I agree that much of the charm of "Your Platonic Relationship: An Owner's Manual" is the way it plays with both fanon and canon. The scent of his cologne, his hand at the small of her back, Mulder's photographic memory, the casefile with no actual solution. The thousand and one tropes of MSR fanfic, with bonus irony.
However, I don't see Scully as Mary Sue-ish in this fic. She's too self-observant and also too much like canon Scully for that.
My idea of a Scully Mary Sue is the completely OOC Scully in "Where There's a Will." The Scully who fake marries Mulder and happily turns herself into a stay-at-home Mom/Stepford wife in order to adopt two children. That's a Mary Sue Scully. Or the Scully in "Worth Breaking" who starts having "meaningless" sex with Mulder because he wants to and she can't say no. This Scully then spends the next 700K alternating between whining to her therapist about how terrible it is to be having sex with Mulder and screwing his brains out. WTF? That's a Mary Sue Scully for sure.
She's the POV character, so we're seeing Mulder through her eyes, which is not necessarily the identical to how Nanda would describe it. Do you think Scully's standing in for the author? I guess what makes this Scully not a Mary Sue is her sense of how absurd her life is. The falling rocks, the clumps of dirt, the futility of playing a scientist in a world where the laws of physics don't seem to apply. It's like she's observing her life, rather than merely living it, kind of like we observe her life and don't live it. Mary Sues have no sense of irony whatsoever.
I also love Mulder in this fic, which makes sense because we're seeing Mulder from the POV of a woman who is in love with him. She's trying to keep him and her feelings for him at bay and failing utterly. She does manage to avoid ravishing him, just barely. It's very cheesy romance novel language in places and deliberately so to heighten the effect.
I think this story is charming, sexy, witty, and very, very meta.
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winterfish
Re: Part 1/2
Date: 2014-08-31 12:18 am (UTC)I agree that much of the charm of "Your Platonic Relationship: An Owner's Manual" is the way it plays with both fanon and canon. The scent of his cologne, his hand at the small of her back, Mulder's photographic memory, the casefile with no actual solution. The thousand and one tropes of MSR fanfic, with bonus irony.
However, I don't see Scully as Mary Sue-ish in this fic. She's too self-observant and also too much like canon Scully for that.
My idea of a Scully Mary Sue is the completely OOC Scully in "Where There's a Will." The Scully who fake marries Mulder and happily turns herself into a stay-at-home Mom/Stepford wife in order to adopt two children. That's a Mary Sue Scully. Or the Scully in "Worth Breaking" who starts having "meaningless" sex with Mulder because he wants to and she can't say no. This Scully then spends the next 700K alternating between whining to her therapist about how terrible it is to be having sex with Mulder and screwing his brains out. WTF? That's a Mary Sue Scully for sure.
She's the POV character, so we're seeing Mulder through her eyes, which is not necessarily the identical to how Nanda would describe it. Do you think Scully's standing in for the author? I guess what makes this Scully not a Mary Sue is her sense of how absurd her life is. The falling rocks, the clumps of dirt, the futility of playing a scientist in a world where the laws of physics don't seem to apply. It's like she's observing her life, rather than merely living it, kind of like we observe her life and don't live it. Mary Sues have no sense of irony whatsoever.
I also love Mulder in this fic, which makes sense because we're seeing Mulder from the POV of a woman who is in love with him. She's trying to keep him and her feelings for him at bay and failing utterly. She does manage to avoid ravishing him, just barely. It's very cheesy romance novel language in places and deliberately so to heighten the effect.
I think this story is charming, sexy, witty, and very, very meta.