The Rec Center #156
As we’ve done for the past two years, we’re taking a bit of a break for the final Rec Center of 2018 to talk about some stuff we liked / loved this year. We’ll be back in ~*~2019~*~ with our regular mix of articles, fic recs, fanart, and more.
year in fandom: Gav
Unlike last year, when Elizabeth & I both fell passionately in love with Black Sails, I didn’t technically have A New Fandom this year. What I did do was get extremely into horror movies, which I blame partly on the genius of Hereditary and partly on the general miasma of dread permeating the atmosphere of 2018. I had a great time feeling unsettled and/or terrified by the 27 horror movies I watched this year, and would specifically recommend Annihilation and The Endless if you’re looking for interesting new releases.
While I find Top 10 lists unnecessarily hard to write, I have three very solid overall choices for media that really struck me this year: Phantom Thread (which I watched twice, and subsequently listened to the soundtrack so many times it was my #1 spotify album of 2018), Mitski’s new album Be The Cowboy (which music critics agree actually is the album of the year), and the dual fanfics “Designations Congruent With Things” and “A Change In Energy,” which I recced in detail in issue #125.
“Designations” (a Pacific Rim fanfic) was deleted by the author a few years ago so I feel a bit ~black market~ even mentioning it here: "Oh, if you knock three times on this hidden door and give the right password, you can find a pirated copy of one of the best fanfics ever written." However, “A Change In Energy” is a new remix of another fic by the same author, and is readily available on AO3. Over 450,000 words long, it’s a Stargate Universe fic (a TV show I haven’t even watched!!) about, in the words of the author, “queerness, posthumanism and trauma,” featuring a lot of excellent music choices. Every once in a while you come across a fanwork so artistically ambitious and exciting that nothing like it could possibly exist in another medium, and this is definitely one of them. May we all embrace this level of creative perseverance in 2019.
year in fandom: Elizabeth
While it wasn’t new, I actually did start the year in Black Sails Land, though if I’m honest, I’d actually been migrating towards “Contemporary Politics Against Which Black Sails Is Set Land” for a while. Specifically, that consisted of interest in domestic British politics from, like, 1688 to 1715, a weird obsession with the Whigs and the Kit-Cat Club (I have already recced Ophelia Field’s book on the group a bunch of times but I’m gonna do it again), and some really delightful historical fan tourism, courtesy of my brilliant friends Veronica and Natasha.
And then, of course, I saw a freakin X-Men movie on a plane and the rest of the year was completely shot. I continue to be resolutely unashamed to have spent much of 2018 reading fanfiction in a fandom that was mostly active in 2011 (though to be fair, people are still posting new stuff every day, and I hate when people talk about fandoms being “dead” or abandoned” when they’re not ~the hottest thing~). I actually talked about this a bit on the Fansplaining “Year in Fandom 2018” episode, at the end where we reflect on our personal fannish years. It’s been refreshing to be in a fandom with a massive, sprawling history that includes many different and/or contradictory canonical iterations and interpretations—I needed a break from newer, in-progress source material where exhausting debates about ships becoming canon or whether characters are gay or bi (😬) blot out my enjoyment of the thing. (Yes, in the episode I did reference the legendary “Enjoyment in Fandom Over Time” graph.)
I’ve been slipping in XMFC recs to various Rec Center themed lists since the spring, but I specifically collaborated with Morgan, Gav’s podcast co-host and the author of one of my favorite XMFC fics (which I read and loved BEFORE I knew it was her, ~serendipity~), on a fairly long list of fic from the current film franchise over the summer.
While I’m closing out the year still fully immersed in XMFC fic—employing my most advanced AO3 tactics over here, folks—2018 truly did come full circle for me with the release of The Favourite, DOMESTIC BRITISH POLITICS RPF IN THE EARLY 18TH CENTURY. It’s obviously way more stylized than a straight biopic—and while politics are everywhere in the film, they’re fairly simplified—but I loved it so much I saw it twice in theaters, recorded a special episode about it, and eagerly ordered Ophelia Field’s *other* book, The Favourite (hey hey), about the relationship between Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill. The book, which came out years ago but has been trapped in “rereleasing a new edition tied to a film” limbo all year, is finally out, so if anyone wants do a book club….
FINAL THOUGHT
An extraordinary gift for us all in the final days of 2018. Do yourself a favor and click through:
Have a favorite one-off rec? Please send it our way! We’ll use it in a future list. Other fanworks—comics, vids, zines, etc—are strongly encouraged as well. And if you have any interest in doing an entire rec list, explainer, or ship manifesto, please get in touch! elizabethandgav at gmail dot com.
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