Story 111: "Melancholia" by Jeylan

[wendelah1]

"Melancholia" is one of the most unabashedly Romantic stories ever written in this fandom. It seems like it shouldn't work: an old, abandoned house, a graveyard in the rain, Mulder reading Marvell and Shelly and weaving a wreath of flowers for Scully's hair. Her Mulder is mercurial and Byronic, her Scully more earthbound. It's a love story for the ages.

Or is it?

Suggested by estella_c, seconded by me.

By all means, send the author feedback, and then let us know what you think. Suggestions for next time can be made at our nomination post. There is still plenty of time to read and comment on last week's Gutless", too.

"Melancholia"

Comments

[leucocrystal]

I have a very vague memory of this one (I'm sure it's been years now since I first read it), and the only thing that comes to mind when I think of it now is... "surreal". I remember not being quite sure of what to make of it, but wanting to bookmark it anyway (which I think I did). Clearly I'm due for a reread.

ETA: I definitely remember finding this endearing, and I still do on the reread: "Scully wandered around aimlessly, doing Scully things. Mulder sometimes watched her, and wondered about those things."

[maybe-amanda.livejournal.com]

ARGH!!!

I couldn`t get through The Watching Wall, I haven`t made it through Gutless despite my best effort, and I intensely dislike this story (which I beta`d).

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

[heartequals.livejournal.com]

I'm not finished with this yet, but I'm really curious what other people think of Mulder's internal monologue. I can't decide what I think of it. I'm not usually a fan of being privy to someone's thoughts but parts of this ring really, hysterically true for me. idk.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

Did I rec this? That was me? Okay.

There are things I like about Melancholia and things I don't. I'm concerned about explaining the latter without being called out for getting extra-textual and irrelevant.

This fic is a real change of pace, first, lushly romantic in a deliberately old-fashioned way, and that is--in leucocrystal's word--endearing. Multiple spring flowers, an abandoned book and graveyard evoking the past, two soon-to-be-lovers hanging out and eying each other. Mulder seems to be in a down mood about ever, ever making love to Scully, but that passes when he finally makes his desperate move. The sex is both soulful and erotic and actually just edgy enough to hold your attention firmly and leave you...unsettled.

Incidentally, Jeylan can write. No question about it. The woman has talent. Talent is the base line and then there's, well, agenda.

When I first read this I did feel an oddness in the characterization, though not enough to bother me. The oddness becomes focused, now that I (and most others) have heard about Jeylan's negative attitude toward Scully. Jeylan was more than a Mulderist; she was an anti-Scullyist. And I doubt that she would argue with that description.

As I've so often heard other's say about other fics, I just didn't recognize this Scully. Meaninglessly argumentative to begin with, then distracted by her imaginary residence-rehab, she doesn't seem at all the empathetic and bright person Gillian Anderson played. Mulder talks a lot about Scully's "typical" attitudes and behavior without convincing me that he really understands her at all. He's in love with her, all right, and he sure thinks she's pretty with the sun on her hair and all, and he solves his melancholy problem by jumping her bones. (The first thing he does is thrust his hand between her legs. That's pretty exciting. He does it several times--three?--and that was at least once too often.)

What is Scully doing all this time. What is she thinking? We don't actually know. She's enigmatically watching and waiting and straightening her poppy wreath and just generally, according to our restless narrator, giving off please-conform-and-be-sensible vibrations. Scully was, of course, the conforming and sensible memeber of the partnership. But I think Jeylan has pushed her into a passive parody of herself.

This makes Mulder's rough and determined approach to making love--to *force* Scully to react--a little squicky. It appears that she enjoys herself, she says so before she goes off to neaten up, but I get the feeling that we are meant to sympathize with Mulder's frustration, even at the very end, in having fallen in love with such a blank and self-absorbed individual.

Nope, Jeylan doesn't like Scully and finally did dispose of her fictionally and introduce Mulder to gay culture. ("The woman turned him gay.") So we part ways. Because I like Scully.

One last ironic point. We've talked a bit about poetic prose here, pro and con, without ever defining it. This story is *really* poetic, with whole passages from PB Shelley and others. That I liked. (Though not for every day.)

Hi, I'm Kind of Offended - 1/2

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

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 - 2/2

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

contd...

the entire time i was reading the fic, my sense of the "wrongness" of the mulder/scully dynamic grew. for the first half i was decidedly on the fic's side. the writing is pretty and unique. that goes a long way with me. and when mulder is by himself, or when he's only thinking about how beautiful scully is, his characterizations really works. but i was already not feeling very great about the fic's tone, when suddenly...--the sexy tiems started:

He was going to take this woman. Now. *Now.* He was going to fuck her, make love to her, make her cry out, make her toes curl and her head toss. He was going to bury himself in her warmth, and her wetness, and let his whole soul revel in it, in this shuddery on-ness, and awakeness, and aliveness -- this fleeting instant, this incalculable, extraordinary, fugitive fragment of LIFE -- stolen as it was out of the jaws of the earthen ponderous inertia of Time. This fragment of heaven -- This --

"Stop!" she said again, more distinctly.

Mulder slowed. He breathed a shaky breath.

"I don't want to stop," he said stubbornly.

hi, i'm OFFENDED. first of all, i am offended by this characterization of mulder - a mulder who thinks "I am going to take this woman and give her perfect sex". i don't have a problem with sex scenes in which the characters become voracious, half-unstrung. in fact, wow, hot. but this is not to be mistaken with that. here mulder isn't voraciously caught up in his passionate hunger. no, he wants to establish his sexual prowess. he wants to MAKE her enjoy it. it's not about them being together, it's about what he can do to MAKE it good for them. he wants to MAKE the moment perfect. her pleasure is about vindicating him. but secondly, i am offended by this fic's chauvinistic rubbish that has the nerve to disguise its mulder as some kind of "altruistic sexual and spiritual messiah".

"Happy, Scully? You like that?" He searched her eyes.

"You -- you have no idea," she whispered. "I -- I -- Mulder,
I --"

Tenderly he touched her lips; rediscovered himself in her eyes.
Amazed himself with touching her like this, and looking into her
eyes like this.

"You trying to tell me you love me, Scully?"

She nodded.

wow, that middle line would be really gorgeous and intimate in the context of a different fic with different characterizations. but has anyone noticed that the translation of this scene is as follows?:

Mulder: i strongly suspect i am a sex god.

Scully: mulder, you are a sex god! also, i-- i--

Mulder: i know intimacy is hard for you, scully, so let me just force you to your point, which is that you love me, right? good, that's what i thought.

if the context of the fic were different i might find it plausible that mulder was simply trying to make the situation easier for scully by taking the pressure off of her. in The Cannibal King and the Dusty Maid by Pan Gamble and Slippin' Mickeys, mulder says, "I love you," and then he looks at scully and she looks back and he says calmly, "you love me to." And it's gorgeous.

But this is Melancholia. the tone of this fic is, "oh scully, you can stop stammering now, i know you love me."

which i suppose ought to be unsurprising, considering that the underlying message of the fic up until that point seems to be, "Oh scully, you can stop ____ anytime. i love you."

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

I just want to say I love this discussion. I agree with all of it.

A celebratory moment like this comes very seldom in life. Bagels for all.

[enj412.livejournal.com]

I agree with many of the comments so far. "Melancholia" starts off very good, and I enjoy some of the Mulder introspection, but then it veers off into disturbing behavior. I can't imagine Mulder ever acting this way towards Scully- territorial, aggressive, forceful- it just isn't true to his character. The sex scene at the end is somewhat hot, but still tainted with all that came before it. I don't like the way Scully comes off in this story, and it is very apparent, even before I read these comments, that the author had an issue with the character. I also don't like the way she portrays the MSR. Thus, I have to disagree with the description introducing this story as "unabashedly romantic." I'd describe the story as controversial at best, and disturbing at worst. Just my two cents.

[bmerb.livejournal.com]

Squick squick squick. That line where Mulder jams his hand between Scully's legs when he goes for the very first kiss was so awful that I had to reread it several times to even believe it was written that way. That's a big ol' serving of NOPE with a side of hell no seasoned with some wtf were you thinking??

Sorry no. This reads less as an author that hates Scully and more as an author that hates women entirely or has internalized misogyny to a painful degree. Poetry and flowery language and location aside just hell to the no. A) the M and S I know and love would never ever behave like this, and B) I would prefer to avoid ANYONE who behaves like this version of Mulder.

Ok I think I made my feelings clear enough 😝