Who owns a grassroots movement?

This is one of those questions that answers itself: nobody, obviously. The whole point of a "grassroots" movement is that it grows up from millions of separate roots, like grass, when there's a feeling throughout a wide section of a population that they need some new direction. It may have figureheads to rally behind, but they aren't the driving force of the movement, and they don't have any kind of authority over it. If they try to lead it in a direction apart from the general consensus, they'll fail.

Literary movements, like the Sad Puppies movement or the more recent ComicsGate movement, have this character as well. If they're destined to amount to anything, it's because there is a broad market being unserved by the established purveyors of their respective forms of literature: science fiction and fantasy, in the case of the Sad Puppies, or comics for ComicsGate. The existence of unserved markets is beyond dispute. Their size and interest is being tested by the creators aiming (like me, as an old Sad Puppy) to produce work we think will prosper. If the enemies of these movements are right, we who try to produce for this market will have little success. If we don't do a good enough job at producing or marketing we may have little success anyway, but the vehement and active opposition to both Sad Puppies and ComicsGate suggest that their opponents suspect the markets for such work are indeed out there, and success is possible.

Another way a grassroots movement, or at least its brand, can fail, is for some of its figureheads to get too puffed-up about their own importance. At the time a couple years ago when Sarah Hoyt tried to leverage her own role in starting out the Sad Puppies movement into ownership of the (untrademarked) name, there were a great many fans who called themselves Sad Puppies based on general sympathy with the ideas it represented. It was a grassroots movement; it meant different things to different people, but all of them had a general dissatisfaction with a direction SFF publishing had taken and wanted something new.

But then Hoyt wrote her blog post, sternly dissing a younger author of growing prominence to Sad Puppy fans, who had dared to publish his own set of recommendations for Hugo nominations using Sad Puppies in the title (you know, so people looking for Sad Puppy information could find it).

And she killed the movement. Suddenly it wasn't fun anymore. Suddenly everyone realized that calling yourself a Sad Puppy wasn't just something you could do casually, and define it yourself, and no one would care much: now it implied taking sides in a dispute--and against someone people liked.

Now ComicsGate looks like it's about to swirl down the same toilet. Vox Day has started a comic book imprint called ComicsGate: I presume he took the trouble of trademarking it before making the announcement. Ethan Van Sciver strongly objects to "his" hashtag being used by a figure he (and many others) strongly dislikes.

Now, I'm not a comics fan of long standing, but am growing more interested in the new voices in the medium; I supported the Alt-Hero comics, and some others, and rather look forward to seeing what they come up with. I see this as part of the movement to reclaim fantastic literature from the bleak, antihuman, antireligious nihilism into which it fell toward the end of the 20th century. But I read with sadness the same recriminations tearing ComicsGate today that sundered Sad Puppies a few years ago: the bitter invective thrown between the anti-Vox Day side and the pro-Vox Day side.

And I suppose the result will be that in their desire to claim the name of ComicsGate for their own, the two factions will turn it into something neither side will have any use for. There are pro-Vox parties "disavowing" ComicsGate, because they're upset with Mr. Van Sciver; which will make Vox's ComicsGate imprint worthless. Swell.

The consolation is that, with or without a name, the movement continues: the unserved markets are still there, and creators will continue their efforts to serve them. The grass continues to grow from its roots, perennially.

My own first effort was the story, "The Kings of the Corona", now close to its publication anniversary in TALES OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. It got some good reviews on Amazon!