Happy New Year! Here are the most-viewed posts from the past year with notes explaining what helped make them so.
The shortlist announcement.
What Brust said got attention. Then Will Shetterley’s prolonged rear-guard defense generated over 400 comments.
How much did Vox Day impact the 2017 Hugo finalists?
The Scroll’s account of the way John Scalzi had been trolled about a remark he made to an interviewer led to Vox Day paying a visit to the comments section.
“Is there a blacklist?” asked Lou Antonelli, because the rejection slips he was getting were not quite as warm as they formerly were. Much discussion ensued.
JJ’s link collection drew a lot of users.
The next item started the story. On this day, Odyssey Con co-chair Alex Merrill published an official response to the departure of GoH Monica Valentinelli – filling the void left by Richard S. Russell’s retracted statement with something more socially acceptable.
Author Monica Valentinelli announced she was withdrawing as Odyssey Con’s Literary/Game Designer GoH, just two weeks before the con due to Jim Frenkel’s continued presence on the concom and her concern for her safety.
The lead item reported that Bogi Takács wrote a series of tweets criticizing Greg Hullender’s statements in reviews about the usage of pronouns for non-binary characters in stories reviewed at Rocket Stack Rank, adding many screenshots of examples.
There was heated disagreement in comments about whether the Shire could be analyzed in Marxist terms.
Opinions about smoking got even more attention than the Scroll item about Sarah A. Hoyt returning to tell Mad Genius Club readers what happened to Sad Puppies 5
Filers discussed many things including the news item about Superversive SF’s Anthony M, who liked Neil Gaiman’s 17th-century vision of the Marvel universe — Marvel: 1602 (published in 2012) – but nevertheless was displeased by its revelation of a gay character.
The Shadow Clarke jury’s lack of acceptance for Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit ignited Filers in open rebellion against the critics.
The winners.
Commenters were in the white heat of discussing award-nominated books.
The Corroding Empire, Castalia House’s parody of John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire with a look-alike cover, was taken off sale by Amazon.
Much reminiscing in comments about D&D and Satanic Panic.
What is meant by the derogatory term “box-checking”? The question may not have been definitely answered, but many commenters saw supposed examples as positively increasing diversity.
More attention to trolls’ efforts to capitalize on Monica Valentinelli’s quitting as OdysseyCon GoH.
Castalia House kept trying to bring its goon book The Corroding Empire back from the dead on Amazon.
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