June 16, 2023

The Rec Center #389

Hello everyone! This week we have coverage of the Reddit exodus (in factual-reporting form as well as funny Tumblr-post form), some lovely Spider-Verse fanart, and an EXPANSIVE Strange New Worlds explainer and fic rec list from guest contributor queersintherain! — Elizabeth

new stuff

“As the Reddit war rages on, community trust is the casualty” by Scharon Harding at Ars Technica
Non-Reddit users may have seen a lot of commentary about a Reddit exodus this week (particularly to Tumblr). This piece gives an overview of what’s happening—and what stands to be lost from a digital communities angle.

“Tom Holland Knows You Care More About His Lip Sync Battle Than His Acting” by Jason P. Frank at Vulture
Look, it’s probably for the best that he’s aware of this.

“The Flash’s ‘evil, disrespectful’ cameo represents everything wrong with superhero movies in 2023” by Gav at the Daily Dot
Among other issues, The Flash includes a distasteful (and already controversial) ~surprise cameo that brings together a bunch of unpleasant Hollywood trends, as studios try to capitalize on fandom nostalgia.

older stuff

“Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd” by Lore Sjoberg at WIRED
What if home cooks interacted with cookbooks the same way that tabletop gamers interacted with RPG manuals?

tumblr & beyond

Across the Spider-Verse fanart by mamunches

“going from the reddit star wars fandom to the tumblr star wars fandom is giving me insane whiplash.”

we must simply accept this as a core element of the tumblr ecosystem.

reddit x tumblr, the greatest enemies to lovers story ever told.

“i think star trek should write an in universe reason why some series don’t have swearing and some do. make it a universal translator glitch or something.”

misha collins is at it again!!!!

fanfiction + explainer: strange new worlds

queersintherain writes fic about love, trauma and alien genitalia—as well as this one Crazy Rich Asians fic. She blogs about mostly Star Trek and cats on tumblr, and previously wrote a two-part rec list/history of femslash omegaverse for this newsletter that she’s super proud of. The one thing she has posted in Strange New Worlds fandom so far is a fic where Nurse Chapel makes bad life choices, “teaches” Spock about blowjobs, and might possibly have a better relationship with T’Pring in the future.

Strange New Worlds, f/f, and intertextuality in Star Trek/fic, the rec list!

Last summer I discovered Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW) and fell in love. Set 10 years before the Original Series (TOS) from the 60s, the show focuses on the adventures of Captain Pike and his crew. Some characters are familiar from TOS and some are new, and it is a delightful return to my favourite things about episodic television: plots both wacky and serious, compelling characters you want to get to know more, and the best part: self-contained episodic storytelling. According to people who have watched a lot more Star Trek than I have, it is also the closest of the newer iterations in style to the older Treks, barring possibly Prodigy (also excellent).

My personal favourite part about Strange New Worlds is how many wonderful female characters there are. They get time and space to be badass, and competent, and vulnerable, as well as to interact with each other, and generally give me So Much f/f fodder.

My favourite thing about getting into Star Trek as a fandom, though, is how large and interconnected it is—how you can absolutely watch one show on its own, but if you’ve watched any of the others, you can catch references to other characters or events, or learn more about a species or culture you’re interested in. Strange New Worlds in particular references other Star Treks in fun ways, and this can provide further threads to follow for fic purposes.

For example, episode five, Spock Amok, makes heavy references to Amok Time, the classic TOS episode where Spock was going to get married, did not, and instead sated his fuck-or-die urges with a fight with his captain… arguably the thing that really kicked Spirk off, if not the fuck-or-die trope broadly. Spock Amok features a dream sequence where Spock undertakes the same ritual combat he undertakes in the TOS episode, though with himself, and features a plot where he is trying to connect with T’Pring, his fiancée, who kicks off the ritual combat in the TOS episode by refusing to marry him.

While Amok Time has inspired many a Spirk fic over the years, it also inspired one of my favorite authors and friends, Alsike, to explore the how the aftermath of that episode would affect the SNW iterations of T’Pring and Nurse Chapel (who lowkey has a thing for Spock in both TOS and SNW). Combine that with the fact that T’Pring in SNW says she’s read and enjoyed Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a queer autobiographical philosophy text largely focusing on trans identity, queer pregnancy and, uh, anal sex, and you get her wonderful T’Pring x Nurse Chapel fic series, starting with, well, the title kind of says it all, and continuing into a well drawn epic about two women who aren’t “too much” for each other and who just happen to have once dated Spock, featuring academic conferences and a lot of Vulcan culture.

Yes, okay, this is actually Spock in T’Pring’s body, but let me have this

“A Hermeneutics of Ass-Fucking” by Alsike. 6K words, rated Mature.
Ship: Christine Chapel/T’Pring
Description: Dr. Christine Chapel always figured that T’Pring was a Vulcan’s Vulcan, and never expected to find her here, on Betazed, living a very different life than she’d had before. But, no one gets out of a relationship with Spock unscathed. And sometimes the ways you tried to change yourself to keep him end up showing you who you want to be.
Content warnings: N/A

(As it is Pride month, I want to mention here as an aside that the third fic in this series also features a really great exploration of queerness and family through the lens of Vulcan culture).

Another way Strange New Worlds draws in earlier bits of Star Trek canon is with its characters—one of the main characters, La’an Noonien-Singh, is a descendent of Khan Noonien-Singh, famous from the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and gets to struggle with being descended from a famous war criminal. Another SNW character, Una, first appeared in Star Trek: Discovery, the first of the new Trek shows, but is actually a character from “The Cage”, the unaired pilot shot before TOS. One of the reasons execs didn’t like “The Cage” was allegedly because Una was Too Strong of a Female Character for the 60s, but she’s back and kicking in SNW. Also, she and La’an have history involving Una rescuing La’an when she was younger and inspiring her to get into Starfleet, leading to an onscreen relationship that makes the great premise for a ship. Alsike’s fics starring the two of them in her Trekkerverse series (loosely connected stories set in the same continuity as the ones recced above) are among my favourites for them:

“future’s so bright (I gotta wear shades)” by Alsike. 5.5K words, rated Teen.
Ship: La’an Noonien-Singh/Una Chin-Riley
Description: La’an may have escaped the Gorn, but after years in their possession, she is still waiting for them to take her back. Luckily, being rescued by Ensign Chin-Riley means that she has someone willing to keep rescuing her, even if it’s from the monsters inside her own head.
Content warnings: PTSD, canon-typical horrors (one character was rescued from captivity by aliens who were hunting her down)

Team always appropriate work behaviour

Speaking of La’an, if you’re going to watch the series I don’t recommend this fic until you’ve finished, because it includes some spoilers for the last two episodes, but this is a lovely gen fic featuring La’an and Captain Pike connecting over cooking in the break between seasons—all of the characters are really thoughtfully written, and it includes a lot of nice cooking detail:

“Thursday Night Cooking School” by igrockspock. 3.2K words, rated Teen.
Ship: Gen
Description: Una had always said that Captain Pike was the best captain in the fleet; she’d never mentioned that he was the friendliest captain in the fleet. Or that he’d be obsessed with food, and getting La’an to eat it.
Content warnings: References to being-captive-to-aliens-hunting-you-down

Captain Horsegirl

Pike is another character in the series who is drawn from previous canons, but comes into his own in SNW. He was the captain in the unaired TOS pilot, and in the original series, there’s an episode dealing with the after-effects of him becoming disabled in a way that means he can’t move and can’t communicate well. In SNW, through plot shenanigans that happen before the series starts, he has foreknowledge of this event, and his grappling with it is an important part of his character arc. The things I love about Pike though are these: he has big space dad energy. His bridge crew is mostly women. He has horses. He once saves the day by cooking, and loves cooking for his crew too–his cooking plays a role in at least 3 episodes, which is impressive for a series that only has 10.

My favourite Pike fics so far (if there is anyone writing fics that sensitively deal with his future canon disability, PLEASE hit me up) include this one, featuring platonic hair braiding (he learned on his horses!) with Una:

“Fringe Benefits” by sunlitroses. 9.6K words, rated Gen.
Ship: Gen
Description: The last time Chris shared a refresher, it had been a perfunctory reality of living on a space-constrained starship. The experience of sharing a ’fresher with Number One was turning out to be much different. (A tale of friendship, communal living, and an awful lot of hair styles.)
Content warnings: Drunkenness, mention of vomiting

And this one, shipping him and Spock, which I like for both characters but also because it has some fascinating ideas about Vulcan pornography (and the author has much more porn with these two if you’re into this one!):

“Three-Fingered Salute” by vulcunt. 2K words, rated Mature.
Ship: Pike/Spock
Description: It isn’t until after Spock’s first pon farr that Chris is allowed to view Vulcan pornography.
Content warnings: N/A

Confession: I know this rec list is heavy on Alsike’s fics, because I really like how she deals with the different Star Trek canons and also because T’Pring x Chapel has taken over my mind—I love a ship between both halves of a love triangle who deserve better and can find it with each other (partially because Spock is clearly in love with Captain Kirk, or maybe Pike).

Alsike has written many more excellent fics with them, but one of my favourite things she’s done with them that’s different enough to warrant including separately in this rec list is a comic—it’s a canon-divergent AU where the original fuck or die trope makes them get married—and then they fall in love while trying to get divorced:

“How to get Divorced on Vulcan” by Alsike. 26 pages (comic), rated Teen.
Ship: Christine Chapel/T’Pring
Content warnings: Content warnings: there’s fuck or die but it’s VERY consented to

How to get Divorced on Vulcan cover page

Finally—I know this is a Strange New Worlds explainer/rec list, but I have to add two bonus recs here, both because they’re excellent and because they really get at my aforementioned fav Star Trek fandom thing of having multiple canons to work from.

One: the Pi’maat series (that this newsletter introduced me to forever ago!), featuring a full cast of wonderfully-drawn original Vulcan characters and lots of Vulcan worldbuilding–the author has notably pulled from several Star Trek shows, novels, and an official guide to Vulcan (reference: comments). The series itself features explorations of bonds, mental and physical trauma, the after effects of war, and all sorts of family stuff, and I always find it a soothing read:

“Pi’maat” by sixbeforelunch. 315K words total, but first fic is 11K, second is 20K…they can be largely read independently of each other; mostly rated Gen or Teen, most recent fic is Mature.
Ship: OMC/OFC
Content warnings: Depends on the fic, they are well-tagged for–generally a lot about trauma and recovery

Two, the fanlore page for Vulcan genitalia. It is full of fascinating worldbuilding and history, and really gives you an idea of the scope of the Star Trek fandom. And also the scope of how much people have and continue to think about what’s in Spock’s pants. (Please note: this page is rated explicit for lots of illustrated pictures of dicks—including images from Gayle F’s famous Kirk Spock Erotic Paper Doll Set, which as a side note is also a really cool look at what gender stuff people found desirable in their slash ships at the time!)

As Gav mentioned in a previous newsletter, season one is available for free on Youtube in June if you’re in the US, and season two of the show started yesterday! — queersintherain

FINAL THOUGHT

That’s all, folks! Have a relaxing weekend! — Gav