I have seen many conversation threads going round on the subject and just wanted to pop up to say my own feeling is, I am uncomplicatedly happy and pleased by the Hugo nom, and if you have contributed to the AO3 in any way, I hope you too feel happy and seen and recognized by it, and we don’t need to pin down who has earned it or who it belongs to.

Thankfully, the AO3 isn’t Twitter or Tumblr: we don’t need to figure out who has the legal right to strip-mine it for billions and run away after setting it on fire. :P Nobody does. Because we deliberately refused the lie, from the beginning, that a space like the AO3 was or could ever be the work of one or even a few people.

The AO3 is not a statue that one artist has made. It’s a living space, a community garden. And the first group of us stood up together and said we wanted a garden for our community and talked about what it should look like, and many of us committed to build it, and many started the work, many left, many joined in along the way. Because of all the early people, we were first able to open the garden, with paths and beds and the organization to keep it going.

But that alone wouldn’t have made the garden. The garden is made new every day, by the people who stop in and plant a flower, or a whole bed of strawberries, and the people who come in every weekend and do the weeding and teach the gardening lessons, and the ones who run the annual fundraiser and the ones who go to the local community board meetings to protect it. And the beds and paths wouldn’t still be there if people weren’t maintaining them and adding new ones and figuring out better ways to lay them out and occasionally bringing in a whole new tree and putting up a gazebo to make things even better.

And because the garden is there, many random passers-by can wander through and enjoy the flowers, and some of those people will stuff a few bills into the donation box or fill out the suggestion form, and some will come back often and some will come every day, and some will one day become caretakers and some will come in once and never again, and some who did huge amounts of work will move across the country and never see it again.

The garden is the work of and a place for all those people. It was built for the person who wanders through once and for the person who comes every day, for the person who contributes and the person who only comes long enough to enjoy the beauty and warmth they can find in a place built only for human pleasure and goes away enriched. And all the people who build it have made a choice to give their work to such a place and for that cause.

So if the question is, which of that work is the nomination recognizing? It’s recognizing all of it. You can’t separate one part of it from the other. The garden wouldn’t exist without all of it. And I am grateful for it all. <3