Booties, Crappies, and Halls of Fame (oh my!)

I've been reading the awards, and it is nice that Dr. Mike's idea is going to be carried on in terms of a more or less perpetual Daria Fanworks Awards, every year. Myself, I would avoid any pressure to do it any more frequently that that. There is just as much a danger in too MANY awards being given as too few, and I commend Mr. Lobinske for taking up the idea that if a category does not receive any nominations, the award should just simply be skipped that year.

There has been recent discussion about making the DFA voting a board-operated poll (say, on Paperpusher or Sheep's Fluff). The only objection I would have to that is: how do you hide a poll's results? One of the reasons I think Dr. Mike did such a good job is that the voting, for the first time, was anonymous. A poll makes anonymity a problem if people can see vote totals change day by day, and as far as I know, there is no way to keep poll results hidden, neither during voting, nor at the time it comes to count ballots at the end.

I think it might be very discouraging for someone to be nominated and find out, on review of the poll results, that they've been outvoted 23-1. I am very strongly in favor of simply naming the winner -- whether she won by two votes or twenty is not important.

thea_zara, on a PPMB post, thought about doing something to tell new fans what was worthy of a first read and what was not. She noted Mr. Pollard's Recommended Authors list (a subject, it appears, that Mr. Pollard is still quite sensitive about) as a start.

Making an "objective" list of the Best Daria Fan Fiction of All Time, however, is an exercise frought with peril, because you're looking at all of the fan fiction written in the last EIGHT YEARS. Do you include writers whose impressions of Daria were built on 12 episodes, and whose work is now hopelessly outdated? Should erotica be excluded? How many pieces of fiction are you talking about? Ten? Thirty? A hundred?

How are you going to whittle down all of those works without a fairly complex nomination process? Here's an example:

Let's suppose you get 20 nominations for "Best Erotic Daria Fic". You get a grand total of FOURTEEN WORKS NOMINATED -- one story gets five nominations, one three, and twelve other works get one nomination each. Do you put up only the top two winners as final nominees, and let them slug it out? Do you include both of them as "great stories"?

It gets very dicey. Do you do a "first past the post" kind of thing, or does everyone get three votes, or five votes, or ten votes in a particular category? I can think of about three different ways of doing this -- right now -- and I'm not sure I couldn't think of more.

Perhaps the best way to create a "Hall of Fame" of great works is to just nominate a Veteran's Committeee, like they do in baseball. Choose twelve people who've been around for a long time, or who have read a lot of fanfic. They don't even have to be active in the fandom anymore. Every year, they get together, and decide as a group which works written before January 1st, 2004 are good and which ones are not.

The committee nominates ten works every year for five years. After that, two works a year. Certainly, that ought to get all the good works on the page. Yes, the question of bias is still there, but at least, the bias is now spread across several people, and not just one. And it will spring debate, and fans love debate.

I may do the "Excellence in Fandom" award myself, in June. (See the "Ten Fans" award, below.) HOW I do it I have no f**king idea.