psocoptera

Ok, some wild speculation regarding the stats. Other people have pointed out some other interesting features, like the ways the raw number of nominating votes goes off a cliff in some categories after the finalists. Dave McCarty, the one non-Chinese official who seems most likely to know what actually happened, has indicated that questions can be emailed to the committee, so, uh, so much for his credibility, but he's apparently willing to go down with this mess.

I guess I'm fascinated by the whole thing because, insofar as it seems like Something Dubious has happened here, it's interesting to me what it is and isn't? Like, if, hypothetically, you had a committee willing to go in full-throttle on falsifying results, I feel like you could do it much *better* than this, just looking at what the numbers looked like from the past couple of years and then cooking yours to resemble them. You could have Babel come in a narrow seventh for the ballot and we all might say "damn, okay, that's super surprising but I guess that's what happened".

Whatever happened here is... not that. You have the things that were brute-force de-eligibilized. You have Best Series nomination counts in the 800s and 900s - Wayward Children got 242 nominations in 2022, and now October Daye got the *least* nominations of the finalists with *816*??

It seems like there must have been either some kind of internal struggle or disagreement, such that the "honest" committee members weren't able to prevail, but are now able to expose what happened, or for the "dishonest" powers involved (whoever they might be) just don't give a shit, or are actively pleased to be able to show their power - because, after all, what's more powerful than knowing you can do as you like and never face any kind of consequences for it.