The Nancing Pony
From Fandom wank wiki
From Wikipedia:
The Nancing Pony (play on the title of the Inn of the Prancing Pony from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings) founded March 3 2003, has been a haven for discriminating fandom followers for over two years. Focusing on satires and parodies, the Nancing Pony caters to well-educated and critical fans in the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars fandoms. The Nancing Pony is most well-known for their Fan Fiction MSTs and outrageous picture captions, often referencing classics, famous literature, and obscure pop culture.
History
After the third installment of the Lord of the Rings films, The Return of the King, was released in late 2003, interest in that particular fandom surged. With it came a slough of predictably bad fan fiction, which created a flurry of misinformation -- as the films deviated from the original book series -- all across the Internet. These stories not only made the canon of Tolkien's books more confusing, but created a wide gap between the "true fans" and the "film fans" of the series.
Discontent by the invasion of "fake" movie fans, and somewhat disgusted by the saturation of Lord of the Rings merchandise into every marketable niche, the original founders of The Nancing Pony (some fans of the series, some not), decided to create one of the first Lord of the Rings parody sites on the Internet -- aimed at destroying the cash-cow hype perpetuated by the films and the films' actors, some of whom had not (and have not) even read the actual book trilogy. The original Nancing Pony featured only harsh parodies and criticism of un-researched "movie fan" stories, focusing especially on the improper mechanics and grammatical problems so frequent in fan stories associated with hyped fandoms.
At its peak, the site was getting thousands of hits per day, and was visited by many of the Lord of the Rings cast members after an episode of MTV's TRL prominently featured Nancing Pony fan signs being held up in the crowd outside the studio.
The Nancing Pony Today
Over time, The Nancing Pony has added much more content, and shifted into a more tongue-in-cheek statement on fandom in general, poking fun at fan conspiracy theories, gossip, and false predictions, with over 300 captioned pictures and fifty MSTs. One of the more interesting aspects of the Nancing Pony's MST style is that the staff will generally stick out a story until the end -- meaning that, with longer stories, the MSTs have gone above ninety pages!
In August of 2005, the Harry Potter and Star Wars fandoms were added to the site. Currently the Nancing Pony has a staff of fourteen, and the site is updated frequently. Most of the active staff members are in attendance at major universities in the United States, majoring in film, theater, classics, history, English, and molecular biology.
