Story 76: "Negative Utopia" by prufrock's love

[wendelah1]

Since the last story just wasn't enough of a downer for me, I decided to bring bring out the big guns. For real angst, nothing beats a post-colonization story by prufrock's love. This is almost certainly her darkest post-col. "Negative Utopia" is a novel, it's MSR, everybody/other, and NC-17, so underage readers turn back now. This story is not for

Comments

[sixpences]

I'm not sure I would call this 'dark'... more like 'blacker than CGB Spender's tar-stained soul

[petite0red0head]

I agree this Scully does not seem like the Scully I know from the show or from other fics. I just took it as Scully transformed by the why the world is now. More interested in observing and not investing in what is going on. This could have been made more obvious though. When she is coming to terms with Mulder being with other women and she doesn't judge because it is what he had to do she could have remembered the professionally polished agent who was wildly jealous over any woman she thought Mulder might have an eye for, make the contrast in Before and After even more striking.

[sixpences]

I agree that this is clearly a traumatised Scully, but she just seemed so blank at times that I just could not believe it. To draw a comparison that the author herself invites, Offred in The Handmaid's Tale suffers in an equally debasing and horrifying dystopian society, but retains her agency and an internal rebellion against her situation. We see that Gilead is awful in part because of what it does to this woman.

But in 'Negative Utopia' Scully barely seems to register that there is something wrong about this new world- she just acquiesces to it with barely any inward resistance, let alone outward, which I just cannot see Scully actually doing- particularly when it seemed clear to me that she does have the opportunity to wield at least a little social power as a community's doctor.

[petite0red0head]

Again I do agree that this is not the Scully we are all familiar with, and yes perhaps it would have been a more interesting choice to have her fight against this world she is in but I found her acceptance heartbreaking. And frankly I did not find the Mulder to be the one we all know. He was unbelievably stoic and quiet and yes I know he had to be. It created more uncertainty for Scully and showed us just how far apart they had become. I also think that more could have been made over the fact that he was raped. That is pretty huge and not really gone into. In terms of what it did to him and him healing.

[wendelah1]

To draw a comparison that the author herself invites, Offred in The Handmaid's Tale suffers in an equally debasing and horrifying dystopian society, but retains her agency and an internal rebellion against her situation. We see that Gilead is awful in part because of what it does to this woman.

This dystopia is much, much darker than the one in The Handmaid's Tale. Although, I think it is plenty dark enough to be recognizably dystopian without Offred, she does give us someone we can identify with, and as you point out, that is her purpose in the novel's structure. One of them, anyway. In an original novel, where you have to create the characters from scratch, part of the conflict is how that character deals with whatever the author throws at them