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

[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