Story 199: "Dance Card" by Sab (Sabine)

[wendelah1]

After reading "Five Things That Never Happened to Dana Scully" last week, it seems appropriate that this week's offering is also about a "road not taken." Since three members separately expressed some interest in reading it, and because Sabine is an accomplished and entertaining writer, "Dance Card" is now on our dance card.

SUMMARY: The road not taken.
NOTE: This is a true story, sorta. I mean, it happened to me, not Scully, but I figured I'd plug her in to the game and see how she played it out. So that's where it stops being a true story, but those little snowy highways and dogwoods and mistakes do exist, ten, fifteen years later. Oh, and in answer to your question, yes, I did write another story with another guy Scully meets named Paul. It's a good all-purpose name; whatcha gonna do? Album and book publication dates verified with Borders.com, Amazon.com, and Cdnow.com, so they should all be correct. German translations c/o Altavista's Babelfish; let me know if they got it wrong. All "chalking" quotes copyright J. Wilson Kello, with whom I spent four years of college chalking. He is not Paul.

That will all make sense after you read the story, I promise. "Dance Card" has two sequels: "What Happened After That" and "Moonshine," which could be subtitled "What Happened After What Happened After That." The links are all to Gossamer under "Sabine" if the links get broken; the first and third are also at Fugues Fiction Archive. Discussion on any and all of the three is welcome. Sab is iamsab here and Sab at AO3, but alas, these stories have never been re-posted to either location.

Leave feedback, leave suggestions, and come back for discussion, which is still ongoing for the last two fics we read, by the way. You guys are awesome.

Read "Dance Card".

Read "What Happened After That".

Read "Moonshine".

Comments

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

I want a wide-open Scully and a wide-open Mulder.

Are you suggesting there are no characterizations of Scully that you don’t like? No characterizations of Mulder that just don’t do it for you? I think past fanfic discussions would contradict that.

It's almost as though you all have such a fixed notion of Scully, for your own psychological/aesthetic purposes, that you've put her into a complicated cage. […] We have all quoted "extreme possibilities" endlessly but you give our characters specific backstories that almost function like straitjackets.

In saying this, you are disapproving of everyone else’s Mulders and Scullys. Apparently your opinion is the only one that is fair to the characters, and you propose to fully embrace any and all characterizations. Yet you don’t embrace ours? How does that work?

My appreciation of a character is not unconditional. If I changed Dana Scully around enough, she could be anyone. More relevantly, if I changed any character around enough, they would stop being themselves. And that’s true for ever character, in the eyes of every fan there is. Call it a fanonical invariant.

You say that you feel our opinions regarding the nature of Scully’s character are “very reductive”. But I don’t see the point in caring about anything if you don’t want to actually understand what it is you’re caring about. Now I know XF fanon fairly well. I’ve read a lot of fanfic and I generally remember what I read well enough. I know that fanon Scully - our Scully, the one we all share, the akashic Scully if you will *g* – is vast and amorphous and she has as many facets as have ever been dreamed up. But my Scully is not so very amorphous, in fact she’s quite shapely, though still with a bit of healthy leeway.

If I only got pleasure out of reading about my Scully, I would not be here and I would never have been here because 99 out of 100 stories would bore me or annoy me. But if I wasn’t interested in understanding my Scully more fully and completely, I also wouldn’t be here. So your accusation (it was one) that I’m somehow enslaving the character(s) is equally as baffling as your proposal that I ought not to have opinions about characterization lest I cripple creativity and repress enjoyment.

Frankly, the very thing that makes discussing fanfic so uniquely fun and stimulating is that within a particular fandom, every fic can be compared and contrasted in so many ways. Unlike original fiction, in which what’s there on the page is everything, with fanfiction what’s there on the page is like one mirror in a huge hall of mirrors, at the center of which is canon. Not formulating opinions about characterization would be like looking at the page and saying, this is all there is, it does not reflect anything at all.

[wendelah1]

Frankly, the very thing that makes discussing fanfic so uniquely fun and stimulating is that within a particular fandom, every fic can be compared and contrasted in so many ways. Unlike original fiction, in which what’s there on the page is everything, with fanfiction what’s there on the page is like one mirror in a huge hall of mirrors, at the center of which is canon. Not formulating opinions about characterization would be like looking at the page and saying, this is all there is, it does not reflect anything at all.

I agree with your comment 100%, from start to finish. The mirror in a huge hall of mirrors imagery is really striking, by the way.

If I only got pleasure out of reading about my Scully, I would not be here and I would never have been here because 99 out of 100 stories would bore me or annoy me.

We have some members here who do only get pleasure out of stories that faithfully recreate their idea of "canon Scully" and "canon Mulder" and canon in general. For the most part, they don't attempt stories that aren't strictly canon-compliant. Personally, I'm okay with that, although I admit I found it perplexing at first.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

I also loved amyhit's hall of mirrors metaphor. It is beautiful, apart from anything else, and makes me think of the ending to Humbug. But it points up how really impossible-dream the characterization issue is in practical terms. Because canon in itself is a hall of mirrors.

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

I want a wide-open Scully and a wide-open Mulder.

Don't we all dear. *sniggers*

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

I believe the dirty-mind fairy blessed you in your bassinette.