Inventing the Mulders

Fanfiction
Title:	Inventing the Mulders
Author(s):	prufrock's love
Date(s):
Length:	3167 words (7 pages)
Genre:	het, POV, PG-13
Fandom:	The X-Files
External Links:	online here at reocities
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Inventing the Mulders is an X-Files story by prufrock's love.

Reactions and Reviews

2007

I love it to pieces and not just because it was written by pru. This is one of those fics where I know I am going to be sad if I read it but I do it anyway. My heart just breaks for Mulder... In the context of the story, I can understand why Scully does what she does. Interesting to read Scully's POV, most of pru's fics are in Mulder's POV. When I first read it I was disappointed that it ended where it did. But after having read it so many times, I can understand why she ended the story there. One thing pru is very good at is drawing the reader into the story regardless if the plot is not pretty (That's why I read The Wasteland and Promises to Keep all the way to the end)

If I don't love it it's only because I don't love the way it makes me feel.

It's an excellent story. I can imagine Scully making these choices, and Pru did a great job of demonstrating the situation rather than describing it.

The situation is low-key and the writing is low-key. Totally unpretentious.

Beautiful Mulder monologue too. That's hard to do.

The story made sense, hit the right emotional notes and had the typical Prufrock dark humor. I've never been a big fan of Pru's long, overwrought angst fests, because she tends to lose her way and fail to stick her landing at the end. But in her shorter fics, I can see the attraction to this author. This is a tightly written, dark story where nobody is completely right and nobody is completely wrong. I liked it enormously and can't find anything that I didn't like. I'd definitely recommend.

2011

Last year, something remarkable happened. Prufrock's love, a beloved but famously reclusive author, started re-posting her fanfic to archive them at Gossamer. Understandably, this caused quite a stir. In the wake of losing so many XF fanfic sites over the past several years, a process accelerated by Yahoo's closure of Geocities, it showed a lot of love for a fandom she had presumably left behind long ago. Well, that's how I choose to interpret it, anyway. She hasn't re-posted everything by any means, but hey, it's a start.

"Inventing the Mulders" is one of the stories she hasn't archived yet, or at least it hasn't shown up on her page at Gossamer. This is a shame since I think it's one of her best. It's an unsentimental look at how season nine might have played out, had it been better written and still had David Duchovny making an occasional appearance. Do I betray my biases? So be it.

Besides archiving her fic, she's posted an email address. You can send feedback now to prufrockslove [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Is there a sequel to this story? I'm not really a Pru fan, but I rather enjoyed this. I'm not sure about the characterization in the beginning- I don't feel like Scully would go on a date with another man, even if she wasn't into it. But Mulder and Scully's relationship here is portrayed in a very interesting way. I thought that the ending was very much in line with my own ideas about the characters- they need each other, despite everything working against them.

No, this is a one-off. Her other season nine au, "The 13th Sign," which we read a couple of years ago, doesn't fit into this timeline. I'm personally happy she left it where she did, thereby letting the reader fill in the rest. The people who want a hearts and flowers happy ending can write one in their heads. The people who think this is as good as it gets, until colonization happens and then it gets much worse, can imagine that ending in our twisted little brains.

Anyway, having just re-watched all 9 seasons with my partner's UST-goggles on the couch next to me made me like this story a lot more than the first time I read it.

The more I look at this though, the more I love the...friction in the fic, for some reason (*Valiant attempt to get on-topic*) I don't know, I just liked the idea that they both have different priorities very much - and that Scully's a lot bigger on family than Mulder is, particularly when he's still got his quest bugbear.

Very good choice. And I agree that this is among the best of Prufrock's Love's fiction, which often arouses conflicting feelings in me.

Though interesting, sure, it is also very unhappy in an arrested development way that was typical of many episodes, I suppose.

I disagree, if I understand you, that Mulder and Scully were never together in "that way," although they obviously aren't now. The sperm donor issue remains unaddressed, but Mulder refers to a "that night" and they are obviously exchanging romantic signals and gestures. Maybe sex is on-again-off-again, as he implies.

The problem now is that Mulder *can't* give up the quest and Scully *can't* give up wanting him to stay home with the family, no matter what the original single-parent deal was. It's ironic that she is left in a relationship like yet very unlike the one Maggie had with Ahab, who was at sea so much of the time.

This is magnificently written. The woman can turn a phrase and make it look easy.

She does have, is seems, a continuing fixation on menstruation.

I love this story, one of Prufrock's best I think.

The delicate push and pull that goes on between them, the resentment on Scully's part, her attempts - but not serious attempts - to move on from Mulder are so conceivable from the concept of how I think of them. Mulder does want to be a Dad, he probably would like the choice to stay at home more, but he is destined to save the world and he knows it. Imagine if there was no William: where would Scully be? Having a "moderately priced knock-off" type of life having dates with people she is not interested in? I don't think so....ultimately they are both where they have to be even if it is not really where either of them want to. No wonder they are so unsure and at such odds.

I really like the tendency to light irony in the writing. Self-deprecating humour is one healthy way to stave off self-pity and exceeding melodrama. Scully is OTT about William's health, but then she really wants an excuse to finish the date and get home. She bitches at Mulder because she is hurt and can't bear him leaving but not because she hates him. That is clear at the end.

So I don't think this story is morose. This story still has hope to me: they clearly love each other and adore William, it is the practical problem of having all that and being heroes too. If ONLY this was the worst that would happen, if ONLY Prufrock had written Season 9 - then maybe we could avoid the absolutely nonsensical tragedy of Scully giving up her baby. Pffah....what rubbish was that?!

Huh. It's been a long time since I read Inventing the Mulders. I quite like it - more the second time in fact - but it's not how I see Mulder and Scully.

I want there to be a genre called Realism MSR for fics like this one - fics that seem to start from the premise of saying, "If Mulder and Scully existed in the real world, it would probably go something like this." Fics where their soul mate status is dented and tarnished.

Usually I like this kind of realism more in early seasons fics, and increasingly less the later the fic is set, which makes ITM a hard sell. I'm a little surprised I like it as much as I do, actually. I like the style it's written in. I like that it's short, concise, and each scene is easy to visualize. I like that it fills in the blanks here and there, so that it's only by the end that I feel like I have a solid grasp of the big picture, but there's still a lot of smaller blanks left. I like that Mulder and Scully have a bond they can't break (even if they'd like to). I like Scully's cynical humor (she seems to have taken on aspects of Mulder's personality in his absence) and that her humor belies the depth of her pain.

I don't like...hmm.

I don't like the way Scully is put in a stereotypical wife position, relegated to waiting at home, taking care of their child, performing autopsies to no specific end, while Mulder is out risking life and limb - presumably working for the greater cause. Beyond that, I don't like that her discontent with the situation seems to be focused on Mulder's absence and how much she wishes he were there. I would have much preferred to see her turmoil over the fact that she's been effectively sidelined - she was his partner, his equal, and now she's a single working mother and he's a lone action hero.

I understand that one of them has to go fight the future and one of them has to stay with William and hold down the fort. I understand that Scully is better suited to stay and Mulder is better suited to go. But the way things are in ITM doesn't feel like a strategic decision made between equals. It feels more like Scully's right back to being Starbuck - asking her father how long he'll be gone, before he sails into the distance; as though she expects Mulder to have an answer.

Pru does a good job of conveying how difficult it is for Scully to be in her position of relative powerlessness. But the pathos of their situation - what ITM is built on - is not as unavoidable as it seems. It's largely the result of them both failing to work together. They could be partners working a two pronged attempt to fight the future. In S4 I wouldn't expect them to form such a united front, but in S8 and beyond I do. ITM is a poignant fic, Pru is a solid writer, and if she wrote more in this universe I would happily read it. But ultimately I think more of them - especially Scully - than this, than two+ years of settling for a knock-off life while Mulder accomplishes...nothing? Everything? Has she even asked?

That said, ITM is very much in the vein of S9, so I can't say it's OOC. But I fairly loathe S9, mainly for the same reasons I struggle with ITM. So maybe why I like ITM is because it outdoes S9. It does the same things S9 does, but at least it does them better - more poignantly, more realistically.

guess I should add that if it comes down to saving the world or being a great parent, I'm going to choose saving the world. Especially since by saving the world you're saving your own child too.

That is actually a very brave and honest thing to say and deserves a response in the like: I don't think many parents could actually, when push came to shove, agree with it. In the abstract maybe, but not in reality. More imaginable perhaps if you had pushed a kid out that you hadn't particularly wanted or planned for, but Scully had.And Scully just wasn't the sort of person (think Emily) that would not take that responsibility enormously seriously. Typically she would end up being a better parent than most of us mere mortals would ever hope to be (although a little bit OTT on the "William's got a fever front").

For Scully to be a parent prepared to sacrifice her own child for the sake of the fight? That to me would make a Scully that I couldn't understand and hard to condone. To the extent that the very fact that she gives him up in S9, without apparently any attempt to find an alternative solution, is at once so unrealistic and so damning of her...

except we know Scully, and know this is outrageously OOC: that it is not her, that the fault lies squarely with those in command of the show, which makes us realize that by S9 they had really completely lost the plot.

And of course it wasn't the only completely ridiculous thing to happen in S9. I don't expect realism in my shows but I do expect some sort of fidelity to character and ambience and it failed on nearly every count. Some of the photography was good though....