xf_book_club | Story 183: "All the Children Are Insane" by MustangSally

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Story 183: "All the Children Are Insane" by MustangSally

In The X-Files fandom there are debatably no two authors more closely associated in the minds of fanfic readers than RivkaT, the author of our last fic, and MustangSally, who are indelibly linked by their co-authorship of "Iolokus". Which is why this week we're going to be reading "All the Children Are Insane," perhaps MustangSally's most widely read solo fic.

It's a vignette set in the summer after S5, with sex, angst, and the burnt-office base notes of existential crisis. The posting date stamp on "All The Children Are Insane" is June 18th 1998, just one day before Fight the Future hit theaters. To me the writing has always hummed with the captured tension of that summer, the fever pitch of fannish excitement and anxiety.

All the Children Are Insane

mustangsally78 is still around; sending feedback never hurts. And as always, our recommendations thread is over here.

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Oh, I love this story. Love love love it! I will elaborate in a couple of days (I have classes the next two nights and a ton of related reading I am procrastinating on this very minute)- I just wanted to drop a quick note to commit to commenting in more depth on this one. I know I've been absent from the past few stories here.

I will say I have a hard time with her Scully voice. I spent the first part of this fic trying to figure out who the character was because, well, it didn't fit my feeling of Scully. I thought maybe it was Skinner or Kryjek, and then I figured it out. I just don't see Scully being so foul-mouthed and hard. It just doesn't fit Scully, to me.

Ooooh, I remember loving that one, but I don't remember much about it. Off to re-read it now.

Hi! The numbering is off. This should be 183.

So after re-reading this...I still like it, but not as much as I first did.

This Scully has a mighty bee in her bonnet - an angry, crude inner voice that swears like a sailor. She's pretty remote from the soft spoken, compassionate woman from the show who only swears in time of crisis.

This is indeed Iolokus Scully's twin on a bad, kick in the balls, day.

But if you accept this OTT portrayal then you can sit back and enjoy the ride. And there's a lot to enjoy in this fic. It is extremely well written and the descriptions sparkle like fireworks, branding images vividly in your head. Mulder feels more or less 'right' to me. The paper bag comment was pretty insensitive, but this is not something I would put past him.

Sometimes it gets a bit much, the metaphors and simile arrive at machine gun pace to the point of ruining the overall effect. Less is more. It feels that sometimes the writer is trying to cram too many things at once, maybe to maintain the sense of urgency, but for the reader this is akin to sensory overload. Of course this could be just me, I like words in the stories I read to have room to breathe and expand to their full potential. I have a similar issue with Penumbra's Parabiosis.

This food is just a a tad too rich for my taste.

And yet, there's a lot to love in this ATCAI. It's so rare to read smut that doesn't make you want to burst out laughing or cringe or roll your eyes. And nobody writes smut as evocativelly as MustangSally (and RivkaT)do IMO. The only thing that didn't work for me was Scully saying "Don't screw around and fuck me" which I SO can't hear coming out of Scully's mouth. Not like this at any rate.

Anyway. This was a beautiful line:

Her throat has precisely the same arch as a well-thrown curve ball.

This was damn hot:

Hot breath stirs the delicate
cilia inside my head and sends the short hairs on the back of my neck
into attack mode.

"Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," she says in a voice that would not
have been out of place on a 900 number.

Underneath it all she is a swan, white and lithe against the black water of the sofa

Okay this is a bit overkill, but can't you just see Scully lying naked on the couch so perfectly with this image? Because I can.

There are many other lines I could quote that worked extremely well, but it would take too long.

IIRC the term "slow motion pornography" was declared one of the hottest line of fanfiction of all time, by my fellow UK Philes back in the days.

I'm not saying that everything works in the sex scenes. All that Everest stuff with Sherpas kinda kill the impact of the moment and could have done with a good trim - as many other lines could have, but it's a whole lot more hits than misses.

And the ending is incredibly bittersweet. I'm not ready

Voila.

Edited 2011-10-18 17:45 (UTC)

Love this story! Yeah, Scully might seem OOC initially. However, I agree with

badforthefish's comment above that this is a harsher, flintier Scully, but still *Scully* at the core. (That said, I do have issues with Scully in Iolokus, but in this story I can put them aside and buy Scully here pretty much without reservation.)

There are lots of great lines and moments here, but I think my favorites outside of the actual smut are these:

"What's the matter?"

"I can't get it in."

It hits me that this is perhaps the funniest thing that I have ever said
in my life and I start to laugh the laugh of a drunk. Scully's disgust
melts after a moment and I realize that she is grinning at me through her
streaked face.

"You should have taken it out to dinner first, bought it a few drinks,
whispered sweet nothings in its ear."

"What are sweet nothings?"

Her hand grabs the arm of my sodden jacket and pulls me down so my ear is
scant millimeters away from her face. Hot breath stirs the delicate
cilia inside my head and sends the short hairs on the back of my neck
into attack mode.

"Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," she says in a voice that would not
have been out of place on a 900 number.

I can totally see that scene in my head.

This has always been one of my smutty, dark favorites. It's not even remotely a sappy story, but I still sense an undercurrent of love and bottom line, Mulder and Scully feel authentic to me.

Bad for the Fish and Write Out have both referenced the M/S interchange that I consider the most erotic one in our lore. "Nothing, nothing, nothing" indeed. It just occurred to me that this touches the nihilism at the heart of the show. Except for the idealism. Oh, never mind. I'm sure MA never considered that. We are sex scene bound!

Mustang Sally's stories--I also love the lighter and earlier "Diamonds and Rust" and "An Everlasting Kiss"--introduced me to fanfic I really got. I want happy endings but I love bad language and rough sex. And how could we get two overtrained fibbies to that point? Booze. More booze. Everyone off the hook and into the abyss.

For some reason a tough-talking Scully has never bothered me. And this sexual encounter, a matter of lowered inhibitions, comfort, but mainly overdue lust, is perfectly to my taste. I do realize, on the reread, that it's kind of a careless story. It's made up of genius lines ("And the great ship split in half and sank into the North Atlantic") and lines that could have used an editor's smoothing hand ("...her teeth scoring the sides of my throat, my shoulders, and her nails nip into the jumping muscles in my ass"). MA is not waiting for editors. She's bound for the Big O.

I actually think the carelessness is in a kind of keeping with the crazy transgressiveness that marked the work of this writer and her frequent partner. They were the break-outs, the outliers, the ones who insisted and demonstrated that pornography without exciting language was pornography without excitement.

I agree that the exaggerated images bump into each other, and that the humor and the serious shipsex ("The great ship") sometimes argue. It's careless language and careless sex. But it sure as hell worked then, and in my opinion it still works.

Incidentally, I could have sworn that there is another ending version somewhere that mentions the hangover fairy. Can anyone recall?

There is a lot I love about this story, but I'll echo a few complaints first.

The metaphors do get a bit much - the Sherpa line was fine for me actually - it was just the right amount of humor for me. One example of one that did not work for me was "I am shaking like a paint mixer at Home Depot" I think the product placement feel to that line threw me off. :-P

The sex scene is a little silly, but it also doesn't take itself quite so seriously. There are a few tropes, but it also feels fairly tongue in cheek.

Also one of the first few lines threw me on the identity of Scully was: "I feel like I'm back in 'Nam." It reads like they meant to start with Skinner, changed their mind and then never changed the line - it could also be tongue in cheek I suppose, but it was a bit too jarring for me for that.

I love a lot of the language and lyricism the most.

Examples:

"I read too much.

"I think too much.

"I talk entirely too much.

"I do nothing."

and I also like:

"Maybe she can't smile anymore, maybe they took that away from her too. They took her future, and now they've taken mine, but you can't weigh oocytes with paper files - it isn't a fair trade."

Plus the pace of the story is a lot of fun, it surges ahead quickly, which for me allows the metaphors to fall quickly without too much thought and analysis. The second read reminded me of a few that stuck out by the first read was smoother.

I also like that Mulder and Scully feel as though they are seething and hardened in this. I did not catch this story back in the day, but it's exactly the kind of raging that I wanted after The End. The stunned silence in the episode is lovely too, but I wanted the rougher part of the mourning, and this fits the bill quite nicely.

I'm not sure what I have to say about this fic that everyone else hasn't already been saying. Um…

I am definitely not wild about this Scully characterization. If she were simply darker and more cynical than canon Scully (a la Iolokus) it would be fine. I think what strikes me as totally off about this Scully is that she actually comes off as gruff and even a bit crass. And I am just never, ever going to buy a crass Scully.

They don't brief you on the etiquette of female macho when you join up with the Bureau.

Maybe this is a part of the problem, this idea of Scully as someone who is, or is trying to be 'macho'. That's just not Scully to me.

I think the only part of the first section, before the POV change, that I like, is Scully thinking that at by having limes in her vodka tonic at least she's getting some vitamin C.

In the last section, the remainder of her POV, I still have trouble with how she's written. The urgency of the sex scene is hot, and I like the fact that it's hard and fast, and that Scully comes at a touch, because I think that's in keeping with the situation. Mulder says, Jesus, who would have thought that she was wired this tight? But of course they're both 'wound this tight'; they've both spent the last five years in relentless pursuit of answers and closure they never get, denied satisfaction, and now the evidence of all their efforts has been destroyed. It's the tension of existential crisis, but in an instant they switch to sexual crisis, like a train switching tracks without slowing down.

But like

badforthefish, I found the whole Everest/Sherpas/avalanche metaphor a bit of a mood killer. That just - wow - that is a really bad sexual metaphor. Especially coming from Scully, who doesn't strike me as someone who tends to think in extended metaphors at the most casual of times. (Too sloppy and indulgent for left-brain Scientist Scully who tends more towards clarity, direction, and precision.)

Mulder's section of ATCAI, on the other hand, I like a lot more. I like the entire first paragraph, except for maybe the part about him shooting up the FBI management meeting. I don't think Mulder would ever do that. But then I guess I can't blame the guy for thinking about it. I especially like, I'm going to have to get a lobotomy to deal with this; anti-depressants are just not going to do the job. This isn't just Mulder being drole, it actually rings true.

Oblivious to my dark thoughts, Scully taps along next to me, playing Ganymede to my Cassio. Or whoever. The 12th Night brain cells are not responding to anything coming from the server.

I have to Wiki this. I Like it a lot, just by the sound of it, but I'm not really sure what it means.

I find it adorable that Mulder and Scully are both walking the walk of the severely inebriated, but that Scully pulls it off better because she's shorter and therefore her wobbling is not as apparent.

They took her future, and now they've taken mine, but you can't weigh oocytes with paper files - it isn't a fair trade.

Can we all just pretend that it's canon Mulder thinking this line? Because man, about half of my issues with Mulder could be alleviated seriously by his simple acknowledgment of this. In fact, this entire paragraph is great. There are still tape marks on Mulder's window, and he claims you can't break down a door as many times as his has been, without having lingering lock issues. There's a theme here: damage, trauma, the marks left behind, the long-term effects of present wounds and actions. Chalk this up as my favorite paragraph of the fic.

Mulder then proceeds to think in a series of really awesome metaphors/similes:

Her throat has precisely the same arch as a well-thrown curve ball.

Underneath it all she is a swan, white and lithe against the black water of the sofa

The fur between her legs feels like a wet rabbit skin against my thigh, and I reach down between the white lines of her thighs to where she is wetter than the rain and hot as spilled blood.

I think MS may overdo it a bit with the literary devices, and some of them do kind of break the mood (if you want your sex scene to be hot, it's never a good idea to have the guy thinking of himself as a baboon, because then the reader will think of him as a baboon, and that will effectively render him repulsive, at least momentarily), but most of them are pretty great. I particularly like the animalistic theme, with Mulder likening Scully to a swan, and then a rabbit, and Scully likening Mulder to a cat with a mouse when he bites her neck in orgasm.

My second favorite part of ATCAI, and the most memorable moment, for me, is the one

write_out already quoted, beginning in the hall outside Mulder's apartment with him saying "I can't get it in," and ending with Scully whispering "Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," in Mulder's ear. They are so very quintessentially two drunk people in this scene, and it's vivid and sexy, but also kind of horrible and mortifying. If it were canon I'd hate it, but since I get to wipe the slate clean as soon as the fic is over, their reckless, messy, ill-considered abandon is kind of thrilling.

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I also like the idea of what's going on here - that they've gone out to some random bar to get horribly, blind drunk because their circumstances are just that bad. At this moment there's nothing for them to hold themselves responsible for, there's nothing for them to be noble and virtuous (in the classic, 'thou shalt not' sense of the word) - self-controlled and self-denying - for. And then they fuck each other, essentially for the same reason. The fact that I don't think canon Mulder and Scully would do this actually makes me more intrigued with the idea of it. On the show, we jumped right from the burnt office to FTF, and in classic Chris Carter fashion, any and all emotional reactions that Mulder and Scully had to the destruction of their office - which by that point was basically their raison d'etre - were carelessly side stepped. We all saw and felt the devastation in the last scene of The End, but that was as far as it went. ATCAI really drives home the reality of what's just happened and the enormous effect it has on Mulder and Scully.

I've always considered The X-Files a show with three essential elements - Mulder, Scully, and The Work - each of which being of equal importance. The season finale for S5 was the first (and only) season to destroy one of those elements. Yes, Mulder had seemed to be dead at the end of S2, and at the end of S4, but most people knew rationally that he wasn't really gone. The End destroyed The Work in a permanent way. There was real and monumental loss, which is how it should have been portrayed, for more than just thirty seconds at the end of S5.

Ultimately it's that feeling of existential crisis, shock and haplessness and the suppressed violence of their desperation, that I value in this fic. And the fact that it was written that summer, before FTF, is very important to my enjoyment of the fic. It's a piece of X-Fileana, something penned at a precise moment in x-files history, when the past and the future had both been razed to the ground, and once again nothing was certain, everything was forced into transition, and anything was possible.

OUCH!

wendelah1 messaged me that you guys were talking about All the Children are Insane and I lurked by last night to see what was going on and I feel suitably embarrassed. It's like looking at my junior high photographs and trying to figure out *why* I thought polyester disco was a good look for me!

In retrospect, AfCaI seems *so* purple and for that I am heartily sorry! I wish I could plead that I was young when I wrote it - but I was about 31 when I wrote it. I might have been drunk, I wrote a lot of fic when I was drunk back in the day, but I don't recall being shitfaced when I wrote that one. I was often crocked when I was working on Iolokus! What I did intend was a very rough and angry Scully*. I never could understand how serene she could be while all these horrible things were happening to her and around her. I know I would have been seethingly angry the whole time. I did intend it to be sordid and ugly - my initial image was sex on the sofa with one foot dragging on the floor and it just being ugly and sordid.

Both Rivka and I set out to intentionally subvert many of the tropes that were endemic in the fandom at the time - saintly Scully, damaged Mulder (anorexic, cutting, masochistic, whatever) e - and the drunken sex being another. Drunken sex was right up there with the shared hotel room.

Seriously, I think I wrote AtCaI over a day or two without a serious beta and it was never structurally sound enough to handle this much examination! It was all about exciting and enraging people and it was fun to write and fun to put the cat among the pigeons as the case may be!

Strangely enough, I saw someone mention Sherlock in the comments and that made me laugh - I'd been playing with an idea of writing a girl!Watson fic and realized that it was just the XFiles and I'd done that already.

But thank all of you for still giving a shit about something that was written so long ago with so little thought. I'm feeling the love here!

*and the swearing like a sailor part was my Mary Sue talking!

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Hindsight is 20/20