Story 211: “In the Bleak” by Teanna
Aug. 14th, 2012 02:11 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
amyhit.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xf_book_clubOur next fic is a relatively short colonization apocafic. To my knowledge, Teanna is a largely unknown author in the XF fandom. She only ever wrote three short XF fics, but her writing is spare, intelligent, sharply observant, and poetic without being wordy. She unflinchingly explores the characters and how they cope with fear, grief, and failure. I should definitely warn everyone that this story is, as the title suggests, bleak. Teanna warns readers that it’s "not a happy story," but at the risk of spoiling everyone, I should probably warn you that major character death is strongly implied and death in general is pretty ubiquitous in this story. This is the apocalypse portrayed with more grim realism than usual.
I hope some of you will read it anyway. There’s plenty in this fic to discuss, and I think summertime is probably the best time to read it, so that those of us who are particularly susceptible to gut-wrenching fanfic can shake off the darkness with a healthy dose of sunlight afterwards.
Read In the Bleak.
I hope some of you will read it anyway. There’s plenty in this fic to discuss, and I think summertime is probably the best time to read it, so that those of us who are particularly susceptible to gut-wrenching fanfic can shake off the darkness with a healthy dose of sunlight afterwards.
Read In the Bleak.
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Date: 2012-08-15 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-15 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-15 04:34 am (UTC)However, I have to say that my suspension of disbelief was severely jolted right at the outset by the corpse on the roadside. Having just done some research into this topic for something I'm writing, there seems to be a serious lack of plausibility here. Four weeks later, the corpse is still lying there, almost as if it were a mannequin--no really notable decomposition, no bloating, none of the smells or the processes dead bodies inevitably go through. Children using the corpse as their gathering place? I really can't see it. Plus there's a reason people get rid of corpses as soon as possible; the associated health hazards are something people in this situation wouldn't likely want to add to the burdens they're already facing.
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Date: 2012-08-15 03:25 pm (UTC)The other thing that threw me out of this story was the sudden appearance of Langley, out of nowhere. Why didn't Mulder ask him about the other Gunmen? Why were they talking in code about Scully? I thought it was odd for Doggett to have ended up there all the way from San Diego, too. How did that happen? It makes me wonder if Teanna knew much about US geography, about the distances between the East and West coasts. She does have Mulder wonder briefly about the coincidence of having three FBI agents in this town, but then it gets dropped. The mysteries all remain unsolved. She just drops people into the story, stirs in some dead bodies and aliens and poof! Everyone dies, so there's no need to bother with the plot or the characterizations anyway.
I found this story frustrating. Compared to the amount of detail and background we get in Life During Wartime, this doesn't add up to much in the end. I can't imagine ever bothering reading it again.
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Date: 2012-08-15 11:49 am (UTC)Her hair, it's never been this long (that he knows), she keeps it in a braid mostly
and he thinks, when he remembers such things, that she looks more like her
sister Melissa now. But he has trouble remembering his mother's face, and so he
might be wrong.
I really like that there's kind of a rhythm to the words here and in a few other places in the story, a beat, like poetry or a song. Another part I liked (and that has the same kind of beat):
A child has led me to these woods, he thinks, and like so many times before, like
so many times since They came, he doesn't know if he is quoting someone or if
he made it up. The words are heavy and they don't go well with what he
remembers of himself, of what he was like - his words were lighter, before.
That said, I'm not sold on the characterization. Mulder (the POV character) was recognizable, but I thought the characterization of Scully was odd. In particular this was weird:
In bed, most nights, she slaps at his hands and it hurts. And so he keeps his
hands to himself, and in his sexual fantasies she looks like she used to look in
DC, short hair and smart suits and all.
Ew, and also if she's slapping his hands away most nights the second sentence ("he keeps his hands to himself") doesn't make sense. Also ew.
(And then:
What he plans for when he's been slapped away by Scully and he's lying next to
her, hurting.)
Stop whining Mulder, it's the end of the damn world. Try to get your priorities straight.
I also thought the characterization of Doggett was...strange? Non-existent? It seemed like he was an original character who the author just decided to name Doggett. He didn't really bear any resemblance to the character in the show, that I could see. I don't think I really understood what I was supposed to understand from him.
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Date: 2012-08-15 03:46 pm (UTC)Doggett in no way resembled the man we saw on screen. If he was an original character, he wasn't a believable one. Really, there were so many loose ends in this fic, it just made me irritable. None of the mysteries get solved. She just dumps her characters together in this situation without bothering to explain how they got there. There wasn't enough detail to make me believe in what was happening or care about the outcome. Maybe we were supposed to be so grossed out by the imagery that we didn't notice how thin the plot was. I didn't buy the roving bands of evil children motif either. Children are the most vulnerable members of a population. Why would they survive? If their parents died of plague, they'd be dead too. But I guess she wanted a reason for us to be suspicious of Doggett and having him shoot kids was the best she could come up with. Meh.
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Date: 2012-08-16 10:01 am (UTC)The combination of her slapping him away (yeah, I don't buy that she'd do that either) and the immediate sentence that follows, which is about his sexual fantasies about her, bothers me. It feels petty and somehow threatening, like he's getting back at her by fantasizing about her. This fantasy version of Scully can't refuse him.
Of course, in that paragraph I'm not sure if I'm supposed to understand that Mulder at some point stops making advances ("so he keeps his hands to himself"), or if this is ongoing, every night.
Were the roaming bands of evil children real? Or was that something Doggett or local folklore made up? By the end of the story, I don't really know whether Doggett's truly a bad guy here.
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Date: 2012-08-23 03:37 pm (UTC)You're right, I can't tell if he's making moves on her every night or if he tried a few times was rebuffed and now he keeps his hands to himself . I'm inclined to the latter, in which case, I can't blame Mulder for having sexual fantasies. Sometimes fantasies of something better than grim reality are all that keeps you going, and like dreams, they aren't something you choose, are they? I think of (and experience, I should clarify) fantasies as waking dreams.
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Date: 2012-08-21 06:04 am (UTC)What I liked best were the glimpses of cynical Scully. A bitingly cynical post-apocalyptic Scully rings true for me, there were moments in the show when her dark sense of humour came out and I'd love to read more of it.
But like others have said, though it was well written it didn't quite come together for me. Others have made really good points. Doggett wasn't Doggett-y, Langly didn't do anything Langly-y, why were the children more evil than the adults? How were the adults coping with the chaos? I liked the idea of a crazed Doggett with nothing to lose trying to be a cop in a world gone mad, and his backstory was intriguing (if out of character) but nothing much was added by the conversations with him in the story. There was a lot of mystery, without much pay off for me. It was hinted for a while that Scully was dying, so that wasn't a surprise, it wasn't a surprise that Mulder stayed with her, and Scully dying in a hospital with a sick child is a pretty "typical" Scully death (??? I don't know how to phrase that better...!). Which does have a sad, resigned beauty to it all, but not my cup of tea. I personally wanted more details on the apocalypse or a more unexpected revelatory ending.
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Date: 2012-08-23 03:28 pm (UTC)There were a lot of questions raised, but not many answers provided. I think your description of the fic is very fitting:: it has "a sad, resigned beauty." There is certainly an audience for that sort of story in this fandom but I'm not among them in this case.
I have a hard time imagining Agent Doggett behaving in this manner. Without more information it just feels like his name was slapped onto a character. On the show, he seems like one of the good guys, not the kind of man who'd kill kids either, especially since his own son was murdered.
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Date: 2012-08-25 01:28 pm (UTC)That fic is the reason I started watching the show in the first place.
Wait, you read Life During Wartime before you'd started watching the show? I never realised anyone did it that way around!
Yeah I'm not part of that particular audience either, but it was definitely worth giving it a try.
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Date: 2012-08-25 02:16 pm (UTC)I don't think it's that uncommon for readers to follow writers they like into new fandoms. I read Maybe Amanda and OneMillionandNine's Sherlock fic before I had seen Sherlock. Frankly, I like it way, way better than its canon, which I think is highly over-rated by its fanbase. Anyway, I think what's different about what I did is that I went backwards to her earlier work, and then got totally hooked on a closed canon fandom. Well, presumably closed canon. I know there are a lot of fans out there who feel cheated by the lack of closure and want a third movie. I don't think they're going to get one.
The X-Files has a lot of long fic but I'm going to try to rec as much shorter fic as I can to keep people engaged here come fall. A lot of the membership is in school. Although, working full-time isn't exactly a walk in the park either...
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Date: 2012-08-25 07:10 pm (UTC)Just jumping in here to ask: where can I find this fic? I'm intrigued by the idea of Sherlock fic by X-Files fic writers.
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Date: 2012-08-25 07:22 pm (UTC)Still interested? Let me know and I'll track down the link for you. It's at AO3 under Maybe Amanda.
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Date: 2012-08-25 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-25 07:44 pm (UTC)Since I disliked the second series and don't ship any pairings and don't enjoy the kind of fic written for it (and yes, I have read enough to tell), I do not consider myself in the Sherlock fandom but I am in theirs forever more. I'll read anything they write anyway, but together, they're an amazing writing team.
I tend to skip the sex, too, but OneMil writes really great sex so I read hers. Anyway. Enjoy!
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Date: 2012-08-26 02:25 am (UTC)I'm studying also, but in the southern hemisphere, I might ask you for some more long recs come summer.
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Date: 2012-08-26 03:09 am (UTC)Southern hemisphere--so this is still winter for you and you're in school now. A good friend lives in Australia, which is many time zones ahead on the other side of the planet. I think it's already one in the afternoon on Sunday there and we haven't eaten Saturday dinner yet. Are you still on Saturday or are you also a person of the(my) future? LOL
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Date: 2012-08-26 04:08 am (UTC)I'm a person of winter and the future too! 2pm Sunday here on the east coast of Aus.
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Date: 2012-08-23 11:04 pm (UTC)I can’t exactly say I love this fic because it’s just too grim – too bleak – to really love. But I’m pretty sure it was the first colonization fic I read, and to this day it remains one of my favorites in that genre, and one of my favorite XF fics in general, albeit a very dark favorite. I’m very glad that not all apocafic’s take the view this one took, but I’m certain that if I hadn’t read this one, all other apocafics would have felt like they were missing something. Because, IMO, this is the most realistic depiction of an apocalypse I’ve read in an XF fic. There’s nothing fun or thrilling about it, nothing romantic; the beauty of humanity is not starkly or profoundly revealed through humanity’s hardships, there’s little grace and certainly no glory. Instead, it’s the dirty, dull, relentless annihilation of human civilization; it depicts what happens to people, and to entire cultures, when civilization is degraded and stripped away. And I think ITB does a crushingly good job of depicting that.
Teanna’s writing is unflinching, brutal, but not without considerable sensitivity. She’s not just tossing this horrible stuff out there to push our buttons. She’s doing it in order to truthfully reveal a horrible scenario. Every dark thing in this fic is given due weight. The rape and the murder and the death are not put in the story to be shocking or provocative or to instill narrative tension. They’re in the story because the story is a portrait of what an apocalypse looks like, and IMO, it’s tragic but realistic to theorize that an apocalypse would look…about like ITB makes it look.
As a diehard shipper I certainly find the relationship between Mulder and Scully upsetting. But I believe it, nonetheless. ITB shows us a Scully who has had to shut down her empathy in order to survive and remain functional, and a Mulder who has found himself shoveled into a futile role and a maladaptive state. The apocalypse in ITB has been harder, I would say, on Scully than it’s been on Mulder. In ITB we see Mulder struggling with feeling like a useless failure. He’s directionless – not the person he used to be but incapable of being otherwise (hence his fixation on his old coat). He used to be a fed, he used to be a maverick, he used to be brilliant, he used to be willing to martyr himself for a cause. None of that is worth anything now.
Scully, on the other hand, is overcome with death and illness (Mulder, to his credit, does seem to understand this, and doesn’t really blame her for her emotional dearth, even in his own head). Mulder is more conceptual in his experience of it – he philosophizes apocalyptic, to an extent – while Scully is in the flesh-and-blood thick of it all. Mulder is watching Humanity die, while Scully is watching an endless procession of individual people die in her intimate environment. As a doctor, she’s taken on the job of being a beast of burden, with the dying as her load. She’s doing what is necessary, and it seems horribly realistic to me to think that she has come to have little regard for that which doesn’t fall into her path as a doctor.
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Date: 2012-08-23 11:08 pm (UTC)In bed, most nights, she slaps at his hands and it hurts. And so
he keeps his hands to himself, and in his sexual fantasies she
looks like she used to look in DC, short hair and smart suits and
all.
People have picked this line out as being creepy, and I can see what you guys are saying and why, but I disagree with how you’re reading it. I don’t think the implication is that Mulder is doing anything inappropriate. I think the implication is that when he shows interest in physical affection, she blatantly refuses. I don’t think she’s slapping him away because he’s pushing her. They’re in a long-term sexual relationship; in such a relationship it’s not unusual for one person to turn to the other in bed and make the moves to start something, or even just cozy up. Mulder does that and Scully refuses him one night; he accepts her refusal, but tries again the next night, at which point she refuses him again. He keeps trying, and she keeps refusing. Maybe the writing could have been a little clearer about that, but personally I didn’t have to strain to presume that’s what was meant. She’s slapping him away because she can’t bear for him to touch her, and she can’t bear to talk about it, and he can’t bear to confront her about it. And, in fact, there’s really nothing for them to say. There’s nothing Mulder can say to make the people stop turning to corpses under Scully’s hands, or to erase the thousands(?) who’ve already done so, and there’s nothing Scully can say to Mulder to make the changes in her disappear.
It’s painful and it’s not how I like to imagine Mulder and Scully’s relationship, but actually the sad state of their relationship is another one of the things I find distinctive and remarkable about this fic. Nobody wants to think of Mulder and Scully this way, but I think Teanna does an admirable job of writing them in a state of disintegration and doing it believably. They’re not bright and sharp and full of cruel edges like in Iolokus (a much more entertaining example of deliberate character disintegration); in ITB they’re simply depleted beyond their capacity to bear it. Neither of them have much generosity of spirit left, yet they’re still trying – even without hope they’re trying – to do their best and to give what they can.
And then there’s Doggett. Wendy pointed out that he is quite different from canon Doggett. I agree that he comes across as being much changed from how he appears in canon, but I think it’s a fascinating decision to write him that way, and I approve very much. The way I see it, Doggett’s character very effectively demonstrates the way the circumstances of the fic has warped everyone. How much do we know about Doggett in canon? His son disappeared and his life fell apart, we know that. Doggett is every inch the law-enforcement professional when he’s certain of his role. But if the world ended and he no longer had a role to speak of – just a gun and a sense of meaningless loss – who knows how he would respond? Who knows how anyone would behave in an apocalypse, without no way to escape from pervasive disorder, grief, and fear of death?
he thinks that maybe Doggett raped and murdered Marla Hemmings and
Laura Burchhardt. Maybe Lance Aldrin was innocent.
Maybe even those kids down in Talla, maybe even them. And Mulder
gave them Doggett.
I don’t think the implication in ITB was that Doggett actually did all of those things. I think he’s telling the truth when he says he didn’t. (I’ve always thought that Doggett was probably searching the packs of wolflings because it was the only way left to him to search for his son.) What I honestly think Teanna was doing with Doggett’s character is giving us a way to see the effect the apocalypse has had on civilization, on people and relationships. Because Doggett – who is a bit unhinged, but essentially still the character who in other circumstances would have made a loyal partner to Scully – could have done those things, and in the world they all live in, they have to be on guard against every bleak and gruesome possibility. In the absence of civilization, nobody gets the benefit of the doubt. Everyone is dangerous, especially the people who manage to be in charge of anything.
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Date: 2012-08-23 11:12 pm (UTC)Another thing I love about ITB is the writing style (though I could say that about virtually every fic I love). I love that it’s spare, but at the same time deliberately rough. I think the style of the writing does a brilliant job of conveying the harsh, ramshackle nature of the existence these people are living. Teanna’s writing has both eloquence and a lack of concern for “proper” grammatical and syntactical structure.
And finally, I love that as bleak as the fic is, I don’t feel like the narrative is one static note of despair. The emotions in ITB shift beneath the weight of despair, enough to keep me closely engaged throughout. There’s not much hope in this fic, and there’s even less by the end, and usually I wouldn’t approve of a hopeless ending, but in this case it works for me. I think it works because in staying with the dying girl, and in staying together, they’re making a choice and they’re choosing tenderness. In the face of defeat, it's- not a triumph, but it's something, the very smallest bit of something.
As to what others have said about the people of Land’s End leaving the corpse of Lance Aldrin on the side of the road, I really do not understand how that could possibly seem out of place in the bigger picture. It’s the END of the WORLD. No one is in their right mind, Doggett is enforcing that it be kept there, historically it’s not uncommon for towns to show off slain corpses as deterrents, and corpse rot isn’t much of a concern when they’re already dropping like flies because of an alien virus. I’m not sure how fast corpses decay, and maybe there should have been more of a mention about the corpse rotting away, but again, it’s not a difficult presumption to make that the condition of the corpse is deteriorating.
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Date: 2012-08-24 09:47 am (UTC)There's also the probability it would have been hard for townspeople to band together to bury it. For one thing, they don't seem to be working together (and again, it feels like there's a collective loss of hope that makes any kind of collaboration with others more difficult). People would also be scared of antagonizing Doggett. One person could dig a grave, of course, but although I've never buried a human, I've buried animals, and it's hard goddamn work on your own, especially in the winter.
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Date: 2012-08-24 09:48 pm (UTC)Yeah, that's an excellent point - probably the most important one, actually, when it comes to explaining the meaning and importance of the corpse in ITB.
I hadn't actually thought of this before now, but it seems fairly likely that if one reads this fic and balks at the corpse of Lance Aldrin, it might be a good early indicator that this fic is not for you. Because in a way, Lance's corpse can be said to be definitive of the state of the world in ITB. there's a reason Teanna starts with Mulder thinking about the corpse, and why the fic keeps coming back to the corpse. Lance's corpse tells you that ugly brutal death has become so pervasive people no longer react to it, that gore and filth are a fact of life, that murder and rape are rampant, that law and order are absent, that most people are too exhausted to care about anything as mundane as terrestrial pestilence, and too exhausted to uphold even the pretence of a ritualistic burrial of the dead.
For the most part, the way a civilization treats its women, its children, its sick, and its dead are very reliable indicators of the state the civilization is in (i.e. if only the able and the male are treated with civility, you're fucked).* Well, in the course of ITB, two women are raped, a desperate women tries to pimp her young daughter to Mulder, no one (except Scully) comes to watch over young Myra as she's dying in the hospital, and Lance Aldrin (barely older than a child himself) is left to rot at the side of the road. The details Teanna focuses on are, IMO, the ones that paint the clearest and probably most realistic picture of what a civilization in pervasive decay looks like. (And okay, now I'm repeating myself, but really, that's basically what this fic is: a picture of human civilization in decay. To comment on the fic and not focus on that aspect of it would be, to me, to comment on the frame and ignore the actual picture.)
*ETA: and I guess this is - to intellectualize the story's structure more than necessary - the reason why it seems definitively right when Scully and Mulder stay with Myra at the hospital: essentially, Myra embodies most of the main qualities of disadvantage a single individual can represent within a society, and as such to abandon her would be the least humane thing they could do, while to remain with her regardless of the probable outcome is the most humane, the most civilized. It just so happens that in the very end, Mulder and Scully's existence narrows down to one decision, and that decision epitomizes the struggle that infuses ITB's narrative from beginning to end.