What Is This Pornish Pixies of Which You Speak?

[icarus]

What Is This Pornish Pixies of Which You Speak?

We fanfiction writers and readers wish that people who stumble on this odd thing we call "fandom" would take their time to learn what it is. Look around. Read some of our better stories (instead of selecting something at random, and really, would that even work in a book store?). Get to know us before you pass random ill-informed judgments.

Now that pornish_pixies has come into the limelight because of Strikethrough 2007 to a variety of fandoms, I'm going to ask other non-Harry Potter fandoms to do the same. I'm seeing pornish_pixies used as an example of "fanfic I wish didn't exist" in some fandoms, and I find that distressing, given pornish_pixies's history in the Harry Potter fandom.

But you don't know that history yet, do you? Give me a moment of your time.

First, Harry Potter is a megolith of a fandom that has kept the hecklers at Fandom Wank entertained for half a decade. The political infighting (a.k.a. "wank") has been in proportion to the size and variety of the HP fandom: immense. It became a by-word. Whenever a new fandom had a lot of wank, the folks at F_W gloated, "This could be the next Harry Potter."

If you wish to understand the history of Harry Potter wank, this well-written editorial (set aside an afternoon), The MsScribe Story: An Unauthorized Fandom Biography, covers 2001-2006 and will give you a Ph.D. in that darkest aspect of Harry Potter fandom history.

But it doesn't seem to mention pornish_pixies. Well, what was fun for the hecklers wasn't much fun for the participants.

Enter switchknife and pornish_pixies.

After a series of inter-related wanks that embroiled many friends, the prolific slash writer switchknife, who maintained the popular Switchknife Recs website waved a flag (red? white? pink?), calling for a halt to all the battles. "This is supposed to be fun," switchknife insisted. "Let's get back to the porn -- the good kind of wank."

Switch created pornish_pixies, "The Community You Wank Off To," kicking it off with a series of "write your favorite kink" challenges. Switch's terms (made somewhat solemnly, with a wink):

- Respect other people's squicks. Since this is a pr0n community, there will be depictions of various kinds of sexual practices. Please state warnings clearly before the fic/poem, or place your story behind a cut-tag (as advised above), if you feel that some of your subject matter could seriously upset people. (Examples: chanslash, bloodplay, rape.)

- Respect other people's kinks. Do not tease and/or abuse someone for their particular proclivities, or what they choose to write in a fic. Everyone here reserves the right to perv unchallenged.

It was intended to be short fics only, lunch hour length, but that went by the wayside very early on.

Since that time, pornish_pixies has been a sort of Japanese bathhouse of R and NC-17 Harry Potter fic. HP fans take off their fandom affiliations and politics and leave them at the door. "Fluffy Harry/Ron Christmas morning romance" appears next to "Werewolf BDSM Non-con" without a qualm. Slash, (Other?), are all welcome, so long as it's sexually explicit and you leave each other be.

So to stand outside of pornish_pixies and use it as an example of "that" kind of fic that "I would never read," misses the point of the community entirely.

Comments

[starcrossedgirl.livejournal.com]

Pst - PP is actually slash and femmeslash only. Het fic is separate at EE!

Great summary otherwise, and I completely agree with your points. :D

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ooops. I could've sworn Het was welcome as well. I guess was a threesome I read there. *corrects*

EE? Where's that?

Icarus

[marksykins.livejournal.com]

erotic_elves. :)

[starcrossedgirl.livejournal.com]

Gah, beat me to it! ;)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'd never even heard of them. I haven't been active in the HP fanfic community for quite a while (except for reading Cambiare Podentes).

Icarus

[starcrossedgirl.livejournal.com]

Sorry, stuck in abbreviation-mode for some reason! erotic_elves, which is essentially Pornish's sister-community for het pr0n.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

No sweat, I'm just not good with abbreviations for some reason.

Icarus

[trobadora]

I'm seeing pornish_pixies used as an example of "fanfic I wish didn't exist" in my Stargate and Supernatural fandoms

WTF?! I'm glad I didn't see that.

Pornish is slash only, though (m/m and f/f).

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Yes. That's fixed, and thank you. I could've sworn... ah well.

I've across it in a couple of places, enough to give me pause. One of the ill-effects of being a community singled out by the strikethrough is that there are some assumptions made -- and there are a lot of wild fics there. A glance through the door isn't enough to understand what it's about. That hold true of any fandom, I think.

Icarus

[trobadora]

Fanfic can't be taken out of its context without losing something - often something vital. And that goes doubly for a comm like Pornish. But you know what? Considering that this necessarily brought a lot of public attention to the side of fandom we usually don't show off to outsiders, I'm actually impressed by how few negative responses I've seen.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Fanfiction's like a picture hung on the wall of someone else's house. Take away the house, the context, and there's no way to understand it.

Icarus

[marksykins.livejournal.com]

Did Switch really start Pornish as a (fandom) wank response? I didn't start writing in HP until just about the very second the comm was created, so I didn't know/think it had that sort of related history. I always figured it was just a response to Switch wanting more porn. :D Which, of course, is not a bad thing.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Not fandom wank itself, but there was a whole series of wanks involving this friend and that friend and then another. She put up an "Oh no, why is everyone fighting..." post and then set out to do something about it all. I'm not sure I still have my original invite, but it was one of the things she mentioned when she invited me.

Icarus

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Thank you!!!

I have vague flashbacks to Arcana here. I dislike it when outsiders point and laugh/snicker/dismiss, but I really, really hate it when we ourselves do it.

It may not be my kind of thing, but I have the fucking context to get where it's coming from (even if I might not have the specific details...)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Penguin fic in the SGA fandom also makes no sense, until you're there. :D

[nufaciel.livejournal.com]

LMAO! This is so very true. I'd seen it around, and I always thought to myself, "WTF? What are they talking about. But once I delved deeper, I totally got it. It's the same with p_p.

Although people really ought to do their homework about stuff before they take that kind of stance. It does tend to make them look dumb more often than not, lol. (Seen that recently on a ML I'm on.) :D

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Every fandom has its little inside jokes, and quirks, and they all make sense -- once you're there.

I'm sure there's a sociology dissertation in this somewhere.

Icarus

[perfica.livejournal.com]

I haven't watched p_p in a while but it's iconic in the HP fandom and I would hate to see it disappear. They were messing with our history, dammit.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

It may be just porn, but it's our fun, gleefully irreverent porn.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

That just sent me back poking through Switchknife's journal. I used to have SUCH a crush, and would flirt in comments any chance I got.

*sigh* I miss Switch.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

switchknife was a flirt.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

And I appreciated that a lot.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

This is a BEAUTIFUL post. Thank you. I love the Japanese bathhouse metaphor.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

:D Thank you!

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm confused as to why any fandom would think they have any moral high ground from which to be sneering or eyerolling at someone else's porn com. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there porn in every fandom's fic? And doesn't every fandom (or at least all the more mature, established fandoms [by which I mean fandoms which have existed for a while -- not meaning any judgements about the fandom itself or the age/maturity of its fans]) have some pretty serious kinkfic? OK, I started hanging out in Blood Ties and Dresden Files fandoms recently, when the TV shows started, and both seem to be pretty new and the stories pretty vanilla still. But every fandom I've poked my nose into that'd been around for a while has its share of kink and other off-the-beaten-path type stories. So what?

My own main fandom has "stuff I'd never read" and that's just because different people have different tastes. There are some characters I don't like, so I don't read them without an absolutely glowing rec. There are some kinks that don't do anything for me, so I don't read those stories or I might read for the plot and characters but skim over the not-my-kink part. There are story types I don't care for (songfics, most drabbles) so I just don't read them unless I trust the writer implicitly. But the idea of going to someone else's fandom to point and sneer at a particular kind of story is just boggling. :/

Angie

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

pornish_pixies, I think, was being used as an example of a certain type of fic that would bother some in any fandom, but it was visible here and now at P_P.

Also there's a sense of P_P being only chan or incest or bestiality or non-con because it was deleted. Understanding pornish_pixies history should, I dunno, open some eyes to everything that's in the community.

Icarus

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Also there's a sense of P_P being only chan or incest or bestiality or non-con because it was deleted.

But even if that were true, my point was that every fanfic fandom that's been around long enough has that sort of thing. It's just part of fanfic. I guess I just don't get how any significant number of people could get snotty about that sort of thing. [shrug] Hopefully your explanation will help. And if it doesn't help for some people, I wouldn't really worry about what they think anyway. :/

Angie

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Like any false accusation, even once you're exonerated the stench of it hangs around. It's a natural human reaction to associate pornish_pixies with "kiddie porn" now.

I think there have been memory studies about how adrenaline/strong emotion causes certain memories to imprint more strongly (thinks back to fuzzy, half-remembered 60 minutes ep).

*yawns*

It's late, been up since 5 a.m. thanks to the boyfriend. I'll try to answer more coherently on the morrow.

Icarus

[percysowner.livejournal.com]

I've never really understood the horror over the "stuff I'd never read" mindset. Not because I'll read anything, but because if I hit a story that fits into the "stuff I'd never read" category, I JUST DON"T READ IT. It really is simple. My kinks are my kinks, and your kinks are yours and if we can both find stories that satisfy our kinks good for us. I have never stumbled into a community and had someone jump out of my computer, hold a gun on me and make me read a story I didn't want to. And if I've stumbled into a story that squicks me I just hit the back button.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

*test click* Yep. My backbutton works pretty well, too.

I'm learning to preface any response I have about, "I'll never read that" even with friends with, "I'll never read that -- at least for now." In time, all of my "I'll never reads" have fallen by the wayside.

First it was Ron/Draco. No, no, it was a pairing so impossible it could never happen.

Then it was non-con. Oh, no, I'd never read that... unless it was written by Rushlight, oh, and this author handled it really well here.

Then it was MPreg. Never in a million years. Except this one was well done, and a fascinating story.

Then it was Het. No, I didn't like het at all-- oh, you say Maya wrote it? Hmm. This looks pretty good.

But of course, I'd never read incest. Well. Except for this one Weasley twins incest story, and this one wasn't bad, hmm, I think I'll write my own.

Still, I managed to hold onto my bias against AUs. What's the point of an AU? If you're going so far against canon, you might as well write original-- oh, hey, these SGA AUs are great.

Finally, the last hold out: Crossovers. I hated crossovers.

Then I found that Supernatural/Numb3rs crossover....

Squicks are like bowling pins. All you need is the right story and they fall over easily.

Icarus

[percysowner.livejournal.com]

I'm learning to preface any response I have about, "I'll never read that" even with friends with, "I'll never read that -- at least for now." In time, all of my "I'll never reads" have fallen by the wayside.
That pretty well describes me too. I had a lot of lines when I came into fandom, but give me the right story and the right author and I can and will jump in. SPN blew away both my incest sqick and my RPS squick. Really good writing will do that.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

It's always the writer, isn't it?

Icarus

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

My "I'll never read that"s tend to be phrased as, "I'm really not interested in that" because one never knows what one will -become- interested in, over time.

I seem to have spent a ridiculous amount of time googling for Numb3rs crossovers today, and this entry popped up during the search. So you got me curious - *what* Numb3rs/Supernatural crossover? :D

Thanks in advance.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I found it a couple months ago at amothea's recs, but man, I'm having trouble finding it now. I'll have to ask her about it tomorrow. I believe it was by derryderrydown? It's unfinished thus far, two of three parts done, but excellent. Still interested?

Icarus

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

No.

It was just as an example. Hmm. I can see this causing trouble which was not my intent. *edits post*

Icarus

[wyomingnot.livejournal.com]

That's good to hear then.

(still want to slap anyone who thinks others' kinks are not okay) ;)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I like switchknife's attitude of "whatever floats your boat." :)

[rike-tikki-tavi.livejournal.com]

I am so in love with your fannish information posts. First the FanLib summary and now this. Awesome!

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Huh. Thank you. This is different. I used to do writing tutorial posts, but for a long time my LJ's been just fics, recs, and personal posts.

Icarus

[femmequixotic]

Thank you. :)

During all this kerfuffle, I went back and edited a post on my journal that was linked to all over the net to say that pornish wasn't an incestfic comm because I was starting to see people say that. It's an erotica community, a porn community. Chan and incest were a tiny fraction of what was posted there kinkwise. For the most part it was your standard NC-17 PWP fare. We've just always upheld a no-censorship clause. I'm hoping that we can continue that, but I'm waiting to hear what SA/LJ will tell me next week. *crosses fingers and toes*

It was intended to be short fics only, lunch hour length, but that went by the wayside very early on.

Actually, they've always been fairly short fics. Up until last month the posting limit was 5,000 words max. Now it's up to 10,000 words, but that still limits stories to one-LJ-post size. :)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

During all this kerfuffle, I went back and edited a post on my journal that was linked to all over the net to say that pornish wasn't an incestfic comm because I was starting to see people say that.

Yep. That's exactly what I've been hearing people say.

Up until last month the posting limit was 5,000 words max.

Ooops. *scratches back of head, John Sheppard-style* Er. Um. Then I've always, um, cough, ignored that limit.

Me? Ignore the rules? Nah.

Okay, when I was invited I told Switch which stories I wanted to post there and said, "I think they're over the limit" and she said it was all right. Well, more like, "Yes, yes, yes! Post that."

Icarus

[pastles.livejournal.com]

(reposted for spelling errors *coughs*)

Thank you! I read a post that was bothering me because it basically said that communities like p_p deserved to get suspended because said author (and I'm paraphasing here) didn't want to share net space with people who got their rocks off to incest/chan etc. I didn't respond because I thought, "Hey, you've got your own stand." But I was still irritated because they weren't involved in this (besides having to be "forced" to read their friends' posts on lj regarding said event) and that they obviously had no idea that some of the journals deleted belonged to survivors and or were discussion journals.

And this is with me being (somewhat) in fandom and never reading anything in p_p before. (Porn's not really my deal heh)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I've been running across posts like that, too.

It happens whenever someone is accused. You get out from the epicenter and fewer and fewer people know exactly what happened, until at the fringe there are people who know you were accused and nothing else. So it sticks, even if you were wrongly accused.

Icarus

[lttledvl.livejournal.com]

thanks for the history lesson!

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Hey, you. :D Hopefully it'll make a little chip in the idea that Pornish is "an incest community."

[ix-tab.livejournal.com]

Heh. I would love it if any of my other fandoms had a communiy like pornish_pixies. The quality of the writing, the rare pairings, the kink, the lack of fanbratiess, and the all round general awesomeness...other fandoms should be so lucky.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Well, it's doable. Switch had a fairly simple premise: have a good attitude and clear community rules. Make it invitation only to keep the quality up, and let her rip. :)

Icarus