I don't have firm statistical evidence that January is prone to fannish feuds, disputes or cause célèbres but something about a new year sets things in motion. Sometimes, it is a delayed reaction to stuff that happened in December (e.g. in 2020 the Courtney Milan/RWA dispute was really a late December thing that spilled over into January) and maybe people taking a break from being heavily online leads to more willingness to get het-up about stuff in the new year.
- Yet another new sub-genre of sci-fi-fantasy
- A cross-genre war (horror v romance v fantasy v stories about cats)
- Somebody says something weird about fan-fiction
- An obscure publisher does something very odd & awful online
- An over generalised sound-bite (like "grammar is racist") becomes the seed of a torrent of bad-faith or reductionist arguments
- Hugo nominations go awry
- There's a big argument about something but nobody really knows about what and most of the argument is people arguing about what the argument really is about
- A very niche argument in a very specific community of fans somehow spills out everywhere
- All of the above all at the same time
- None of the above because Twitter collapses
No comments:
Post a Comment