The Rec Center #32
So! This is a shorter newsletter than normal, due to the following things:
Gav is en route to London for Nine Worlds (fun fact: the only time we’ve ever met in person was at Nine Worlds). If you’re going to be there, check out her schedule (and know that I am very jealous that you are seeing Gav in person/attending Nine Worlds, which is the best).
I have a concussion! Don’t worry, I’ve been to the doctor and been tested for things and all that. But it’s my blanket excuse rn (it’s kind of a good one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
Luckily we have a fantastic Voltron explainer and rec list from Kelly, plus a few articles to read if you’re huddled next to the air conditioner this weekend. — Elizabeth
new stuff
“Fan Control: One Direction, Fandom, and Project No Control” by Allyson Gross at The Learned Fangirl
“Beyond merely functioning as recipients of One Direction’s product, fans demonstrate ownership in the dissemination of its content through organizing themselves towards particular goals.”
“Social justice, shipping, and ideology: when fandom becomes a crusade, things get ugly” by Aja Romano at Vox
“Shipping in the world of fandom has increasingly taken on all the characteristics of a religious dogma—one for which shippers are increasingly willing to crusade.”
“The Value of Fandom” by Dana Reback at Chaotic Good Studios
“It’s not that Hollywood is bowing to entitled nerds, it’s that Hollywood, first and foremost, is a business.”
old(er) stuff
Everyone but me is watching the Olympics (I am spending my precious limited-due-to-concussed-state screentime on TWITTER, not staring at swimmers) so I thought I’d check in with Olympics fandom expert Sulagna Misra about some of her fannish coverage of past Olympics. She directed me to her entire site on it! Including Dutch fans and the color orange, interviews with NBC interns, and her piece on Ryan Lochte, which she writes is, “still the most read piece on my blog!”
fanfiction (+ explainer)
Kelly reads comics for a living and can be found online mostly on tumblr and twitter. She writes a fortnightly newsletter called Feminist Mind Virus, about breakfast foods, pyjamas, whatever pop culture thing she’s obsessing over, and yes: fic recs.
When Netflix announced it was rebooting the 80s cartoon Voltron, it made few waves in my section of the internet. It seemed prime ground for a reboot: it was a recognizable property which people of a certain age felt nostalgic about, but not too nostalgic. It wouldn’t be facing the scrutiny of, say, a Power Rangers reboot. Netflix had some latitude in production, and they used it very well.
The reboot, called Voltron: Legendary Defender, is a very slick update of the original. It's about a group of five pilots from Earth who are chosen to pilot huge mecha lions.
These lions combine to form a giant humanoid robot called Voltron in defense of the galaxy. In this case, the galaxy needs defending from a race known as the Galra, who are large, purple bat-looking dudes .
The series takes place at some unspecified future point, and begins at what I can only describe as a military astronaut school. Out five pilots (“paladins,” in Voltron parlance) are composed of current students Lance, Hunk, and Pidge, drop-out Keith, and former student/decorated hero Shiro. Shiro's ship was tragically lost while on a scientific mission, and it's his return to Earth that rockets everything into action.
Princess Allura and Coran, the only remaining members of the race which built Voltron millennia ago, round out the primary cast of characters. (If you’re looking at this photo and thinking “oh cool, another thing with a bunch of dudes and a single girl”: I thought the same thing, but it’s not as bad as it seems at first. Could be better though, because that’s true of literally everything.)
What makes Voltron: Legendary Defender work so well is that it’s a fun show with excellent characters and real emotional stakes. I like to jokingly refer to Shiro as “tragic backstory dad,” but the truth is that he, and the rest, are beautifully three-dimensional. A lot of this comes down to who’s making it: the showrunners and head writer all previously worked on Avatar: the Last Airbender and Legend of Korra, the animation is by Dreamworks, and the whole package is rounded out by a stellar voice cast.
The first season is only 11 episodes, but we've been promised a second season before the end of the year, so more is coming!
Now the good shit: the ships. The main ship is Keith/Lance (the red paladin and the blue paladin), which is great for me because they’re my jam. These recs are a bit of a mix, though.
Shippy:
“My Baby Says A Lot of Things” by Barkour. 2.6K words, rated Teen.
Ship(s): Keith/Lance, background Shiro/Allura
Lance kisses an alien girl, which leads to a frank conversation with Keith about some things that Keith maybe had assumed that Lance already knew.
“Sweet Quiznak” by CheckeredCloth. 6.8K words, rated Teen.
Ship(s): Keith/Lance
Gravely injured, Lance babbles to Hunk a number of secrets, including how he feels about Keith. Once recovered, he's sure that Keith now knows.
“never been kissed” by kairiolette. 1.9K words, rated Gen.
Ship(s): Keith/Lance
Keith and Lance go to a space diner, bickering ensues, and naturally it all leads to kissing.
“the electric synthesized pop ballad of why keith can’t have nice things” by kay_cricketed. 10K words, rated Teen.
Ship(s): Keith/Lance
This fic is primarily about Keith, who’s never had a family, figuring out his new, found family, but it also brings a/b/o dynamics in in a really interesting way that really works.
“accustomed” by thir13enth. 2.1K words, rated Gen.
Ship(s): Shiro/Allura
Shiro and Allura teach one another about their respective worlds, and Allura gets used to her new comrades.
Gen:
“The Shape of You” by Barkour. 4.1K words, rated Gen.
This is an excellent Pidge character study revolving around the idea of Pidge being trans. It's deftly handled, and the voices are perfect.
“By Name” by Barkour. 1.4K words, rated Gen.
It's plain that Keith and Shiro have a shared history, and this fic speculates that perhaps it began when Shiro's family adopted Keith.
FINAL THOUGHT
So Gav was like, “You’re concussed, I’m travelling, let’s just run the Voltron explainer by itself,” and I was like, “BUT MY PATREON GAV I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT IT.” Because this is the week that I have been learning how to ask people for money, and trying not to be tacky about it. :-/
If you’re a regular listener to Fansplaining, the podcast I co-host with Flourish Klink, you’ll know this is our one-year anniversary (we had a whole bunch of former guests come back to tell us what they thought had changed in fandom over the past year for our anniversary episode). In conjunction with our anniversary, we launched a Patreon!
🎉🎉 https://www.patreon.com/fansplaining 🎉🎉
Wait wait, go back. Before we launched the Patreon, we launched a written publication, something we want to run in tandem with the podcast, kind of a little ~cross-platform synergistic media brand~ thing (lololol sorry). I published our first piece there, “Harry Potter and the Sanctioned Follow-On Work (or, Fanfiction vs. the Patriarchy),” which you may have seen in our Cursed Child roundup last week, and we hope to publish more pieces like this going forward, by Flourish and me but also by guests, professionals and great-writers-who-have-yet-to-be-paid alike.
So! We launched a Patreon to try to keep the podcast sustainable, and to raise money to pay fanartists for cover art, writers for the Medium collection, and people to help with the sloggy technical work that you NEED to pay people for, like audio things and transcription. If you have a dollar or two to spare per month—especially if you like the podcast or like the idea of fan-run independent media—please consider donating! You can watch a sort of goofy but explainy video about it, too:
Depending on how much you give, you’ll get access to all sorts of rewards, and everyone who signs up will get a link to our special ~Cursed Child episode~, which I’ve just finished editing and, like, really devolves into a full deconstruction of the seven books, the Potter Complex™, the discourse around Fantastic Beasts, scriptwriting, why the hell Albus and Scorpius would see James, Lily, and baby Harry just strollin’ around the morning of their death when they are supposed to be under deep secret-keeping...I COULD GO ON. :-) — Elizabeth
Have a great fic to rec? Please share it with us! We’ll be using your one-off recs to build multi-fandom lists around themes, tropes, etc in the future.
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)