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Unfortunately, I don't think it's really possible to learn in enough detail with developing judgements. I'm more pro-Sad than anti-Sad, though I'm also pretty heavily anti-Rabid. To give as neutral a summary as possible...
The Hugo Awards (and a few separate non-Hugo Awards like the Campbell/"Astounding Award for Best New Writer") are annual awards given at WorldCon. Since the 1960s, the process has the worldcon membership submit (up to) five works for each award category for nomination, the nominations were checked for eligibility, and then totaled up. Until 2016, the finalist round consisted of the top three (minimum) or up to five works (sometimes requiring the work to receive at least 5% of the nomination-round vote); since 2016, they use the top six works with no minimum threshold.
((The categories themselves were originally selected by WorldCon committees, but they've since been defined into the WorldCon constitution and members can change them over a couple years.))
There were always some awkward bits to this process: They'd Rather Be Right was widely believed to have been a Scientologist op in 1955 back when the initial nomination was open to the public, a number of the lower-relevance categories tended to be starved for nominations due to the 5% threshold, Best Related Work was kinda a wasteland of garbage 'how to write' and bad fictional encyclopedia for decades at a time, and a few very good works and their voters got screwed over due to the arcane eligibility rules (Lady Astronaut of Mars most famously, but it's also one of the reasons Iain Banks was only seriously considered once, and at that for one of his lesser-known works).
But for the most part, it worked and was considered mostly respectable. Not every Hugo Award-winning novel was great, and a lot of the less-well-known categories tended to collect dreck or be little more than popularity contests, but they were the sorta thing you could point toward as a novelist and be pretty happy.
However, because of the award's relatively insular nature, it tended to get a little tactical when it came to voting. There were only hundreds of nominating ballots, and it wasn't unusual to see (non-Dramatic Fiction) rockets break by twenty to fifty votes. Some of this becomes pretty obvious, like the fifth time the same person wins the Best Editor award with near-identical breakdowns, or from the other direction where Girl Genius starts refusing nomination so someone else can finally take a rocket. But even a lot of the bigger-name awards became hard to clear as the number of published eligible works increased: when there are literally hundreds of good works being written every year, the vote becomes more and more diluted without some coordination mechanism. For the most part, this was just 'award eligibility posts' in the nomination phase (or... less subtle things) followed by highly-publicized reviews of the nominee, but there'd been some rumors of vote-trading for some of the final rounds.
In 2011, Larry Correia was nominated for the Campbell award, a (non-Hugo) WorldCon award for new writers. While Campbells don't cite specific works, he'd published Monster Hunter International in 2009 and that was the work in the eligibility period. While not exactly high fiction, it's a pretty good World Of Darkness-style slightly ridiculous work and got some moderate acclaim. He lost, and lost honestly, to Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which I personally hate but had a pretty widespread fandom at the time, along with some other strong competition.
Correia also claims that at least some opposition to him was motivated by his religion (Mormon) and politics (he's the sort of person where the gun-nut self-insert daily-carry dude is toned down from his real life persona), and that even had he lost naturally, this separately reflected an increasing exclusion within WorldCon insiders over anything that remotely smelled of right-wing and, more broadly, of science fiction and fantasy that didn't match a very specific worldview and flavor, to a point of excluding many works that once would have been Hugo-worthy. Correia uses SMOF (Secret Masters of Fandom) as a joke-term for this faction and viewpoint, but also because it was pretty much the explicit stance of the Science-Fiction Writers Association (SFWA).
This isn't entirely true -- Bujold got a ton of rockets for literal Baen-style writing, sometimes in preference to the (often-better) most fem-progressive works -- but she was very much an exception. Baen, mil- or action-focused scifi, or more gonzo works, including a lot of pretty mainstream fantasy, had become very disfavored outside of Dramatic Long-Form (which ended up doing Doctor Who for fucking ever) and a (very small) block of voters. And this was post-Racefail WorldCon: there absolutely was a pretty significant number of voters who thought about their votes in Broader Context Of Harm, especially given the politics around gay rights (which Correia was mostly holding his tongue on) and gun control (which he very much wasn't) at the time.
In 2013, Scalzi won the Novel award with Redshirts. Some of that reflects a lackluster competition (eg Captain Vorpatil's Alliance is a comedy and not Bujold's strongest), but most of it was Scalzi being a Tor writer with a big following and putting a ton of effort into getting people to vote for him and a slate of other people who also advertised his work in turn. Redshirts... is an awkward book. It's kinda funny, but it's a worse Galaxy Quest in a lot of ways, and while that's praising with faint damns it made it a weird Hugo award. Correia made a joking "Sad Puppy" request for Monster Hunter Legion, which missed the nomination by <20 votes and... well, I don't think I'd have voted for it on the Rocket, but it's a lot closer than Redshirts.
In 2014, Correia submitted to his fandom a Sad Puppy II slate, along with information on voting requirements and options. While this was mostly a bunch of generic (and not always especially-great) conservative or libertarianish authors (I'll admit a guilty pleasure in Hoyt's writing, but it's... uh, not going to appeal to the general scifi audience), one notable problem point was Opera Vita Aeterna by Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale). Where Correia or Hoyt were just Boomer (if Mormon) Conservatives, Beale was an asshole.
I mean, charitably, 'alt-right'? But mostly asshole. Like, 'oh, I didn't call that African-American person names, just made a comparison that was very easy to read as such'-level, /r/culturewarroundup founders think he's a bit too much-level. He got attention for getting in a fight with (and kicked out from) the SFWA in 2013, and turned that into a business model, which to be as fair to him as I can at least meant a lot of his enemies were jerks too. So that Got Some Attention.
Once those effects shook out, Sad Puppies II got absolutely clobbered. There's a bit of weirdness in the votes for novel because the Wheel of Time also separately got a ton of protest votes/anti-votes because its eligibility was very complicated, but about 300 general Sad Puppies and about 150 more that were willing to vote for Beale were largely crunched by a pretty active Tor/McGuire/Glover faction that tried to raise as much outreach as possible to vote against them. Opera Vita Aeterna was somewhat unusual for getting smashed so hard it lost to No Award, then pretty much unheard of because of the necessary coordination.
Correia et all took this as pretty clear evidence of his thesis: even assuming that Beale's writing is atrocious, so was and is Scalzi's, and that didn't result in a giant outcry or mainstream media coverage or a near-industry-wide effort to absolutely smash any chance at victory. Nor was it just Beale's (odious) politics; Torgersen and Correia seemed to be getting similar repulsion. John C Wright said he didn't get fired he quit, but it's not exactly subtle. Nor was even not having public political positions or the wrong gender the issue, as Toni Weisskopf went from second-place to fourth in the ranked choice voting despite having picked up more votes than Correia's writing did (and imo had at least as reasonable a claim as Ginjer Buchanan, and definitely over Gorinsky in 2014, given Tor's problems at the time). Likewise, a lot of the 2014 winners and high-ranks weren't great sci-fi/fantasy, or even sci-fi fantasy: "The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere" has little to recommend it besides the politics, "We Have Always Fought"... uh at least it's actually Related, which isn't always something Best Related Work hits.
Beale took it as an opportunity.
Why do you hate The Magicians?
The Sy-fy show is also way better than the books fyi.
The Magicians proper has a complex relationship with magic. It's advertised as about an Hogwarts-for-Adults with Bakebill, and Narnia-for-Adults with Fillory. ((The Magician King also adds in not!urbanfantasy with the hedge witches and Underground.)) It's also about how they all kinda suck. That's not necessarily bad as a story decision, but the execution is awful and undermines the central themes of the trilogy (which are at least in theory about wanting things and depression), or the critiques of the original fiction.
This is most obvious with Fillory. No, it's not legally defamatory to have the thinly-veiled CS Lewis stand-in as a literal pedophile who diddles his own male family member into cannibalistic monstrosity, especially as you can't legally defame the dead, but it's doesn't feel like a particularly strong send-up of Narnia so much as an insult for insult's sake. Having his sister turn away from not!Narnia out of misplaced allegiance to your Aslan-analogues is a bit on the nose; having them do so to become a Texan evangelical is just stupid. I'm not opposed to atheist stories, but when you make a story where the crux eventually becomes "what if
lionram!Jesus won't sacrifice himself for the world" (in Land) it runs into the problem where the author doesn't believe it, the author's fellow atheists don't believe it, and the religiousnutsadherents that they're criticizing also don't believe that. It doesn’t really matter if the atheists and the religious disbelieve it in different ways: it doesn’t leave any meaningful discussion ground.About the most clever beat for Fillory involves the Watcherwoman's time shenanigans, and it's still the sort of thing that would get mockery were it written by M Night Shyamalan. There's definitely ways to parody Narnia, and to do it well, just as there are ways to critique religious fiction and do it well. But Grossman isn't really trying a parody or serious critique; he's throwing his characters into a knockoff of the setting and giving them things (things Grossman doesn't like) to emote at.
Bakebill... nostalgebraist has a review that focuses more on it, but the tl;dr is that it tries to send-up the hidden magic school as hard and boring like normal school, and the students being assholes. Which is absolutely something that could happen, but it's neither interesting nor particularly compelling. The ways that they're assholes aren’t even that interesting; there's so many more varied ways even an anhedonic magician could do things that the students come across as prats at best and bullies at worst.
These decisions undermine each other, rather than simply being incoherent. The best defense I've seen describes the first book as resonant for someone with severe depression, as an understanding of the feeling that nothing fixes things and all the promises you've had given were lies. And that could be interesting! There's nothing wrong with a slow-burn drama story about interpersonal interaction. It's even possible to mix it with the sudden existential dread of the botched prank leaving a fellow student eaten, or life-threatening final exams; it's anathema to a story where the protagonist is getting a lot dropped in his lap. Depression's hard enough for focused works like Catcher In the Rye (which became far more famous for 'phonies' and the prostitute scene than for the protagonist have had a cancer death in his family and a suicide literally in his view); without being handled very carefully you end up with a protagonist who comes across as a whiny little sod or cause of many of his own problems, and Quentin definitely falls here.
On its own, this'd just make the story 'not for me'. The trick's that The Magicians isn't a bad book. I want to say it could have easily been a great one! There's a few pacing problems, but overall it's technically very well-executed, and there's a few individual scenes that are absolutely excellent prose. It's just the glue holding these portions together's just missing, in a way that’s far more disappointing than a merely bad or disagreeable piece wouldn’t bug me.
I could believe that.
Then the books must be bloody awful. The only thing I saw about the show were fan posts on Tumblr, and they were more enthused about the four main characters(?) all being in some version of a pansexual polycule(?) but since the enthusiasm dropped off when the show stopped airing (has it?) I don't care.
Even just looking at the photos and clips of the characters, they seemed so drippy that I can well believe book Quentin is a whiny little sod who causes most of his own problems.
As for better opposition takes on Narnia, heck yes. See this artist, who has their own complicated relationship to Christianity from what I can make out of their history, but they get it in ways that I can agree with as well:
https://www.tumblr.com/tomato-bird/674387478831120384/tomato-bird-inexorable-2020-taylor-leong-some?source=share
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((About this point, there's a campaign for women's representation starting at the Nebula Awards, a more insiders-focused awards system, eventually culminating in 2016's awards.))
In 2015, Torgersen ran the Sad Puppies III slate, specifically as recommendations after Correia had been accused of trying to crowd out other works. There's a few stinkers in there (why on earth is Kevin J Anderson near your awards list?!), but intentionally mixed as much political, racial, and gender mix as Torgersen could come up with while still finding good(ish) names who wouldn't have won otherwise. The day after that, Beale published the Rabid Puppies I slate, with some overlap but a very explicit 'fill exactly this' setup, and things got complicated, not least of all because no few of the Sad Puppies recs were only willing to be on the Sad Puppy list if Beale specifically was not. And, uh, Beale also pushed a lot of works from either him directly, or his print shop Castilla House.
Later, the actual nomination results came in, and everything went to hell. Rather than struggling to even get some pieces nominated, a majority of works in both slates went forward, and in many cases they made up all five slots. And because of how the nominations procedure works, it was really hard for people to tell if they made it because of Torgersen's recommendation, Beale's recommendation, or a combination of both. A number of authors -- including many of the progressive ones -- declined nomination after the votes were tallied, specifically to avoid the taint. Correia himself dropped out.
Then the media got involved. Sad Puppies II had gotten some mainstream press coverage, but mostly in a 'look at the dweebs' sense. This time, it was a good deal more. For an example, The Guardian wrote about "The Puppies’ real beef is that SF, and society as a whole, has become too feminist, too multiracial, too hospitable to gay and trans voices" while Sarah Hoyt's nomination was one of the gayest and fanficiest things ("All the President's Men" is exactly that pun) I've ever read, and I read furry porn. But pretty much every major mainstream newspaper had something on it, all with the same framework and about the same interest in accuracy.
Internal to the scifi/fantasy world, it got heavier. Everyone remotely involved had to have politics somewhere to the right of John C Wright; the slate as a whole was a couple full Gamergates. An unrelated attempt to clean up some of the leftover problems of the Wheel of Time snafu underwent revision lest it benefit Old White Guys. And there was a massive campaign to No Award every slot any Puppy candidate had, even over non-Puppy votes.
In the end, No Award picked up over half of the total ballots for some awards, and the only big Puppy nominee to win was Guardians of the Galaxy. Laura Mixon's report on MsScribe won, but still got over 1k No Awards votes and an asterisk, despite not being a recommendation from either Puppy Slate, because she was perceived as Puppy-adjacent or at best a tool of white people. The finalists that scraped through that got delightful little "Asterisk" awards, complete with a slideshow presentation mentioning how sports leagues would mark questionable victories or records with an asterisk; a number of other bits and pieces were set up to humiliate them as much as possible. The voting membership rushed through a couple changes to the nomination and voting system specifically to resist this form of slate, which would apply after the 2016 year -- penalizing multiple nominations in the same category, got the most coverage, but there were other rule changes that reduced slate- or slate-looking votes.
This absolute sucked for the Sad Puppies (even many of the ones who pulled out still have a Reputation today), and was absolutely hilarious for Beale specifically, who got a ton of publicity even outside of the fandom. And it turned up the evaporative cooling at the Hugos directly.
In 2016, Kate Paulk ran Sad Puppies IV. It... mostly focused on being as unobtrusive as possible; technically, they promoted Neil Gaiman and I'm not sure Gaiman noticed. Beale ran Rabid Puppies II, but wasn't particularly successful either. A lot of Sad Puppies started to promote the DragonCon awards, a separate and already-extant setup that ran the same weekend as WorldCon and had long had a feud. The Dragon Awards are going ok, as are most of the Hugo Awards, although Best Related Work remains absolute garbage.
((The 2016 Sad Puppy Slate ended up including or promoting Chuck Tingle's Space Raptor Butt Invasion for the short story rocket, which is a) exactly what it sounds like and b) still felt more scifi/fantasy to Sad Puppies than If You Were A Dinosaur My Love. This could have ended up raising some interesting questions about the relationship between Hugo awards and the increasing prominence of adult pornographic media, but it didn't win and most of the time progressives (including Tingle) and Sad Puppies only really brought it up to bash each other.))
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