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titti just wrote a post on PWP's and not liking them and this is my response. *phew*
This discussion helped me to realize something about myself and my kinks and my reading habits: I don't really like PWP's either. But, and here's the big one, I think that fannish work is rarely truly plotless or without characterization.
Because even in a story that starts out with Hermione and Luna fucking and gives no background as to how they got together, they are still characters that we know, and this gives the story tensions. It's not like completely anonymous, random-people-screwing porn. We know who Hermione is, who Luna is. We know their stories and their struggles and their flaws, and many PWP's are stories about how these already-known things play out in sex. It's not always necessary to state everything, and if you do it's like JKR's irritating habit of doing a full basic plot recap at the beginning of her books. I think that that, for me, is a large point of the attraction of fannish porn: that it's this person and this one, and that the sex must necessarily be some sort of culmination in a story that we have already read a good deal of. There's a story there, but it's implicit rather than explicit. It goes by the assumption that if you've read HP you'll know who Hermione Granger is, and you'll know what she likes and what she fears and where she comes from and maybe some of where she's going. And you'll be able to perceive the tensions that must arise if she ends up having sex with Luna Lovegood. A good writer of PWP's will implicitly provide clues and traces of the tensions within the smut itself, and I think it's safe to say that a good PWP is one where the people having sex are actually the characters, with all their tics and traits, and not just bodies.
Of course, there are some stories that really are PWP's in the most literal sense: the aforementioned ones that you could cut and paste any two names into, the ones that have no context or character or setting at all. The ones where it's not actually Hermione and Luna, just a blonde and a brunette. The ones that do absolutely nothing for me. But those are something completely different.
So, to conclude: if the characters are in character, PWP's have built-in elements of plot, in that they are resolutions of previous canonical interactions or issues or quirks of or between the characters, and that's, IMHO, what makes them so much more satisfactory to many of us than traditional pornography. They are never, if done well, anonymous or without character tension, even if things are not said in so many words. Plotless pr0n rests in the grey areas of assumption and implicitness of characterization.
So there.
titti just wrote a post on PWP's and not liking them and this is my response. *phew*This discussion helped me to realize something about myself and my kinks and my reading habits: I don't really like PWP's either. But, and here's the big one, I think that fannish work is rarely truly plotless or without characterization.
Because even in a story that starts out with Hermione and Luna fucking and gives no background as to how they got together, they are still characters that we know, and this gives the story tensions. It's not like completely anonymous, random-people-screwing porn. We know who Hermione is, who Luna is. We know their stories and their struggles and their flaws, and many PWP's are stories about how these already-known things play out in sex. It's not always necessary to state everything, and if you do it's like JKR's irritating habit of doing a full basic plot recap at the beginning of her books. I think that that, for me, is a large point of the attraction of fannish porn: that it's this person and this one, and that the sex must necessarily be some sort of culmination in a story that we have already read a good deal of. There's a story there, but it's implicit rather than explicit. It goes by the assumption that if you've read HP you'll know who Hermione Granger is, and you'll know what she likes and what she fears and where she comes from and maybe some of where she's going. And you'll be able to perceive the tensions that must arise if she ends up having sex with Luna Lovegood. A good writer of PWP's will implicitly provide clues and traces of the tensions within the smut itself, and I think it's safe to say that a good PWP is one where the people having sex are actually the characters, with all their tics and traits, and not just bodies.
Of course, there are some stories that really are PWP's in the most literal sense: the aforementioned ones that you could cut and paste any two names into, the ones that have no context or character or setting at all. The ones where it's not actually Hermione and Luna, just a blonde and a brunette. The ones that do absolutely nothing for me. But those are something completely different.
So, to conclude: if the characters are in character, PWP's have built-in elements of plot, in that they are resolutions of previous canonical interactions or issues or quirks of or between the characters, and that's, IMHO, what makes them so much more satisfactory to many of us than traditional pornography. They are never, if done well, anonymous or without character tension, even if things are not said in so many words. Plotless pr0n rests in the grey areas of assumption and implicitness of characterization.
So there.