Well, that was a clusterfuck.

The whole 2023 Hugo Awards fraudulent controversy has truly been something. Reading the exposé and angry responses, including the responses from other authors affected by this such as Xiran Jay Zhao and Neil Gaiman, it's honestly astonishing how much of a shitstorm it is. I, like many others, started paying attention to this when it started circulating around (mainly on Tumblr, for me) about a week ago because authors being disqualified without reason and rumors of intentional censorship seemed rather sus, and I didn't think we'd get an actual answer. But then the whistleblowers leaked the emails of what happened behind-the-scenes of how this shitstorm clusterfuck came to be, and it's just a mess. A nuanced mess, but an incompetent, cowardly, spineless mess regardless.

I don't know much about the Hugos aside from how it's supposedly a prestigious award, and the only thing I have ever paid attention to over the years regarding it was when Archive Of Our Own won a Hugo in 2019 and the whole Puppygate ("Sad Puppies"/"Rapid Puppies") block-voting controversy. Although based on the latter and this recent scandal, it makes me wonder how much prestige the Hugo Awards hold anymore, because unless they do some serious reconsidering of how they handle and run these events it doesn't look good for their overall reputation.