Thanks again, amyhit, for the plotwork. Give the girl a raise. It's hard stuff, and helpful when crafting some kind of opinion. I should reread this, but...never mind.
I admire this fic extremely--it's a hard one to love--because as noted it's very faithful to the underplayed, elliptical, nonshippy casefile adventures of the early years. There's banter, there's suspense, and the plot twists and turns in a genuinely mystifying way. I think of it as circling, spiraling through various characters and times and places to a blunt, still understated conclusion. That it takes a certain laissez faire attitude to feel that the plot points cohere does not bother me. Partly I am willing to trust a writer who demonstrates such obvious control. Partly I don't mind being mystified. In a sense the love of horror fiction is a temporary submission to the Dark Side, which is always beyond our understanding and will usually defeat us. Good horror fiction--oh, hell, all of it--has a quasi-religious quality. We are in over our heads. We might drown.
I'm looking at that ending. Mulder is doomed. It is *very* fast-and-over. I felt unprepared for it because, well, our heroes are hardly every doomed in fanfic. Not in fanfic with detective work. Not in fics with banter! That can't be right.
Mulder is going to become a Mulder-monster. The idiot encountered the goo and lost. Scully tried to, did, save him, but it doesn't matter because they're never going to get to that FBI ball. They'll never have sex. The casefiles are over.
It's awful. I hate it. But only a writer this good could make me thrill to it at the same time. Those dead and madness-manufactured sparrows: I can see them falling and it's poetic. (And how often does an actual poetic allusion of a title play out in literal terms? Cool.)
ESF makes me think of "The Crouching Thing." But bigger, plottier, and...with banter. The combination of light and heavy tones sells the horror.
Oh, coincidence? Without it fiction couldn't exist, though critics still dislike it. Lately I've become convinced that we encounter coincidences every day but seldom slow down enough to notice. Whether they are part of a great underlying plot, who can judge?
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winterfish
no subject
Date: 2012-02-16 09:44 pm (UTC)I admire this fic extremely--it's a hard one to love--because as noted it's very faithful to the underplayed, elliptical, nonshippy casefile adventures of the early years. There's banter, there's suspense, and the plot twists and turns in a genuinely mystifying way. I think of it as circling, spiraling through various characters and times and places to a blunt, still understated conclusion. That it takes a certain laissez faire attitude to feel that the plot points cohere does not bother me. Partly I am willing to trust a writer who demonstrates such obvious control. Partly I don't mind being mystified. In a sense the love of horror fiction is a temporary submission to the Dark Side, which is always beyond our understanding and will usually defeat us. Good horror fiction--oh, hell, all of it--has a quasi-religious quality. We are in over our heads. We might drown.
I'm looking at that ending. Mulder is doomed. It is *very* fast-and-over. I felt unprepared for it because, well, our heroes are hardly every doomed in fanfic. Not in fanfic with detective work. Not in fics with banter! That can't be right.
Mulder is going to become a Mulder-monster. The idiot encountered the goo and lost. Scully tried to, did, save him, but it doesn't matter because they're never going to get to that FBI ball. They'll never have sex. The casefiles are over.
It's awful. I hate it. But only a writer this good could make me thrill to it at the same time. Those dead and madness-manufactured sparrows: I can see them falling and it's poetic. (And how often does an actual poetic allusion of a title play out in literal terms? Cool.)
ESF makes me think of "The Crouching Thing." But bigger, plottier, and...with banter. The combination of light and heavy tones sells the horror.
Oh, coincidence? Without it fiction couldn't exist, though critics still dislike it. Lately I've become convinced that we encounter coincidences every day but seldom slow down enough to notice. Whether they are part of a great underlying plot, who can judge?