I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on why exactly, but this fic somehow doesn’t feel quite like it’s written in this fandom. As diverse as the fanfic in this fandom is, there’s a certain feeling that most of it has (or that I get from it, anyway), and this fic just feels different.
It’s a bit beautiful, introspective but spare (a rare combination), but the strange feeling of dissonance between what I’m used to from MSR and the way this fic embodies MSR has always been the most interesting part, for me.
They’re businessy, this Mulder and Scully. Their intelligence feels functional. They’re mature people doing their mature-people jobs, and the strangeness of their lives/careers is only background, where usually it’s part of the foreground. This Mulder and Scully could just as well be feds in some non-bizarre division. The fic doesn’t seek to reinforce our connection with the x-filean. It’s focusing on the characters as professionals, partners, lovers, exhausted people, afraid of the future (death) – having sex at the end of long days.
The tone of their relationship is casual, yet it’s also weighty – a strange permutation in a fic genre that it dominated by “serious and weighty” and “serious but fluffy” and “serious but porny”. Where your typical MSR has the UST dance followed by some combination of sex and The Feelings Talk leading to RST, this fic has sex followed by…um…life stuff, and sex, and life stuff, and sex, and eventually Mulder and Scully both figure the relationship out from their own separate corners and meet in the middle, which is as close as it gets to RST.
"How do we undo this?" she asks one night, curled against him in a tangle of sheets.
Mulder’s hands, which were lazily moving over her stomach, stop. "Do you want to?"
She thinks a minute before she pushes her back against his chest and says, "No. But I think it’s a valid question."
He tightens his grip. "I don’t think there’s a valid answer."
I find this conversation both unusual and believable. Atypical pillow talk, that’s for certain, but I like it. I like that in this fic they can have this somewhat abstracted moment of discussing what they’re doing, without needing to flood a bunch of emotion into it. The emotion’s there – it’s just not carrying them. They’re thinking their way through this as far as the thinking will help.
Also, I think this quality of the fic – the way Scully seems to be watching and doing at the same time – plays in well to the idea that she knows she may be dying. On the surface, her illness plays such a disproportionately small part in the fic (another way this fic isn’t like most of its kind), but I think the way Scully is characterized speaks implicitly about the effect her illness is having on her state-of-mind.
I wonder if the shift of tone and perspective I perceive in this fic is a result of LM having been primarily a writer of TWW stories when she wrote this? I think it might be, though obviously it’s total presumption on my part. I think LM was writing these characters as someone who knew them well and had cared about them, but also had some distance from them, and was writing them from somewhat outside the initial experience.
no subject
I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on why exactly, but this fic somehow doesn’t feel quite like it’s written in this fandom. As diverse as the fanfic in this fandom is, there’s a certain feeling that most of it has (or that I get from it, anyway), and this fic just feels different.
It’s a bit beautiful, introspective but spare (a rare combination), but the strange feeling of dissonance between what I’m used to from MSR and the way this fic embodies MSR has always been the most interesting part, for me.
They’re businessy, this Mulder and Scully. Their intelligence feels functional. They’re mature people doing their mature-people jobs, and the strangeness of their lives/careers is only background, where usually it’s part of the foreground. This Mulder and Scully could just as well be feds in some non-bizarre division. The fic doesn’t seek to reinforce our connection with the x-filean. It’s focusing on the characters as professionals, partners, lovers, exhausted people, afraid of the future (death) – having sex at the end of long days.
The tone of their relationship is casual, yet it’s also weighty – a strange permutation in a fic genre that it dominated by “serious and weighty” and “serious but fluffy” and “serious but porny”. Where your typical MSR has the UST dance followed by some combination of sex and The Feelings Talk leading to RST, this fic has sex followed by…um…life stuff, and sex, and life stuff, and sex, and eventually Mulder and Scully both figure the relationship out from their own separate corners and meet in the middle, which is as close as it gets to RST.
"How do we undo this?" she asks one night, curled against him in a tangle of sheets.
Mulder’s hands, which were lazily moving over her stomach, stop. "Do you want to?"
She thinks a minute before she pushes her back against his chest and says, "No. But I think it’s a valid question."
He tightens his grip. "I don’t think there’s a valid answer."
I find this conversation both unusual and believable. Atypical pillow talk, that’s for certain, but I like it. I like that in this fic they can have this somewhat abstracted moment of discussing what they’re doing, without needing to flood a bunch of emotion into it. The emotion’s there – it’s just not carrying them. They’re thinking their way through this as far as the thinking will help.
Also, I think this quality of the fic – the way Scully seems to be watching and doing at the same time – plays in well to the idea that she knows she may be dying. On the surface, her illness plays such a disproportionately small part in the fic (another way this fic isn’t like most of its kind), but I think the way Scully is characterized speaks implicitly about the effect her illness is having on her state-of-mind.
I wonder if the shift of tone and perspective I perceive in this fic is a result of LM having been primarily a writer of TWW stories when she wrote this? I think it might be, though obviously it’s total presumption on my part. I think LM was writing these characters as someone who knew them well and had cared about them, but also had some distance from them, and was writing them from somewhat outside the initial experience.