Fancake

Fandom: Multifandom (The Right Stuff (1983), The Dream Is Alive,From the Earth to the Moon (TV))
Pairings/Characters:
Rating: Gen
Length: 4:38
Creator Links: Destina 
Theme: fun, fanvid, in space, competence, old fandoms, small fandoms

Summary: From Chuck Yeager, to the Mercury 7, and on to Apollo and the Space Shuttle Program (STS) - a very human history of the triumphs, joys, and tragedies of the USA's journey into space.

Reccer's Notes: This is gorgeous, and moving, and a perfect tribute to everything I love about the space program.

Fanwork Links: To Touch the Face of God

Fandom: Multifandom
Pairings/Characters:
Rating: Gen
Length: 4:16
Creator Links: seekingferret 
Theme: fanvids, small fandoms, old fandoms, favorite fanworks,

Summary: All the Jews! All the Feelz!. The Jewish dance vid of my heart.

Reccer's Notes: I am not Jewish, and I don't recognize at least half the sources of this vid, but I love it because it is contagiously joyful.

Fanwork Links: Warning: Might Lead to Mixed Dancing

Fandom: Multifandom
Pairings/Characters:
Rating: gen
Length: 3:37
Creator Links: such_heights 
Theme: fanvid, female characters, female friendship, femslash, competence

Summary: I came to win.

Reccer's Notes: This vid is so fun to watch, all my favorite women are there.

Fanwork Links: Fly

Fandom: Multifandom
Pairings/Characters:
Rating: gen
Length: 2:54
Creator Links: flummery, Flummery 
Theme: fanvids, meta, pre-AO3 fanworks, old fandoms

Summary: The more things change...

Reccer's Notes: This is a vid about vidding. It's about the history of vidding, and it's about what vidders do: construct realities in defiance of the powers that be in Hollywood who want complete control over how people watch their shows and interact with them (and certainly don't want people copying bits to use as part of their own art).

To really get this vid, you have to understand the history of vidding. The first vids were literally slide shows: slides, in projectors, advanced in time with the music. I recced one such vid (Both Sides Now by Kandy Fong) earlier this month, and if you're sharp-eyed you'll see a clip of that vid in this vid. Then came VCRs, and in order to vid you needed a dual-editing machine, i.e. one with two tape decks that you could record from one VHS tape onto another. Vidders would work together to plan out how long each clip needed to be and exactly what time code it would stop and start, then would record the whole thing onto the master tape clip by clip using stopwatches. (And stopping and starting didn't happen instantaneously; the tape would rock forward a few frames past where you stopped it, so you had to know your machine very well to compensate for that. Oh, and magnetic tape degrades as it gets re-recorded over; if you messed up one clip and didn't start over from scratch, it would be noticeable.) One of the main vidding collectives of this era, the California Crew, once filmed themselves making a fanvid and then made that footage into a vid to "Pressure by Billy Joel." (ETA: I have been informed that Pressure is available online!) "Pressure" is included in this vid, when they transition from film to TV; when you see the hands and the stopwatch, that's it. After that came computer editing, which is still used today (though of course programs and specific hardware change constantly). The vid used to start this section is Dante's Prayer, which I've already recced this month. And then, at the end, the llamas: llamas were the mascots of Vividcon (2002-2018), the premiere vidding-focused convention in the US, which made llamas the symbol of vidding and vidders for many US vid creators.

Fanwork Links: Walking on the Ground
Meta post about the making of the vid and the meaning of the clips

Fandom: Multi
Pairings/Characters:
Rating: Teen
Length: 2:05
Creator Links: cesperanza, flummery 
Theme: old fandoms, fanvids, fandom, meta, humor, crack

Summary: Who's up for a metaphor?

Reccer's Notes: Although the most skin that gets shown in this vid is tiny bit of male pectorals being exposed briefly, this is not a vid that is safe to watch at work. It's about metaphors. Mostly phallic metaphors, though there are a few yonic metaphors as well. Some of the metaphors were intended by the creators of the original shows; some weren't, but were taken that way by fans intent on reading slashy subtext into things. Some of the metaphors only become metaphors when you put them in a lineup of all the other metaphors. And some of the clips aren't metaphors at all, but just weird visual stuff shows did. The overall effect is very funny.

Note: this vid was premiered at Vividcon. VividCon was a convention for anyone who enjoyed fannish vids - watching them, talking about them, or making them. It ran from 2002-2018 and the con mascot/logo was a llama, which is why there are llamas in this vid--it's an in-joke. This vid was the opener for the vid show at the con that year.

Fanwork Links: Metaphor

Fandom: Multifandom
Pairings/Characters:
Rating: Mature
Length: 4:54
Creator Links: thingswithwings, twwings, thingswithwings 
Theme: meta, fandom classics, fanvids

Summary: Mr Billowy Coat King of Pain.

Reccer's Notes: This is a vid about manpain and fridging. This is a vid of all the times when women are tortured or killed so that the Strong Manly Man Character can have an emotion (one single glistening tear!) while still being Manly. And it is so well done. The song choice is perfect, and they did an excellent job of finding clips to show the visual tropes of manpain and really reinforce how common they are. And the sparse use of special effects is spot-on. Heed the warnings on this one, folks; the AO3 tags are Manpain, Toxic Masculinity, dead women, Violence, Blood, Glittery Tears, Suicide, and Violence against women.

Fanwork Links: The Price

Fandom: Multifandom
Pairings/Characters:
Rating: Teen
Length: 3:13
Creator Links: charmax, charmax, Charmax 
Theme: old fandoms, small fandoms, fanvids, canon LGBTQ, fandom classics, female characters, female friendship, femslash,

Summary: A celebration of media clichés for the International Day of Femslash

Reccer's Notes: It used to be there was very little queer media, and a lot of what you got was subtext. In this vid, Charmax takes the perfect song for female queerness (I'm Your Man, sung by a woman) and sets it to clips of all the women-loving-women cliches and tropes she could find, from Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to Voyager and Xena to Tipping the Velvet.

Fanwork Links: I'm Your Man

Fandom: Sentinel, Atlantis, Monk, Highlander, due South, others
Characters/Pairings: Blair Sandburg, Jim Ellison, a whole grab-bag of others from other series depending on which story in the series you are reading.
Rating: PG-13
Length: around 300k for the whole series
Creator Links: dasha_mte, dashamte, Cascade Library, a bunch of other places.
Theme: Sentinel AU, novel-length, crossover, casefic, fandom classic, old fandoms, plotty fic, worldbuilding

Summary: If Blair's washing out of the guide program, who's taking care of Jim?

Reccer's Notes: If you're wondering "how come she's reccing a Sentinel fic for a Sentinel AU category?" it's because this is one of the biggest and best known mega-crossovers in which one (or more) character from a particuar show is a Sentinel who just happens to cross paths with Jim and Blair. It's popular for a reason; the stories in this series are generally well-written, great worldbuilding on what "a world where Sentinels and Guides are known." And I think it is a more real look at what the world might be like than a lot of Sentinel AUs are. It's neither a dystopia nor a paradise, with lots of thought put into things like "what might the Occupational Safety and Health Administration regs be like for sentinels? What are the legal limits on the police use of Sentinel surveillance?" And so on and so forth. It's also a thoughtful look at the aftermath of abuse and recovery from abuse. In addition, there are a series of great cases that build into one overarching case that ties everything together. And there were so many different fandoms, there was something for everyone. I've only listed the major crossovers.

Fanwork Links: Ahahahaha. Unfortunately, this series got posted in dribs and drabs on a variety of archives. If you, like me, prefer reading on AO3 where you can download fics to archive them easily, the first nine main-line (focusing on Jim and Blair) stories are here at AO3
The first nine stories plus (I THINK) all of the ones focusing on the crossover characters are here
The tenth mainline story, which really is a stand-alone which crosses over with Murder, She Wrote, is here.
I think that's everything?

Fandom: Multi
Characters/Pairings:
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2:04
Creator Links:  cesperanza flummery 
Theme: humor

Summary: Who's up for a metaphor?

Reccer's Notes: This is a wonderful vid about the shows fandom loves and the ways we interpret them. (The vividcon llamas are a particularly nice touch.) The pointed use of phallic imagery always makes me giggle.

Fanwork Links: Metaphor