just plain wrong

[pauraque_bk]

I have some recs of new fic in store, but until I get around to that, I'll rec an old fic:

The Ravenclaw Girl (Explicit, Filch/Luna, underage, blackmail, consent issues) by delphi. A retelling of the Pergamon anecdote from Petronius' Satyricon set during Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Mr. Filch attempts to have his way with a young student, only to have the tables turned on him.

I love this fic because it's both completely filthy and truly funny. It's so hard to find smut that makes you laugh without just being crackfic (which this isn't). This is a perfect example where you're laughing with the characters, not laughing at the premise.

Anyway, in discussing the fic delphi commented that it was one of the most wrong things she'd written, which of course made me wonder what the wrongest thing I'd written was...

I'm not sure. In HP fandom at its height, there was such a great community of really kind, open-minded, kinky people who were game to read/write and draw/see anything, that it was hard to feel that anything was off-limits. Within that context, nothing I wrote really stands out to me.

I guess maybe The Set? I mean, it's non-con underage incest, but that's not even really why. The manipulation and coersion in there is so terrible, and Regulus seems so incapable of defending himself, that I guess to me it seems more disturbing. (I don't take credit for the wrongness of Cut With Diamonds because it's inherent in the AU and I didn't make it up.)

What about you guys? What's the wrongest fanwork you've created, whatever 'wrong' means to you? And what does 'wrong' mean to you? (No, this is not just a ploy to find new dirty fanworks to consume, though it could be that too!)

This entry was originally posted at http://pauraque.dreamwidth.org/16667.html. Comment here or there.

Comments

[donnaimmaculata.livejournal.com]

It's funny, because I've been musing about this recently, too. It might have something to do with the fact that I've uploaded all my fics to AO3 and re-read some old stories, going, "I wrote what?!"

Oddly enough, I wrote something in a non-HP fandom a few weeks ago that made me feel more guilty and that felt more wrong than all the bizarre ideas I came up in HP put together. I'm no stranger to wrongness; I mean I wrote stuff like Umbridge abusing Moody's eye, an Aunt Muriel/Griphook romance, Grindelwald coercing Ron into raping him, Harry/Molly, and Molly choking to death on Remus' cock, to name but a few. None of those is a crack fic, they're all aiming at "plausibility". Actually, just about every other fic I wrote is full of wrongness!

However, it took Jack's Boy (fandom: Hornblower) to make me feel really bad. It's straightforward non-con, pretty tame by HP standards, but I cringed throughout it, and I was exceedingly nervous before posting. After analysing my reaction, I came to the conclusion that I felt bad about it, because usually when I wrote non-con, it was from the perpetrator's perspective. And somehow, that's not quite as bad as writing the victim, because here, I suddenly had to write about trauma that is not my own, and I felt bad for using it for, essentially, entertainment purposes. Writing horrible stuff from the perpetrator's perspective allows me to distance myself from the the victim's pain, and I use the perpetrator's thoughts and feelings for entertainment purposes - and that, oddly, does not take me out of my comfort zone. I don't think that makes a lot of sense. Or perhaps it means that I'm a horrible person, who knows.

[pauraque]

Hm, I think when I write noncon it's usually from the victim's perspective. For me that actually feels easier because I don't have to directly talk about the perpetrator's desires or how they justify their actions in their own mind. That's what scares me the most.

I also wonder if you might have felt more nervous about the Hornblower fic because though it might be tame by *HP* standards, that's really not tame at all for most fandoms! I know I feel much more free to do horrible things to the HP characters than I would in any other fandom, because it's all been done to them before and probably worse than I could ever come up with.

And I am completely sure you are not a horrible person. :)

[donnaimmaculata.livejournal.com]

I know I feel much more free to do horrible things to the HP characters than I would in any other fandom, because it's all been done to them before and probably worse than I could ever come up with

This is definitely very true. The HP fandom has been very liberating in that respect - there's no need for guilt or shame here ;-) Only yesterday, I was trawling through the old hpsquick100, delighting in the abundance of truly horrendous and just plain wrong concepts. I don't think they've got them in other fandoms.

[pauraque]

I haven't thoroughly examined every fandom, but the ones I've participated in have been much more conservative, and I do think we have a reputation as the filthiest, which I consider a point of pride. :)

[donnaimmaculata.livejournal.com]

which I consider a point of pride

Indeed!

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I think the wrongest thing I ever wrote might be a fic called Petals. It's kind of a Lolita situation with Pansy 14-going-on-15 years old seducing first Draco (just for the presents he gives her) and then Lucius (for the challenge of it). On the scale of wrongness, it's probably not as bad as most, but for me that was pretty damn wrong. ;-)

[pauraque]

It's all relative, of course! It strikes me that HP fandom is so diverse that community standards probably differ a lot depending on what circles you run in.

[gmth.livejournal.com]

I think mine is probably Headlong We Are Tossed, which includes some dub con bestiality incest-y type stuff. In my defense, I wrote it to spec for someone else for reversathon. Heh.

[pauraque]

Ah, but if it was Reversathon, you must have put something in your ad that led them to believe you would be the perfect choice to write it. ;)

I'm not sure how I've been in HP fandom this many years and never written any animagus!bestiality. I read it and I like it but somehow it hasn't happened.

[gmth.livejournal.com]

Oops. I'm busted.

[pauraque]

Speaking of which, I hear Reversathon is coming back this year! Are you going to do it again? I've actually never participated but I'm thinking about it.

[gmth.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely thinking about it! It depends on what my work schedule looks like at the time.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hannelore/]

(omg that fic! sooo glad you recced it, not sure how I missed it the first time around)

For some reason Discretion Forbids a Reply received a lot of reaction as being "so wrong," but I often wondered if it was because it was Vernon/Harry and not so much the scenario. I do recall some of the conversation that led up to the creation of the fic and it was again the "wrongness" that seemed so tantalizing to others. If there's any particularly wrongness that I see in that particular fic, it's that Harry is manipulating Vernon but there's quite a lot of desperation there too.

[pauraque]

See, I feel like any fic with Vernon having sex would get a certain amount of "so wrong" responses just because of who he is. He doesn't swoop and flourish enough to be a sexy villain.

Actually, I'll go further: In the alternate universe where JKR made Vernon thin and snarky, lots of people write the hell out of Harry/Vernon.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if my current head fic scenario is the most wrong thing I've ever come up with: consensual, adult incest between a great-great grandmother and her great-great grandson. (They're elves. Longer lifespans.)

[pauraque]

Fictional incest generally doesn't bother me, even if it's parent-child, but for some reason a gap of more than one generation feels squickier to me. It's not the age, I think it's conceptual... it's hard to remove 'grandmother' and 'grandfather' from a very non-sexual place in my mind. It's probably also because that type of incest is so rare in fiction, so any mental blocks about it haven't had much opportunity to get worn down.

But, on the other hand, if I think about it in terms of specific characters, the squick value decreases enormously. Like say, pairing one of Harry's parents (if they were somehow still alive) with one of Harry's kids. The idea of that doesn't bother me, but then it does again if it were written where Albus Severus was calling Lily 'grandma' or something.

Sorry for the ramble, I'm just interested in how taboos are shaped in our minds and how we react to breaking them.

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

Hm...it occurs to me that while I've written great-grandfather/great-grandson slash, it ranks very low on my list of wrongest things I've made.

[pauraque]

Really, was it fanfic or original?

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

Snape/Dumbledore: http://archiveofourown.org/works/29727

[pauraque]

Oh, duh! Didn't I beta that, even?

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

I believe you did. *g* It's one of the very few incest stories I've ever written, and yet for some reason it probably wouldn't crack the top ten on my "wrong" list. Maybe because it still makes me laugh a little.

[vikingcarrot.livejournal.com]

The wrongest fanworks I've created I've attempted to wipe from the internet. I realise this is actually completely impossible - once it's there, it's there forever, somewhere, and I know they've probably been reposted en masse. But they're removed from my sites and I had Rule 34 put a Tin-eye style ban on the images so that if people kept reuploading it theit system would recognise the images and disallow it. Both were pretty heavy chan, with heavy dubious/non-con.

It isn't that I've grown to be ashamed of having done them so much as grown fearful of what it could do to future job prospects. I fear that in regards to all the HP porn I've ever drawn, and that my real name can fairly easily be attached to it. So if an employer really wants to look... I mean, it's prettymuch too late for me to wipe the connection now. It didn't matter to me years ago, and it still shits me that it should matter, but it has become a fact that employers will insist on trying to web-stalk potential and current employees to find out if what they do on their own time is morally acceptable.

Though there is a definite sense of shame these days over the poor quality of the art, rather than the subjects. :P

[pauraque]

I totally understand the concern. It's not something I actively worry about for myself, partly because my name is not an uncommon one, and my dad (who has the same name as me) has a large online presence under his real name, and also because I don't do anything under my real name online, not even Facebook. So I think it would take more stalking than average to figure out that pauraque=me.

Well, I slightly lie. I do use RealID on WoW, and I have made plenty of posts that link pauraque to my WoW characters, so there is that connection.