Who gets to frame a fantasy world?

MR-KR-GR describes a kingdom ruled by crocodiles. KRACHING turns toward a valley run by cats. HANTU! brings Zedeck Siew’s reflections on ghosts into relation with prose and random tables. In his 2018 introduction to these publications, Siew describes work made with Mun Kao as adjacent to RPGs, with imaginative material that requires further preparation for play. Siew’s introduction to the zines

Those particulars matter before a regional label enters the discussion. A Thousand Thousand Islands does not become intelligible simply because someone calls it Southeast Asian fantasy. The label locates an area of interest; the creatures, relationships, images and creative decisions make the work worth reading.

The sources here document historical publications and creator accounts, including an interview conducted in February 2020 and published in 2021. I am using them to interpret the work’s framing, without treating them as proof of current availability or continuing partnerships.

A center can be chosen differently

In the interview, Mun Kao and Siew explain their wish to move fantasy’s imaginative attention toward their region while resisting both colonial viewpoints and later ethnonationalist frames. They describe working through images, texts and personal experience, with each collaborator developing material received from the other. The account identifies decisions and tensions within their practice, rather than offering a single authorized picture of Southeast Asia. Their interview with Kill Screen

That distinction changes the critical question. Asking whether the zines are authentic can become an unhelpfully broad demand that a fantasy publication represent an entire region. Asking how a particular image, setting or relationship was chosen invites evidence about the work. It leaves room for invention and disagreement without making the creator’s position irrelevant.

The distinction also protects the variety within the project. A collection of drawings and a prose account with random tables offer different means of entering an imagined place. A reader may need visual particulars before they can imagine a character moving there, while another may begin with a social relationship or an event. The material supplied shapes what the reader has to invent next.

For librarians, the immediate implication is that a display label should name what a work actually does. A regional grouping can be useful, especially when it helps readers encounter publications they have not seen before. Within that grouping, each item still needs its own account of subject, form and intended use.

The source of an image remains a question

The interview also addresses the difficulty of working with colonial records. Mun Kao discusses the need to examine inherited imagery carefully, and Siew describes reading a colonial account of magical practices with suspicion toward its framing. Their explanations make source interpretation part of the creative process. They do not convert the resulting fantasy into historical or ethnographic evidence about every community it evokes.

Haraway’s account of situated knowledge helps clarify why that distinction matters. Her argument connects accountable knowledge to limited, located perspectives and rejects both an impossible view from everywhere and the idea that every partial view is sufficient merely because it is partial. The relevant demand is to account for how a view was made and what it can support. “Situated Knowledges,” pages 582–585

Applied to these zines, that demand keeps several claims separate. A creator can explain an imaginative intention. A published image can be analyzed for what it presents. A historical source can be examined for its own circumstances of production. None of those steps automatically establishes how a reader understands the finished work.

An academic librarian could build a source-comparison exercise around those differences. Where the relevant materials are available, place a creator’s explanation beside a specific feature of the publication and the historical source under discussion. Ask students which claim each item supports, then require them to identify a point where the evidence stops. The exercise gives fantasy serious attention while preserving the standards appropriate to historical inquiry.

It also makes the library’s mediation visible. Selecting one interview or one issue already frames what a class encounters. Explain that selection and provide a route to further work, especially when students might otherwise mistake a convenient example for a representative survey.

A region contains several imaginative projects

The Across RPGSEA description of Our Shores offers useful wider context. It brings together three games with distinct premises: agents resisting an apocalypse in Navathem’s End, young adults finding their way through city life in Capitalites, and myth-inflected mecha in Maharlika. The compilation is relevant to the regional publishing conversation, but that does not make it or every included game a zine. Across RPGSEA’s account of Our Shores

The differences make a simple point that selection work can easily lose. A regional collection need not be organized entirely around folklore or historical settings. Everyday life, imagined technology, social relationships and catastrophe can all belong within its scope. The individual work should determine which of those subjects enters its description.

For a public library, I would choose several publications whose differences can be stated concretely, within the available budget and collection purpose. Describe why each is present. That gives readers several points of entry and avoids placing the burden of representing a region on whichever title happened to be easiest to acquire.

The same care applies to invited speakers. An author can speak about a particular practice without being asked to settle every question about a vast cultural area. Paying for that situated expertise, and naming its scope in the event description, respects the work while giving the audience a clearer reason to attend.

A Thousand Thousand Islands rewards attention to the choices its makers describe. The crocodile kingdom, the drawings, the ghosts and the source questions each give a reader something concrete to examine. Begin there, keep the creator’s account in view, and let a regional label lead toward the work rather than finish the reading before it starts.