The Rec Center #272
Hi, folks. We know it’s been a difficult week for many, and while we’re going ahead with our usual newsletter, we want to use our platform as best we can. If you’re looking to donate money to Asian-American charities and anti-racist orgs, here are some links to Stop AAPI Hate, the Asian Mental Health Collective, and Red Canary Song, a collective supporting Asian and migrant sex workers.
On an unrelated topic, we know some of you may already be concerned about our current use of Substack as a platform. This is something we’ve discussed as well! Elizabeth goes into this in more detail in our end notes, but basically we’re making plans to migrate The Rec Center elsewhere, for ethical reasons.
So! Onto the actual newsletter. This week we have fic recs on the unusual theme of “fic that led people to consume the source material,” along with coverage of a highly unusual TikTok fandom, some cute LOTR fanart, and more! — Gav
new stuff
“What is Ships of the Northern Fleet?” by Ellissa Bain at HITC
In line with this week’s fic rec theme, here’s a TikTok fandom for a TV show... that doesn’t actually exist. Den of Geek also has a list of the five best episodes.
“Dear H.O.T., I’ll Love You Forever” by Giaae Kwon at Catapult
The first installment in Giaae Kwon’s column “From a K-pop Fan, With Love.” “My rebellions were small, in retrospect, but I was working within the limits of being a fan in another country.”
“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is already a political quagmire” by Gav at the Daily Dot
This is gonna be a huge fandom due to the obvious appeal of Sam/Bucky and the MCU in general. There’s plenty of fanfic fuel in episode 1 alone. However, Gav had some major qualms about the show’s political themes and military ties, which she explored further in this post about the Flag-Smasher villains. (Yes, they’re literally called the Flag-Smashers lol.)
older stuff
tumblr & beyond
Hobbit Hole/Polly Pocket fanart by Shelby Pearson
Video: “That Scene in a Christopher Nolan Film When You Give Up Trying to Follow the Story”
“tiktok for me has become a platform where I learn about homestuck against my will”
The Mandalorian: A perfect summary.
“say those 7 special words and I’m yours”
“all the movies and tv shows over the next few years that will have to decide if they’re canon compliant or a canon divergence no plague au”
fanfiction
Last week we asked for fic you read without consuming the source material—both stories that led you to then seek out the source material afterwards AND stories for source material you still haven’t engaged with. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we got literally dozens of responses, enough for several months of lists! This week we’ll start with fic that led folks to eventually consume the source after they read it—thanks to everyone who sent in a rec! — Elizabeth
“By daybreak we’ll be gone” by storm_petrel. 13K words, rated Mature.
Fandom: The Losers (2010); Ship: Carlos “Cougar” Alvarez/Jake Jensen
Recced by: fieldofyellowdandelions
Backstory: The Losers are a team of black-ops/special forces operatives led by Franklin Clay. In the movie (there is also a comic book but I didn’t read it) they are betrayed by their handler and embark on a quest for revenge. This fic is an origin story of The Losers with an AU twist—they are also werewolves.
Rec: So, werewolf fic—it’s a guilty pleasure. What I like about this fic is that it is so wholesome (no sex, no knotting, no ABO). While there is a relationship in this fic, it’s ultimately a story about Clay creating his pack and has some very good found family vibes.
Content warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, references to past trauma
“You’ve Kept Me Waiting” by Mandi1. 14K words, rated Mature.
Fandom: Twilight; Ship: Alice/Jasper, other canon Twilight pairs appear but aren’t featured
Recced by: Kzal
Backstory: The story of how Alice and Jasper met, and what each of them went through to reach that moment.
Rec: The thing about Twilight, IMO, is that the world is interesting and Bella is boring. This fic has very little Bella, just the interesting world.
Content warnings: N/A
“crossfire” by kittebasu. 523K words, rated Explicit.
Fandom: ダイヤのA | Daiya no Ace | Ace of Diamond; Ship: Miyuki Kazuya/Sawamura Eijun
Recced by: madshark
Backstory: DのA is a classic sports anime about a high school baseball team fighting to win at Koshien Stadium, and a young pitcher's quest to be the team’s ace. This story looks at the relationship between the pitcher, Eijun, and his catcher, Miyuki after they've long graduated, and their journey navigating love, loss, prejudice, anxiety, and the world of pro baseball.
Rec: This story stripped me raw emotionally and then lovingly healed me again. Kittebasu is an incredible writer and they know exactly how to dig deep into your emotional core with epic stories about people just trying to be in love. (No knowledge of baseball required).
Content warnings: Mental health issues, implied/referenced homophobia, minor character death
“A Kind of Merry War” by blithers. 37K words, rated Explicit.
Fandom: Life With Derek; Ship: Casey McDonald/Derek Venturi
Recced by: stars-inthe-sky
Backstory: Casey’s mom and Derek’s dad got married just before the show begins, kicking off a modern Brady Bunch scenario. Casey and Derek spend most of high school clashing in very family-sitcom-that-aired-on-the-Disney-Channel-hijinks sorts of ways, except with an ongoing level of UST that the writers probably didn't intend (although the actors evidently did).
Rec: Besides requiring next to no knowledge of the fandom, this story takes a delightful spin on enemies-to-friends-to-lovers through a banter-filled series of escalating bets. Plus, both characters are teenagers, and they actually talk and act like it, in all their snarky, undeservedly overconfident, and sexually baffled glory.
Content warning: Underage (though very consensual) sexual content
“Assistant to the Consulting Detectives” by idyll. 19K words, rated Teen.
Fandoms: Teen Wolf and Elementary; Ship: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Recced by: Vee
Backstory: Stiles works for Joan and Sherlock. Supernatural shenanigans + Sherlockian adventures await!
Rec: I had seen Teen Wolf but not Elementary when I read this fic (the original source material is fairly popular). The dynamics in the crossover were so well-written that it didn’t matter that I didn’t know Joan and Sherlock (in Elementary)’s characters perfectly.
Content warning: BDSM undertones
“This Must Be the Place” by thehoyden. 18K words, rated Explicit.
Fandom: Hockey RPF; Ship: Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin
Recced by: Kate
Backstory: Sid is shaken by some changes to the team and ends up sort of moving into Geno’s house and never leaving.
Rec: According to my bookmarks I read others before this one, but this is the one I hold clear in my memory that kicked off: 1. reading more hockey RPF than you can imagine, and 2. actually becoming a hockey fan. I’ve never admitted that before, you’re welcome.
Content warnings: N/A
FINAL THOUGHT
So: we need to get off Substack. We had some reservations when we migrated here in January—there was a lot of chatter about the kind of company Substack was and what it meant for the media industry—but after doing a ton of research, it was pretty much the only option that would allow us to have an unlimited number of subscribers *and* let us publish for free.
We’ve never asked for money for The Rec Center—we’re reccing fanworks, and with so many guest contributions, it’s a communal fandomy project, too. We’ve both been in fandom for a long time, so we’re pretty aware of the general attitudes around money and fanworks, particularly fic! While our use of Substack was pretty unusual, at least compared to the way they frame it—publishing for free with literally no intent to ever charge our readers—we knew their general VC ~thing~ as well as the writers who were pulling in the $ were subsidizing that.
In the past few weeks, the general bad vibes of the platform have become a lot more concrete. If you haven’t been following the conversation, start here. TL;DR, Substack courted some high-profile writers and paid them *a lot*, but they have little to no editorial oversight or accountability—and some of them are using their platforms to, amongst other things, spew transphobic rhetoric. Similarly, at least one well-known transphobic Substack writer is allowed to continually violate the Terms of Service with the kind of hate speech that got him booted from Twitter not long ago. Substack’s responses on the subject have been...bad, to put it mildly. So bad that, like other Substack writers and publishers, we can’t keep using the platform. We’re not generating any actual subscriber payments for them, but we are giving them clicks and ostensibly bringing readers into their ecosystem, and that’s not something we want to continue doing.
But another free newsletter platform hasn’t magically emerged since we last looked into this! So after putting out some feelers, we’ve decided to migrate to a platform that costs $ to publish on—tentatively, Buttondown, which we’ve heard good things about (we like that the creator donates some of those fees back to the open source software underpinning the platform). Yearly fees will be a few hundred dollars, so we’d like run a one-off fundraiser and/or tip jar to raise the basic hosting costs. Doing the math, 6% of our subscribers donating $1 each would cover a whole year! So ideally, we’d raise enough for hosting costs for a year or two, then donate the rest to charity.
Unless we get a lot of objections, we’ll likely implement this shift next week, so stay tuned—and we appreciate everyone’s patience as we try to figure out how to handle this situation. — 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://buttondown.email/the-rec-center. And find us on social media: Gav (twitter/tumblr) & Elizabeth (twitter/tumblr)