A 'R'omance with 'r'omance, Or, What a difference a cap makes

Meta
Title:	A 'R'omance with 'r'omance, Or, What a difference a cap makes
Creator:	Fialka
Date(s):	2000
Medium:	online
Fandom:	The X-Files
Topic:
External Links:	A 'R'omance with 'r'omance - Fialka, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

A 'R'omance with 'r'omance, Or, What a difference a cap makes is by Fialka.

It was part of a series. The author comments that: "Many of these essays first appeared as discussions on OBSSE, Scullyfic and/or ATXA."

The essay was first posted to The Annotated X-Files Study Guide and is at Fialka's Candybox.

Later, it was reposted:

Sadly, when the old NBCI server went the way of so many really cool, free things on the net, I never could find another free site with enough space to house the whole Study Guide, and it didn't get enough traffic to warrant paying for 250mb on a server somewhere. Not to mention, I no longer have as much time on my hands as I did back then, so like the UFOs...well, it is another UFO. Some of it still appears to be here, if you can wade your way through all the advertising on FortuneCity. I sure won't be insulted if you don't. These essays are from the original site, and appear here unchanged. Unlinked titles got abducted by aliens somewhere along the way. If you find them wandering dazed by the side of the road, could you be so kind as to send them home?

Excerpts

I never heard the word 'shipper' till I came online just before S6, but I never doubted for one second that The X-Files was a Romance. Yes, I said, Romance, with a capital 'R'. Note that, please, because it's important. Is it a romance, with a small 'r' -- YMMV. What I've always loved about the series was the idea that it was a Grand Romantic Quest in the old Heroic tradition -- two people whose lives became taken over by a shared goal, so much that whatever grab at personal happiness they may have dared to make became secondary to anything else. It was about Right and Wrong and Battles To Be Fought, Enemies to Be Vanquished; all that lovely stuff. And it was about Love, without a doubt. But Love is a many-faceted thing, which can or cannot include sex. Most importantly, it can *choose* not to include sex, and it seemed to me that at some point both M & S had made a conscious, albeit silent and separate, decision not to allow their feelings to take on a sexual expression. When (or if) this happened, is up to one's own mileage, and I've liked that as well. What made the series intruiguing to me was the between-the-lines reading, much as I've always loved the X-Files best when neither Mulder nor Scully were right, when the answer lay somewhere between them and we could decide for ourselves what we chose to believe.

Sadly, the Grand Romantic Quest was finally subverted with the movie -- the minute 1013 decided to jack us around with the damned bee thing, they brought it down to the cheapest kind of Harlequin 'r'omance. Will he kiss her, won't he -- LOOK HE IS! Oh. But he didn't. But he wanted to. But she wanted to. See, they're IN LOVE! Now, where do we go? And here's where it all turns for me: once the Grand Romantic Quest ceases to be Grand (or even Quest-like) there's no honest place for M &S to go but their own separate ways, or down the road to romance. It could have been done, one overt acknowledgement would have been enough, and we would not need to see it again. We could have moved on to other underlying questions, not will-they or are-they but is it going well, wonderfully, badly? Would they be laughing in the face of the gods, courting planetary disaster for the hubris of a mere mortal kiss?And if it doesn't work, if they can't do both, how will that affect the Quest everyone agrees must have the ultimate precedence? How will they save the world if they can no longer bear to look at each other? And what strength might they have gained from physically being what they have always symbolically been -- two halves of the same Hero, male and female, intuition and intellect?

The loss of Romance is possibly the reason my heart surreptitiously began to disengage from the show last year, without my mind's knowledge or consent. On the other hand, the late-S7 turnabout into ordinary romance delivered a stability to the uberstory that I needed, because without the Quest the show and the characters had lost their way. With no further Truth to search for Out There, Mulder and Scully could only search for the Truth in themselves and in each other. That was not the story that drew me into this series, but since it could no longer go in any other direction, I was rooting for them to call it a day and head for home. If the show were to go on, the Quest would have to pass to a new set of Heroes. Mulder and Scully's story was over, had been for some time apart from the coda: they didn't save the world, but they did save each other. It would have been a great place to end. But the show didn't end. Mulder was no longer on the Quest, he had (in theory) become it. This would not have been a bad idea, had Scully not been denied her rightful place as leader of the new Grand Romantic adventure. There would be no Great Search For A Lost Love. The Quest would pass into the hands of a reluctant hero who could not, alone, rise to the demand to be Heroic, as the Hero of this universe must always be two. Worse, Scully would be plunged even further into the mundane -- for what is more mundane, no matter how rewarding, than the day-to-day of raising a child? Single working mothers do not have time for Heroic Quests, it's heroic just to get through the day.