The Rec Center #96
Hello! Thank you for your patience with our technical difficulties: VITAL IMAGES NOW EMBEDDED. And greetings at the end of this roller-coaster of a week! You’ve survived, and we’ve got you covered if you missed any of the Truly Important News these past few days, from the Hamilton catfishing scandal to the constable-frozen reveal. 🙃 Perhaps more importantly, we have a brief His Dark Materials explainer and accompanying HDM & daemon AU fic recs from Gav. As of this past weekend I finally have copies of these books (THANK YOU, LINAS), and I’m gonna read them soon, I swear. — Elizabeth
new stuff
“The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons” by Neima Jahromi at The New Yorker
“In 2017, gathering your friends in a room, setting your devices aside, and taking turns to contrive a story that exists largely in your head gives off a radical whiff for a completely different reason than it did in 1987.”
“A scientific deep dive into the Marvel movies’ most hilarious trope: the shirtless scene” by Angie Han at Mashable
Very Important Scientific Work.
“‘Neopets’: Inside Look at Early 2000s Internet Girl Culture” by Nicole Carpenter at Rolling Stone
“How one game community inspired a legion of girls.”
“Constable-Frozen, the Internet’s Most Famous Frozen Fan, Denies That His Frozen Tumblr Is Secretly a Fetish Blog” by Brian Feldman at New York Magazine
If you’re on Tumblr, you’re probably aware of constable-frozen, the deeply surreal Disney photomanip blog. If not, this article explains it all. Constable-frozen caused a ~stir this week by (seemingly) getting Horny On Main, and people began to theorize that its absurd Disney posts had actually been fetish art all along. NYMag managed to track down the blog’s creator [Ed. note from Gav: I’m extremely envious of that reporter], to uncover the ~truth. Kind of.
older stuff
“A Letter to All the Fandoms I’ve Loved Before” by Carly Lane at The Mary Sue
“You should know how much you mean to me, how much you defined and shaped my love of certain genres, how much I looked up to the strong female characters that made their presence known on my TV screen and changed my life forever.”
tumblr & beyond
On a normal week, the constable-frozen thing would be the biggest story in Tumblr fandom. This week, not so much. That’s because some internet sleuths revealed THE HAMILTON CATFISHER, a truly wild tale that stands alongside some classics of fandom history. This person created two false identities, one of whom was an HIV+ South Asian survivor of human trafficking, to defend their ~creative decision~ to write a high school AU with an HIV+ protagonist. Oh, and this story was kicked off by a feud about cannibal mermaid fanfic. It’s A Lot.
BRB going full Galaxy Brain over this biblical analysis of Willy Wonka as the Old Testament God.
You know a post’s gonna be good when it begins, “Sarek at the mall.”
A rarepair hero.
fanfiction
Growing up in the early 2000s, Philip Pullman wrote some of the formative books of my childhood. While it’s impossible to think about Harry Potter without handling its massive cultural impact, His Dark Materials is weirdly small fandom. I won’t write a full explainer here (the books are bestsellers, and you can just check wikipedia lol), but it’s interesting to see how beloved HDM is, while also inspiring a relatively small volume of fic and art.
My theory is that the books are so perfectly conclusive, there’s less desire to ~correct the original text. Or maybe it’s because, like Narnia, the main characters are kids throughout the series, making it harder to write as an adult unless your fic takes place long after the series ends. Whatever the reason, “daemon AUs” are actually more popular than fic about HDM canon itself. They’re a subgenre of AU that borrows the idea of daemons (talking animal companions that represent a person’s soul), and fuses it with another canon. I LOVE this trope, and actually co-wrote a novel-length Hannibal daemon AU last year.
P.S. For those who aren’t aware, we picked this fandom because Pullman’s wonderful new HDM book, La Belle Sauvage, came out last month. It’s the first of three companion novels to His Dark Materials, and takes place when Lyra is a baby. I’d describe it as less ~epic than the main trilogy; an emotionally intelligent adventure story that deals more with the power structures of organized religion, rather than the religious/philosophical themes of the original trilogy. — Gav
Will and Lyra art by dreamingpartone
“like gold to ayery thinnesse beate” by lalaietha. 4K words, rated Teen.
Ship: Will/Lyra
Backstory: Post-series, when Will and Lyra are both young adults.
Rec: The Amber Spyglass has a perfect ending, but you can’t help craving a wish-fulfilment epilogue for Will and Lyra. This fic takes place in Will’s world, where Lyra pays an unexpected visit. A satisfying reunion, followed by a series of other fics in the same timeline.
Content warnings: N/A
“One of You and One of Me” by HopefulNebula. 1.3K words, rated Gen.
Ship: Will/Lyra
Backstory: Post-series futurefic
Rec: Will and Lyra are reunited in death. As you’d expect from HDM’s view of the afterlife, it’s surprisingly uplifting!
Content warnings: N/A
“The Exquisite Barometer” by Vehemently. 9.5K words, rated Gen.
Ship: Gen
Backstory: Post-series, set in Will’s world.
Rec: Will decides to study abroad in the U.S., but unlike most fics taking place in college, it’s not remotely tropey. Will and his daemon Kirjava are familiar and well-characterized, and the author does a great job of combining the timeless and poetic style of the HDM books with a contemporary setting. You can see how Will’s adventures have impacted his personality as an adult, without him seeming like a larger-than-life figure in an everyday setting.
Content warnings: N/A
“Works and Days” by threeguesses. 1K words, rated Teen.
Ship: Serafina Pekkala/Farder Coram
Backstory: Serafina Pekkala and Farder Coram are supporting characters in Lyra’s story, and both are deeply compelling. Serafina is a quasi-immortal witch, while Coram is a Gyptian elder, leading a community of riverboat travellers. They used to be lovers, but eventually grew apart due to circumstance. I wish there was more fic for these two!! It was fascinating to see a younger Coram in La Belle Sauvage, he’s such an appealing character.
Rec: A sadly brief look at Serafina and Coram’s first meeting, and how they fell in love.
Content warnings: N/A
“Daemonology” by trinityofone. 8K words, rated Teen.
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis; Ship: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay
Backstory: Stargate: Atlantis is a sci-fi show about an exploratory outpost in space. Sheppard is the military commander of the city, while McKay heads up the science team. Despite their clashing personalities, they’re best friends and were a massively popular fanfic pairing in the late 2000s.
Rec: Posted in 2005, I think of this as the patient zero for daemon AUs. It takes the concept of daemons and transfers it into the Stargate universe; an especially good fit for an emotionally repressed character like Sheppard. The presence of daemons (and the taboo against touching someone else’s) alters the dynamic between the main characters, and this fic is a perfect example of why the trope became so popular.
Content warnings: N/A
Lyra art by n00talie
FINAL THOUGHT
I am now back in the U.S. (ugh) but last weekend we concluded our HANGING OUT with an amazing tour of Naval London circa 1705 (GUESS WHY), led by my brilliant friend Veronica, so I figured we may as well continue to share some Things We Learned. (We also, separately, saw Toby Stephens star in OSLO, highly recommended, where we also learned things and, like, I can’t speak for Gav, but watching him IRL was !!!!!!!)
Crucially, we began the tour by BOAT.
With these incredible maps!!
We learned about Westminster at the turn of the 18th century, passed the site of Execution Dock, discussed river pirates—“light-horsemen,” “heavy-horsemen,” “mud-larks,” “scuffle-hunters.”
We arrived in Greenwich and headed to the Old Royal Naval College, which in ~1700 was being established as a residence for retired seamen.
We took an Autumnal Stroll and Gav impressed us all with her dramatic red coat
Inquiring minds would like to know why this statue happened
Tucked away in Deptford, once the site of the royal shipyards: a beautifully-preserved street where a single officer in the Navy might have rented a room in 1705………
<33333
Thus concludes our IRL excursions, at least until Gav comes to visit me and I give her some kind of Captain America tour of Brooklyn, Land of Docks. :-) — 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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