xf_book_club | Story 162: "Inventing the Mulders" by prufrock's love

Entry tags:

Story 162: "Inventing the Mulders" by prufrock's love

Last year, something remarkable happened. Prufrock's love, a beloved but famously reclusive author, started re-posting her fanfic to archive them at Gossamer. Understandably, this caused quite a stir. In the wake of losing so many XF fanfic sites over the past several years, a process accelerated by Yahoo's closure of Geocities, it showed a lot of love for a fandom she had presumably left behind long ago. Well, that's how I choose to interpret it, anyway. She hasn't re-posted everything by any means, but hey, it's a start.

"Inventing the Mulders" is one of the stories she hasn't archived yet, or at least it hasn't shown up on her page at Gossamer. This is a shame since I think it's one of her best. It's an unsentimental look at how season nine might have played out, had it been better written and still had David Duchovny making an occasional appearance. Do I betray my biases? So be it.

Besides archiving her fic, she's posted an email address. You can send feedback now to prufrockslove [at] yahoo [dot] com. Please do so, then come back and let us know what you think.

The story is PG-13, no warnings. Read Inventing the Mulders.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't believe in Soul Mates, myself.

This development does put a huge dent in their partnership, one which I doubt either of them could have foreseen. The truth is until you've had a kid, you have no idea how disruptive it will be. I sincerely believe Scully wanted a life, and in particular, that she wanted a kid. In this story, I believe she asked Mulder to donate sperm, with the proviso that she would take full responsibility for raising him, and Mulder agreed to those terms. In The Thirteenth Sign, he describes this scenario, so I think this is how prufrock sees the baby issue. So in this universe, the IVF worked and then Mulder got abducted. He came back before William was born and they got together shortly after the birth, when "the terms changed," and he "got to be a real father." I think the terms of their agreement were clear until she decided Mulder was "the love of her life shortly after giving birth to his child." "When he was acting sickeningly romantic," she adds rather sarcasticly. No, I don't think she can ask for things to change. She has chosen a different path. And really, he chose it too as soon as he agreed to make a baby with her. No matter how it came about, there are no do-overs in parenting. You've got the kid, and short of Scully's extreme solution to the William problem, someone has to be there to feed him dinner, read him a story and tuck him in. Keep him safe. She's at Quantico because it works better for parenting.

I'm not really disagreeing with anything you're saying. They are playing out exactly the scenario that would have happened if 1013 had a clue as to how real life worked. The strategic decision was made back when they agreed to make a kid, it's just that it didn't work out the way either of them expected it would. That's life for you.

Edited 2011-05-25 02:52 (UTC)

The strategic decision was made back when they agreed to make a kid

But making one strategic decision (to have a child) does not mean the capacity for future strategic decisions stops or is lessened. Scully is just sort of enduring in ITM. Instead of them both being in constant communication, making it so that Scully can 'fight the future' from DC while Mulder is away - making it so that they're both more informed and effective - they're just throwing themselves along on their seperate paths.

she is not at the mercy of Mulder...she is not little Starbuck with Daddy

She's not at the mercy of Mulder, no, but all the things they've both worked so hard for and given so much for have now become his responsibility. She's at the mercy of her circumstances, and in ITM she doesn't do much to change that. She takes the passive role of waiting, yearning, asking futile questions about how long Mulder will be gone.

And if you want to argue that the only way to raise a child is to put everything else, no matter how important, far on the backburner, that's one opinion, but many parents will disagree. Not that I envy Scully her position. It's a tremendously difficult position and by wanting her to fight the future and be a mother I know I'm asking a lot of her. But my Scully never stops fighting, no matter what, and I don't believe ITM puts her in a position where she has to.

And if you want to argue that the only way to raise a child is to put everything else, no matter how important, far on the backburner, that's one opinion, but many parents will disagree.

I don't think that's what I'm saying. Scully still has to work for a living. She still has to do the work she's getting paid for. Now she has another job, being a single parent to William. There are only so many hours in the day. I think what she's enduring is the separation from Mulder. She's lonely. Does she think about colonization? Does she still see it as a threat? That's a good question. If she did, would she still have wanted to have a kid?

Not that I envy Scully her position. It's a tremendously difficult position and by wanting her to fight the future and be a mother I know I'm asking a lot of her.

Plenty of women are working and raising kids on their own in this country, with very little help from anyone. I don't know what it's like in Canada. One problem is I'm not really clear what "fighting the future" looks like in this scenario of prufrock's or even what Mulder does when he disappears for months at a time. But that's not what this story is about.

But my Scully never stops fighting, no matter what, and I don't believe ITM puts her in a position where she has to.

Yes, and I respect that. I like that version of Scully, too. I'm just not sure that canon!Scully is as committed to the fight as we'd like her to be. Prufrock's Scully feels much more like the woman who could have ended up in a Catholic hospital working as a pediatric neurologist or whatever she was doing in IWTB.

As much as I loved Machines of Freedom," particularly the way it wove together the most problematic elements of canon into a coherent narrative, I thought the amount of responsibility Amal put on Scully's shoulders was, to say the least, unrealistic. Mulder wants a kid so she has one. Okay. She is still working full time up until a few weeks before delivery. Hard, but doable, even in your forties. In her spare time, she's organizing the counterinsurgency? Well, it's no wonder she got a Nobel Prize...

It depends a lot on how realistic you want things to be. The X-files (as Wendelah pointed out earlier) is not big on realism, but that's one thing. Fanfic is another. And in this universe Prufrock has taken a realistic (yet still heroic) take on the Mulder/Scully day-to-day reality.

And if you want to argue that the only way to raise a child is to put everything else, no matter how important, far on the backburner, that's one opinion, but many parents will disagree.

No absolutely not. many of us have tried to raise children on the sort of basis that they fit into your life, not you into theirs. Except that this quickly turns unrealistic. So in the unreal world, yes, Scully can be a great parent, a great FBI agent, a great partner...effective, loyal, brave and capable - but in the setting of the realist context of this story, that would not be feasible. What happens if you try to have too many roles in life? you are good at none and rubbish at all. Scully, here, knows this and has chosen where her focus might lie. But Mulder has chosen a different set of priorities (I hasten to add, in my view not necessarily wrong within the context of his choices) and herein lies the rub.

But if we want un-realism, then sure, the whole ITM universe is mundane and relatively pedestal-denting. I think most of us got hooked onto the X-files mostly because , whilst still retaining entirely human characters, it represented the opposite of the every-day, it stretched the imagination - and ITM pulls all of that AU charge out of it and puts it into a very RL scenario. Which still could, in my view, be a valid springboard for typical M/S heroic and above-us-all antics in a rational Season 9.

Actually don't think anyone is disagreeing with anyone really. It's just about realism versus....the opposite. Pru gives us a chance to see the X-files through credible RL lenses which is rare in (good) fanfic and probably unheard of in Canon. It merits this sort of discussion.

Actually, I'm not sure that Mulder has entirely chosen his priorities...according to him, in this story, they have partially been chosen for him ,in his perception, by Scully. To whatever extent he might be getting that wrong as a result of him and Scully being at crossroads in their lives, it is not at the expense of their equality of partnership or human beings.

I agree that it's more about how much realism a person wants in her version of the story, though I do disagree with the insistance that Scully can't be a parent and fight the good fight. Wendelah's clearly right that there are only so many hours in a day, and I think that if Scully is working as a full time ME then it's going to be very nearly impossible for her to fit anything else into her life but that and parenting. But I see no reason for her to be working full time, and we have every reason to believe that there are much more important (globally effecting) issues at hand.

I agree that only a truly remarkable person could have a hope of being "a great parent, a great FBI agent, a great partner...effective, loyal, brave and capable -" while fighting to potentially save humanity from global disaster. But I don't believe it's impossible. It's improbably - deeply, deeply unlikely. But I never watched this show to see normal, regular, or average. Which is really what you're saying too, I guess. I'm just quibbling with the difference between "can't be done" and "probably can't be done", because if I was asking Scully to do something that was truly impossible then I would...well, I wouldn't do that. I do like a basic degree of realism in my texts, even if I prefer idealism over all.

Actually, I'm not sure that Mulder has entirely chosen his priorities...

Yeah, this is an interesting distinction, and one that I don't think the show ever really cleared up for us either. Many fans (particularly Scullyists) resent S9 Mulder for choosing to leave, because the show never really did anything to convince us of the necessity that he leave. It never told us what he was doing out there. I've always been of the mind that whatever he was doing (or at least trying to accomplish) was something that had to be done, and therefore he was doing the right thing by leaving, despite what it cost him (them).

Anyway, ITM puts us right back in that same S9 boat, with everybody kind of floundering.

I guess I should add that if it comes down to saving the world or being a great parent, I'm going to choose saving the world. Especially since by saving the world you're saving your own child too.

So maybe my argument, as its core, is not that Scully can be a great mom and a resistance fighter. Maybe she can and maybe she can't, but mainly my argument is that if she has to be a poor mom in order to fight, I still think that's the right choice.

Which is why I find S9, IWTB, and fics like ITM kind of beside the point. Though I appreciate ITM in a way I don't appreciate S9, because it is realistic, because it makes the most of S9, and because it does find (make) poignance even in the relative mundanity.

Edited 2011-05-26 23:49 (UTC)

guess I should add that if it comes down to saving the world or being a great parent, I'm going to choose saving the world. Especially since by saving the world you're saving your own child too.

That is actually a very brave and honest thing to say and deserves a response in the like: I don't think many parents could actually, when push came to shove, agree with it. In the abstract maybe, but not in reality. More imaginable perhaps if you had pushed a kid out that you hadn't particularly wanted or planned for, but Scully had.And Scully just wasn't the sort of person (think Emily) that would not take that responsibility enormously seriously. Typically she would end up being a better parent than most of us mere mortals would ever hope to be (although a little bit OTT on the "William's got a fever front").

For Scully to be a parent prepared to sacrifice her own child for the sake of the fight? That to me would make a Scully that I couldn't understand and hard to condone. To the extent that the very fact that she gives him up in S9, without apparently any attempt to find an alternative solution, is at once so unrealistic and so damning of her...

except we know Scully, and know this is outrageously OOC: that it is not her, that the fault lies squarely with those in command of the show, which makes us realize that by S9 they had really completely lost the plot.

And of course it wasn't the only completely ridiculous thing to happen in S9. I don't expect realism in my shows but I do expect some sort of fidelity to character and ambience and it failed on nearly every count. Some of the photography was good though....

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Story 162: "Inventing the Mulders" by prufrock's love

Realism MSR

Re: Realism MSR

Re: Realism MSR

Re: Realism MSR

Re: Realism MSR

Re: Realism MSR

Re: Realism MSR

Re: Realism MSR