Attention seeking troll puppies

The various Puppy leaders, it turns out, have little to say, and their arguments implode into insignificance. They don't think a literary award, the Hugos, should go to literary fiction. They don't think science fiction should contain messages, or be socially progressive. Their voting slates, of course, contain attempts at literary fiction and message fiction. If we set aside their arguments, all we are left with is noise. Their attention-seeking trolling of the Hugo nomination process in essence says "look at me, look at me!" That is sad, indeed.

Hugo Award slates and the politics of exclusion

Slate voting is an exclusionary tactic.

Regular Hugo Awards voters nominate the stories and authors that they love in a scattershot manner, a method of voting that is easily overwhelmed in the nomination process by a relatively small group of lockstep slate voters.

The leaders of the Rapid Puppies and Sad Puppies recruited enough voters to march in lockstep, filling entire categories of the Hugo Awards ballot with their large slate of nominees. The motivation behind these slates, it is clear to me, has little to do with promoting under-appreciated authors and stories. Instead, their goal is the exclusion of others from the Hugo Awards ballot.