Polygon Exit Interview: Susana Polo, senior entertainment writer

"If you have a favorite writer on Polygon, you should reach out and let them know how their work touched you."

Welcome to Polygon Exit Interviews, a series of chats with my excellent former Polygon employees who were laid off (along with me) when Valnet purchased the website from Vox Media May 1. We’re talking about how these talented people got to Polygon, what they did in their time there, and what they hope is next.

Next up: Susana Polo, one of the key parts of Polygon’s entertainment team since the website expanded from solely gaming coverage. A subject matter expert on comics, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and all sorts of other great topics that were crucial to Polygon’s coverage, Susana wrote a whole book about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy during her time with the website. Susana also founded The Mary Sue and has been a fixture in conversations about comics, pop culture, and fandom and their intersections with queerness, race, and feminism for more than a decade.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Tell me about your pre-Polygon background.

I guess I'd say my career started with an internship at a company called Abrams Media to be the second person on a website called Geekosystem.com. It was a very hardscrabble startup, aggregate-y, soak yourself in online culture. That was 2011, so right on the tail end of a very different era of the Internet, when the weird internet was still very much a thing, and RSS feeds still worked and were things that people used. After about a year of that, the owner of Abrams media, Dan Abrams, told me that he was interested in making a site about nerdy shit for women, and that he was going to do it either way, but would I be interested in running it? And a friend pointed out to me, “Well, you got to do it, because if you're not doing it, but you're in the office with the person who is doing it, that will drive you insane.” So I found myself sort of levered very quickly into being in charge of an entire website.

I'm very proud of what I did at the Mary Sue, but after being there for four years, it was not a great place to work. I think it really was just a cycle of young people coming in for their first jobs in the industry, being worked extraordinarily hard for not a lot of pay, and then getting out.

I left the Mary Sue. It was not by my choice. It was rough, and it hurt. I wound up actually only applying to one job. And it took a while, because Vox was rejiggering its budgets that year, and they couldn't make a decision on it for a while, but I wound up taking the role of Polygon’s first entertainment editor in early 2015.

What do you remember about first joining?

I remember that the onboarding process was just me and Chris Grant sitting in a conference room and him helping me log onto all of the systems. I didn't realize for years that Polygon was only two or three years old when I joined. I think there were only three or four female employees when I joined. I was nervous about entering a workspace that was predominantly dudes. It was right after Gamergate. The silver lining of being kind of shoved out of The Mary Sue in mid-summer 2014 was that I was significantly less online during the crest of that wave. And while I was nervous about coming into a workspace that was mostly dudes, it was also very clear to me immediately that all of these guys, having been through that experience, were really mad about it, in a way that I found very satisfying. I felt solidarity from these guys.

The way Chris always put it is, if our audience is interested in a Batman game, there's no reason they wouldn't be interested in a Batman movie or a Batman comic, and we should be serving that, and that there are plenty of video game websites that have the chops to expand into covering entertainment, but there's basically no big entertainment sites that have the chops to expand into covering video games. The Hollywood Reporter is not going to start covering video games. Vulture is not going to start covering video games. Entertainment Weekly is not going to start covering video games. So this is a space that game sites need to move into. I think there was some push back initially, like Why does Polygon cover movies and TV now? There's an element of perceiving it as selling out to the mainstream or whatever. But really it is just a move that elevates games to being at the same height as all of these other art forms. You can't pretend that gaming isn't mainstream when it is. The industry is so huge and pulls in so much money and touches so many people.

Can you run me through your history at Polygon – what roles you had, and what each entailed?

I started out as entertainment editor, and I think the progression was from entertainment editor to comics editor. Last year, I wound up sort of being moved sideways to senior entertainment writer.

One of the earliest things [as entertainment editor] I did was getting all the video game people to sit in a room and be like, What are we doing for the anniversary of Back to the Future? We have three people on the site, each of whom can go to bat for one is the best one, two is the best one, three is the best one. Let’s run all those essays on the same day. I also remember explaining to Chris Grant that Sleepy Hollow is really big on Tumblr right now. That was something that no one on the site had this knowledge of.

Then I had a meeting where I was just like, Comics are where I'm at. And they were like, Cool, let's do that for a while and see how it goes. And that was a long stretch of writing, but also editing and soliciting freelancers, which is when I did Horse Girl canon, when I did Year of the Ring, Who Would Win Week, started up a lot of those projects. Then I moved into a senior writer role, which involved getting a lot more of my voice on the site, exercising my writing muscles and my storyfinding muscles and my pitching muscles.

Brag about yourself: what’s one thing you’re proud of from your time at Polygon?

I’m so proud of Year of the Ring, but it also represents so much work, so it feels like an obvious answer. I’m extraordinarily proud of it, and it’s extremely cool, specifically in our current situation, to be like I have a book. I’m not going to have to ever look this book up on the Wayback Machine. It’s in libraries, and it’s bananas. I’d love to do something like that again.

I do want to shout out the Horse Girl canon as something that was very strange. There wasn’t a lot else like it on Polygon. I think the thing that really sets it apart to me is this recognition of a genre built not by publishing, but by people who are interested in a very specific topic. I would have loved to have done more of those. That was one of my first big experiences with a big project like that.

Year of the Ring would not have happened without the Horse Girl canon. It was a lot of the same muscles. The thing you learn about projects like that is that as much as you need to have a big, expansive place for freelancers and writers, you also need guardrails. You need to know what's outside the topic, so that things don't get muddied. With Year of the Ring, we could do a billion essays about JRR Tolkien, but at that point, it stops being a package about the Lord of the Rings movies. So how do we find ways to talk about Tolkien's work that's still connected to these movies? With the Horse Girl canon, it was figuring out the balance between personal essays, reported stuff, and critical analysis. And some of it was educating an audience that we knew would be looking at this topic from an outsider perspective. Like the origins of the book Black Beauty and how we consider that to be a children's book today, but it was written as an animal rights and animal welfare screed, and a very successful one.

Both of those were collections of many stories. I'm curious if there are any that stick out to you now?

For the Horse Girl canon, there were a lot of things on my list of we have to talk to these people. One of them was Lisa Hanawalt, who is a big horse girl but is probably better known for Bojack Horseman and Tuca & Bertie. Getting her to talk about being a horse girl who enjoys playing Red Dead Redemption [was a highlight.] I knew I had to get [author] Seanan McGuire in to talk about My Little Pony. And I really prioritized getting something from Alice Ruppert, who’s been running a blog called The Mane Quest for years. It was really important to me that we couldn't talk about horse girls and horse girl video games without reaching out to some folks who had been doing that work online in niche journalism spaces, and get them Polygon’s mouthpiece to flex the expertise that they had been working on for years.

Some of the stuff in Year of the Ring that I'm most proud of was going out and finding the original script of the two-movie pitch, and James Grebey’s piece about the size double who basically played Gimli for 90% of those movies.

About half of the stories that wound up in the Year of the Ring book are just stuff I wrote. Some of it because it was stuff I really wanted to write, and some of it was because, fuck, we don’t have something for next week, I guess I'll write about Orlando Bloom's weird faces. There's some pieces in there that are very dear to my heart, especially the very first one in the package that went up is a long piece about how hope is voiced through Tolkien's work and how many tragedies he had early throughout his life: He was an orphan who lived through the 1918 flu pandemic, lived through all of his friends dying in World War One, seeing combat, and was just old enough for his three sons to be of age when World War Two starts. He's a member of the lost generation, and he's right up there with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and those other folks who we think of as marking this very cynical and disillusioned era in literature. And he's out here with his story about how little people can change the tides of history. We published that on January 6, 2021, so that was just a real experience. There's no adjective to put on that word. It was just a real experience. But I'm very proud of that piece. I still really feel that piece, that thought process, helped me get through 2020, and 2021, is still helping me get through today. Despair is a tool of the enemy, and we do not need it. We will not use it.

I wrote one original essay for the Year of the Ring book to fill one of the gaps that we never got in freelance pitches. Nobody pitched anything on the inherent racism in Tolkien’s story that felt like it was saying something that hadn't been said before, that was reckoning with something that was new, or that was really coming at it in a Polygon way. So, easy enough, you know, chill topic for me to add into the crazy October I spent working a 9-to-5 job, and then also prepping 50 stories and editing them from the format of a website with hyperlinks and embedded video, and prepping them for a physical book where you can't do any of that stuff. In addition to that, just for kicks, let me write an essay about Tolkien and orc racism.

I reached out to a guy named James Mendez Hodes, who has been a consultant in the tabletop industry for a number of years now, who has really interesting and informed thoughts about unpacking the legacy of racism in fantasy and in Tolkien-inspired fantasy worlds, including in Dungeons and Dragons. And I sort of wrap it all up in one of my favorite of Tolkien's works that no one's ever heard of, this short story called Leaf by Niggle. If you like Tolkien, you gotta read Leaf by Niggle because it's him, like with a bullhorn, shouting about his insecurities, about how he never finishes anything, and how his perfectionism gets in the way of him completing his life's work. He wrote it before the Lord of the Rings was even finished. It's this intensely nervous work about an artist who has a big project he doesn't finish before he dies, and then how the afterlife is shaped by his unfinished work. Tolkien wrote this in the 30s, and he died without finishing The Silmarillion in the 70s. I'm feral about the tragedy of Tolkien predicting that he would never finish his life's work. Anyway, I managed to wrap that all up in a piece that is about what we can take away from Leaf by Niggle is how Tolkien feels about the artist's role in society and culture, and how he wants his work to be seen and interacted with after his death, and all of that is why we should be unpacking the stuff in his work that no longer works in the modern era, and that when we do stuff that is inspired by him, we should be moving forward, and we shouldn't be prizing “accuracy” over making stories that welcome people in.

Everyone pitched in across sections at Polygon. What’s a time where you did something outside of your core job responsibilities that you enjoyed?

It was really a blast to get to go to a whole-ass video game press event for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It was a really interesting anthropological experience, and also a real challenge to be like “I actually need to play this video game for eight hours.” I also really enjoyed, over the last couple of years, being the Cyan beat reporter for Polygon and getting to review the Riven remaster. It was really fun to get to play around in that space and revisit the world.

I used to have a whole video series called Issue at Hand, which was super fun. It was so much work. The video team were so good at what they do, and I was coming in there being like Well, I could write an essay and then read it on screen. I learned a lot doing that. It was a ton of work, but it was really fun. It was nice to tap into that the audience for the site and the audience for video was separate in a lot of ways. Not totally separate, but it was nice to get in front of that audience for a while. They’re really lovely.

Do you have a favorite Polygon story or video by someone else?

I have like, a million of those. Petrana has got some incredible bangers, Joshua Rivera is just an incredible writer. And there are a lot of people I could call out, but I want to take this time to be a little contrary, and talk about the folks who were the backbone of Polygon, who did not regularly publish on the website, Samit and Kallie and [executive editor] Chelsea [Stark.]

There were so many folks behind the scenes that I think the audience just had no way of knowing their contributions. Kallie was our copy editor, and she was only with us for a couple of years, but she was our greatest cheerleader. You knew you had done it right when Kallie was in your copy editing thread being like, Wow, this is so interesting. Samit is totally lovely. The two of them made sure our shit looked good and professional. And Chelsea was the person that you went to if you had a question about your health insurance, about how to get your laptop fixed, about literally anything about the business or your career, what company resources you should be looking into to figure out what's next for you. And then [Managing Editor of Audience Insights] Sadie [Gennis] came in and was like, You guys are organized wrong, here's how to get organized right. It was night and fucking day. I had been there for a decade, I watched all of these systems get layered on like sediment, and then Sadie coming in and being like, How did this happen? You need to do it another way.

That stuff is incredibly important. It's really hard work. And everybody who did it was just enthusiastically, earnestly, putting all their skill and attention and time towards it.

What do you think is the biggest misconception that people outside the industry have about entertainment journalism?

The number one question that I've learned to handle is when I tell people what I do, and they go, Oh my gosh, I would love to get paid to watch TV all the time, and I go, OK, but you know, it's not just the good TV, right? Sometimes it's watching six hours of Iron Fist season one on a Saturday, and then writing about it as quickly as possible.

But honestly, I think the most damaging misconception the audience has of the work we do, is that a fan and a critic are two different things. The idea that critics are this separate class that has no enthusiasm for the thing that they're writing about really couldn't be further than the truth, or that the definition of a fan is someone who always leaves space to be enthusiastic about whatever they are deeply invested in.

I wrote this piece around when The Last Jedi had come out, and the final season of Game of Thrones was coming out, and everybody was writing about these Change.org petitions to get HBO to redo the final season of Game of Thrones. I wrote this essay about my own journey from being a person who read every Batman comic to being a person who accepted that there were just going to be Batman comics that I didn't like and I could just not read them, and it wouldn't be a change in who I was, I wouldn’t stop being a Batman fan. We need to understand that creators don't owe us anything for how invested we are in their works, and that being a fan of something doesn't mean you own it, and doesn't mean that you're entitled to it being good or it existing at all. I was trying to make that point without saying that there's no point in being upset when something happens in your favorite thing that doesn't go the way you want or expect. Criticism is important, and I think the idea that fandom and criticism are two diametrically opposed ways of engaging with something is detrimental, not just to critics, but I think that harms fans, too.

When fans are in this position of I don't like this. I feel like my investment in this has not been rewarded, but are maybe unable to articulate why they feel like that, or are even just looking to find an outlet for that feeling. That’s what criticism is for, is to say here's why it failed, here's how it could have been better. Not You’ve got to make it better next time, or The artist has to change what they're doing. But just to be like this is why this emotional disconnect is happening. Criticism isn't an order. It’s a post-mortem.

The piece was definitely about me getting out of college and Grant Morrison taking over Batman, and how I was really not enjoying Morrison Batman. I wrote a piece for Hot Takes Week about Damian Wayne and how I think the existence of that character has really negatively impacted the interpersonal drama of Batman stories. I consider stepping back and going I can just read the things I like to be a really important step in my maturation as a fan and in my ability to keep enjoying comics for 20 plus years. I shouldn't be reading a comic if it makes me feel like my blood is going to shoot out of my ears. That's not a problem the writer has, that's a problem that I have. I'm in charge of me, and I can fix that.

What’s your wish for the future of entertainment journalism or digital media?

I think a lot of the dialog around what's happened to Polygon has been about games media and the difficulty of keeping games media sites alive. And certainly there is a part of me that's like, Hey, we had an entertainment team, too, but that's besides the point.

We’ve all been watching comics media dry up over the last decade, just to a trickle. The Eisners almost eliminated their journalism award.

We all think about comics in America as a really tiny industry. But comics have always been dying. They'll always be dying. You'll always be able to find an article about how comics are dying, and that was sort of the narrative – it's a tiny, niche industry, and it just can't support full-time people writing about it journalistically, or sites that are just about comics news. Heidi McDonald, long-time comics journalist, queen, she’s my hero, made this post the day of the layoffs that pointed out that video games make billions, if not trillions, of dollars in America every year. The problem is not the size of the industry, it's the platforms and it's the way the internet works. All the online spaces that we have created do not funnel money back to journalists or back to journalistic edifices in the way that they have managed to be profitable historically, by subscription, by ads — all of those models are failing because of the way the modern internet is structured, because of algorithmic attention. I'm not smart enough to know exactly what the “snap my fingers, one-wish solution” to that is. An idea bigger than saving journalism is how to fix the internet so that platforms actually work for the people who are on the platforms, and not the people who own the platforms and get money out of them that way.

What’s next for you?

Right now, I'm resting. I was at Polygon for a long time. So thanks to our union, I got a very nice severance package that's going to keep my lights on for a comfortable amount of time, which is not to say I'm not stressed about it, but you know how it goes.

My birthday is at the beginning of June, so I've given myself time to do some little adventures, relax, write some fan fiction for my friends, finish Blue Prince, my second playthrough of Dragon Age: Veilguard. I imagine I will return to freelancing in some capacity in July, if nothing else, because Fantastic Four and Superman are coming out, and I'm gonna have thoughts about that, so I may as well get paid for them.

We talked about my early career, but, like, the job at GeekoSystem, when I took it was, well, I can get paid for this, I can move out of my parents house. But what I really wanted to do is write comic books, and then that turned into a 15-year career in media journalism. But I majored in creative writing in college. I've always wanted to write fiction. I don't know if that's where I'm going, but I'm going to be talking to some folks that I know who've made that transition. Maybe it's writing a book about Batman. Like, not a Batman book, but a book of essays about Batman. Maybe it's writing fiction. Maybe it's editing, either editing journalism or editing comics, editing fiction. Maybe I will come right back to media, journalism and criticism and stuff in the fall, especially since the GoFundMe has given us some extra cushion. Shout out to everybody who is a fan of Polygon. There are a lot of people in there that we know personally, and it's extremely sweet to see from them, but also from the folks who were readers who want to give back. You’ve got to know it is so appreciated by all of us. We really do see it as a thank you and a note that we touched folks, which is hard to find on the internet. If you have a favorite writer on Polygon, you should reach out to them and let them know how their work touched you.

Where can people follow you and your work?

I’m on Bluesky. I’m slowly coming back to social media. As I do things and as I get things done, I'm also at susanapolo.com. Those are really the two ways to get in touch with me and find out what I'm doing. And everybody should go read the Tolkien short story, Leaf by Niggle. If there's one thing to take out of this, that's a way to get in touch with me emotionally.