The Dragon Awards Are Dead
The Dragon Awards began as a rebellion against the Wokelings that ran the Hugo awards into the ground.
The Dragon Awards is now the property of the Wokelings that ran the Hugos into the ground.
That is because the methodology used to award a Dragon is in a word: Crap.
There is more to it but we will look at the methodology first. This simple popularity contest favors people who either have a large enough fanbase to swing the needle OR a bunch of little people on Disability for hyper-obesity, who have nothing better to do with their sweaty, greasy, purple-haired lives than be diversity activists on social media. Although the latter needs Woke librarians who can get things organized.
Larry Correia is popular enough to make the Dragons his private annual award, but he is too busy making money for something that silly.
John Scalzi on the other hand is nowhere near as concerned with making money after landing his ten-year contract with Tor. He is however very, very concerned with being handed awards.
Scalzi is a medium talent scribler. He will never get any more skilled than he is now. But he CAN get affirmation that says he actually lived up to his early hype, this is called being given awards. And unless he goes Trans non-binary, he will never see another Hugo.
Consequently, John Scalzi is going to make sure he is on the ballot at every Dragon Awards from now on.
The green-haired body-positivity activist in the mobility scooters crowd is the more important factor. Hatred is what drives these sad broken women (and gamma males). The Dragons were briefly our toys, so they were determined to break them no matter what. This is the closest thing to joy that they can experience in their lives.
The final factor is Woke librarians. They were the backbone of the very successful effort to highjack the Dragons. Woke librarians are some of the worst SJWs on the planet because they have actual organizational skills.
There is no way in hell the guys who run the Dragons are going to change their award methodology. That would mean admitting the Awards are a disaster that is in some ways even worse than the Hugos. They won’t do that unless someone big publicly tells them it’s a failure.
The Dragons are dead, just accept it and stop filling out the ballots, you are only participating in a failed system.
Unfallen Darklings: Is there anything that can be done?
Dark Herald: No.
Here is the thing about an award that is genuinely valued by the public at large; it is an acknowledgment of genuine excellence handed out by an institution that works as advertised. There aren’t any of those institutions now. You know it and they know it. Not for athletic prizes. Not for music awards. Not for film trophies. And sure as hell not for literary awards. But pretending that they recognize true merit is of critical importance to propping up temples that are built on timbers that have rotted to their innermost core.
The masquerade of competence requires that everyone participate in empty rituals that are now a burlesque of their founding purpose. They have to pretend that the foundations of society work as well as they did when Eisenhauer left office. But they don’t.
Western civilization is now incapable of creating an award that is of genuine worth.
Deal.
