re going against God’s will, from hardcore atheists and skeptics who don’t think there’s any scientific justification for transgender identity (or believe that it’s a psychological disorder that should be stamped out), from old-school trans people who think you have to cleave to traditional gender roles and stay under the radar, from new-school trans people who think anything explicitly gendered is crap (even if you’re genuinely girly or butch) and those who aren’t completely open about their history are traitors to the cause, and of course, worst of all, from ourselves. I’m my own worst enemy. I bet Chloe Sagal is hers. Honestly, I think it’s the human condition, but it’s so much worse when you have so much reason to doubt yourself already.

I don’t talk much about my religious beliefs, except in the vaguest terms. But there’s a hymn I sing to myself as the seasons change, or when the winter is cold, or I feel lost and alone and I want to think that it won’t always be so. It’s a humble, homely little thing, and I’ve always been a bit too embarrassed to sing it or show it to anyone else. But I drew the title of my post from it, and I’d like to share it with you all now.

Blessed mother, sweet life-bringer
By the waking morn we pray
By the sacred moon we call thee
Let there come another day
Let the sun shine on a green world
Let your loving children play
Do not let the darkness claim us
Let there come another day

This is my life, and the life of everyone like me: struggling, day after day, not to let the darkness claim us. So often, we falter. Too often, we fail. I’ve had so much to say here about my own thoughts and feelings – more than I really wanted to, when this is not my story, but Chloe’s. I can only pray that this, together with the stuff I’ve linked to, gives you some insight and inspires some sympathy.

And for you, Chloe, if you ever read this, I pray that the darkness will never claim you. I pray that there will be many more days ahead of you, and that you will find everything you need, and everything you’ve hoped for. I’m very sorry this happened. I’m sorry I felt compelled to share this, and if you ever ask me to take this down, to take your name and your story out of this, I will. Likewise, if you end up soliciting donations for your SRS, I’ll happily post the link here and share it far and wide. I wish I could tell you it will get better. But all any of us can do is hope, and try our best to help one another, however we can.

All we can do is try not to let the darkness claim us.

The Ranting Fangirl: Sexuality, Sacrifice and Sainthood

As I grow older and, perhaps, wiser, I am increasingly convinced that there are very few objective truths – at least when it comes to human experience. There are only our individual truths, the thoughts and feelings and experiences that change our lives in great ways and small, in good ways and bad. This is a difficult thing to accept. The world would be easier to deal with, people would be easier to deal with, if we had cold, hard, unchanging facts to guide our lives. Even I am forced to confront some uncomfortable truths at times, some stories that fly in the face of everything I think I know and everything I prefer to believe.

Case in point: this blog post that popped up on my Facebook feed the other day, posted by an old, dear friend from my childhood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I think I’ve mentioned before that I was raised Mormon; if I haven’t said it on this blog, then I’m sure I’ve said it on Twitter, and I know I’ve talked about it with several of my friends. I do not often go into detail about my time there, or why I left, but it’s part of who I am. It still informs some of the things I believe and some of the things I do, even though I no longer consider myself a Christian, let alone a Mormon, and even though I drink (very rarely) and swear (with moderate frequency) and am, generally, a scary liberal feminist transsexual lesbian who writes books about fairies and plays games full of vampires.

But I digress. I urge you to go and read the blog post in full, but in summary, it’s a personal account from Josh Weed, an active Mormon who identifies as gay but has been happily married to a woman for ten years. They have children, and he obviously loves his family, and his wife, very deeply, even though he feels sexually attracted to men. He makes it fairly clear that he doesn’t believe his choices are for everyone. He doesn’t claim to be ‘cured’. But nevertheless, he is happy. He doesn’t believe he’s living a lie. His wife, who knew all about this before they married, doesn’t believe that either.

My feelings about this post are complex, to say the least. There is skepticism: I firmly believe that human sexuality is a continuum, and that there are many shades of gray between gay and bi and straight. I find it difficult to believe that this is not simply a real-life example of “If It’s You, It’s Okay“. Then, too, there is worry: I worry that this will convince people that gay, lesbian, bi and trans folks can change if we just have enough faith and try real hard, and while I do believe sexuality is fluid, I also don’t believe it’s that fluid. I also worry that the post will lead young gay Mormons down a difficult and dangerous path – already, there is at least one comment from a young man who is about to go on his mission, a young man who was struggling with his own sexual attraction to men but now believes he can follow Josh’s example and fulfill Heavenly Father’s plan. Maybe he’ll succeed. Maybe he’ll fail, and hearts and homes will be broken. I hope he, and other young Mormons like him, move carefully down this difficult, treacherous path, and do a lot of soul-searching before committing to it; I fear they will not.

But I also find myself agreeing with some of what Josh has to say. This much is true: virtually every member of the QUILTBAG community is intimately, painfully familiar with choice, and with sacrifice. He and I made different choices under different circumstances. He chose to set aside his feelings and live the life the Church expected of him; I chose to leave the Church and find my own way.

He is content with his choice. That is his truth.

And I am content with my choice. This is my truth.

It was not difficult for me to leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and in all honesty, my decision to embrace my true identity had very little to do with it. I may discuss that in depth some other time. In my heart, I left the Church three or four years before I even admitted to myself who and what I really was. I stopped going to services, and I began exploring other ideas. The Church doesn’t really stop thinking of you as a member just because you stop going, though – maybe you’re an inactive member, but unless you’ve faced disciplinary action or asked them formally to strike you from the records, you’re still a member.

But during my freshman year of college, everything came to a head. I had long felt like an outcast – at church, at school, just about anywhere. I was shy and quiet and preferred the company of girls. I liked playing with dolls and ponies; as I grew older and got into games like D&D, I almost always played female characters, and I was fascinated by spells and magical items that could change a character’s sex. When puberty hit, I felt wrong and I had no idea why. I begged Heavenly Father, night after night, to let me be a girl, to transform me as I slept. When that didn’t work, I begged for a peace that never came. I convinced myself that my feelings began and ended with the torment I experienced as a child – if I was a girl, I wouldn’t have been teased or beaten, right? I learned about transsexuality during my adolescence, but even after I left the Church, I denied that part of myself. I tried to convince myself that I could be happy as a man, that I could find ways of expressing myself without starting the transition. When I first started seeing a therapist at school, in fact, I was looking for a cure. A way to reconcile my feelings with the ‘truth’ of my existence. That therapist didn’t judge me, didn’t pressure me one way or another, but just by listening, she helped me realize that my feelings ran deeper than I had ever believed. That those feelings were the truth of my existence, and by denying them, I was denying myself.

I couldn’t go on that way. The pain was excruciating. I have said before that I don’t consider myself brave for making the choices I did, because these were my choices: I could embrace who I was, or I could die, probably after a short and miserable life. And while I had stopped believing in the Mormon conception of God years before, I could not – I cannot – believe in a loving God who would ask that much of me. Who would make me this way and then tell me I had to twist and squeeze and pound myself into some torturous mold. I could not take my life. I could not go on living as I was. And so I made my choice.

While I didn’t particularly care what the Church thought of me at that point, I didn’t really want them poking their noses in my life, either – so once I’d made my choice, I went to my Bishop (in Mormon parlance, that’s the leader of a Ward – an individual congregation) to start the process of formally leaving the faith. At first, quite honestly, it went well. He understood why I felt I had to leave, and even, briefly, wondered aloud if I could leave during my transition, and come back when it was done, though he quickly rejected the idea and I was too polite to tell him I really didn’t see myself coming back at all. But then things turned to shit. There was the letter the Bishop wrote to me asking me to confirm my decision to leave – and also, not-so-incidentally, asking me if I’d ever had sex with men. I rather frostily responded that I had not yet had sex with anyone, but as I was leaving anyway, I didn’t particularly feel it was his business or the Church’s. There was the family friend in the Church hierarchy who gave my mother a blessing in which, among other things, he asked Heavenly Father to help her support me – only to call her up a few days later to tell her he shouldn’t have included that bit. And, eventually, though I still haven’t heard all the details, I do know that my mother was put under tremendous pressure to choose between her status as a member of the Church and her support of my ‘lifestyle’. She chose to support me.

I don’t think I’ll ever forgive them for forcing that choice on her. But then, to my knowledge, no one involved has sought my forgiveness. So I think that’s fair.

I couldn’t have made Josh’s choice. Obviously my circumstances differ greatly. There was really no way to reconcile my gender identity with the principles and demands of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It was not as simple as finding someone I could love, because it was never about who I was attracted to; it was a fundamental truth about my identity that burned inside me until I could take no more. But there are plenty of gay and lesbian and bisexual Mormons out there who can’t make Josh’s choice either, who can’t choose a heterosexual marriage or a life of celibacy. He seems to accept that. I’m not sure all his readers do.

But the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints adapts with the times. Change can be maddeningly slow, but it does happen. And Josh’s post is another piece of a growing conversation about Mormonism and homosexuality. I hope the conversation continues. I hope it widens to include the whole spectrum of sexual orientation and gender identity. Though I don’t think I will ever again walk in fellowship with the Church, I hope that, one day, change will come again, and QUILTBAG Mormons won’t have to choose between faith, family, love and self. More than that, I hope this widens the conversation about the nuances of human sexuality, not only among Mormons but among all of us. I hope we recognize the complexity of the matter and move past this black-and-white, nature vs. nurture, choice vs. genetics debate into a new perspective that acknowledges and embraces our diversity.

And while we’re at it, I would like an actual unicorn.

A girl can dream.

Writing Wednesdays: Complicity, Responsibility, and Rue

Welcome back to Hunger Games Week on the blog. I’ll be honest: I really wasn’t expecting to tie my Writing Wednesdays post into the movie or the book. I’ve already talked about the influence The Hunger Games and its sequels had on Fall – namely, the realization that the present tense could make for perfectly valid and even compelling narrative, and I didn’t need to feel awkward about using it. So when it came time to figure out what else I could say about The Hunger Games and the writing process, I drew a blank.

And then the Internet happened.

As I said previously, I went to see the movie last Saturday, and while I had some reservations, I freaking loved it. Amandla Stenberg, who plays Rue, was a pretty big part of that. I noted in my review that Rue’s story in the book, while sad and compelling, didn’t actually make me cry (I think I did get a bit sniffly, but my full-out sobbing moment came two books later, in Mockingjay). The film was a different story: when the climactic moment came, I broke down completely. During the scenes that followed, I lost it. And I do think it was in large part because Amandla Stenberg so perfectly embodied Rue. She gave a face and a voice to the character. A person I had only seen in the abstract, in the depths of my imagination, became real. If I could give her a standing ovation right the hell now, I would. You know what, let’s call this a virtual standing ovation. Brava. Seriously, fantastic job.

This little girl didn't tug at your heartstrings? Really? REALLY?

Imagine my shock, outrage and sadness when I discovered that countless assholes on the Internet were tweeting and blogging about their anger over Rue’s casting. Colorlines has a great article about this. You can also read about it on Feministing. Or on Alyssa’s blog at ThinkProgress. Or you can just check out the Hunger Games Tweets Tumblr. But to sum up: people were awful about this. There were people on Twitter who said Amandla Stenberg’s role as Rue ruined the movie for them. Others said that they were no longer saddened by Rue’s story – or they were no longer as saddened – when they saw her as black. Still others flat-out denied that Rue was black at all.

All things considered, it put me in mind of the ridiculous, overblown ‘controversy’ over the casting of Idris Elba as the Norse god Heimdall in Thor…except, in this case, the outrage is even more outrageous because yes, for God’s sake, Rue is black! At the very least, she’s clearly a person of color. The Hunger Games, page 98, where Rue is first described:

I […] see the little girl from District 11 standing back a bit, watching us. She’s the twelve-year-old, the one who reminded me so of Prim in stature. Up close she looks about ten. She has bright, dark eyes and satiny brown skin and stands tilted up on her toes with her arms slightly extended to her sides, as if ready to take wing at the slightest sound.

Emphasis mine, naturally. So these jerks are not only openly racist – they completely fail at reading comprehension. But you know what, let’s leave aside the fact that yes, Rue is a person of color. Even if her race wasn’t described in the book – even if she was explicitly described as white – the casting of Amandla Stenberg would be perfectly valid and, in fact, praiseworthy.

We live in a country where Trayvon Martin was murdered in cold blood and his murderer may not even be arrested, let alone prosecuted. We live in a country where Shaima Alawadi was beaten to death in her own home, her body discovered by her 17-year-old daughter along with a note telling the family to go back to Iraq, and the authorities think it might be a hate crime. I love my country. I do. I believe in the promise of the United States of America. But we have a problem with race. The whole Western world has a problem with race.

And that problem becomes especially egregious when we consider Hollywood and all its works. It is damned hard to be a person of color in Hollywood. When the film and television industry deigns to cast people of color at all, they are all too frequently delivery people, waiters, terrorists, criminals, token sidekicks…rarely, if ever, leading men and women. Rarely, if ever, characters with really meaty, vitally important roles (unless, again, they’re terrorists or criminals). And you know what? Popular culture influences culture, full stop. When we’re constantly told that people who look like THIS are criminals, people who look like THAT are terrorists, and if they’re not, well, it’s perfectly okay to ignore them…that sinks in. That’s precisely what at least some of us start to believe. I want to believe that things are getting better. I truly, deeply want to believe that. But I cannot afford to wave these concerns off. None of us can.

As a white person, I have the luxury of ‘not seeing race’. That is privilege in its most basic form. I have the luxury of looking at all-white casts and going, ‘okay, well, race wasn’t specified and those were the best people for the job, right?’ I live in a magical fairyland where people who look like me are the default. I lack privilege in other areas, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean I get to ignore the privileges I enjoy as a white American from a middle-class background. That doesn’t mean I get to fall into the trap of going with the default, where the default is white.

How does this tie back into writing? Well. I’m a big fan of Ursula K. Le Guin. I love pretty much everything of hers I’ve read, but more importantly, I admire her convictions – her determination to break out of the mold, to refuse to accept the white person as default, to include people of color, people of all backgrounds, in her stories. She’s opened up and talked about race here and there. She’s talked about wanting people who are not white, who are not among the people in power, to see themselves reflected in her stories. That’s something I want to do, too. Hell, that’s half the reason I’m writing Fall: I wanted to write a story for people like me. I wanted to see gay relationships reflected in supernatural romance. If I fail to include others in my world – if I fail to show a broader spectrum of human experience – then it’s just that: failure.

I was trying to articulate this to a friend last night. I’m not sure I succeeded, but what I said was this: the world is a mess. And if we all look at that mess and say that we didn’t cause it, that it’s not our problem, that we’re not going to take responsibility for it, then nothing is ever going to get better. I mean, I’m a person of faith, but the cold, hard truth is that we know nothing about this world except that we’re here, now, and it’s kind of screwed up. Our first duty is to make things better. Here. Now. On this planet, in this lifetime. We can’t do that by ignoring the problems. We can’t do that by denying our complicity. We have to take responsibility for what we write, what we put on film, what we draw, what we create in any way, shape or form. As creators, we have to capture some part of a whole big wide world. It is terrifying. But it is vitally important.

And if readers don’t get it? If they reject that? Well, that’s on them. Some minds are bound to stay closed. Maybe we’ll open others, if we do it right. Suzanne Collins included a little girl with brown skin who stirred readers’ sympathies to the point where several of us cried at the end of her story. Some readers rejected that premise – at least once they saw the film and realized that, horror of horrors, they were sympathizing with a black girl. Pardon my French, but fuck them. Fuck that.

The central characters of Ten Witch Grave have brown skin. And while I have struggled with issues of race in Fall, given its white protagonist and its themes of Irish mythology and the Irish diaspora, I’m including people of color there, too, because – surprise! – they freaking exist, and when I deny that, when I ignore that, I am part of the problem. And if ever the books take off, if ever the film versions are made, and my so-called ‘fans’ go off about how they lost sympathy for those characters, how they thought the mere presence of people of color ruined the story, how they don’t believe the characters I clearly and explicitly defined as people of color actually are…then those are not my fans. Those are assholes.

This is a tricky issue. I get that. I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. And, while including the whole range of human diversity, we have to be careful not to cross the line into cultural appropriation. But God damn it all – we have to try. If we fail, then we pick ourselves up. We listen, and we learn from our mistakes, and we go on and do better. But if we don’t try, then we are complicit. We have helped make the world just a little bit worse.

Try to make the world better. However you do it. Words and images have power, and as someone once said, with great power comes great responsibility. As writers, as artists, as creators, and as consumers of content, be responsible. Don’t be an asshole. Okay?

EDIT: Since first writing this post, I’ve come across Amandla Stenberg’s own statement to US Weekly regarding the racist tweets. I apologize for the omission. And, while a cursory reader might be forgiven for thinking the statement is awfully generic, I read it as a really classy way of pointing out that the people who flipped out over this don’t really deserve to be considered part of the Hunger Games fan community, and the actual fans are the ones who matter here. Way to go, Ms. Stenberg. 🙂

Kicking Ass At PAX East: The Campaign Continues

TL;DR: I’VE GOTTEN SOME VERY GENEROUS DONATIONS, BUT I COULD STILL USE HELP! PLEASE CLICK HERE TO DONATE!

I have some good news, some great news, and some complicated news. The good news is that I got some really generous donations last week from people like fellow Omeganauts Ross and Sophia, and friends and fans like Nate, Jeanne and Sarah, and I’m already over halfway to my original goal! The GREAT news is that I’m set to start a new job after PAX East – I’m not going to say where just yet, but I’m very excited. And the complicated news…well, the complicated news is that expenses have come up and are still coming up in relation to all this, and I could still use your help.

Since I’m going to be working regularly as of next month, I’ll need to get myself a monthly T pass rather than the weekly one. I could use some new shoes and I need to replace my watch strap, which is about to fall apart completely. That’s in addition to the various con expenses I’m still worrying about. So I’ve revised my target amount to $500, and yeah, I could still use some help.

Let me be clear: the initial deal still stands. It wouldn’t be fair to move the football when people have started kicking, so I’ll honor everything I said before. If I hit my original target of $400, I’ll tweet and blog live from the convention center. At higher goals, I’ll add video to the deal. And hell, I’ll tell you what: if I hit $1000 in the next week, I’ll drop all my inhibitions and cosplay every day of the con. During the Omegathon rounds themselves, I have to wear the Omeganaut t-shirt and all, of course, but I’ll make it work outside of Omegathon events. If you’d like to see me wandering around the convention as Jean Grey, Batgirl, and Wonder Woman, well, you know my price.

I’ll also see if I can do something nice for everyone who’s donated. Maybe you’ll get medals. I’ll come up with something when I see the final total.

If you want to help, but you can’t really give money right now – that’s perfectly okay. I get it. Retweeting or blogging about this would be a huge help. The more people I reach out to, the better chance I have of making my goals. Or, if you prefer, you can find me and help me out at the con itself. I may have trouble finding time to eat, so you know what – a candy bar, some chips (I love Lay’s Sour Cream & Onion and Pringles Ranch), a sandwich (I don’t like tomatoes or lettuce, but I really like chicken salad, egg salad, tuna salad, onion, mozzarella and/or pepper jack) or a Diet Mountain Dew could be HUGE to me at the right moment. Find me and feed me and I’ll be grateful. 🙂 As a huge fan of The Hunger Games, I also wouldn’t say no to a mockingjay pin for luck, say. 😉

Your support – in whatever form it takes – means a great deal to me. If you can help me in any way, I’ll be very, very grateful. If all you can offer is moral support, I’ll take that, too. I am genuinely in awe of all of you. I am stunned each and every time I discover another fan. Thank you all. Each and every one of you. Keep your fingers crossed.

Media Mondays: Comic Book Men

Behold the original boys' club.

Though my interest has flagged a bit in recent years, I still consider myself a Kevin Smith fan. Chasing Amy, despite a few problems, remains one of my favorite films. Dogma gets gross in parts, but I still think it’s a great commentary on religion as opposed to faith. Clerks and Mallrats are of course pretty damn great. And while I admit one viewing of Clerks 2 was enough for a lifetime, and Red State wasn’t quite the movie I was hoping for, I still like Kevin. I like what he’s doing. I think he’s the kind of guy I’d like to hang with. And though, as a lifelong Bostonian, I consider New Jersey the Eighth Circle of Hell*, I admit I’d given some thought to heading down to Red Bank one of these days to hit up the Secret Stash.

Comic Book Men, which finished its first season last night, has pretty much destroyed that dream.

In retrospect, I probably should have known what I was getting into the moment I heard the title. The show is aptly named. In fact, if I were a Cosmo-sipping, condescending Carrie Bradshaw type, I would probably say it should have been titled Comic Book BOYS, because these immature louts can hardly call themselves men, but I like to think I’m above that kind of clichéd rhetoric. My criticism of this show begins and ends with the fact that there is a serious lack of any kind of female influence in the world of the Secret Stash. Women are never-seen wives and girlfriends, or the poor ladies who wander into the shop seeking gifts for significant others, or the folks who periodically come in to sell off old comics and paraphernalia, or (and I can literally count these on one hand) that vanishingly rare and oh-so-prized beast, the female comic book fan. If there is even one woman employed at the shop, we never see her. Women are not the target market of the Stash in any way, shape or form. It is no surprise, then, that actual female customers are so rarely seen. I can only imagine they’ve found other, more welcoming shops far more deserving of their custom.

But we’ll get back to that.

This is Bryan. His duties apparently include acting like a total asshole and looking a bit like Alan Moore. HE IS VERY GOOD AT HIS JOB.

I knew right away that something was wrong with this show. Actually, for the first few episodes, that something had a distinct name and face: Bryan Johnson. From the first episode, he acted like a sarcastic, obnoxious douche. He clearly thought he was funnier than he actually was, and his treatment of his fellow employees sometimes bordered on the abusive. When he and the rest of the guys were sent out to a flea market to sell excess merchandise, he actually went so far as to take collectible plates off of fellow employee Ming Chen’s table and smash them just because he could. He finally gave Ming cash for the plates after being told off by a really awesome older gentleman…but then, as soon as said gentleman left, he tried to get that money back.

The only thing that kept me from completely hating Bryan – and for a long time, I did – was his behavior in last night’s episode. See, it turns out Bryan has a five-year-old niece, whom he obviously loves very, very much. In last night’s episode, we not only saw him buying superhero Barbies for her (I’ll be getting back to the Barbies, too), but we also saw him get a tattoo in her honor: a zombified portrait of his niece on her bike, right on his forearm where the whole world could see it. When he showed the tattoo design to his co-workers, they obviously thought he was insane, that everyone would be extremely creeped out by the undead little girl on his arm and his niece would not like it at all. But it turns out that his niece LOVES zombies – that it’s something they bond over – and when she came into the shop at the end and he showed her his tattoo, it was hands down the most heartwarming scene I’ve seen on television all week. The man I’d seen as the outright villain (or at least assholish anti-hero) of the show turned out to be a human being. I still think he’s kind of an asshole, but I have a little more sympathy for him now.

That doesn’t really change the fact that the Stash seems to be a really, really awful place to work, particularly if your name is Ming. See, Ming is kind of the Meg Griffin of the shop, as near as I can tell. He’s there to take constant shit from his co-workers. And, okay, look. He’s kind of a dork. He’s a little awkward, he doesn’t know nearly as much about comics as his co-workers, and sometimes he has really awful ideas. But you know what? I used to be like that. I had my ugly duckling phase. And I’m still awkward and shy and kind of a dork at times. And that’s no excuse – NO excuse – to treat someone like crap. It’s hard to tell if Ming’s in on the joke. Sometimes I think, yeah, he totally is, but all too often I’m convinced they’re laughing at him, not with him. And I have to say, if I were in his shoes, I would be done with that shop by now. No job is worth that level of abuse.

And the fact of the matter is that Ming is one of the most dedicated employees the Stash has. He puts up with EVERYTHING. He seems to do a hell of a lot more work than, say, Bryan. And he’s a lot more on the ball than any of them. In one episode, for example, he came up with a zombie-themed ad campaign (and sale day) for the shop. It ended up flopping, and I think his ideas were a little flawed, but he got one thing absolutely right: on the day of the sale, he was busting his ass out on the sidewalk trying to get customers in the shop, and he was talking to EVERYONE. Men, women, older folks, younger folks, all of them. And time and again, his boss and his co-workers kept yelling at him to target more typical customers, but Ming kept plugging away.

You know what? Ming was right. Zombie fans – geeks in general – come in all shapes and sizes. Men, women, old, young, gay, straight, professional, blue-collar, mime. You can’t always judge a book by its cover. The fact that it’s still news that women like comics, sci-fi movies, fantasy, zombie flicks – the fact that this is a controversial assertion – confuses and infuriates me.

This is a recurring problem with the Secret Stash as portrayed on Comic Book Men. Women are ignored, dismissed, tolerated at best. The products made for women and girls are denigrated – such as the aforementioned superhero Barbies. In last night’s episode, a couple of women came into the shop to sell some Barbies dressed and packaged as various superheroines: Batgirl, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, etc. These were official Mattel products from a few years back, and honestly, they looked great. I have not been into Barbies since I was ten, but I would totally buy them, and I bet I’m not the only one. And Walt Flanagan, manager of the store, flat-out refused to buy them. He refused to believe that any of his customers would possibly be interested in them. Bryan, as I said, ended up buying a couple of them for his niece, but Walt made it very clear – on the show itself and in the podcast studio afterward – that he could not conceive of a world in which he would carry Barbie or Ken dolls, superhero-themed or otherwise, in his shop.

Okay. That’s his right. But this shop sells all kinds of action figures and toys. I’m willing to bet they’ve sold some premium figures that are fashion dolls in all but name. These Barbies were official products, they looked cool, they seemed like they were well made, and they were in excellent condition. I’m willing to bet they would have sold. But Walt rejected them because they were girl toys. That’s what it comes down to. They were dolls, and this shop is for comic book MEN.

To be fair…for certain values of fair…it really, really is. Actual female customers are a rare breed in the shop, and given the sheer amount of testosterone wafting out the door, I can’t say I’m surprised. Especially when you consider the incident that truly infuriated me, the event that once and for all destroyed any interest I might have had in visiting the Secret Stash.

In the fourth episode, a woman came into the shop with her significant other – I’m assuming that’s who the guy walking around with her was, anyway – and it was very clear from the outset that they were both comic book fans and she was shopping for herself. She ended up spending a pretty big chunk of cash on some valuable old comics. The transaction itself went fine – the guys were personable and polite, they rang her up and saw her out the door. But afterward, while discussing the sale on their podcast, they made a bunch of sexual jokes about how “she knew what she wanted” and Ming (who rang her up) “gave it to her”.

Guys, this is a line. It’s a pretty clear line. It’s bright and shiny and painted right in the middle of the road. We used reflective glow-in-the-dark Day-Glo orange. And you just JUMPED right on over it.

Let me be clear: if I were that woman, if I had spent a bunch of money only to find out on national television that the staff who helped me had gone on to make a bunch of sexual jokes about me behind my back, I would be done with that store forever. I would tell all my friends to steer clear. I would do my level best to ensure that they never got any new business. That is not okay. That is not acceptable behavior in polite society. You treat your customers with respect before, during and after the transaction. You treat women as people, not magical unicorns here for your pleasure, not aliens who only rarely deign to descend to Earth. Women don’t shop in the Stash, Walt? Women aren’t your target audience? Gee. I wonder why.

I wanted to like this show. I really did. And there are parts of it I have enjoyed. I actually do enjoy seeing the staff haggle with the people who come into the shop to sell stuff or buy rare items. I like seeing the amazing memorabilia that comes in and the cadre of experts they call upon to assess it. Seeing the staff in full zombie makeup for Ming’s campaign was pretty cool. Watching them film a TV commercial full of all kinds of crazy crap was fun. And, again, Bryan and his niece were the most adorable thing ever. But all things considered, I’m not sure I’ll be back for Season 2. They’d have to make some serious changes to the show and the store. They have some serious, heartfelt apologies to hand out. And I really don’t think any of that is going to happen.

All things considered, I’d rather watch a show about New England Comics. They actually employ women there. And, more importantly, I’ve always been treated with respect. Something tells me that wouldn’t happen at the Stash.

* In case you’re wondering, New York is the Ninth Circle, with Satan himself dwelling in the frozen waste of Yankee Stadium, his three mouths forever gnawing on Harry Frazee, Jonathan Papelbon and Johnny Damon. I barely need to mention that Connecticut is the Seventh.

Linkspam: Friends and Family

I have thoughts and opinions about last night’s Supernatural, but I think I’m going to give them some time to settle – I may blog about it tomorrow or Monday. But rest assured that it’s coming. Oh, boy, is it coming.

So, in the meantime, I’m going to spend a few paragraphs talking about things my friends and family are up to. You’ve probably seen some of these links before – hell, in at least one case, you might have found this blog through the site I’m linking to – but hopefully you’ll discover something new nonetheless.

My costume for Halloween 2011: Queen of the Autumn Fairies. Ears by Alanya Divine. Photo by Katie Hallahan.

In yesterday’s Fangirl Fridays post, I mentioned my sister, Alanya Divine. Alanya’s an incredibly talented jewelry-maker who makes a number of unique, intricate pieces out of copper, silver and assorted stones. She also specializes in ornamental “elf” ears accented with stones, clock parts, feathers…you name it. She made a pair of truly lovely copper ears ornamented with black feathers for my Halloween costume last year (I’m afraid they don’t fit perfectly in the photo; she’s since adjusted them to a much better fit) and I can’t wait to find another use for them. You can find her Etsy shop at www.etsy.com/shop/belethil; while she does have her own dedicated site, it’s not quite finished yet. Alanya is absolutely dedicated to her craft, and I’m so, so thrilled and proud to see her enjoying such success.

I’ve mentioned my friend Katie a few times (unsurprisingly, since we’re in the same writing group, we both go to Women in Games Boston, and we’re gaming buddies and occasional creative partners), and I’ve linked to her blog each time, but in case you missed it, here it is again. Katie’s an incredibly bright, funny, snarky lady, and I always enjoy working with her. She’s also a vital part of Phoenix Online Studios, which recently produced The Silver Lining, a fan-made sequel to the King’s Quest series, and she and her colleagues are currently hard at work on an original game called Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller. I’ve been privy to some of her other creative work, and while it’s not really my place to talk about it, I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the years to come.

While I haven’t met many of them personally, I’m Internet buddies with a number of the bloggers on The Border House, which focuses on the perspectives of marginalized communities in gaming. While I wouldn’t call The Border House a totally safe space (some of the comments on various articles can be quite vicious, and there have been scattered incidents of harassment during some Border House-connected events, which the writers and staff have been quick to recognize), the writers there are always insightful, and I highly recommend the blog at large. (They also did me a good turn by promoting the GLBTQA Gamer Meetup I’m organizing, so it’s only fair to send what traffic I can back their way!)

I also want to give a quick shout out to a couple other Internet buddies: Maverynthia and I have been following each other on Twitter for a while now, and most recently, she was kind enough to write a loose companion and counterpoint to my own piece on the used product market. (I say “loose” because I would not describe it solely as a companion to my piece – it’s her own article, offering her own unique perspective, and she was gracious enough to link it with mine.) Then there’s Kate Cox, an independent blogger and guest poster on The Border House who has recently joined the staff of Kotaku. Once again, we’ve been following each other on Twitter for some time, and she’s an awesome lady and a great writer, and I’m looking forward to reading her future work.

Maddy Myers is also mainly a Twitter/Facebook friend, though we did finally meet in person at this year’s Arisia (where she sat on the Women in Gaming panel and wore an awesome Gargoyles shirt that made me kinda jealous – oh, Elisa Maza, you are so getting a Fangirl Fridays post of your very own). She’s a writer for the Phoenix, specializing in games and gaming culture, and I cannot recommend her highly enough.

Last but far from least, Amanda Cosmos is a friend and former colleague of mine, currently working at Irrational Games. I have to admit that I am really really terrible about following what she’s up to, but I keep tabs on her on (say it with me) Twitter and see her every so often at Women in Games Boston, and she’s also very cool.

The truth is that I am blessed with a whole lot of amazing friends and there’s no way I can keep track of them all – so if I’ve passed you over, I’m sorry! I’ll try to get to you next time, and please feel free to call me out in the comments. As for the rest of my readers, I hope you follow up on these folks – they’re all incredible in their own unique ways, and I’m sure you’ll find something you like among their work.

Fangirl Fridays: Claudia Donovan, Warehouse 13

My new best friend, animated Claudia Donovan.

I should begin this post by saying that my little sister, Alanya Divine, is basically the best sister ever. Though we fought like cats and dogs when we were kids, we’ve become genuine friends in the last decade or so, and she’s bailed me out of a few real messes. She’s an incredibly talented jewelry maker, she’s painted some amazing pieces (two of which occupy places of honor on my bedroom walls), and of course she’s given me my favorite niece, Elizabeth, who is pretty much perfect in every way, though she needs to hug her freaking aunt more often. I love her dearly, and I owe her a great deal.

You may be wondering why I’m talking about my sister in a Fangirl Fridays post. Well, I am a big fan of my sister, but I’m actually here to talk about one of my favorite female characters on television right now. The two are just somewhat related. See, late last year, I found out about the Claudia Donovan Animated Maquette from Quantum Mechanix. I’m an enormous fan of Warehouse 13, and of Claudia Donovan in particular, so when I saw that little statue, I pretty much had the classic geek reaction: IT MUST BE MINE!

But money’s been tight lately (so, by the way, if anyone’s looking to employ a geeky, snarky redhead with three years of game QA experience and a small talent for writing, I’m free), and there was no way I was going to scrape together the spare cash for that statue before the preorders closed. Luckily, I mentioned it to my sister, and probably went a little overboard in my gushing over the character, and as it happened, she had wanted to know what I wanted for Christmas anyway, so…

Needless to say, it arrived on Tuesday.

Claudia’s taken up residence on my TV shelf, directly opposite Tali (who is herself worthy of a Fangirl Fridays post at some point), and in honor of her arrival, I thought I’d talk a bit about why I love her so very much.

I was a pretty big fan of Warehouse 13 from the moment it started airing on (sigh) Syfy. Though there were some initial complaints that the concept strayed too close to Steve Jackson Games’ Warehouse 23, I think the show moved quickly to distinguish itself from the SJG-created game setting/meme, and both owe as much to the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the conspiracy theories surrounding Roswell and Area 51 as anything. The cast, including veteran TV character actor Saul Rubinek, was full of intriguing and delightfully quirky characters, and the premise – that figures throughout history had invested their creations with strange and often dangerous powers, and it fell to the small team affiliated with Warehouse 13 (itself the heir to a dozen previous Warehouses around the world, going all the way back to ancient Egypt) to collect, neutralize and preserve them: to “snag, bag, and tag ’em,” as the show’s most prominent catchphrase goes.

But while I enjoyed the show immensely, something seemed to be missing. Artie Nielsen, Saul Rubinek’s character, was wrapped in mystery and often distant from the main characters, former Secret Service agents Myka Bering and Peter Lattimer. The recurring characters of Leena the psychic innkeeper and the eternally enigmatic Mrs. Frederic, director of Warehouse 13 (played by the unforgettable C.C.H. Pounder), were little better. As for Myka and Pete, they soon became a dynamic duo, and their explorations of the bizarre world of Warehouse 13 mirrored the viewer’s own journey, but there seemed to be little tying them to the rest of the cast.

And then, just a few episodes in, it all began to change. WARNING: spoilers for the first season follow.

Knock knock, Artie.

The first few episodes of the series included a tantalizing subplot revolving around an unseen hacker who was trying to infiltrate the Warehouse’s computer systems. At the end of the third episode, these attacks culminated in a terrifying all-out assault in which the hacker briefly assumed control of the mainframe. As Artie scrambled to lock the intruder out, the mainframe abruptly lit up with a simple yet enigmatic message, repeated over and over again: KNOCK KNOCK.

It didn’t take long for the hacker to reveal herself. In the very next episode, Claudia Donovan, a figure from Artie’s shrouded past, managed to get inside the Warehouse itself – and, worse, she managed to abduct Artie himself. As Myka and Pete tried to track her down and save their boss, Claudia confronted Artie over his role in the disappearance of her older brother several years ago. Forced to face his guilt and shame over the whole affair, Artie soon agreed to help Claudia with a seemingly far-fetched plan to rescue her brother from his predicament. Once Myka and Pete were on the same page, he and Claudia managed to use an array of artifacts from the Warehouse to locate and retrieve her lost brother – and while Joshua Donovan eased his way back into the world around him, Claudia fearlessly accepted the consequences of her crimes against the Warehouse and stepped forward to face the music.

It was clear from the start that those consequences could very well be dire: Mrs. Frederic herself made it very clear that Artie could either hire Claudia or dispose of her. Artie chose the former, and offered Claudia a job as his assistant. Though initially tasked with cataloging artifacts, organizing files and beefing up the mainframe’s security, her boredom with these tasks soon led her to pursue various side projects, with and without Artie’s blessing. Though she was already clearly a bright young woman, the true scope of her intelligence was revealed only in later episodes, as she showed a distinct talent for her own unique brand of superscience, redesigning artifacts to serve a variety of esoteric purposes. We are talking about a girl who not only understood the principles behind a holographic projector built by Alexander Graham Bell, but successfully transformed it into a 3D imaging device capable of creating a composite hologram out of disparate 2D digital images. And a girl who literally invented a suit to transform the wearer into a superhero. Claudia has some truly insane skills.

That’s far from the only reason why I love her, though it’s a start.

Claudia Donovan, Badass Scientist

The fact of the matter is that Claudia is a tremendously fun character. She’s snarky, funny, cheerful, genuinely enthusiastic about her job, and openly affectionate with her friends. In the last few seasons, she has rapidly become the glue that holds Warehouse 13 together – a surrogate daughter to Artie, a surrogate little sister to Myka, an occasional partner in crime to Pete, and one of the few people to truly stand up to Mrs. Frederic’s machinations. When a new agent joined the team, she was the first person to welcome him with open arms, and soon formed a close friendship with him as well. Her brief fling with Douglas Fargo in the course of a crossover with Eureka was adorable, hilarious and authentic (and made for a nice change from her previous romantic subplot, which was a bit dull and overly convoluted). As an unabashed geek, she’s the perfect avatar for the show’s core audience. Brave, loving, brilliant and fierce, she is one of the best female characters on (sigh) Syfy right now, and possibly one of the best female characters on TV, period (along with Leslie Knope and the late lamented Veronica Mars, of course). She’s not perfect. She certainly makes her share of mistakes. But she is nevertheless a wonderful role model. I would be thrilled if my niece, upon her inevitable discovery of Warehouse 13, decided she wanted to be Claudia Donovan grew up. Hell, I want to be Claudia Donovan when I grow up.

Of course, it helps that Claudia is brought to life by Allison Scagliotti, an adorable and all-around awesome young actress who has stood up with numerous other celebrities in support of the NOH8 Campaign. She’s a comic book fan, she loves Joan Jett (which demonstrates her exquisite taste), and she’s got some serious pipes of her own, as demonstrated by her memorable cover of The Pixies‘ Where Is My Mind? on a recent episode of Warehouse 13. I admit that I know her mainly as Claudia Donovan (though I did see her guest appearance as Jayna of the Wonder Twins on Smallville), but I was swift to follow her on Twitter and I’ve been very impressed by what I’ve seen of her work outside the show.

If you’re not watching Warehouse 13, you should be. It’s a fun show with some truly terrific characters (and I could write a whole other post on the relationship between Myka and recurring character H.G. Wells – yes, THE H.G. Wells, but not quite the one you expect), some epic plotlines and some brilliant ideas. There are a lot of reasons to tune in. But it’s really worth watching for Claudia Donovan alone. I can hardly wait to see her adventures continue – but at least I have a truly awesome little Claudia statue to keep me company in the meantime.

(Seriously. I have the best sister.)