Vox Day and many of his supporters may indeed be douches, but again, this doesn't mean that everyone on that side is. As I wrote above, there are always opportunists who jump on movements like this to get their messages out that often distort the discourse. From what I can tell, Vox Day is not the organizer of Sad Puppies, but rather ran his own movement that got lumped together with it because many of his nominations were similar. He took it upon himself to jump on the bandwagon, as it were. I do believe that the original movement was started in good faith to give certain authors more representation, but it has now become tarnished with some truly shady and repugnant opinions.

Nevertheless, as I said in my first post, skewing voting is unacceptable, no matter your politics. I disagree with the whole idea simply because popularity contests ruin the spirit of the awards. It's only made worse by people like Vox Day who slither in with their agendas.

I must also reiterate that I'm not on either side. I like science fiction and believe in fair representation. When someone considers it a "win" that nominations are more diverse, that politicizes the issue just as much as people like Vox Day have done. The focus is now removed from writing and becomes about the authors' identities. Both sides are wrong in this respect.

I've written on this sub before that we need to support and encourage non-white and non-male authors because they have a harder time getting noticed, and I still stand by that opinion. I'm just so tired of the us vs. them mentality that so many supporters on every side always end up touting. There are people that honestly believe that if there aren't diverse enough nominations that it's because of bigotry, and only bigotry. Conversely, there are people that believe that the "evil SJWs" are ruining science fiction with their agendas. I can't tell you how oversimplified and illogical both those lines of thought are.