The Rec Center #13
PSA: It’s April Fool’s Day but this newsletter is an April Fool-free zone because AFD is garbage. Especially if you’re a journalist, which is why I’m currently very thankful that I don’t work Fridays.
We don’t have a fanfic ~theme this week, and instead are just including a grab-bag of awesome fics I think you should read. Also: Elizabeth gets mad at Men Writing Bad Journalism About Fanfic! (Let’s be real here tho: we’re all mad about that.) — Gav
new stuff
Gav launched a new podcast with her friend Morgan this week, and you can listen to the first episode on iTunes and elsewhere! Each week they’ll discuss a different pop-culture obsession, and for ep 1 it was the fascinatingly disastrous BATMAN V. SUPERMAN, which Gav described as “Like Saw, but aimed at kids.”
“Teen Idols” by Apoorva Bisht, Vartika Sharma, and Vatsala Manan at Rookie
The pages of teen girls’ lovingly-crafted scrapbooks from ten years ago—think Lindsay, Hilary, Mary Kate & Ashley.
Elizabeth too had a teen girl scrapbook—it was mostly Anthony (STEWART HEAD, WHO ELSE??)—that she lovingly crafted a few years prior. She’s writing about it, along with the long history of fannish scrapbooking (see the “Fangirling Through Time” episode of Fansplaining). She has been talking about this for a year; please encourage her to finish the damn piece.
[The crowning glory of the Buffy Book, from 1999]
old(er) stuff
“In Defense of Feels” by Mithen at the Fan Meta Reader
“‘Feels’ is actually a perfectly cromulent very useful word that describes a quite different emotional experience than ‘feeling’ something.”
black panther
Non-fanfic recommendation: The new Black Panther comic begins next Wednesday, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze. If you read one ongoing Marvel comic this year, it should be this one: Marvel’s coolest superhero, a powerful yet troubled king on the throne of Wakanda, a nation whose technological and political advancement seems at odds with the continuing existence of a monarchy.
Here are some of Coates’s thoughts on writing Black Panther (he’s primarily known as a nonfiction author and journalist, and won the National Book Award last year), and here is a preview of the first few pages. You don’t need to know anything about the character to read this comic (and if you’re new to comics, you can very easily make a Comixology account and preorder/buy a digital version online), although I’ll soon be posting a reading guide to earlier BP comics if you want to get to know him a little better. — Gav
tumblr and beyond
“Harry was used to spiders, because the cupboard under the stairs was full of them, and that was where he slept.” Beautiful HP fanart by smelslikeart.
@Batlabels, an essential Tumblr/Twitter/Vine account that posts screencaps and clips of explanatory labels in the 1960s live-action Batman TV series. SO GOOD.
“On queer friendship, fandom, and negative capability” by havingbeenbreathedout
“But more and more I feel incredibly alienated by the entire bright-line friend-versus-sex/romance construction at all, and everything it implies about the clarity and impermeability of boundaries between those categories.”
(many thanks to betty days for giving Elizabeth this Kylux modern rom-com AU trailer that has brought her nothing but JOY. Watch it even just for the cameo at the end.)
WHAT IF CHRIS EVANS HAD A SOUL PATCH
fanfiction
This week we have random multi-fandom recs by Gav!
“Marci Stahl, Avocado at Law” by igrockspock. 14K words, rated Teen.
Daredevil gen & Marci/Foggy
This post-S1 Marci-centric fic is a must-read for a great side-character who doesn’t get much screentime in the show or in fanfic.
“Blah Blah Vortex” by Rave/Sashayed. 5K words, rated Teen.
Deadpool/Spider-Man
Hilarious, and delightfully meta: Deadpool finds himself in an alternate universe where Peter Parker is played by Donald Glover.
“Conjoined” by TheGlintOfTheRail. 9K words (WIP, still updating), rated Teen.
Hannibal/Star Trek fusion AU, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
I think this is the first time we’ve recced a WIP, but this fic is SUCH an interesting idea I just couldn’t resist. A smart and characterful Hannibal/Star Trek AU wherein Will Graham is an unusually sensitive Trill/Betazoid empath who works as an engineer onboard a starship, and Hannibal is a conjoined Trill/symbiote passenger onboard. Despite the Star Trek worldbuilding, I think it should be pretty easy to pick up for non-Trek fans, so if you’re into Hannibal I’d definitely recommend it so far.
“The Atlantis Job” by LtLJ. 9K words, rated Gen.
Leverage/Stargate: Atlantis/SG1 crossover, gen
The idea of a Leverage/SGA crossover feels like a blast from the past, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need. This one was published last month, and has the fun, upbeat tone of both shows.
“Alexander Hamilton VS. The 21st Century” by infraredphaeton. 4K words (WIP, still updating), gen, rated Teen.
Hamilton/MCU/Hamilton RPF crossover AU
This isn’t the first Hamilton/Captain America crossover I’ve read, and I’m very much hoping it won’t be the last. These two fandoms go together like PB&J. In this particular fic, the historical figure Alexander Hamilton (the version from the musical) wakes up in the 21st century of the MCU, and acclimatizes to modern society with help from Steve Rogers (another relic of a bygone age) and the other Avengers. Obviously, Hamilton quickly becomes a Twitter fiend.
[Daredevil, in a nutshell]
FINAL THOUGHT: Men explain fanfiction to me
This week’s outro was supposed to be about Slash: The Movie. Have you heard about Slash? It’s quite possibly the first feature film about fanfiction? Written and directed by indie filmmaker Clay Liford, it stars Michael Johnston as a confused boy who writes fanfic and grapples with his sexuality. It premiered at SXSW a few weeks ago, and our friend Aja Romano saw it and...had some feelings. She screencapped her tweetstorm, which may have crossed your dash, it has a lot of notes(!) and wrote a comprehensive review, touching on what the film gets right—but mostly on what it gets wrong.
I co-host a fandom podcast, “Fansplaining,” with Flourish Klink, a longtime fan who works in the entertainment industry. (Look at that, all we do in this newsletter is plug our podcasts.) Flourish and I wanted to judge Slash for ourselves, so we watched it and….had some feelings. You can listen us talk about it, or read the transcript of our interview with Clay, who was gracious enough (and, frankly, brave enough) to talk to us. We broadly agreed with Aja’s critiques: the movie succeeds on a teen romance level, but it fails when it comes to depictions of fanfiction and fandom. When it comes to fanfic, this movie just gets it...wrong.
There are little things, weird incorrect language choices, “that Harry/Draco genre” (MY FAVORITE “GENRE” AT THE MOMENT THO SOMEONE SAVE ME) or not a whisper of the words “ship” or “pairing” or “OTP” and, in a moment that took my breath away, the assertion that curtainfic was written by and for “older, post-sex gays,” meaning gay men. Because above all, this is a movie about men—there are several female characters (one of them central, one of them a villain) but this film’s world of slash fanfiction is men, writing for men, about men. Which is what you might assume if you looked at slash from the outside. But.
This week we didn’t have a lot of fandom articles to recommend—but that didn’t mean there weren’t any articles about fandom published. I began Wednesday morning a little dismayed by “50 Shades of Rey” (yeah) in The Atlantic, a deep-dive into Reylo that, in the ultimate ironic twist, quotes an article I wrote COMPLAINING about bad mainstream media articles about Star Wars fanfic. (Maybe I didn’t complain loudly enough.) The Atlantic piece isn’t terrible—it’s thoroughly-researched and quotes a lot of people and for something of its length, written by a dude who is clearly an outsider to this corner of fandom, it’s not full of those wincing moments you get in other articles of this kind.
But Wednesday evening I stumbled upon this masterpiece in the LA Times and….I lost it. It starts in such an obnoxious place, and then proceeds to (attempts to) elevate fanfiction using arguments I and many others have made in the past, but...ARGH. And it’s part of a frustrating trend, the inevitable symptom of the mainstreaming of fanfiction fandom, where we—fanfiction readers, writers, lovers—have gone from being an object of mockery to an object of weird anthropological study, an army of dudes (and not just dudes, I see A LOT of women from outside fanfic attempting to tackle this stuff) coming in and half-observing, half-assuming and sometimes even asking, “Why are they doing this?” Or my favorite, “Why slash?”
Gav and I have the privilege to write about this stuff—for money, even—but not often enough, and honestly, not with the massive platforms a lot of these guys are writing on. And my dash is full of BRILLIANT fanfic lovers who dissect this stuff every day, because they love it, and are rewarded in reblogs and conversation with friends and peers, and that’s it. This isn’t to place the blame on all the unpaid laborers I read and admire every day; I understand why many people want to write about this stuff just for themselves and their community (for the same reason, there’s a whole host of deeper-level fandom stuff that I’d love to write about—but don’t feel comfortable putting it in the general-interest publications I write for).
But I’m tired of fanfiction people getting quoted and not paid. Being the subject of a piece but never offered a chance to write that piece. Getting studied but never really understood. I’m tired of people getting it wrong, when so many of us know what’s *right*. I know there’s only so much that me continually complaining about this can do, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop complaining about it. Because fandom deserves better than this.
ANYWAY, fuck it. This week in that old Harry/Draco genre, I give you “Sins of the Fathers” and its sequel by my new fave, blamebrampton. This was a rec from a reader who surely is aiming to destroy my life but thank you!!! More life-destroying recs are welcome, and I will pay it forward. The first story is Albus/Scorpius with Harry/Draco subtext, and the sequel MAKES THAT SUBTEXT TEXT. And I don’t need some man to write an explainer about why subtext—>text is always a good time, yeah? :-) — Elizabeth
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