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

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

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.

Comments

[write-out.livejournal.com]

Yep, I was just going to post something almost exactly like this. Season 5 shitstorm indeed. I think the burning was just the final straw.

I didn't take anything Scully said (internally or outloud) as mean or bitchy. She's drunk, she's pissed, she's cracking jokes (working at a salon) and she's basically had enough.

[wendelah1]

Yeah, she's thoroughly pissed and pissed-off.

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

The next time I saw him I was
going to waste his skinny, wrinkled, dried up, hemorrhoid-ridden,
incontinent old ass. I was going to make him look down the barrel of my
Smith & Wesson and inhale lead.

Maybe I could write a
book about it and retire to a nice inbred, paranoid, provincial town in
Maine with killer dolls or something. I could write mysteries like
Patricia Cornwall, only I'd get the science right

That's feels pretty mean and bitchy to me(even if richly deserved). But yeah, she's drunk so there's no way to be sure if the mean streak I can feel here is just a product of her cracking bad jokes and being simply pissed off.

[write-out.livejournal.com]

To me that's just a pissed off and drunk Scully who's reached the end of her rope and not out of character meanness. (damn, maybe that means *I'm* a bitch!)