i want to know about the extreme outlier opinion on never again!
ooh, thank you for your interest and I hope I don't get myself in trouble with this lol!
So this opinion is in multiple parts.
The first part being the one most unpopular, which is that Ed Jerse was not to only man who was not Mulder that Scully, that Dana had a night or a mini fling with between Jack Willis and/or then getting assigned to the X files and when MSR got together (whenever you believe that might be), and probably not the only dangerous one to some degree.
She's got that thrill seeker side to her, which is to some extent satisfied by chasing Mulder around on the X files. But Mulder keeps her in a sexless box in his perceptions -- IMO this is partially self defense on his part because if he lets himself go there even a bit in thinking of her dating potential/as a potential romantic-sexual partner his already limited ability to hold onto any kind of boundaries would just collapse. And I don't think this sexless view of her is at odds with my belief that Mulder was in love with her within a few months of working with her and knew it, but he doesn't think he deserves a relationship like that and more importantly he doesn't think Scully wants a relationship like that with him, or maybe not with anyone at all because she's given up dating completely after Jersey Devil, and what they talk about is work and theory and science and case notes and things within the kind of fixed shadow of their partnership/the files. Thus he's got this view of her that's completely divorced from her hedonistic, risk taking, rebellious, attention seeking, obsessive side.
I believe her ruthlessly compartmentalized nature and her constant awareness of other people's expectations of her, especially the expectations of people in authority or pseudo authority combined with a need for a release valve and a clear thread of sensualism in her character make it highly likely that there were other times when she picked a near-stranger and acted out a role with him, letting herself act out parts of herself she doesn't often express and using him as a proxy for her conflicted and/or baser feelings towards the Ahabs and 'fathers' in her life in a very limited capacity that is both satisfyingly dangerous (near stranger, almost certainly someone she doesn't really trust or want to get to know, after all she's not looking for a real and lasting relationship) and very safe because she can just stop playing that character and stop seeing that man and he won't even have ever 'met' the person she is the majority of the time.
I don't think she does it a lot, but by 'never again' it had been 4ish very high stress years with Mulder and 5ish years since Jack Willis, which, since Ethan didn't make it into the Pilot, was her last relationship, so yes. Maybe once or twice a year there's a bit of an 'i'm crawling out of my skin i need to tempt fate' ritual. And since we see so little of their personal lives, not hearing about it doesn't rule it out, the reason we saw this time because it was such a disaster and became another X-file -- and because Jerse was so dangerous and violent, and because Mulder found out about it, that particular game stopped being interesting even in a self destructive way. Plus very soon she would realize she had cancer and would take stock of her life in a different way and get closer to Mulder on another level so there was less of a need for a pressure valve rebellion.
And I don't think that this idea cheapens her relationship with Mulder or means she was cheating on him if that did happen, because it would be about simple attraction and being not 'herself' and also a proxy thing for her feelings and frustrations about Mulder that she's too afraid of tarnishing his image of her to let him into directly. And if it would make Scully's jealousy of Mulder interacting closely with other women hypocritical, well, she's certainly allowed to be a flawed character and is shown to have double standards about a number of things.
Part 2 of my outlier opinion is that Ed Jerse isn't out of character for Dana. Going back to Jack again, instead of believing in possession, she thought he'd had a mental break after years of obsessive work and mutilated a cadaver and killed a guy and she was not surprised at all. She had a fairly long relationship with him while believing he had that level of instability and violence in him when pushed. That means Jerse lines up for her.
part 3 of my outlier opinion (I guess it is, I don't see it talked about directly afaik) is that the story is dark as fuck with Jerse and his ergot psychosis but at the same time the tone is not horror-bleak the way Blood is and many s2/s3 with similar types of plots, but more extremely darkly ironic or wry. Between Mulder in Graceland and the extended Rocky and Bullwinkle plot discussion, and the fact that all it takes is a divorce and an Evil!Rosie the Riveter tattoo to push this guy over the edge there's this air of like, pulp noir mundane and ridiculousness. Fandom generally treats it as this like this profound statement about Mulder and Scully's relationship and Mulder's selfishness and thoughtlessness and if he just brought her a bottle of wine and asked about her day a la Van Blunht in Small Potatoes she could've been flinging that fling with him. Except, no, she couldn't use him as his own proxy, so she'd have to crack herself open a lot more than she was ready to. But also it's a story about both of them spinning their wheels and not getting anywhere and ending up feeling dumb, it's absurdist, it's a comment that neither character is smarter than their narrative, it's not a statement about a fractured partnership.
Part 4 is a little more out there and whatever but I do think Mulder's reaction is interesting. He's obviously hurt and completely baffled because he can tell Scully's given him very little of the actual framing of her distress and because 'i'm bored at my job' is both hurtful to him and something he can't conceptualize as leading to 'so i'll have a one night stand with a violent man' -- because that isn't her complaint, it's just what he heard. But in that last scene he doesn't read as angry or jealous, even the hurt doesn't exactly read as sexual jealousy. He's confused, he doesn't know what she wants, and he gets in some cheap shots with his annoyed. But there's an interesting tone to it. Maybe i'm reading too much in. I think there's a combination of trying to laugh it off/brush it off because he can tell she's feeling too exposed, and aside from the 'was the professional dissatisfaction worth all this??' he was curious. He'd caught a glimpse of the barest silhouette of her wild child side.
like a combination of 'so you slipped off your pedestal and bounced a little, so your halo got dented, so what' (paternalistic, dismissive, kidding) (reassuring) and 'oh, so she's a little like that? what else does she like? can a person get her like that without actually being on the verge of snapping?' He knows about Willis and Jerse now. It's more than one, and Willis is now certainly not a fluke. He's got to be sure there's some fascinating things brewing in her subconscious, and he's got the idea that her sexual side is one part girlish wounded bird, one part manic live wire, and one part intellectual 3D chess. He's curious about what that means for him and them. Curious about what she might be willing to do with him now that he's been reminded she'll do it with other people. He's even optimistic, I think, about what he could coax from her.
Probably also reminded to be cautious about what entanglements with him that he could accidentally 'manipulate' her into with some of his more demanding behavior, though. But like, even though they're both feeling bitter at that moment i do feel like there's a 'positive' in the kind of colliding worlds event of the episode in Mulder being reminded of Scully being a human woman with a carnal side.
And that is... I think the bulk of what I wanted to talk about re: NA? I think? My brain feels overcooked now. But I rewatched it to refresh my memory (i'm now in s5) but I stand by this. And also I think I need to break my custom and do post-episode fic about it, honestly.
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…i just saw this poll and my unevolved brain gel wriggled inside my cranium like a feral fish:
idk how you look at his official art and call him conventionally attractive. my man looks like a wet dog and has eyebags for daysss. face full of pox scars, skin pale af, and those shaggy ass hair & a rugged beard hanging from his flat long face.
he is pretty *to me* but like dude???
—not exactly a heartthrob boy band material is he?
obv I wouldn’t call him “misunderstood baby uwu” if we are talking a little more seriously —but to be fair jean is having possibly the worst week of his life. the car? fucking sunk. case? unsolved. not to mention his close partner (who is also an ass mind you) doesn’t even remember him, already running around with a new one.
yeah he is absolutely foul and aggressive and degrading harry but like i said before (in my tag essay lol) judit also makes ableist comments and i don’t see people hating her because she’s outwardly nice—
and respects harry as her superior. her BOSS.
(also a friend with benefits? /nope, it’s just him harassing judit/ as well but not as a complicated relationship compared jean and harry’s brötherbund. only a few months of acquaintanceship.)
plus it’s highhlyyy likely that harry is not the only one substance abuse. —look at jean’s rudolf-looking-red-ass-nose. a drunkard’s sniffers. probably had few lines with him late at night… when your lifetime partner is an alcoholic it's hard to say no.
about the left for dead thing, they left because harry told them to fuck off. tbh harry is nightmare to work with esp pre-bender. (and am saying as a pathetic little unmedicated neurodivergent woman.)
but when the second time they left revachol was not jean’s fault, and it was judit’s suggestion anyway. the squad probably thought that since harry had someone a little more responsible looking after him. it will be fine when they come back. the tribunal was absolutely unaccounted for.
yet despite all of these things, he will try to come back to make sure he is ok and accommodate harrier to the best of his abilities which is wearing very thin. look at him trying to make up to our harry boy:
anyways am incapable of writing coherent thoughts (even though i want to talk about it for hours) that make sense so go look at sygneth’s jean psychological analysis instead. it is an excellent read. please go read.
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oooooo please tell me (who knows nothing on the subject) about orv swap au
hehehe. hehehehehehe. hehehehehehehhehehehhheheheh <- guy who is so normal
the premise of orv swap au (name has yet to be finalized) is this: what if kdj and yjh swapped narrative positions (reader <-> character) but very little else? what if a video game player enters a time loop to save his favorite character from dying over and over again and also to end the apocalypse?
admittedly it's not super fleshed out yet (a lot of the changes this premise would introduce are still not hammered out yet) but here are some points under the cut (novel spoilers ahead!)
orv swap au starts with pro gamer yjh who feels :/ abt his job, but hey, it pays the bills. despite (or maybe because of) his relative popularity as a pro gamer and networking with the agency/sponsors/people to impress, he's kind of isolated in a way that's detrimental, a facade of someone he's not whenever he's on camera
something to play around with is the idea of agency? maybe this yjh doesn't feel like he has any and has his hands tied between the lifestyle and being under public scrutiny and not having enough of a support system to leave everything behind. maybe he doesn't know what else he would even do. maybe he's aimless and drifting with nothing to hold on to.
his favorite video game is what i've been thinking of as World's Hardest To Play Indie Game (not based on difficulty but just on the experience of consuming it) a boring, exposition heavy, player-hostile, poorly designed, slightly buggy mess of a barely-playable game: twsa, a game that was not finished upon release and experiences with sporadic updates every now and then.
the ending tree to this game is so convoluted its insane. also theres no save states so if you die (very likely) u restart babeyyy.
twsa (video game) does have multiple endings, all of which happen when kdj, your main character, dies. some are farther into the apocolypse than others, some paths require meta knowledge of future events or character actions or items or whatever. the "true ending" is either analogous to the original 1863: kdj makes it to the end at the cost of everyone he loves, or hsy's modified 1863: kdj makes himself enemy of the scenario to secure a way out for the kimcom remnants.
there's branches on the choices tree where everyone dies and everything sucks and is bad forever and theres choices to make where kdj gets to make a family and they don't really get to settle down but they can get pretty close to it among the ruins of the apocalypse. through all his testing, yjh finds that these endings are nice but peter out - to get to the end of the apocalypse yjh has to claw his way there inch by painful inch, through betrayal and sacrifice, and he still cant fully get past it
i originally wanted to finagle a yoohankim 3 way swap but i couldn't figure it out. swap aus are a lot easier to work with when they're even numbers, at least to me, so this au features a ysa who is a video game company employee by day and by night she really has become god this time (and also a terrible indie dev). and this is how jungdoksang can still win !!!!
also yjh's coworker from Real Life hsy :) i haven't decided if she's like an employee for the same agency, or if she's someone else in the gaming circles that yjh interacts with sometimes (in my heart theyre in like some sort of discord server together), or something like that but she's around. whatever she does she is twitter cancelled for something. to me.
the only other character swaps are lsk and yma. yma is yjh's estranged sister (in broad strokes there's a vague bad parent situation going on here) (they used to be close until they drifted apart and slowly started hating each other [there is an abyss between them that neither of them can bridge]) (he feels that she betrayed him and threw him under the bus so he left [maybe he gets kicked out]) (she feels that he abandoned her to whatever situation they have going on [he didn't even try to take her with him]) and he has to find her when the apocalypse starts. yjh older sibling to yma gives us a whole different little dynamic to explore from kdj ysk (there's different levels of responsibility and guilt and blame when you're talking siblings that are soooooo interesting to me. sorry that i see any set of siblings and immediately try to figure out how to make them worse)
lsk is kdj's mom who appeared into existence at some point with kdj and they were both just adults. that's weird isn't it. oh well. i guess she can become a transcendent later too for funsies
everyone else stays in the same configuration of Real Person vs Character to me this is a very important aspect
this point has no precedent with the swap, nothing particular that would change to cause this, but it would be so funny if lgy was a little gamer boy who is an avid yjh hater. hates that guy. shows up to competitions to boo him. tunes into yjh's silent no-mic speedrunning streams to mald in chat but yjh +mods don't ban him bc its kinda funny.
anyways the apocalypse starts when yjh and his coworker/fellow gamer hsy are on a train to twitchcon and lgy is also there (also headed to twitchcon) and he brings bugs because he likes them but also to sabotage yjh specifically. its just funny if this happened. you understand
instead of having reader-related skills and abilities, yjh's skills are video game player based! he gets flavor text insight on people, location, and items, things like that. notably, he has the ability to reset, to bring himself back to the beginning of the apocalypse
orv swap proper follows yjh as the Player of the Game (Consumer of the Narrative) who lives hundred of lifetimes in this ruined-world-become-reality "replaying" [read: time looping through] the game to reshape it to save his fave character from self implosion (kdj with no dissociation is very prone to dying. all the time.). to revisit the idea of playing with yjh and the idea of agency, of creation, the only way to get past the apocalypse is to go off the beaten path, to choose options that weren't even there in the game. when in space, at his darkest point, yjh becomes a writer. in this story, at his darkest point, he has to become a creator too
please do not ask me how the epilogues go i dont know how the epilogues go (i don't want to throw yjh back into a train for milennia after he Just went through a thousand resets so i'm sending kdj for that but i havent fully planned how or why)
anyways, hope that helps!!! :)
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