Watching You Tube so you don’t have to: Larry & Ethan edition

If you write a book you should do a promotional tour but 1. I’m lazy 2. I’ve no time and 3. I don’t want to. Luckily, other people can do your promotional work for you and what better way to advertise Debarkle than for Larry Correia and Ethan Van Sciver to talk about the overlap of the Sad Puppies and Comicsgate campaigns!

OK, you can all probably think of things a LOT better than over an hour and a half of two beardy guys self-aggrandising and re-editing history. However, I watched this for you.

What sustained me through what was an extraordinarily dull experience was the question on whether the elephants in the room would get mentioned. Put these guys together and there are two elephants: one quite significant and based in Switzerland and one less so and based in California.

Vox Day’s history with the two of them was a neat example of history repeating itself. Correia promoted Day during Sad Puppies 2, the planning for Sad Puppies 3 by the so-called “Evil League of Evil” included Day but then with SP3 Day gazumped the campaign with his own more radical offshoot called Rabid Puppies which Day could control directly. With Comicsgate, Day’s anti-SJW rhetoric was promoted by Ethan Van Sciver, Day got into the comics business and then started his own “Comicsgate” imprint which Day could control directly. Both Corriea and EVS got roundly manipulated by Day but at least EVS had the common sense to complain about it.

The second person I wanted to see if they would mention is Jon Del Arroz. There is a lot that can be said about JDA and the claims he makes about himself but his claim to have been an early and significant figure in Comicsgate is a reasonable one. JDA has a working relationship with Vox Day and ideological similarities, so when EVS and Day fell out, JDA was caught in the middle, leading to prolonged internal feuding within Comicsgate. JDA’s culture-war book promotion strategy didn’t really start until after the Sad Puppies had faded. Nonetheless, JDA’s actions got some positive promotion in Puppy circles. However, eventually by 2021 JDA was in a feud with Correia and stating that Correia had sent a mob to cancel him (https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/02/17/i-couldnt-make-it-one-day-back-on-facebook-without-getting-banned/#comment-102677 )

In short, EVS and LC had a lot in common to talk about! You won’t be surprised to discover that they didn’t talk about it either. OK, Vox Day got a brief mention:

The “$5.00” means somebody paid US$5 to have their comment put on screen. A waste of money for them as all they got was a sort of mumbling reply from EVS (I think LC had already left).

Instead, we got the absence of Vox Day as a ghostly presence. EVS asked Correia to explain what the SFWA was and Correia explained that the organisation had got rid of the conservatives and libertarians in its ranks. Which is interesting. I wonder who the conservative-libertarian they got rid of was? Did his name rhyme with Dox Vay? Given that VD was the ONLY person that was expelled, there’s not a big range of example to draw from.

I’m skipping ahead. So what’s this video like? The first 6ish minutes is a montage of God Emperor Trump and Pepe memes with alternate lyrics to a song by the band Sabaton which plays over the montage. It’s like being trapped in a time loop in the internet of 2017. After that, we get several minutes or so of promotion for EVS. Larry Correia appears at around the 11:30 minute mark. Then there’s a whole bit about a time when EVS had a Marvel guy call into his show and the guy wouldn’t say “hi to comicsgate”. So, if you do think about watching this (don’t) you can skip ahead to the 20-minute mark for when the content starts.

The fantasy content kicks in around that time. Correia explains that he knows liberal writers who love his work but “they can’t say that” because if they did they would “get skinned and eaten, they’d get decapitated”. He adds another anecdote about some (anonymous) leftist who read one of his novels with the intent of giving it a bad review but liked it so much that he couldn’t write a review at all, for fear of the persecution he’d get from praising Correia’s work. Let me speculate here and suggest this is horseshit. I spent years and years now talking about Correia’s actions and I’ve said often that he is a decent writer of entertaining books and I’ve had zero pushback on that. The problem with Larry Correia isn’t his fiction or rather it IS his fiction but not the fiction he sells in books as fiction.

26 minutes in you’ll find Larry explaining that he can no longer make the New York Times Bestseller list anymore because the list is “rigged” because he used to make it but once he became well known as having the wrong politics he was out. Note that just prior, in his account of his Campbell Award nomination he also claims he was criticised for having the wrong politics widely at the START of his career.

After that, we get a garbled history of the Puppy campaigns. Events get shoehorned together and the absence of Vox Day from the story looms ever larger. It becomes this big mysterious thing as to why people might think of the Sad Puppy 2 campaign as being racist and misogynistic (hint: Vox Day aside from anything else). The absence of Day from the narrative enables this spin that the pushback against the Sad Puppy campaign from a diversity perspective was wholly irrational.

But there is not a complete absence of personal growth here. Back in 2008, Correia was claiming that he personally was “blacker than Barack Obama”.

“My personal political leanings are pretty darn obvious to anybody that reads this (I own a machine gun store, not a lot of Democrats in that line of work) so you can be relatively certain that I don’t like Barack Obama, but I think I actually hate him. Well, I suppose somebody could say that by saying that, I’m racist or something, but hell, I’m blacker than Barack Obama.  My Mom’s from Africa and I at least grew up poor.  Let me see, how many times have I gone windsurfing on Maui… uh… NONE, but I have witnessed a crack dealer in Birmingham beat a man with a baseball bat and push him off a 2nd story balcony, so maybe Barack can educate me on the “Black Experience”. No, I hate him because he’s a socialist idiot pretty-boy waste of precious oxygen.”

https://monsterhunternation.com/2008/04/02/why-i-would-rather-gouge-my-eyeballs-out-of-my-skull-than-vote-for-barack-obama/

These days, perhaps because the medium of video might be less supportive of such claims, he has modified his position.

“I’m mixed race. My dad is browner than Barack Obama.[laugh] My mum is super white – which is funny because she’s actually from North Africa.”

You Tube interview 2022

That’s progress, right?

What can I say. That was a poor use of 1:35:31 Earth time intervals that I will never get back.