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xf_book_club"Collapsar" is my favorite post-ep for "Millenium," the series' only New Year's Eve episode. I just love watching Khyber's Scully as she confronts Mulder for his (in her eyes) ill-timed, opportunistic stroke of midnight kiss, while inwardly berating herself for not being more responsive to said kiss.
The story is part of a larger, still unfinished project, Khyber versus Season Seven, but I think it works well on its own. He wrote six or seven of the planned fourteen stories.
I also especially liked the two part "episode" he wrote to substitute for "En Ami" and "Fight Club." Part One is "Home From the War" and "Where I End and You Begin" is Part Two.
Edit: In case anyone reading here is unaware, Khyber has resumed writing Kvs7. There are two new stories posted and another one due to appear on March 6, 2009. Good things come to those who wait.
Edit the Second: As of April, 2009, he had written ten of the planned stories. Though his website has gone down, if the webarchive links don't work, you can still find his fic on his Author's Page at Gossamer.
Collapsar
As always, let the author know what you think, let us know what you think, and give us your suggestions for next time.
The story is part of a larger, still unfinished project, Khyber versus Season Seven, but I think it works well on its own. He wrote six or seven of the planned fourteen stories.
I also especially liked the two part "episode" he wrote to substitute for "En Ami" and "Fight Club." Part One is "Home From the War" and "Where I End and You Begin" is Part Two.
Edit: In case anyone reading here is unaware, Khyber has resumed writing Kvs7. There are two new stories posted and another one due to appear on March 6, 2009. Good things come to those who wait.
Edit the Second: As of April, 2009, he had written ten of the planned stories. Though his website has gone down, if the webarchive links don't work, you can still find his fic on his Author's Page at Gossamer.
Collapsar
As always, let the author know what you think, let us know what you think, and give us your suggestions for next time.
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Date: 2009-01-02 05:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 07:36 pm (UTC)Second, I'm with Scully--what a cheesy, office-party move! The M/S dynamic is epic and sweeping and full of deep, serious things, and he kisses her on New Years Eve? SERIOUSLY? FAIL. Bad Mulder, no cookie. Or, um. Nevermind.
Third, I love how internal/external Scully differ. On the inside, she is a wall of righteous, seething anger and cohesive thought. But every time she tries to speak it's all "umm...errr...your arm...um...i should go" and then she flees.
bang.
Happy New Year!
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Date: 2009-01-02 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 04:40 pm (UTC)Khyber! Come baaaaaaaack!
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Date: 2009-02-12 12:43 am (UTC)I AM OZ, THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE
Date: 2009-02-12 03:19 am (UTC)Back when Khyber first was writing and then not writing Kvs7, I used to send him little nudges, just every now and again, until one day I noticed he had put up this banner at his website: "Coming next: Chinese Democracy," in other words, don't hold your breath. I am such a square that I didn't even know that was a rock and roll reference to the long, long, long awaited album (remember those?) by Guns N' Roses, until the day it was released last year. I swear to God, I thought he meant democracy, in China, also quite an unlikely event. Anyway, when the recording was released, I got the bright idea to ask a friend to tell him that now that Chinese Democracy had been completed, he no longer had an excuse not to finish Kvs7. This is not the reason he started working on it, of course, but I am still so happy about it that I could burst. Then, at other times I come down from that high and start thinking about how much bad fan fiction is being written, how the economy is doing and how the war in Iraq is never-ending.
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Date: 2009-02-12 04:34 am (UTC)well, you still got the heading, and the icon. two outta three ain't bad. *grin*
i am pretty thrilled K's back, even if this is all we get.('all', she says ungratefully) and how silly am i, using the word 'back' as though i'm in the know. pft! i wasn't around when he was here to begin with.
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Date: 2011-08-30 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-30 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-30 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 08:18 pm (UTC)I am at work, but I will come back with more recs. You could try "Reach." It's back somewhere in May, or June, I think? Penumbra loved it. So did a lot of other people. I might have been a little more lukewarm. I like the sequel better, "Sokol." It is a masterpiece, and very long. But worth it. I would put it in the same level as "Iolokus." or "Arizona Highways."
Got to go. Have fun. I so envy you. Reading Khyber for the first time was electric.
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Date: 2009-01-02 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 03:38 am (UTC)you really, really do. I, like wendelah am envious of you, who will be reading him for the first time. there's just- Gah! no words are forthcoming. too good, too good. i'm going to come back and say something semi-constructive in a while, hopefully. for now, just...
oh, um, here's something: this might just be me and my undiagnosed ADHD, but if i was reading Khyber for the first time i'd want someone to tell me that his work sort of builds momentum from beginning to end. At first most of his stories seem to start with the intention of making the reader go 'WTF?' and sometimes the forward narrative doesn't actually start making any cohesive sense until about the halfway mark. But it's all intentional, or at least i would speculate that it is. He's not just making his fic confusing for the hell of it. the confusion actually contributes to the satisfaction of the reader when it all comes together in the end. I found Home from the War/Where I End and You Begin to be particularly this way.
as i said, maybe it's just me, and his fics aren't confusing in the first place, but i thought i'd mention it, as the first time i went to read Reach i wasn't immediately drawn in by it so i quite reading (a big mistake on my part), and it took me another half a year to go back and try again.
*Goes off mumbling about brilliance*
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Date: 2009-01-03 09:36 am (UTC)This makes me want to start reading even more! I get where you and wendelah are coming from - I'm always that little bit envious when a friend of mine gets to read or watch something I love for the first time. I'm really looking forward to getting into Khyber, and being able to discuss him a bit more with you guys.
Lukcily it's Saturday today so I can spend all day in my PJs reading fic. =)
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Date: 2009-01-05 02:38 am (UTC)1. He has empathy for the fodder characters. He makes them real. He gives them voices; unique, sometimes punchy, sometimes eloquent, sometimes annoyingly naive voices. His OC’s have relationships (often with each other) that effect who they are and what they will and will not do in the course of the story. Some of them are innocents who think everything is going to be fine until someone has a gun in their face. Some of them are not innocents, but that doesn’t mean they are not human. Khyber seems to have a knack for writing truly ‘human’ qualities – that is, complicated, confused, muted qualities. People die in his stories, and i’m constantly being surprised to find how much he’s made me care about them (a lot more than i seem to care about the fodder characters of the show).
2. I’m never sure if mulder and scully qualify as innocents or not. Their kindness and their altruism are balanced beautifully by their wariness and their anger at being terrorized and used, time and again. Sometimes he’s writing them and i’m pretty sure they could do anything. They are superheroes, all jacked up on adrenaline and ‘nothing-but-each-other-to-lose-and-we-might-lose-that-anyway’ mentality. Other times i get the overwhelming impression that they are utterly impotent; At best they are pebbles damning the flood, at worst they are ants scurrying for a place to hide.
3. He gets metaphysical. He talks about the ‘shape’ of a million years (Sokol). He suggests alternate realities (WIEaYB epilogue), not in the limiting and concrete sense that they are or aren’t existent, but in the sense that they could exist (how ‘cat state’ is that?).
4. He doesn’t adhere to the traditional technicalities of writing, and his writing is usually better for it. There’s a segment in WIEaYB which ends with ‘And.’ That’s the whole sentence. but it actually means something. That was when i pretty much decided Khyber was in my personal pantheon of fic-writing heroes.
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Date: 2009-01-09 03:40 am (UTC)That set of stories feels so tragic to me, and their ending is one of the reasons I felt so let down by his not finishing the series. By the end of WIEaYB, I want that happy ending for them so badly, and all there is is more loss, and dreams of a normal life together that literally went up in smoke. I wanted to see what kind of ending he would give to season seven, to substitute for Requiem, and make up for that sadness.
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Date: 2009-01-20 02:46 am (UTC)oh, yes. just thinking about hurts. i love khyber's way of writing tragedy though. he's so ruthless with the what and how (what happens, how it feels), but he's so tender and sensitive towards the characters. that strange balance, i think, makes the story even more painful than it otherwise could have been. i could not believe how much WIEaYB got to me. After i read it i just sat there for a while. i had literal chills. and while i would never have wanted to change the ending of that story to make it happier, i, like you, would have liked to be soothed by some future comfort.
it isn't even that he writes a story that is 'hopeless' exactly. when i think about other bleak, hopeless stories they have a different dynamic than khyber's. But i think he writes involutory stories - that is, stories that don't end and problems that cannot be solved. ever. that's a lot of what makes the ending of WIEaYB so chilling to me: it's a 'could-have-been' for mulder and scully, but it is so removed from them - just infinitely far out of reach for the people they have become. even if the world could be kinder, in khyber's universe it would be too late. mulder and scully aren't those 'kind' people anymore. they are good people, but they're too spare, too fierce now.
sorry i didn't see your comment sooner.
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Date: 2009-02-12 03:32 am (UTC)This is so true to the series as well, so when writers do try to create these false, romance novel type stories for them, I just cringe. The best of the writers in that genre do transcend it, because I can read some MSR easily, as long as there is a plot. I really need plot. Mulder and Scully are in love ATTHS is not a plot, unless you are writing for the Porn Battle.
I must be feeling bitchy, I am doing my anti-shipper rant. Sorry about that.
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Date: 2009-02-12 04:28 am (UTC)there's a certain sweetness to some of the more well written romance fics that makes me glad for them, just in case i ever need to give myself a tooth ache. over the past half a year i've read almost all of '12 degrees of separation' and periodically enjoyed it - as an example. but no, i don't think our perspectives are very far from each other. the way i ship, if it can be called that, hasn't much to do with 'romance', really.
The best of the writers in that genre do transcend it, because I can read some MSR easily
out of curiosity, do you find it easier to read MSR when it is a fairly canon-based fic, or when it is closer to AU? or are both equally as dodgy?
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Date: 2009-02-12 02:05 pm (UTC)I can't believe EC has been so absent. She's the biggest Khyber fan on the planet.
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Date: 2009-01-03 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 02:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 02:34 pm (UTC)What's most interesting to me is that it's an MSR story, but contains dialogue discussing some of the reasons I have a hard time seeing M&S as a viable romantic couple:
"This has never been an equal partnership, Mulder. The where, the
what, the when, it's always been up to you. " He almost staggers
backwards, looking confused.
"Scully, I... I mean, if you want to take a bigger role directing
what we're working on, I think that would be great..."
(I hope this doesn't offend; I'm currently in a period of fascination about the difference in branching-off places in the show between shippers and non-shippers, if that makes any sense.)
Current personal obsessions aside, the writing is wonderful and the characters fully in character. I love take-charge!Scully. And I love that she's annoyed about the kiss: interesting twist.
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Date: 2009-01-03 04:23 pm (UTC)All opinions are given a hearing here. I think in that phrase, Khyber is speaking not just to his readers, but also to the powers that be. If only they had listened, we might have had a better, even more interesting show.
I agree, it is a much more interesting story to have Scully pissed off at Mulder, than to have her come to the motel room intending to jump him. Although, Mulder is sexy enough that I suppose fan fic writers must be forgiven for that lapse.
As
****this sounded really formal, in reality I am mentally jumping up and down and happily squeeing. lid lid lid. sorry. going back to grown-up land now.
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Date: 2009-01-03 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-04 07:36 pm (UTC)Plus, I guess explaining is the post-ep's raison d'etre. So forget I spoke.
Wendelah isn't kidding, Sokol is a MASTERPIECE. It's so mind-blowing that I almost got the feeling--for a while, anyway--that there's no point going on with fanfic reading as it's been rendered passe and beside the point. But my personal favorite is the "Home from the War" and "Where I End and You Begin" duo. It's very mysterious and science-fictional as well as heartbreakingly romantic.
Unusual guy.
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Date: 2009-01-04 08:04 pm (UTC)I guess I should reread Kv7, too, so I can ask you questions about it. I love those stories, but I found them confusing as well. They are romantic and mysterious, yep.
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Date: 2016-09-20 03:54 am (UTC)