The Rec Center #10
Hello and welcome to an (almost) entirely Elizabeth-curated issue of The Rec Center! Featuring K-pop recs from Danice and many cool articles I look forward to reading once I’m no longer in a cabin in the woods. Here’s my contribution: two fantastic vid recs, one of which is VERY relevant to all the MCU fans who are currently having A Moment over the Civil War trailer. — Gav
Captain America: “Blank” by lim
Hannibal: “Strike Me Down” by voordeel
new stuff
“Magic & Marginalization: Et tu, JK? :( ” by Taté Walker at Righting Red
“Beyond this, I’m writing because as a fan, I’m so…hurt and disillusioned to discover a world I escape to so often and with people I love like my young daughter is now an unsafe space that takes the very real cultural histories, practices, and belief systems of a hyper-marginalized group of people and casts them into the realm of myth and fantasy.”
“Seth Green Among The Backers Of Hollywood's First Fan-Owned Entertainment Company” by Simon Thompson at Forbes
Lord knows why Seth Green’s involvement is headline-worthy, but an interesting write-up of Legion M, an entertainment production company backed by a million fans’ small donations.
old(er) stuff
“The teens on Tumblr are all right” by Aja Romano at The Daily Dot
“‘Why do men scream at sporting events?’ turns up a single result, and it’s a question being posed in baffled response to a Reddit thread asking, ‘Why do women have to scream like that?’”
tumblr and beyond
Absolutely gorgeous Ex Machina fanart by davidrflores.
While you all were fanning yourselves over those Obama/Trudeau pics, I was falling for a much steamier political OTP.
This septembriseur post is extraordinary: “The fear of the Fake Geek Girl (because that’s what has given rise to the term: a perceived threat) is directly related to tensions surrounding the transition from an economy of knowledge that is focused on accumulation to an economy of knowledge that is focused on access.”
Mark Hamill, making everyone cry. If you’ve only seen the gifset (by reyton), go watch the full answer IMMEDIATELY.
kpop nonfic
We’re trying something a little different with our guest recs this week, because Danice provided us with fic AND nonfic recs about K-pop. Danice writes that she “is a proud, card-carrying EXO-L noona from the Philippines.” Find her on Twitter at @hastyteenflick.
There are a number of awesome nonfic pieces to be read on K-pop as a pop-cultural phenomenon (that all go beyond the obvious references to Gangnam Style). I think these are good jumping-off points for those curious about K-pop who are not too familiar with it. My main K-pop fandom is EXO, a nine-member (formerly twelve) boy group from a South Korean music company called SM Entertainment. EXO have one the biggest K-pop fandoms today. — Danice
“A Quick Guide to Being Part of the K-pop Fandom” by Lindsay at Seoulbeats
From an excellent site for critically slanted pieces on K-pop and K-Ent (Korean Entertainment) fandom
“On Korean Idol Pop and Its Producers” from One Week // One Band
In the highly manufactured universe of K-pop, the hitmakers are just as important as the idols themselves. This piece is a good, tip-of-the-iceberg primer on the pop music machine in Korea.
“Korea’s SM Entertainment: The Company That Created K-pop” by Andrew Salmon at Forbes
A profile on SM Entertainment, arguably the biggest producer of K-pop.
“K-pop Kings Bigbang Fly Seoul’s Soul to NYC” by Maria Sherman in The Village Voice
In 2015, K-pop group Bigbang did a few dates in the US. This review gives a rundown of the NJ show plus great insights on the group and a glimpse into the fandom.
“The Persecution of Daniel Lee” by Joshua Davis in the Stanford Alumni Magazine
In 2010, Korean hip-hop artist Tablo was accused by Korean netizens of having falsified graduating from Stanford. The piece is a good peek into “the dark side” of Korean celebrity.
fanfiction
For my fic recs, I’ll be focusing my recommendations on EXO fics. With nine members, there are a shit-ton of shipping combinations. Here are some of the best, most well-written fics for some popular ships.
“Phoenix” by Unnibee. 231k words, rated explicit.
This fic features the original twelve member (OT12) lineup for EXO and is a sci-fi a/u set in space. And it has a smutty one-shot epilogue! “Touch Me (Save My Life)”
“Spare The Rod, Spoil The Child” by Fliour. Rated PG-13.
Some of the most memorable EXO fics are AUs. EXO-L love cross-pollinating the boys with fandoms outside of K-pop, such as the Harry Potter fandom, of which there are many HP/Hogwarts AU fic exchanges and fests! (This one is a multi-ship fic.)
Other favorite AUs in the EXO fandom are mafia! AUs, pornstar! AUs and high school/college AUs. We also love us some catboy/hybrid EXO:
“Nothing More Than Ordinary Life” by thesockmonster. 23K words, rated NC-17.
...As well as some a/b/o dynamics:
“Love Unexpected” by London9Calling. 97K words, rated Mature.
...A Kingsman AU (another Kaisoo—my bias is showing):
“Tiny Games” by changvasion. 6K words.
….and a Regency mystery AU:
“The Masquerade” by London9Calling. 94K words, rated Explicit.
FINAL THOUGHT
First of all, let it be known that it took a *great* deal of self-restraint not to fill this newsletter with Kylux links exclusively in Gav’s absence. Because like,
OK but in all seriousness, I want to talk about Harry Potter exactly one second. Harry Potter, my deeply problematic fave, this thing I will always love in spite of itself, my active fandom from 2001-10 and now 2016-???? (I have 10 different HP fics open in tabs rn, and that’s because my computer crashed and I lost the 30 that were open before.) Even if you’re not interested in Harry Potter, you couldn’t have missed the anger this week over the “History of Magic in North America”—I wrote about it, and I urge you to read the posts about it by Native American writers, linked in the article. I included my favorite, from a long-time HP fan, in “new stuff” above.
When it comes to this specific debate, and these specific voices, the ones from within Native American communities are the ones that matter. I saw a lot of disagreement, about whether JKR should write about other cultures at all, a kind of question of outright exclusion versus...offensive inclusion. This debate is going to continue, and it will migrate to other communities, because Pottermore is mapping the world.
But it’s interesting to watch, as a person who stopped caring what JKR thought or said at least a decade ago. It’s that thorny fandom thing where you love what someone created and respect them forever for that, but you also see how much MORE fandom can do, how many more perspectives fandom can bring, how rich any given fictional world grows in the aggregate. When you don’t wait for content creators to represent you because you can do it faster, and better—and because you’ve been burned too many times. I was angry, so angry with her, for the heteronormative bows she insisted on tying on EVERYONE at the end of those books. We had a beautifully blank, uncharted world of characters we could map ourselves onto—and then she went on a pairing-off spree, starting with two of the most heavily queer-coded characters in the damn series. ….possibly not over it.
THAT BEING SAID, I understand that not everyone is as cynical as me, and, more importantly, not everyone is transformatively-minded as me: lots of people, fans and non-fans alike, want representation to come from content creators, from official sources. I absolutely understand that. And I can bang on about death of the author, or about books belonging to their readers, or about us fracturing a story and reshaping it in our image. But that doesn’t work for everyone. It’s especially hard when it comes to incredibly marginalized communities, who have to struggle for any visibility at all.
As Pottermore unfolded I mostly ignored it, beyond sorting myself and getting my super-cool Sirius Black wand, until I found myself deep in it a few weeks ago—I’d clicked on an HP wiki link while researching a fic, and learned that the Potters made their fortune from Sleekeazy’s Hair Potion [I STILL CAN’T WITH THIS, HOW UNDIGNIFIED], and then continued to fall down this canon-sanctioned rabbit hole with a sort of weird fascination. Over the years, much of Pottermore and JKR’s tweets have felt like that, or like this
But it’s growing into something much more complex. JKR has always had trouble, where her big, political allegories fail to carry over into real-world politics, where the magical world butts up against the world her readers actually live in. And perhaps fans like me do a disservice, when we just say, “Fuck it,” a rewrite the stories ourselves rather than pushing her to do better. There’s no conclusion to this—I’m ambivalent, and confused, and tired. But I’d love your thoughts, if you’ve spent the week trying to turn these issues over in your head as well—just hit reply, or elizabethandgav at gmail. Meanwhile, I’ll head back to the saccharine-sweet 34-chapter sequel to a 43-chapter Harry/Draco domestic fic I’ve been reading all week. Don’t judge me. — Elizabeth
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