My opinion upon first read, a year and a half ago:
There is something about Jeylan's style that is kind of psychidelic and bizarre. Even so, there is also a loveliness to the way she describes things, blurring together sensations and emotions like watercolor. This fic is romantic in a sort of classic sense, but it isn't terribly schmoopy, which I like.
My opinion now: (certain parts bolded because, yeah, this is long, and i'm trying to help people find parts that are more to-the-point than others)
in hindsight, while i appreciate the uniqueness of the style this fic was written in, and part of the time i feel like Jeylan's mulder characterization is really wonderful, there's just too much that's off here and the more i look at it the more the off parts grow. things are off about scully, definitely, but also off about mulder, and that's something i find almost more offensive in the long run.
Jeylan's scully is a shrew, she really is. a beautiful shrew. she criticizes and hassels and pries into everything including but not exclusively mulder -- which would be perfectly tolerable if she also possessed the other traits that canon scully possesses: insight and patience and more underlying compassion than four people ought to have. but instead jeylan so often seems to be writing only the reserved and critical aspects of scully - not even recognizing the inherent justification for those aspects of her. mulder thinks longingly of the scully who first walked into the x-files office, and i find myself wondering if he even loves scully as she actually exists. he thinks he does, but he's longing for who he wants her to be, even while it is everything they've gone through together - everything they are to each other - that has evolved her into the scully who is there with him.
there are things that jeylan gets right about scully. i like the emphasis that jeylan places on scully's desire to 'fix' things, because i think that's true of her. her anxiety tends to stem from a desire for things to be "right". for scully there is safety in "rightness". but that one thing does not a characterization make.
mulder, on the other hand, spends much of this fic not realizing he is being selfish, insensitive, critical, and basically a chump. ironically, these are all the things he is seeing in scully. hey buddy, hypocritical much?
the way mulder is characterized in this fic it's as if he were two people. the mulder on the surface is sensitive and compassionate. he spends all his time philosophizing and reading poetry and feeling sad for just ebout everyone - wanting to transcend all the mundanity and the crap and just be free to be loving to scully and be loved in return. ya-da-ya-da-ya-da. upon first read i bought into this characterization of him big time. i dont, for the record, think that this mulder is faking his sensitivity or his desire to be loving. i believe he genuinely wants that. frankly, i think he's mainly too immature to realize how poorly he's managing it.
the other aspect of this mulder characterization is that he is passive-aggressively selfish, critical, and insensitive - particularly towards scully. he guiltlessly ignores her very serious accusation that he "messes with people's minds" in order to think about how great her ass is. he man-handles her (grabbing her by the waist to help her when she hasn't asked him to), then he makes a crack about how she is uncomfortable with him doing so because she "wants a man". he spends the entire fic thinking about all the things that scully's missing because she lacks innate sensitivity to the universe, and bemoaning how at odds he feels because she doesn't "get it". only to finally just decide that "now is the time" for him to make a move. because clearly it's his choice to make. the writing pays lip service to the fact that mulder is doing something that for mulder and scully counts as "extremely intrusive" by having mulder think that if scully slaps him he'll cope with it. as if his action is only going to burden him if it doesn't work out.
Hi, I'm Kind of Offended - 1/2
There is something about Jeylan's style that is kind of psychidelic and bizarre. Even so, there is also a loveliness to the way she describes things, blurring together sensations and emotions like watercolor. This fic is romantic in a sort of classic sense, but it isn't terribly schmoopy, which I like.
My opinion now: (certain parts bolded because, yeah, this is long, and i'm trying to help people find parts that are more to-the-point than others)
in hindsight, while i appreciate the uniqueness of the style this fic was written in, and part of the time i feel like Jeylan's mulder characterization is really wonderful, there's just too much that's off here and the more i look at it the more the off parts grow. things are off about scully, definitely, but also off about mulder, and that's something i find almost more offensive in the long run.
Jeylan's scully is a shrew, she really is. a beautiful shrew. she criticizes and hassels and pries into everything including but not exclusively mulder -- which would be perfectly tolerable if she also possessed the other traits that canon scully possesses: insight and patience and more underlying compassion than four people ought to have. but instead jeylan so often seems to be writing only the reserved and critical aspects of scully - not even recognizing the inherent justification for those aspects of her. mulder thinks longingly of the scully who first walked into the x-files office, and i find myself wondering if he even loves scully as she actually exists. he thinks he does, but he's longing for who he wants her to be, even while it is everything they've gone through together - everything they are to each other - that has evolved her into the scully who is there with him.
there are things that jeylan gets right about scully. i like the emphasis that jeylan places on scully's desire to 'fix' things, because i think that's true of her. her anxiety tends to stem from a desire for things to be "right". for scully there is safety in "rightness". but that one thing does not a characterization make.
mulder, on the other hand, spends much of this fic not realizing he is being selfish, insensitive, critical, and basically a chump. ironically, these are all the things he is seeing in scully. hey buddy, hypocritical much?
the way mulder is characterized in this fic it's as if he were two people. the mulder on the surface is sensitive and compassionate. he spends all his time philosophizing and reading poetry and feeling sad for just ebout everyone - wanting to transcend all the mundanity and the crap and just be free to be loving to scully and be loved in return. ya-da-ya-da-ya-da. upon first read i bought into this characterization of him big time. i dont, for the record, think that this mulder is faking his sensitivity or his desire to be loving. i believe he genuinely wants that. frankly, i think he's mainly too immature to realize how poorly he's managing it.
the other aspect of this mulder characterization is that he is passive-aggressively selfish, critical, and insensitive - particularly towards scully. he guiltlessly ignores her very serious accusation that he "messes with people's minds" in order to think about how great her ass is. he man-handles her (grabbing her by the waist to help her when she hasn't asked him to), then he makes a crack about how she is uncomfortable with him doing so because she "wants a man". he spends the entire fic thinking about all the things that scully's missing because she lacks innate sensitivity to the universe, and bemoaning how at odds he feels because she doesn't "get it". only to finally just decide that "now is the time" for him to make a move. because clearly it's his choice to make. the writing pays lip service to the fact that mulder is doing something that for mulder and scully counts as "extremely intrusive" by having mulder think that if scully slaps him he'll cope with it. as if his action is only going to burden him if it doesn't work out.