2021 Hugo Award for Best Related Work Ballot

In past years, I grouped my ballots together by theme. But this year, I have much more time to get them all up, so I'll be doing a single post for each category in which I am voting. First up is Best Related Work, that increasingly weird catch-all category. (The titles of works link to either full reviews I did, or where you can freely access the work in question on the Internet.)

Things I Nominated

I am not a very systematic nominator, but I did nominate one thing in this category: Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century by Sarah Cole (Columbia UP), which I reviewed for the SFRA Review (not that the review has actually been published yet even though I turned it in in February 2020). I'm not very surprised it did not make the ballot, however, as it is the kind of book not really in the orbit of sf&f fandom. But I didn't read much sf&f nonfiction from 2020!

---

7. CoNZealand Fringe by Claire Rousseau, C, Cassie Hart, Adri Joy, Marguerite Kenner, Cheryl Morgan, and Alasdair Stuart

I don't like Hugo finalists that are about things that happen at Worldcon (more on that for #6 below) and I don't like Best Related Work finalists that I don't think are "works" in a conventional sense (more on that for #5 below). CoNZealand Fringe was a set of supplementary programs to last year's Worldcon, so it in fact falls into both buckets, making it everything I do not like to see. This is no judgement on the CoNZealand Fringe itself; it's just not the kind of thing I think the Hugos should be awarding. (Not everything that can happen in the sf&f space needs a Hugo Award; see also this year's special Best Video Game award.)

6. "George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off into the Sun, or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)" by Natalie Luhrs

This is a blog post about how bad a job George R.R. Martin did hosting the 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony. I did not watch it, so I have no opinion on how he did, but it seems pretty widely agreed that he didn't do a great job (though also some of the fault clearly rests with the 2020 Worldcon events team), and it's one of many that circulated at the time, and I seem to recall I enjoyed reading it then. Anyway, one of the things I hate about Hugos are Hugo Awards for things about Hugo Awards and/or Worldcon. It's so insular. One of the six best things related to science fiction and fantasy was about the awards devoted to recognizing such things? Bleh. It would have been an easy last place if not for CoNZealand Fringe combining two of my Hugo peeves.

5. FIYAHCON by L. D. Lewis (director), Brent Lambert (senior programming coordinator), Iori Kusano & Vida Cruz (FIYAHCON Fringe co-directors), and the Incredible FIYAHCON Team

"Best Related Work" was previously called "Best Non-Fiction Book" and then "Best Related Book"; the category definition has become increasingly broad over the years in an attempt to encompass things people may do that are about sf&f, but are not themselves sf&f; I agree with the broadening in the sense that I think there have been a number of very worthy finalists that would not have made it with a more restrictive definition (e.g., 2020's Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin documentary, 2019's Hobbit videos from Lindsay Ellis)... but I don't really buy the argument that though putting on a convention is "a work" even if it is clearly "work."

4. No Award

Everything beyond this point I would be fine with it winning a Hugo Award, even when it's not my favorite. Really, my preference for this category is nonfiction books about sf&f, though other things have interested me in the past (as I stated in #5 above). But this year we got just one of those!

3. A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler by Lynell George

This book is based on George's time going over the Butler papers at the Huntington Library. It's not a biography or anything; it's meant to give you insight into Butler's working mind and thought process. How did she perceive herself as a writer? Unfortunately, I felt like there wasn't enough of Butler and there was too much George, who seemed to be getting in the way of her subject. Those papers will be the basis of a really good book someday, but this isn't it.

2. "The Last Bronycon: a fandom autopsy" by Jenny Nicholson

This is a YouTube video about the rise and fall of My Little Pony "brony" fandom, through the lens of the last BronyCon, a convention held from 2011 to 2019. I thought it would be documentary-style, like Ellis's Hobbit videos, but it was more like an extended (70 minutes!) vlog; Hayley and I watched it while folding laundry. I enjoyed it, especially the digs into some of the weirder aspects of brony fandom (the body pillows, ugh, but also the idea of being "horse famous," and the weird Netflix brony documentary), but some of it felt poorly sourced (I wouldn't be surprised to find homophobia in brony fandom, but I found her discussion of it unconvincing). Fundamentally, though, an enjoyable look at an aspect of fandom I am only peripherally aware of.

1. Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley

The award rules are that fiction is eligible in Best Related Work if "noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and... [if] not eligible in any other category." This book is noteworthy for its translation and apparatus, and as it was originally published c. 1,000 C.E., it certainly is not eligible in any of the fiction categories! It's not exactly the kind of thing this category was designed for, I must admit, but I enjoyed it best of the three works I experienced, and I think it will surely have the most lasting impact of any of them. (It does seem odd, though, to grant an sf&f award to an edition that downplays the fantastic elements. I mean, there's still a dragon of course, but in Headley's version, Grendel's mother is not a supernatural monster.) Anyway, I don't know if I want this category to become "Best Translation" but this is definitely a worthy winner.

---

Overall Thoughts

My first year voting, 2017, this category was made up of five nonfiction books and one series of blog posts; in 2018, it was six nonfiction books. Since then, it's gotten weird. Though I like the occasional oddity, the category containing just one nonfiction book is a swing too far away from what I find appealing, and what it was originally designed to recognize. I don't have a good solution, though. What is a definition of "work" that would admit things I like and keep out things I don't? If this is what the nominators want, this is what we'll get, and all I can do is rank them on the final ballot.

Review: My Little Pony/Transformers: The Magic of Cybertron by James Asmus et al.

I guess the first Transformers/My Little Pony crossover must have sold well, because just five months after it came to an end, another one began-- and the end has hints for a third! While the first featured Queen Chrysalis bringing the Transformers to Equestria, this one has Megatron bringing the ponies to Cybertron, inadvertently releasing King Sombra in the process. Sombra promptly mind controls a group of ponies, Decepticons, and Autobots, and its up to the remaining ponies and Transformers on both sides to figure out a way to stop him from conquering two worlds.

IDW does a lot of these weird mash-ups: Transformers/G.I. Joe, Star Trek/Transformers, Star Trek / Legion of Super-Heroes, and so on. Part of what can make them less effective, I think, is that in your head, you can imagine six million different fun things that can happen... but if it's a four-issue miniseries telling a single story, there probably isn't room for most of those, and the resulting story is a bit more plodding. (The sheer insanity of Transformers vs. G.I. Joe is of course an exception to this.) Thus, I like the format of these MLP/TF crossovers. Each of the four issues contains two ten-page stories; in between the opener and the finale, we get can get six quick stories against the broad framework of "what would ponies do on Cybertron?" This lets the writers indulge whatever weird team-ups they like, without having to worry about how it all goes together. (Indeed, in some cases, they clearly haven't worried about how it fits together at all!)

from My Little Pony/Transformers #1
(script by Sam Maggs, art by Casey W. Coller)

So, in the six middle stories we get:

• a team-up between two lesbian parent couples (MLP's Holiday and Loftie, aunts/guardians of Scootaloo, and TF's Arcie and Greenlight, guardians of Gauge)
• a team-up between flying teams (MLP's Wonderbolts and TF's Seekers)
• a showdown between "Western" characters (MLP's Applejack and TF's Wildwheel)
• a team-up between musical characters (MLP's Vinyl Scratch and Octavia Melody and TF's Soundwave)
• a team-up between characters who are into beauty (MLP's Rarity, a fashion designer, and TF's Knock Out, a cosmetic surgeon)
• a team-up between reptiles (MLP's Spike and Smolder, both dragons, and TF's Dinobots)

MLP continuity seem to be pretty firmly rooted in the tv show's season 9, but the TF continuity-- as is usually the case for a lot of these crossovers-- seems to be based on the 1980s cartoon in its general precepts, but freely pulls characters and concepts from other continuities. (Arcie and Greenlight are from IDW's 2019-present ongoing, Wildwheel is from the 2018-present Cyberverse cartoon, Knock Out is from IDW's old 2005-18 continuity.)

from My Little Pony/Transformers #2
(script by Ian Flynn, art by Priscilla Tramontano)

They're all by different creative teams, and I liked some better than others, but I think literally every story had one great moment. The opener had an excellent Unicron gag; I loved Scootaloo zooming in on a Transformer scooter with a bunch of "kid" Autobots; the bit where Starscream expects everyone to cheer for him but instead they cheer for Rainbow Dash was perfectly done; Knock Out insisting that Rarity needed to see the beauty of Cybertron was a surprisingly good grace note, and Knock Out's speech about his love for fellow Decepticon Breakdown was pretty cute; and who wouldn't love Vinyl Scratch using Soundwave as her own sound system? Last time the finale was pretty perfunctory, but this time it has some good gags, too: the Mane Six are given exo-suits that let them transform, and Pinkie Pie's wondering what she'll turn into is fun, as is her delight at what she does become (yielded by Megatron, no less!). Starscream's last line is perfect.

I had two particular favorites. One was "One-Trick Pony" (from issue #2, by Sam Maggs and Trish Forstner), the Western-styled showdown between Applejack and Wildwheel. I didn't know Wildwheel (I've never seen Cyberverse), but this was a perfect Western pastiche, and it read brilliantly.

from My Little Pony/Transformers #4
(script by Ian Flynn, art by Casey W. Coller)

The other was, like last time, the Spike/Dinobot team-up (from issue #4, by Ian Flynn and Casey W. Coller). This just had a lot of good jokes, as Grimlock and Spike struggle to explain to the other Dinobots what makes Spike so cool. "Friend-Spike can fly, too!" "I'm... still learning, to be honest." "Him learning to fly! Him dragon! Breath fire, too!" "M-mostly to send correspondence..." "Telecomm fire!" But of course Spike comes through with the magic of friendship when they have to battle a combiner.

Are these comics great art? Well, I don't know, but they're certainly great comics. Like, what else could you want from them? I will definitely be here for any third volume. (That said, I think Transformation Is Magic would have been a much better subtitle.)

The Magic of Cybertron was originally published in issues #1-4 of My Little Pony/Transformers (Apr.-July 2021). The story was written by James Asmus (#1, 3-4), Sam Maggs (#1-2), Ian Flynn (#2, 4), and Tony Fleecs (#3); illustrated by Jack Lawrence (#1, 4), Casey W. Coller (#1, 4), Priscilla Tramontano (#2-3), Trish Forstner (#2), and Tony Fleecs (#3); colored by Luis Antonio Delgado (#1-4),  Joana Lafuente (#1-2, 4), and Tony Fleecs (#3), with flats by Lauren Perry (#3); lettered by Jake M. Wood and Neil Uyetake; and edited by Megan Brown.

Friendship Really Is Magic: Thoughts on My Little Pony

I don't know if it goes for all toddlers, but Son One gets into things very intently-- and then moves on. So for a while, he watched Frozen every single day and was particularly obsessed with Sven. (Every time Sven was off-screen: "Where's Sven? Sven needs to come.") Then it was Super Truck, and we were constantly building him Super Truck characters out of Duplo. Then it was Paw Patrol, and Hayley made him a bunch of Duplo pups. ("They are not dogs," he would correct me, "they are pups.")

Now it's My Little Pony. He's actually been low-key into it for a while, and he previously had a period of being into it, but it recently really took off. Hayley has been a big My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic aficionado for several years now, and she has a lot of mini-figures and most of the tie-in comics from IDW, as well as a box full of G1 ponies from when she was a kid. For Son One, he's often really into things when he can draw connections. (It was mind-blowing to him, when about a year ago, he realized the planets in Chris Ferrie's Eight Little Planets were the same planets as in some other book.) The presence of pony toys, pony comics, and a pony tv show means he can always make these connections. "I have that one!" he'll exclaim when recognizing on screen a pony he has a toy of, or "I read a story about that one!"

His tv viewing is limited at home, but his comic reading is only limited by the patience of his parents, so we are constantly being asked to read a lot of pony comics to him. I do enjoy this, but to read a 20-page comic book out loud takes a while, and my commitment to doing all the voices means it also takes a lot of energy. (I am pretty proud of my Fluttershy voice, but I feel like Rainbow Dash never comes out how I would like.)

from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #18
(script by Katie Cook, art by Andy Price)

During his first spate of pony comic reading, he was really into a storyline called Ponies of Dark Water, where the Mane Six turn evil because of magic water from a hot spring. Son One always wanted to read that one. "I want to read the one where they are evil." He would also tell us things like, "I have red eyes because I am evil Applejack." He hasn't asked us to read that one again of late, but he is still into ponies and other creatures that are or have been evil. (It's not entirely clear to me he knows what "evil" is, but he does know that opposite of, say, "good Celestia" is "evil Celestia.") He is especially into Princess Luna and her evil counterpart Nightmare Moon; a passing reference in one comic made me realize there is one episode where Princess Celestia is revealed to have an evil counterpart called Daybreaker, and when he watched that episode, he flipped out with excitement, and often asks if "evil Celestia" is going to be in a particular story. (Thankfully, the other day he told me, "I only like good ponies.")

As long as Hayley has been into MLP, I've known a lot about it. I absorb details about fictional worlds quickly and easily. But now that I am constantly reading these comics, I keep learning more and more. It's a weird experience primarily being exposed to a world through tie-ins, but if you've read as many tie-ins as I have, you know how to recognize the joins. "Ah, this character who just appeared must have been introduced in the show..." and you can even guess pretty accurately what the plot must have been. 

from My Little Pony: Legends of Magic #12
(script by Jeremy Whitley, art by Tony Fleecs)

I am also constantly asking Hayley questions. A lot are about how alicorns/princesses work, but there are no real answers to that. But a lot of questions were raised when I read Son One the twelve-issue Legends of Magic maxi-series; this detailed the lives of a number of ancient heroes of Equestria, and came out in parallel with a season of the television show that also did something similar. I could tell something was going on when I read it; there's a character introduced in issue #7 whose name is never used, for example, until issue #9, and that's because the episode that introduced his character (as a villain) aired between issues #8 and 9.

I was asking Hayley about this story arc... and so she came up with a sequence of episodes that would lead up to this. There are a lot of ongoing plots in MLP, so to understand that storyline, we would need to watch some other episode-- but to understand that, we would need to watch some other episodes, and so on. So when Son One gets his daily dose of tv, all three of us (and sometimes four) sit down to watch with him as we work our way through this sequence. So far we've watched eight episodes, and I'm not sure how many more there are to go.

But what I am realizing is that, like Son One, I am into the evil ponies. Some of the best tv characters are ones that start "evil" but become good. (TV Tropes has an article, of course.) Crais in Farscape, Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Dukat (for a time) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Blackarachnia in Beast Wars / Beast Machines: Transformers, Astronema in Power Rangers in Space, and so on. (And in comics, there's Megatron in Transformers: More than Meets the Eye.) I think this is because they can often have a little bit of "edge" to them that our heroes lack, but also because they are emotionally complex: they genuinely believed in what they did, even if they no longer do, and so they might regret it but not regret it at the same time.

Because the premise of the show is that friendship is literally magic, MLP has more of these than most shows. You don't win by destroying or imprisoning people as you might most of the time in the above shows-- the characters who switch are very much exceptions in those. In MLP, though, you typically defeat someone by making friends with them... so the show is replete with ex-villains, many of whom go on to become recurring characters (and the ones that don't recur on screen end up doing so in the comics): there's Princess Luna/Nightmare Moon, Starlight Glimmer, Tempest Shadow, Stygian/the Pony of Shadows, Sunset Shimmer, probably others I'm forgetting.

Starlight Glimmer is probably the best of these on screen. In her first couple appearances, she was a unicorn who convinced a town they would live more happily if they had no cutie marks (the unique indication of ponies' talents), because difference is the cause of unhappiness; she then sought revenge on Twilight Sparkle. But Twilight learned that Starlight had been upset when a friend got a cutie mark indicating he was talented at magic and thus left her to go to magic school, and took her on as a pupil. I really like the subsequent episodes I've seen Starlight in, as she struggles with her self-worth.

from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #67
(script by Jeremy Whitley, art by Andy Price)

Tempest Shadow was a secondary villain in the MLP movie; the character never appeared on the tv show, as she was played by Emily Blunt, someone the cartoon couldn't get on a regular basis. But the comics have no such restriction, and there's a great two-part comic story illustrated by Andy Price (the best illustrator of pony comics) where she confronts the tragedy in her past that led her to becoming a villain; it makes a great companion to the issue of the movie prequel comic also illustrated by Andy Price about how she met up with the Storm King. Like there's some legit great art in these things, and thus great character work.

On the show, once Nightmare Moon returns to being Princess Luna, she mostly seems to just turn up to crisis situations alongside her sister, Princess Celestia, who rules Equestria. (One of the only exceptions I've seen is the episode "A Royal Problem," where Starlight Glimmer switches the cutie marks of the two sisters to help them better understand each other.) But there are a number of comic issues that focus on her attempts to readjust to life in Equestria after spending a thousand years as an insane villain on the moon. (And even before she became Nightmare Moon, she was always kind of an outsider.) These are some of my favorite issues of the comics.

The comics even redeem characters the show apparently never does. On screen, Sombra was defeated-- in the comic story arc The Siege of the Crystal Empire, he gets reconstituted from being a spirit, but then is convinced to give up his evil ways. (Apparently, though, the show undermines this by bringing him back in a totally different way later on, still evil. Alas, as it's a great story arc.)

from My Little Pony: Friends Forever #7
(script by Jeremy Whitley, art by Tony Fleecs)

I recently read Son One one where Luna goes to Pinkie Pie to learn how to do comedy, and there's another good one where she teams up with Twilight's dragon spike to investigate arson in Dragontown. ("Forget it Spike. It's Dragontown.") The best one, though, is one (drawn by Andy Price again) where she takes over Celestia's job for the day. The tv show would do something similar later in "A Royal Problem," but this is much funnier, with much more emphasis on Luna's tendency to call other ponies her minions, and on her overall awkwardness. It's not quite how she is in the show... but it's in some ways better, and I always enjoy declaiming stuff in my Luna voice in the stories where she shows up.

Hayley has actually been after me to read her pony comics for years, but Son One is far more likely to throw a tantrum if I don't do it. But as Hayley pointed out to me, I really should be counting them on my reading list!

Review: Transformers/My Little Pony: Friendship in Disguise! by James Asmus, Ian Flynn, et al.

Even though I tell him I'm largely only interested in the comics of IDW's main Transformers continuity, my comic book guy is forever sticking whatever random crossovers IDW does in my pull box. I have no interest in the Transformers meeting the Terminator or Marty McFly, but the moment I heard of Transformers/My Little Pony, I knew I had to get it. My wife is a big My Little Pony fan, so I have had a lot of exposure to the world, and the concept is so ridiculous that it would have to be sublime.

At its best, that is true. This isn't really one big story, but a series of short stories (each of the four issues contains two ten-pagers) set against a common backdrop. There are bookends that explain the set-up and provide a wrap-up: Queen Chrysalis tries to magically summon allies to aid in her takeover of Equestria, which pulls the Autobots and Decepticons from Cybertron through a malfunctioning spacebridge. The Decepticons agree to aid Chrysalis, while the Autobots try to help the ponies of Equestria. The six middle story provide a variety of encounters: Arcee and Rarity team up against Starscream, Spike and Grimlock battle the Constructicons, Pinkie Pie and Gauge's cooking show is interrupted by Shockwave, Fluttershy and Discord's tea-time is interrupted by Soundwave and his cassettes, Rainbow Dash and Windblade race while they battle some Seekers, and Insecticons attack the Apple family farm.

The frame is perfunctory but necessary; I did like that it opens by highlighting the absurdity of it all and also downplaying the continuity issues. (From the Transformers side, it seems to take place in the 1980s G1 continuity, but later characters like Windblade and Gauge are present; the Transformers wiki informs me there's not really a place in the MLP chronology it can fit, either.) The weaker stories don't really do much other than have a pony team up with an Autobot and mouth some platitudes about friendship. The only one I didn't like was the Apple family one, which didn't do anything clever or interesting.

from Transformers/My Little Pony #2
(script by Ian Flynn, art by Sara Pitre-Durocher)

But when it hits, it really hits. The Spike/Grimlock story might make no sense (how did Spike and Grimlock get to Earth?) but makes up for it with some delightful inanity as Spike saves the day by reading Modern Cybertronian for Everyday Conversations well enough to understand Teletraan I for Dummies, which he then reads well enough to reprogram the Ark's engines to use them as weapons against the Constructicons-- all seemingly in the matter of moments! I always like some good Grimlock jokes, and this has some great ones. (On top of this, my toddler liked it. He often sees me reading comics, or pulls one of my wife's MLP comics off the shelf, and asks to be read them, but gets bored after just a couple pages. But when I read him this story, he sat all the way through it and then asked for it again multiple times over the next couple days. And then a month later, I was reading The Transformers Classics UK and told him Grimlock was in it, and he started talking about "Grimlock and neigh-neighs," so clearly it left an impression!)

The Pinkie Pie/Gauge one has its moments, but the best of them all was the one about Fluttershy and Discord coming up against Soundwave. Soundwave's cassette robots all transform into animals, so Fluttershy tries to befriend them... this leads to a delightful moment where one clarifies that Ravage doesn't have a "boo-boo," he has "battle damage"... but then Fluttershy wins him over by applying "boo-boo creme" to it. At the same time, Discord turns all the animals in Fluttershy's sanctuary into Transformers in order to battle Soundwave, and in the end, Soundwave goes AWOL to spend time basking in friendship in Equestria.

from Transformers/My Little Pony #3
(script by James Asmus, art by Jack Lawrence)

There are some crossovers you can take seriously, I suppose, but a crossover like this doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. Or, indeed, benefit from it. Thankfully, the writers here largely understand that and make the best of it. I didn't really care about the plot-- but I don't think anyone involved expected me to. The end promises a sequel with the ponies in the Transformers universe, and if they make it, I will tell my comic book guy to put it in my pull box!

Friendship in Disguise! was originally published in issues #1-4 of Transformers/My Little Pony (July-Nov. 2020). The story was written by James Asmus (#1, 3-4), Ian Flynn (#1-2, 4), and Sam Maggs (#2-3); illustrated by Tony Fleecs (#1, 4), Jack Lawrence (#1, 3), Sara Pitre-Durocher (#2, 4), Casey W. Coller (#2), and Priscilla Tramontano (#3); colored by Tony Fleecs (#1), Lauren Perry (#1, 4), Luis Antonio Delgado (#1, 3), and Joana Lafuente (#2, 4); lettered by Jake M. Wood and Neil Uyetake; and edited by Megan Brown.