The Rec Center #91
Apparently we’ve never done a general/multi-ship Harry Potter rec list before, which seems impossible? And yet! So here’s a multi-pairing list of HP fanfic for your enjoyment, plus my enthusiastic Star Trek: Discovery post-mortem, a unique My Little Pony anecdote, a horrifying retrospective on Glee fandom, and more. — Gav
new stuff
“TV Series Budgets Hit the Breaking Point as Costs Skyrocket in Peak TV Era” by Mo Ryan at Variety
This past year we’ve seen networks and content producers cite too-high production costs when cancelling certain shows with devoted fandoms. This is a look at television’s unsustainable “arms race” and the way the industry is fundamentally changing.
“Quit making fun of teen girl fans” by Hannah Ewens at Vice
Vice reversed the roles on typical fandom coverage and interviewed some teen music fangirls about what they think of older (and more male) fans.
“Star Trek: Discovery review” by the Overinvested Podcast
Gav is VERY EXCITED about Star Trek: Discovery, so she had plenty to say on this week’s ep of Overinvested. Klingons! The true ethos of Starfleet! Sonequa Martin-Green’s pronunciation of the word “sensor”! Meanwhile if you’re more of a text-based person, you can find her recap of the first two episodes here.
older stuff
“Slash Shipping, Pseudo-Progressivism, and Reinforcing Patriarchal Standards in Fandom” by Stitch at Stitch’s Media Mix
In the outro, I highlight a tweet thread from Stitch/Zina, a fantastic fandom critic that I first met when she came on Fansplaining’s big double race and fandom episode. I wanted to recommend her back catalogue for some great writing on representation, racism, queerphobia, and more within fandom spaces as well as in media. — Elizabeth
tumblr & beyond
The Yellow Wallpaper fanart by Alex e Clark
“orlando jonathan blanchard bloom: original character do not steal”
“a while back my best friend linked me to a thread on homemade My Little Pony transformation hypnosis tapes”
This retrospective of Glee tumblr fandom is legit terrifying.
“if I directed THE HOBBIT all the battle sequences would have been out of focus while Bilbo ate a sandwich in the foreground.”
fanfiction
Ten years after the final book came out, Harry Potter fandom is still going strong. We’ve got a mixed bag of multi-ship recs this week, including old favorites and new hits. Thanks to our readers for suggesting some of these! — Gav
“Lust Over Pendle” by A J Hall. Novel-length, rated Teen.
Ship: Neville Longbottom/Draco Malfoy (give it a chance, it works!)
Recced by: Ro
Backstory: Lust Over Pendle is a comedy of manners set in the Golden Age detective thriller genre. Written in the time between books 4 and 5 were released, Hall takes Rowling’s world and runs with it, setting the story after the war has ended and peace has been restored. The story starts with Neville and Draco being outed by the press and they soon find themselves racing to solve a devious plot and save the world.
Rec: This fic is a masterclass in how to make a world your own. I often think of it in its own canon because it deviates so far from Rowling's world and it has its own delightful, unique voice. It’s a long read that’s masterfully plotted and extremely well written. Don’t let the rare pairing put you off—you’ll soon be so engrossed in the world building and the twists and turns of the story that you'll forget the little interaction they had in canon.
Content warnings: Homophobia, gore in the later chapters
“A Lean and Hungry Look” by kerisempai. 21K words, rated Mature.
Ship: Pansy/Hermione
Recced by: Aja
Backstory:” Someone’s out to kill Pansy Parkinson. Can her former enemies put aside their own prejudices long enough to save her life?” This post-canon femslash fic features Ministry official Hermione and a Pansy who’s a secret Wizarding engineer. When Pansy goes into Auror-assisted protection because someone’s trying to kill her, Hermione gets caught up in the mystery and soon sparks are flying. Epilogue-compliant? No.
Rec: I’m a sucker for Gryffindors and Slytherins picking up their lives after the war and each dealing with the shift in their collective personal and political relationships. This is one of those stories that’s light and easy and fun but still offers a look at the Wizarding world trying to rebuild itself after the war. Note: features some mild Ron-bashing, which I for one am perfectly fine with.
Content warnings: N/A
“The Collaborator” by midwesterngirl. 4K words, rated Teen.
Ship: Percy Weasley/Audrey Weasley
Recced by: Ais
Backstory: The author's summary is “He’s officially cleared of all wrongdoing, but Percy Weasley still puts himself on trial.” And I think that does a pretty good job of explaining it.
Rec: It’s a creative way of addressing Percy’s inner guilt. It plays with, interrogates, and transforms the source material in a way I wish more fics did.
Content warning: implied abuse
“Combat Rock” by trailingoff. 4.7K words, rated “Hard R” (~Mature).
Ship: Remus/Sirius
Recced by: Elizabeth
Backstory: Set in my favorite R/S era, post-Hogwarts and pre-Azkaban, this falls into one of my favorite reads on that era, ‘the war is really grim and we are all drinking too much and not being particularly kind to one another.’ Summary: “We don’t know how to fight for what we want.”
Rec: I swear to God I was going to rec something cheerful and fluffy but then I was going through old classics and this really hit the spot. Trailingoff is brilliant at capturing the specific sort of desperation I always associate with the first war, and though it’s relatively short, it balances snapshots of various events with really strong emotional through-lines so well.
Content warnings: drug abuse, violence, homophobia
“An Unequal Magic” by Crispin Coote. 11K words, rated PG.
Ship: Gen
Recced by: Flourish
Backstory: Written in 2006, before the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it takes all of Half Blood Prince as canon but assumes a noncanonical end to the war. It centers on Petunia, who hasn’t heard from Harry in years, and Snape, who is on the run in the aftermath of Voldemort’s final defeat.
Rec: I love this story for its portrait of Petunia, who feels here extremely /real/. She’s cramped and squashed, and she’s done it to herself, and she’s not sure that she did the right thing, but also—realistically—she finds herself unable to change her situation now, and it’s not all bad, is it? And I never would have thought to compare her with Snape, but the comparison is perfect, and not just because Lily had such an impact in both of their lives. I dare anyone to read this without pitying Petunia.
Content warnings: N/A
“Hermione Granger's Hogwarts Crammer for Delinquents on the Run” by waspabi. 93K words, rated Teen.
Ships: Harry/Draco, Hermione/Ron, ensemble gen
Recced by: Gav (also several Rec Center readers, so thank you for your earlier recs!)
Backstory: Canon AU where Harry didn’t go to Hogwarts. The fic starts during Seventh Year, with Hermione leading an ~underground teen resistance cell~ against Voldemort. They find Harry in the muggle world and teach him magic, knowing that he’s essential to defeating the Dark Lord.
Rec: Published in 2017, this fic feels contemporary while also capturing the tone of HP. The author made some thoughtful choices about how the wizarding world would change without Harry, and there’s a great balance between Harry/Draco romance stuff and adventures/witty friendship scenes with the other teens. It feels fresh compared to fic from 10+ years ago, partly because Harry and Hermione are portrayed as POC (which was virtually unheard-of at the height of HP book fandom), and partly due to the fic’s politics and more ~millennial sense of humor. A satisfying longfic, and a great place to jump back into HP fandom if you haven’t been around in a while!
Content warnings: N/A
FINAL THOUGHT
OK, so: it’s been a while since either of us has written a proper outro, and as the ~trans Snape discourse~ unfolded on my feed this past week, I had a few things to say. (And before I begin, let me acknowledge the pure coincidence (is it...ironic?? Alanis leaves me confused) of this coming up the week we decided to do HP recs.) If you missed it, basically: Broadly (Vice’s lady-oriented vertical) published a piece entitled “The Shockingly Convincing Argument That Severus Snape Is Transgender.” Yeah.
I read a lot of commentary before I actually clicked on the article, and a lot of it was great—the overwhelming response, on my feed, was frustration, anger, and disappointment that instead of headcanoning (or trying to prove) that Snape was a trans woman, it would be great if fans actually supported trans creators and celebrated stories about explicitly trans characters. One thread I liked in particular was by Stitch/Zina:
This isn’t unique to the HP fandom—lots of fans try to read more diversity into some of our whitest, straightest, male-est franchises than I think they often deserve (all the while rarely embracing stuff that centers characters of color, queer characters, women, etc, especially stuff that’s actually made by marginalized creators). HP fandom certainly is guilty of this, and it’s more than a little frustrating to see JKR lauded for, say, a character you read as queer-coded, because let’s be real, she was writing some *painfully* hetero/cisnormative books here. (And I say this as someone who was and still is determined to read certain characters as queer—doing it for myself, as it were, no matter her actual thoughts on her own characters.)
What frustrates me most about this piece, though, is the actual article itself. I mean, setting aside the “these Harry Potter fans proved this mindblowing theory” angle, which is nearly always Not Good? But within the framing of the piece was a weird conflation of different sorts of fan practices—some fans, many of whom are not cisgender, like to create trans Snape fanworks, but the article lumped this in with an idea that “fan scholars” had “proven” that Snape was trans in the text. It reminded me of an article I wrote about the mainstreaming of slash early last year, as everyone under the sun had some sort of bad take about Finn/Poe, shipping, and queer rep. I wrote:
There are, of course, plenty of people who want both: many more canonically queer characters and relationships, and the right to queer your own reads on characters, regardless of what you’re given on the page or the screen. And it’s in this dichotomy that we see the trouble with conflating shipping and representation: they are separate acts, and we need them both in equal measure. The world that I joined when I started reading slash was one built on decades, perhaps even centuries of subtext and coded readings; our media is slowly—and at times, it feels painfully slow—making that subtext text, and allowing characters to be queer from the start.
I don’t begrudge anyone their headcanons, their interpretations in fanworks, their readings of a book or show or other media. But I’m not here for the idea that your headcanon imbues a text with more progressiveness or better representation than it actually has—especially since it’s so often accompanied by a privileging of white creators, straight creators, cisgender creators, most of whom never indicate that they’ve given much thought to their deeply undiverse casts of characters. — Elizabeth
Have a favorite one-off rec? Please send it our way! We’ll use it in a future list. Other fanworks—comics, vids, etc—are strongly encouraged as well.
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