Ideal Work Schedule:

Anyway. Suffice it to say that I identify strongly with Scully for a whole lot of personality, mental health, and neurodivergence reasons (and yes, as someone on that spectrum, Scully reads way more that way to me than Mulder at any given point), and that is exactly why I don't think Scully is this beautiful little angel martyr who never did anything wrong in her life ever.

In many ways her lack of communication + big emotional outbursts + contradictory impulses and lies about what she wants are the main reason she's stuck in a situation where Mulder keeps hurting her, her family keeps hurting her, and she keeps ending up with less than what she wants.

if you don't say what you want and need, don't set any boundaries, blow up with 'people ask too much of you' or you get overwhelmed (without at any point saying you're getting overwhelmed or that the stress is getting to you or that you're not getting what you're hoping for from the people around you) and then lie and deflect when asked what's wrong and what you do want, then yeah, you're not going to get what you want because absolutely no one knows what you're 'hinting' about or trying to make happen. what's more people will end up treating you like an emotionally fragile bomb to diffuse, who might decide to trash the whole relationship if asked to modify your behavior, instead of someone who can deal with a conversation about wants and needs in a two way exchange.

That kind of avoidant-hostile behavior makes a lot of no-win situations that you created for yourself, and then the other person conveniently takes the blame for both of you a lot of the time.

So yeah, seeing a lot of myself in Scully is exactly why I sometimes say i think Mulder can do better and why I don't think he put them in the acrimonious, tense relationship they were in in much of s4, s5 and s6. Sure, he got fed up and started snarking back and distancing himself as the holding pattern wore on and Scully kept up a pattern of extreme neediness and avoidance-with-prejudice. But he wasn't 'pushing her away' or 'punishing her' or 'being consumed by guilt,' it reads as him responding to her surprisingly consistent pattern of on screen behavior, which. I'd bet that if someone's playing emotional yo-yo with you, you'd get snappish and withdrawn, too.

And yes, ultimately I don't think they can stay apart. And yes part of me wants to see Mulder always forgive Scully for her behavior because it's a comforting fantasy for me. But it's also a cathartic fantasy for me to see him make her confront and deal with the consequences of her mind games sometimes because it's a way to help me make sense of the times people I cared about have cut me out of their lives "for no reason."

And no it isn't 'more equal and fair' to erase her flaws and always let her off the hook.

God I hate how normalized not being in control of your own devices has become. My phone updates in the middle of the night without asking me shit or getting my consent for anything and its like "Oh hi I'm your new AI, please enjoy this forced overlay that you can't exit out of until you go through my tutorial"

"Great fuck you, I would like to uninstall you" "Oh I'm sorry you can't uninstall me! I'm a core system application and if you uninstall me your phone won't function correctly despite the fact that I did not exist yesterday and your phone worked fine" "....." "You can disable parts of my functionality but I will always be here and I will pop up notifications asking you to re-enable me unless you figure out how to disable those too! Then I will still show up in a different color at the top of your settings application telling you that you need to 'fix" a 'problem' with your phone, that problem being that I am disabled. Does that help?"

Like, you know what I can do on my desktop? "sudo pacman -Rdd linux" , this will just fucking remove the entire linux kernel. Fundamentally breaking my computer until I boot up a live disk and chroot in and reinstall it or whatever, and the computer will go "Are you sure (y/n)" or whatever and i'm like "y" and it will just go "Ok you got it boss"

But its mine, I get to do what I want with it. I control the computer, the computer does not control me. I refuse to cede control to my phone or anything else. The thing is a lot of people will joke that like "Oh I love just letting the machine tell me what to do, I don't know what I'm doing, it knows best" or whatever but the thing you have to realize is that when you say that you are abstracting away that "the phone" or whatever is not some value neutral logic driven robot like from sci-fi, it is a collection of the the capitalistic and fascistic desires of the tech oligarch fuckwits that are burning the world to the ground right now. You aren't submitting to the phone, you are submitting to Musk, Bezos, Nadella, Pichai, Cook and all those other evil bastards.

Fuck them, fuck their little AI toys, and fuck this.

Alex Krycek in profile

i hate this place i want to go to build a bear

Fan art by Ami Thompson

even more smoll scully and mulder holds her gently 🥺❤️

you see, one of the main reasons the x files works is because it is fully dedicated to simply torturing that man

lovely character. i need him to finally break down sobbing clutching his chest like it'll stop the pain crumpling to the floor begging God to either help him or let him die

but on the other hand i object to the allegation that a 'loyal malewife transformation' was necessary. MSR is not The Taming Of The Shrew/Moonlighting, they just liked each other on a personally compatible level from day 2 and both of them are hard wired for extremes of devotion, which are demonstrated immediately.

mulder saying 'nothing else matters' about trying to save his baby sister and 'wanting to believe' that she will be returned safe is a demonstration of that absurd devotion and by the time Scully's shown she's not going to turn on him and in fact will take secret military police hostage for him, she's earned that devotion, too. Even when these things aren't directly stated, they can be inferred from their actions.

Even when they don't agree about work things and scientific findings, there are no phases believed the other is shallow/amoral/scum-like/vindictive/faithless, etc.