It looks as if having multiple versions of a character in your story is the way to win awards, specifically a Hugo Award.
Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and an episode of the NBC existential after-life comedy The Good Place which featured more than one iteration of one of its lead characters won Hugo Awards in the best Dramatic Presentation Long Form and Short Form categories last night at the Dublin World Science Fiction Convention.
Sony’s animated Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse featured a young Miles Morales learning about the responsibility that comes with his spider-centric powers from a group of similar superheroes hailing from alternate Earths, while winning Good Place episode “Janet(s),” featured a number of its ensemble all taking on the visage of afterlife AI Janet while on the run from agents of the Bad Place.
This is the second Hugo win for The Good Place. The show also scored the Short Form award last year for the episode “The Trolley Problem.” For both years, the winning episode was one of two episodes from the series that were nominated.
Previously, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse took the Best Animated Feature Oscar at this year’s Academy awards, as well as nabbed top honors at the 46th Annual Annie Awards for animation.
The Hugo Awards are presented annually at the World Science Fiction Convention – aka WorldCon – a designation that moves annually from convention to convention around the world. Next year’s WorldCon will be CoNZealand in Wellington, New Zealand.
Pretty much the Academy Awards of science-fiction, the Hugos were founded in 1953 to honor the best literary work in the genre. They began awarding a Dramatic Presentation category in 1958 – with The Incredible Shrinking Man being the first recipient – and split the category into Long Form and Short Form divisions in 2003.
