Yeah I think I’m done here
Anonymous asked: i’m arenoseanima on archive of our own. have at it.
I immediately went for the Mulder/Scully fic because it was topical. And the reason it was topical was because you introduced yourself as a MSR writer who was offended by what I had said. You fucking degenerate.
Now onto the point by point of your post.
1. it doesn’t include every character who canonically interacts with either Mulder or Scully
Okay first, of all. I would like to applaud you on your fine work misrepresenting my argument here.
I referred to Skinner and Frohike specifically. Not Equius, not Dave, not even fucking Nepeta. Just Skinner and Frohike.
Why is that? Do you wonder?
I would wager that I did that because,
A. Skinner and Frohike are both canonically interested in Scully on a romantic level, a sentiment which is mutual.
B. This is a story about Scully’s romantic options.
Which would therefore mean that Skinner and Frohike’s respective romantic arcs with Scully have to be resolved, or at least implied to be resolved in some sort of satisfactory fashion. Else it is a plot hole.
You don’t even feature them. Never mind explain why they aren’t all over cancer-girl, therefore it is a plot hole.
Idiot.
2.the events depicted therein are not canonical,
Oh shit really? Well look at all the fucks that I don’t give.
3. my characterization of Mulder is weak
Meh.
4. you didn’t read the first story in the series, which explains where Reyes is, in addition to the quite long segment in this fic which also describes what she’s doing,
How on earth is this relevant?
If you’re saying that you developed Mulder and Scully’s relationship in the previous fic then you’re a shithead who has no idea how to organize his fucking story.
If you’re trying to excuse Reyes’s lack of macking on Mulder then you don’t need to bother, you established within the fic that she’s too busy macking on Doggett. Which I already gave you credit for doing.
5. you have no idea what in medias res is.
No, I only wrote a 60,000 word story featuring this exact concept. I clearly have no fucking idea what I’m talking about.
1. this is completely infeasible. if i included every character who interacted with Mulder or Scully, then i would have to include every character who interacted with those characters, and then it wouldn’t be a story at all, just a long rattling-off of every canon character and what they are doing at each moment. the story isn’t about Skinner and Scully, or Mulder and Reyes, or Scully and Frohike, &c. it’s about Mulder and Scully. i didn’t want to write a story about those other people, so i didn’t.
I already went into detail about why this is a load of shit. The simple matter is, you don’t get to claim plausibility unless you’ve actually done the work to make it plausible. Your fic is written in such a way as to be inexplicable, it is literally impossible for any reader to devise a plausible series of events which would culminate in this conclusion with the information you’ve given.
2. of course they’re not canonical! what’s the fun of writing fic at all if it all has to be rigid and regimented and perfectly acceptable within the bounds of the story that someone else is already telling. if every fanfic had to be acceptably canonical, there would be no aus (as seen in “Fox Mulder and the goblet of sick fires,” which also characterizes Mulder better than i ever could, located at http://gobletofsickfires.tumblr.com/), fascinating divergences from the story arc (as seen in “voices,” located at http://archiveofourown.org/works/273548), or ships that nobody would have thought of (as seen in “domesticide,” located at http://archiveofourown.org/works/270238/chapters/426440).
Stop putting words into my mouth. I never said anything about it being perfectly canonical.
My problem is that the events within the narrative are implausible and inexplicable. There aren’t any egregious breaches of canon as far as I can tell, but there are egregious breaches of characterization and causal logic.
3. yes, my characterization of Mulder in this fic is weak. Mulder is difficult to characterize. it’s difficult to strike the proper balance between jocular and insensitive. he is also less characterized because he just isn’t in the spotlight as much as Scully is. the fic is called ‘polemic;’ being a writer, i’m sure you’ll know what that means without having to look it up. i had the name first and the fic second. it’s about Scully, mostly, with a side order of Scully/Mulder. it’s about his issues in a relationship due to his lack of self-confidence. i love Mulder, but he’s pretty much a prop in this story. maybe i’ll write another one later where he acts less “gay,” since that’s evidently a bad thing.
also, i find it hard to believe that Mulder would never call someone he’s quite fond of “silly.” here, a quote from the “i am not a homosexual” page that you’re so fond of (http://mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004528): “EB: going on weird fight dates and beating the crap out of each other, and being in hate-love or love-hate.” i find it perfectly acceptable that a guy who talks like that would call his boyfriend silly.
I looked up the word Polemic and suddenly fail to see how this is supposed to be relevant in any way, shape or form.
Furthermore while it is fine to focus on one character over another, it is not fine to use that as an excuse to justify poor characterization.
And while I will concede that Mulder would use the word silly in a conversation, he wouldn’t use it in the way that he did in your fic. It is simply not the way that he talks.
4. Reyes is still buddies with Mulder; it’s just not explicitly stated in the fic. she’s in new york with Dogget, which you would know had you read the previous story in the series. or, you know, read the pesterlog in the middle of this one. i didn’t feel the need for Reyes to spell out her friendship with Mulder, since i thought it was within the bounds of assumption that they would still be close. if i’m mistaken, please correct me.
i’ll also address Frohike and Skinner here, because what the hell. Frohike is at the house on the rock in wisconsin. she’ll show up in the next fic in the series, when i get around to finishing it. it’s a bit of a theme in the series, however unintentional it was when i set out, that characters are mentioned but do not outright appear until the entry that focuses on them, and after that it’s fair game; since the series only consists of two stories at this moment, this is difficult to pick out, and i’ll give you that, but it should be a bit clearer once the third entry is finished. i don’t know where Skinner is. i have to pick something really good for her.
Maybe Skinner is dead? That would at least explain why Scully suddenly doesn’t give a shit about him.
Also I didn’t need basic suppositions lined out for me. Reyes and Mulder are still friends. Thanks for telling me something that I, as a reader would have assumed from the start until otherwise proven. Maybe next you should reassure me that Mulder is still a human, male and named “Mulder.” because if you don’t he might suddenly be a female goat named Tracey in my crazy brain damaged head.
5. “in medias res” is latin for “into the middle of things,” and refers to a storytelling technique in which the narrative does not begin at the start of the story, but opens somewhere in the middle. it may go back and explain events at the outset of the story, or it may not. flashbacks are a common device used to describe what the readers missed, as i employed in dream form and inner monologue in “light and rain.” examples of non-fanfic stories using in medias res are the films “reservoir dogs” and “megamind.”
again, i didn’t begin at the beginning because that wasn’t the story i wanted to write. there are plenty of stories out there about Mulder and Scully hooking up. i wanted to write one where they were already together. the reader can fill in however they prefer them to have entered their relationship, and how Mulder realized that he was attracted to Scully in a way that did not fall under the iron curtain of “no homo.” i’m sure it was very adorable, clumsy, and endearingly adolescent. i also did not provide the reasons for them to have been in a relationship. i think that their interactions in canon provide ample reasons for them to be more than friends, and apparently so does about 80% of the rest of the fandom. if Mulder thinks Scully is cute, then that’s his business. do you ask for married couples on the street to explain their relationships to you?
I don’t give a fuck where you start in the god damn story. Inexplicable is inexplicable is inexplicable. If you have a story where something has no justification for the way it is, it is a plot hole. How do you not understand this?
examples of non-fanfic stories using in medias res are the films “reservoir dogs” and “megamind.”
Funny thing about these examples. Both actually take the time to explain everything. We aren’t left wondering at the end “How the fuck did that happen?”, not unless we’re particularly thick anyway.
again, i didn’t begin at the beginning because that wasn’t the story i wanted to write. there are plenty of stories out there about Mulder and Scully hooking up.
Yes, all of them terrible for committing the exact same sins that you have.
i wanted to write one where they were already together.
Unfortunately for you, this requires that they already be compatible.
Spoiler. They are not.
Because Mulder is not a heterosexual.
the reader can fill in however they prefer them to have entered their relationship, and how Mulder realized that he was attracted to Scully in a way that did not fall under the iron curtain of “no romo.”
See above segment.
i’m sure it was very adorable, clumsy, and endearingly adolescent. i also did not provide the reasons for them to have been in a relationship. i think that their interactions in canon provide ample reasons for them to be more than friends, and apparently so does about 80% of the rest of the fandom.
I don’t care.
if Mulder thinks Scully is cute, then that’s his business.
I agree completely.
Oh wait, I think you’re implying that Mulder thinks Scully is cute.
Which he doesn’t.
Because he isn’t a heterosexual.
And because you haven’t done a god damn thing to prove otherwise within the confines of your narrative.
do you ask for married couples on the street to explain their relationships to you?
I am absolutely astonished that you think this is, in any way relevant.
formatting things is hard
why are mulder and scully so cute????????
This opinion actually disturbs me quite a bit.
It’s a look into the mind of a MSR shipper. And it’s even more distressing then I had imagined it might be.
Just the fact that they apparently have such an enormous hard-on for MSR pairings that they only ever ship slash and in fact only ever think MSR makes sense is damning enough.
But topping it all off is the hypocrisy and the irrational justifications.
No, you aren’t hurting anything by shipping MSR in X-files, there are only two characters in the entire cast that have confirmed sexual orientations, and twelve members of the cast are strongly hinted to be bisexual, along with two that are unconfirmed. So in total you had fourteen members of the primary cast that you could ship in literally any combination that you would like, and two more, one male, one female that had the corollary of “No civilians”.
So basically you could ship as much M as your little heart desired. You wouldn’t hurt anything provided you left Mulder and Frohike’s “Vriska Only” signs alone. Or at least spent some time convincing them to take them off.
Guess what you did.
Mulder/Scully and Mulder/Scully again are the two most popular ships in the fandom. A fact that absolutely infuriates me. But their popularity is barely a pet peeve, no what pisses me off is the way in which they are shipped, ignoring canon for no reason, ignoring characterization for no reason, displaying a complete lack of thought or effort beyond “HOLY SHIT IT’S MULDER AND SCULLY! MAKING OUT!”, and an overabundance of entitlement and excuses on the matter.
I’m not even going to bother touching on Scully/Krycek as moirails. Partially because I don’t believe it’s an issue, Platonic quadrants and all that, and partially because if Shokaide cared enough she would focus on precisely that.
man i’ve been waiting like a million months for another ship rant
in other news mulder and scully are really doki
Oh and might I also add that “We’re Not In Love, This Is A Professional Relationship” is a trope that has existed in X-files fic since the dawn of the genre itself and has never ever not been hideously arousing in execution.
Even beyond the argument, the way it is presented, particularly the accompanying image makes me want to track down the OP and slug them across the face with an angry badger.
Furthermore if anyone ever tried to feed me this line of bullshit in a narrative I would probably want to do the exact same thing to them.
This is just another incredibly weak excuse used by desperate Mulder/Scully fans who want to make their ship seem more plausible then it is so they don’t have to face the fact that IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
This is exactly the problem with you fucking MSR Fans, you are so dedicated to your jackass ship that you literally blind yourselves with your own biases on the matter. They basically never address it as anything other then “true love at first sight” and consider having to actually work to build a ship to be offensive because it implies otherwise.
Relationships don’t work that way, sexuality doesn’t work that way, narrative structure does not work that way and people don’t work that way.
You want to use this excuse as justification? Fine. You still have to fucking execute it without giving me the desire to execute you. Good luck with that, you will almost certainly fail right out of the god damn gate.
tl;dr: this is why I hate you.
whoa„ whoa„ how about we stop trying to invalidate real-life truths involving orientations and attractions just because you don’t like a pairing from a 90’s pop culture phenomenon on the internet, WHOA„,
REAL LIFE IS NOT FICTION!
Are you really such a fucking failure that I have to fucking explain this?
But guess what, even if we assume you have a point, which you don’t. You’re still wrong.
Just as in real life, for something to seem realistic in fiction it has to have a reasonable explanation associated with it.
You wouldn’t accept “Aliens.” as how your friend ended up with a new car (unless you were Mulder), and I’m not going to accept “True Love/Just Because.” as the justification for Mulder/Scully. If you don’t give me a god damn reason I’ll accept or at least have a situation with an intuitively plausible explanation behind it I will gut you like a flukeman.
I am disappointed
This past week has been both enlightening and insanely disappointing. I used to have a lot of respect for the X-files Fandom as a whole. But apparently it was terribly, terribly misplaced.
I started this whole stupid argument unintentionally, but with the premise that most of the people involved would be able to separate their emotions from their reaction to what I said and be able to either address my points logically or shut the hell up. To be fair, some of them could do just that. Although it’s very clear that the vast, majority was composed of the horde that over this past week has turned my inbox into an open sewer and has been futilely attempting to label me with every epithet that is even vaguely applicable.
Anyway, I just received a message on LiveJournal telling me that I had been banned from the X-files Shipping Olympics. I already had one (deserved) strike due to the violent imagery I used against Eternal (which was in admittedly very poor taste to say the least). But the moderators have deemed fit to skip over the second warning and go straight to a permanent ban for reasons that simplify to “We don’t like your face”. No actual infractions, just banned.
Well shit. Not so much for me, if they’re willing to shit all over their own rules for something as petty as this I don’t think they’re worth caring about. I am however disappointed that I won’t be able to help my team with the final Collaborative Round entry. I was largely responsible for the rough draft script and I had been planning on fleshing it out over the next few days. Unfortunately it looks like I won’t be able to help. Damn, I already felt terrible because I couldn’t think of any good ideas for the Second Round Prompt and that this argument was tearing me away from the third round, the prompt of which was very meh.
I just got this message. Literally just now. Not yesterday, not a few days ago. Now. I haven’t even posted anything in a day or two and the days before that were mostly just me mocking poorly constructed insults, rolling my eyes at idiotic attempts to “invalidate me” and pleasantly answering questions that were posed honestly and worth answering.
Sigh.
Oh X-files Fandom, why must you disappoint me so much lately?
hmmm this one isn’t very interesting
oh
well
I’ll just copy/paste the entire rant.
The reason I’m not linking to it is because I don’t want to be drowned out like I was originally, and because I don’t care to give the dumbass I ranted at any more exposure.
He’s not a bad writer, in fact he’s so good that it just makes it all the more damning - not because I don’t think pairings I vehemently disagree with don’t deserve to be written - but because his shitty attitude makes me want to break his face. I’d never have gone off on him like this if he wasn’t so fucking full of himself.
Anyway, here’s the rant. I was pretty annoyed when I wrote it so it’s pretty coarse and very rough around the edges. If I had any actual motivation to do so I might go back and do some hardcore editing, along with adding some detail. 4300 Characters is pretty stringent though.
Warning: Writer losing his shit proceeds. RANT RANT RANT
Usually I just keep my fucking trap shut and let people do whatever the fuck they want. I couldn’t care less what you ship or write so long as you don’t shove it in my face. But since I already lost control of myself and started flipping my shit I may as well finish the damn job.
I literally can’t say a single good thing about the Mulder/Scully pairing. I can’t even say it’s a creative pairing because there’s such a ludicrously disproportionate amount of it.
Added to it, you have to tear Canon into ribbons to make it work. First you have to get rid of Mulder’s homosexuality, either by just outright ignoring that it ever happened or using the magical Wand of The Nile. Either way I strongly doubt it’s ever been done right, and no that isn’t an invitation to try.
Of course Mulder’s sexual orientation is only the first hurdle in this endless Olympian event. After that you’re in the unenviable position of having to somehow cancel out all of their existing romantic interests, Mulder/Reyes, Mulder/Vriska, (Skinner/Scully)/Fowley, (Skinner/Scully)/Flukeman. All in a way that’s convincing. Of course if you choose to get rid of them by setting them up with someone else you have to literally pull everything to a stop, address this then start the god damn story again because there is absolutely no way to skip this.
Then after you’ve somehow managed to nullify Mulder’s sexuality and his existing relationships, along with Skinner or Scully’s relationships you have to somehow find some spark of interest between the two that hasn’t already been smothered by this human disease of friendship/noromo. Here’s your shovel and fine toothed comb, this will take a while.
And after you’ve somehow located whatever seed of a relationship that may or may not actually exist in their interactions you have to somehow encourage it to grow and do so in a way that doesn’t seem cheap and contrived. This will be even harder then the last step.
This is all just to make the pairing believable. Most people don’t even get through the first sentence, they just randomly slap the two together like slabs of beef and pretend it makes any kind of sense. It’s either that or pull an insanely asinine Dues Ex Machina out of your FBI-issue Utility Belt or just give the fuck up and pull an extremely unsatisfying AU just to be able to smash the two together with all the grace of a pair of runaway trains.
I’m not declaring it to be impossible, but I am saying no one has given either pairing the treatment it would require to do right. You would need at LEAST a hundred thousand words to pull it off. And yes I do know how much that is, I’ve written a fic that’s at 50,000 words. If anything it feels too damn low, I’m tempted to double it. Even then it will probably fall short considering how exhaustively Hussie set up the canonical decahedrons.
I could write an encyclopedia on how this doesn’t work, and considering how nauseatingly pervasive this is I’m starting to think I might actually have to do so.
*Sigh*
I hope you realize that whatever dynamics you find so interesting in Mulder/Scully already exist. It’s a disease called friendship and it doesn’t require Mulder or Scully to be suddenly overwhelmed with a mysterious hunger for fbiflesh. And if you’re referring to anything else then I’m sorry to tell you this but, it doesn’t exist.
I also have no idea how you could possibly feel as though you could handle this pairing. There is so much stacked against it and absolutely nothing to support it whatsoever. I could get my two best friends together and combined we could almost certainly be the best writer this fandom has. Assuming I somehow managed to bribe them into trying to write this pairing it would still cost us four months of our lives, every scrap of our combined dignity and self-respect and all of my sanity, and I can still only say with a 50% certainty that we could pull it off and even if by some dark miracle we succeeded, at what cost? At what cost?
Wait... So, what's this blog about?
AnonymousVexarian is a fan of the webcomic homestuck, and writes long tirades about why his opinion is right and everyone else is wrong.
and
i thought it would be funny to replace all the names of the homestuck characters with x-files characters (i was right)
This is in response to: This
This has very clearly nothing to do with the original blog entry anymore so I’m moving this conversation out into the open and the fresh air.
…Okay, I forgot how much fresh air sucks, but no matter.
Yes, I have read several Fox/Dana Fics. Not many, and even fewer to completion, I tend to just bail out when I can no longer suspend my disbelief.
I have yet to be pleasantly surprised by any of them, one of them was so bad I would without irony qualify it as one of the worst pieces of anything that the fandom has produced. I obviously don’t consider that one to be fair to judge the rest on however.
I don’t think I’ve read Fox/Skinner except for maybe once or twice. I am however curious about “A Game of Gay Cluckbeast” on Kinkmeme, it’s absolutely enormous. At the very least it makes me suspect some effort was put into it.
However I have made a point of at least attempting to read every single XFSO entry in a main round before passing my obviously omnipotent judgement. I’m relatively certain that I’m not technically allowed to comment on the quality of any specific entries, however I will say that I have been pleasantly surprised by some. Infuriatingly disappointed in others however. This applies to both slash and heterosexual entries however.
I was even tricked into reading a fair bit into your Promfiles. I ended up eventually chasing after something shiny and dropping it however. Pretty good but there are two distinct flaws in how you handled things, however both could be fixed without too much effort and you may well have addressed them later, making this entire paragraph null and void.
I rephrased the whole denial thing in my original reblog. What possessed me to use that overdramatic phrasing I don’t even know.
“or the simple fact that they would like to enjoy a straight narrative that doesn’t portray being heterosexual as some kind of personal cancer one has to come to grips with. Sometimes you want chocolate icecream, sometimes you want strawberry.”
Here’s a crazy idea. If you want to write about a straight character so badly… How about writing about a character that actually IS straight? If I went to sleep tonight and woke up to find that Fox/Dana and Fox/Skinner had been replaced by… I don’t know, Bryers/Dana and Bryers/Skinner then I’d be… weirded the fuck out. (How the hell did that even happen?) But at the very least you don’t have to fundamentally alter either character in the pairing in order to get them having consensual sex in the missionary position with eachother.
Skinner only has an implicit sexuality, which would make him being gay, or even bisexual a lot less fundamentally unbelievable. Added to it, all FBI unless otherwise confirmed are explicitly bisexual, which means all of the male trolls are prime candidates for the navy.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’d still be annoyed at all of the fics, but not because of the pairing specifically. I’d be annoyed that two pairings dominate over 60% of all the fanfiction in the fandom. They aren’t even canon pairings either, which would make it significantly less weird but only marginally less annoying.
Fuck, I’d eventually get annoyed if the two top pairings were Fox/Vriska and Fox/Langley. And that’s canonical, heterosexual and involves three of my top three favorite characters. My top three favorite characters are in order - Vriska, Fox, Skinner/Tooms/Flukeman/Dana/Langley (Third place is a tie).
“C-can I at least see Flukeman with one of those two girls?”
“Skinner/Reyes is nice too…”
“Maybe we could see Frohike sometime? You know, change of pace?”
I guess my point is, Fuck my life.
