The Rec Center #261
As we do every year, we’re changing format in the final Rec Center of 2020 (it’s now technically 2021, but still) to talk about our personal fandom experiences + stuff we actually enjoyed during this deeply unenjoyable year. We also have some beautiful fanart from the most important Christmas movie of all time, Carol.
We’ll be back next week with our usual mix of articles and fic recs—though as a reminder, we’ll likely be transitioning to Substack between now and then, before we hit TinyLetter’s subscriber cap. Nothing should change for readers, other than potentially seeing a new address in your inbox and slightly different visuals in the newsletter.
Hope everyone is having a safe New Year’s holiday. <3
Elizabeth & Gav
year in fandom: Elizabeth
My fandom-related 2020 started out strong. I finished publishing a novel-length fic that I was proud of. I started working on a new one that I was really excited about. I wrote a long oneshot in a fandom I have not nor ever will be in as a gift for a friend. (I truly did not think I was capable!) And I got a somewhat last-minute “who would fly to the UK in January”-priced flight to London to see my friends and also James McAvoy in Cyrano, which I felt was an excellent decision at the time but has since come to look like the greatest decision in the history of the universe.
And then around the second week in March I lost 1) the ability to read a full sentence of fiction and 2) the ability to string together enough words to write a full sentence of fiction. A lot of fandom folks I knew seemed to be reading more than ever to cope these past nine months—I support all of you but I sometimes feel like I’m glimpsing into an alternate universe when I hear people talking about this! 😂 On the other hand, around the start of July something flipped back on in my brain and suddenly, I could write again; all in all, I wound up writing about 100K words of fic in 2020, which I’m pretty proud of, all things considered.
That’s largely in the X-Men fandom, for the record, because I am a fandom monogamist! But in terms of media that is not a decade old, I saw a few things I loved and a few things I Strongly Disliked and literally nothing on my list is groundbreaking (a lot of it didn’t even come out this year lol). I watched Succession through twice in like six weeks. I was one of those people googling, “when does schitt’s creek get good” as late as the third season, and by the end had totally fallen for it. This past month I found Ted Lasso, which is cut from a similar super-soft comedy cloth, a total delight. But my favorite thing of all was Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which I saw twice (!) in the first week of March, and yes, the last movie I saw in theaters was about people isolated in a house wearing masks, the (sad) jokes write themselves.
Carol fanart by jujulsbp
year in fandom: Gav
Well Elizabeth, I am one of those people who has been reading a lot more than ever, and I feel truly #BLESSED that The Untamed fandom includes such an astonishing volume of incredible writers. What a boon! An extraordinarily satisfying canon/fandom combo, with an impressively wide range of fanworks.
As for actual ~participation, however, I didn’t really... do very much? Which is interesting. Maybe I just found it too effortful this year. I did post one short Untamed fic this summer, and embarked on a very ambitious multimedia Star Trek fic at the start of our first lockdown in March, which I wound up abandoning with virtually zero guilt because... well, it’s 2020, whaddaya wanna do? I may pick it up again next year; I may not. Who knows!
I usually find it pretty easy to pick out a few big “fandom moments” from the past year, but 2020 made that virtually impossible thanks to the weird passage of time + the disrupted schedule of movie/TV releases. The one exception is Supernatural, whose belated ending was Officially Certified Iconic. Truly chaotic energy. The Gritty of fandoms. I respect it.
As for ~art in a more general sense, here are my strongest recommendations from 2020:
Movies:
Saint Maud (an indie horror movie about a Catholic hospice nurse who becomes obsessed with her patient.)
Lovers Rock (a joyful hour-long film set at a reggae house party in 1980s London.)
Books:
Piranesi (the delightful and surprising new fantasy novella by Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.)
Theatre (watched online, obviously):
The Met Opera’s adaptation of Akhenaten by Philip Glass, a 3-hour modern opera about the rise and fall of an Egyptian pharaoh. Beautiful, ritualistic and weird.
FINAL THOUGHT
Just one more reminder: we start off every year with Yuletide recs, so if you’ve encountered any favorites over the past few days, please send them in for next week! Just be sure to include “Yuletide 2020” in the “themes” section, to make it easier for us to spot. — Elizabeth
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.
If you liked this, please share it with your friends! https://thereccenter.substack.com/ And find us on social media: Gav (twitter/tumblr) & Elizabeth (twitter/tumblr)