Atlasian Oscars 2020 Edition: New and Improved!

[SevenEleven]

Pericles is the most villainous politician Labor has ever had since Griffin and I lol.

KING PERICLES

[The Dowager Mod]

I would think that my being elected to office after well over a decade in the wilderness would be a comeback.    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Continential]

I would think that my being elected to office after well over a decade in the wilderness would be a comeback.    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To be fair, there wasn't any downs in your career.

[Anna Komnene]

I'll throw a nom to TexasGurl for comeback kid, Sev for policymaker, and Blair tying another race for biggest surprise.

[Dr. MB]

One day left to get nominations in.

[Joseph Cao]

Most Villainous: I'll pull a Delaware-at-the-DNC and pass – for the moment.

Biggest Failure: PSOL's various schemes over the year, while perhaps expected to fail by more experienced players, still strike me as being the runaway winner in terms of their sheer magnitude. Bear in mind that I joined during the ACLO strike, the motives of which I am still unable to tease out, and his massively unwieldy and constitutionally unworkable plan for the Greens would have caused the party to collapse sooner or later even without the catalyst that was Laki's predictable unpredictability.

Rookie of the Year: While I will not nominate anyone for obvious reasons, I have to say I think there's a good case to be made for OBD – Frémont MP and Speaker, active policymaker, Labor internal leader, and Representative is an unusually productive trajectory.

Comeback Kid: Also surprised that Ted has not received more recognition here. He returned as a result of COVID (which certainly nobody saw coming) and rapidly stepped up through the offices of Frémont MP, Representative, and Senator to Vice President within the span of about five months. In a new player that rise would be described as meteoric; for a longtime player who spent the first months of the year as a zombie, it is a pretty good comeback.

Best Policymaker: Thumb is an unquestionably skilled policymaker on his own, and his position as Speaker of the House over the first six months of this year only emphasized this. There were a lot of consequential bills, many of them COVID-related, that passed the House on his watch and with his input during that period.

Saddest Death: Double nomination. A case has been made for Siren that I fully agree with; I'd also like to put in a word for lfromnj, who this time last year was in contention for ROTY and even Person of the Year for his efforts to revive the right, and is now nearly six months deregistered.

Drama Queen: Pericles has been the source of more than enough drama this year – enough to spawn two new parties and irritate a whole lot of people. This is purely an evaluation of his personal touch, however, and does not reflect on the standard Laboriteness of his policy views.

Biggest Surprise: I suppose the biggest shockwave has been the sudden reorientation towards a multiparty system and specifically the rise of a Third Way lane that the Democratic Alliance and Liberals both seek to fill, which despite this competition appears to be more long-lasting than the previous times it's happened. The events and aftermath of the August midterms – Jimmy v. Blair, the House flipping, PSOL's fumble arguably costing the Greens a Senate seat, the subsequent intrigue over the Speakership – are a good runner-up.

Best NPC Campaigner (NEW CATEGORY!): There have been rises and falls and disappearances, and gaffes aplenty, and outbursts in campaign quality followed by regressions or stagnations followed by improvements, but the consistency and quality (consistently high quality?) of Poirot's relentless local campaigns have not wavered over the entire six-month cycle.

Most Villainous: …And we're back here. Others have argued for Pericles, but as I mentioned above, his shortcomings are more on the non-policy side of things. As "villainous" as his personality is claimed to be, the shadiest tactics have tended to originate from people other than him within the Labor Party, and, well, it doesn't seem right to give the Most Villainous award to an entire party when the vast majority of them didn't put in the work for it.

But as for what has caused the most damage to the game… I am not thinking of Discord here, as much as I am aware that its nomination is off limits. Discord is only a manifestation of political forces of thinking and action that have permeated the forum and the game these past few years, from what I can tell, but especially in 2020. It's been referred to elsewhere on-forum (and I find it hard to articulate myself, so excuse me for not referring to it more clearly), but the fundamental change in partisan thinking over the past year is a development that we should strive to keep out of the game as much as possible. It is unpleasant enough out on the largely anonymous wilds of social media; worse on Atlas, with our easily identifiable avatars and mannerisms; and in the game proper, where most of us non-zombies rub shoulders regularly, it is downright unbearable. And the overall health of the game suffers when we make the choice to import it in here, as convenient as it can be in the short term.

So in the spirit of TIME and its occasionally head-scratching decisions, I will nominate the Atlas Talk Elections Forum and all the posters who have made the importation of this form of thinking into the game possible. It's easy to see the damage other people cause, but I submit that our actions and our choices can sometimes be just as damaging even when we don't see them.

[Mike Thick]

Biggest Failure: PSLOL
Rookie of the Year: OBD, Cao
Best Policymaker: thumb21
Drama Queen: Peri, LT
Biggest Surprise: Siren losing the June election in a landslide
Best NPC Campaigner: OBD, Poirot

Since people are explaining their noms, decided to expand/modify this with some of my th0ts on why I chose who I chose. These are my final nominations.

Most Villainous: I gotta say that the Great Green Panty Raid belongs here. Not proud to admit it, but the shoe fits.

Biggest Failure: PSOL’s party was a few days away from locking down the Vice Presidency and the Speakership of the House. 24 hours later, all their leaders were gone and half their members had defected. The single most spectacular failure I’ve seen in ~5 years in this game, and it isn’t close. PSOL, the walking, talking manifestation of Dunning-Kruger, is my choice for biggest failure.

Rookie of the Year: Cao and OBD. The cases have been made elsewhere, but going from newbies to respectively Speaker of the House and Labor leadership is pretty impressive.

Comeback Kid: Ngl nice that some of y’all are showing me love lol. I do think TG deserves consideration here, particularly in light of the awful stuff she’s had to deal with IRL.

Best Policymaker: Thumb is such an obvious choice for this it hurts. Nobody else in this game could have done that three-post-long privacy package, or anything else he wrote up. Holy cow.

Saddest Death: Even though I was happy Peri won, I’ve worked with Siren quite a bit over my career and I was bummed that she got thumped so badly. So, Siren (although I’m glad she’s still involved with the game in another capacity).

Drama Queen: Peri and LT, Gd bless them both, are the two people you can always count on to start sh**t on Discord.

Biggest Surprise: I thought about this more, and I think the liberals becoming a serious force belongs here. Definitely would not have believed anyone who told me that a year ago.

Best NPC Campaigner: Poirot is a one-man army. He has led his party to seriously contest a lot of places pretty much solely off of his own effort. OBD has also pretty much come out of nowhere to run our entire apparatus, despite having plenty of things occupying him in real life.