Story 78: "The Flexible Concept of Tomorrow" by finisterre

[wendelah1]

This week I am posting a wonderful The X-Files/Dr.Who cross-over story by finisterre,"The Flexible Concept of Tomorrow." finisterre is the fic journal of the artist formerly known as Marasmus. She left our fandom, and came to LJ, I suppose, with the big fandom migration from the usenet groups. From what I can tell, she had virtually stopped posting her fic writing.

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Comments

[amyhit]

strangely, while i agree with most of what everyone has expressed here in technicality, this one just...i couldn't get past the crossover aspect. I know that the writing is good. if nothing else, i know that it is because when Donna isn't there, and the focus spins and shifts back into focus on mulder and scully alone, my heart flushes and i feel what finisterre is driving at with this story. at least i think i do, to an extent. and there are these lines:

It’s not until five years later, when he decides that Scully doesn’t dance enough and waltzes her round the kitchen to songs from the radio, that he recognizes the music from the phone again - "Hey Ya" - and has the thrill of knowing for sure that he met honest to god *time travellers*.

where i can read it and go, okay! beautiful! donna is simply a reoccurring MoTW! she's well written, complex, yet unobtrusive to the integral structure of TXF as i see it. finesterre's writing is heavy with undertones and half-spoken details, and it's just very sensitive to everything.

or even, say, the part that occurs while scully is out of the picture with good reason because she's been abducted:

The first time Mulder meets Donna Noble he is 32 years old, it’s fall and the days are endless, stretched gray. A cold, wet Tuesday evening, end of October; a badly lit, near empty hotel bar at almost ten o’clock. It has been eleven weeks, three days and - he checked his watch an hour ago - four hours since Scully was last seen bloody but alive on the grainy surveillance footage from a state trooper’s camera.

i love it, and i can begin to stop feeling like...(okay, finisterre, how this sounds isn't how i mean it, but-) like i'm looking at frankenstein's reanimated creation, something unnatural. where as, great lines like:

- something you’d wear to invade Russia, not to pick up guys in bars. She catches his eye and he ducks his head but she comes over anyway.

are like the pea in the bed, for me, because they make me aware that donna is a character in her own universe and it isn't this one, so...why is she here. it's even more difficult when mulder begins to tell donna all about TXF and scully, because suddenly it's blurring the lines even more. for me it feels like intruding on one universe with the other, giving away precious secrets and intimate details that can't ever be recanted.

the reason i bring up my dislike in this case, rather than saying nothing, is because it seems like the discussion of whether a person likes crossovers or they don't actually says a lot about fanfic and about the different ways of appreciating canon as well as fic. also, i bring it up because no one else has taken a negative footing on the fic, so i figure it won't hurt to establish one.

personally, i see the universe of any story something like a soap bubble - whole in and of itself. if it bumps into something or if something is inserted into it, the bubble pops. and that's why i have a hard time with finisterre's fic, even for all it's merits. it feels like she's 'pricked the bubble' so to speak. she's done it beautifully and tenderly, but for me (and perhaps for others who just don't usually read crossovers), the XF bubble still pops in the process.

i find it interesting that you, wendelah1, who has voiced appreciation for the claustrophobic structure of TXF universe, doesn't feel as though the universe's privacy is being intruded upon by the crossover. why do you think you accept the implications of this fic so easily?(i'm only curious, though. if you want to say, 'just because' that's fine too.)

[wendelah1]

Actually, I really like cross-overs, especially when they are this well done. Nothing popped for me, except the story. I'm pretty distant emotionally from Dr. Who, as I only watched the old series, never the new, but I didn't have any trouble integrating Donna into Mulder's world, maybe because in this story Mulder was so open to the extreme possibilities, just as he always is.

I think I've read nearly every cross-over I can get my hands on in nearly every fandom I read fic for. A few are great, a few more are okay, many others not so good. This one is amazingly well-done.

raaaambling.

[amyhit]

the structure, as i'm fairly certain i recall someone else pointing out, is brilliant, truly. she seems to build the fic in a circle, of sorts, telling you bits from all different places and all different head-spaces (so that they seem to almost be 'moving in different directions'(i'm not sure how to say it better?) until eventually all those fragments coalesce to form one complete picture.

again with the circle imagery for me, jeez. i have to go get a new stick. *grin*

I think I've read nearly every cross-over I can get my hands on in nearly every fandom I read fic for.

yeah, whereas i tend to avoid them, as i guess my above post makes abundantly obvious. it's not the fic's fualt or the author's, of course - i do know that. but i pretty much always finish the fic feeling as though "my" story has been in some way violated. in this particular fic, the more effort finisterre puts into writing donna well, the more i want to shove her aside. and she does write her well, as far as i can see. i love donna's attitude. she just seems so similar to mulder in quite a few ways. she seems like a bit of a brazen, pushy crackpot who just happens to be intelligent and keyed in to what's 'really going on'.

but see, there's another 'problem' for me: how can what's 'really going on' for her, and what's 'really going on' for mulder co-exist? there just *tries to calm self* there can't be enough room in one universe for all that? it would surly have to be connected somehow - her work and his work - wouldn't it. if it wasn't, then suddenly we would have to ask of our characters if they were even devoting their lives to the mission that most needed them, or if maybe they should go join donna's work. and if they are connected, then the fundamental dynamic of the entire story is altered by that, since they're clearly not fighting the fight they think they are. *flails* i just can't get around it. crossovers make me batty and neurotic.

[sixpences]

Actually, I think I agree with you a fair bit vis-a-vis crossovers; as I said above, I can't make TXF and the Whoverse mesh in my mind at all. They are just too different on so many levels, both in the details of the universes, and the underlying cultural and social assumptions of each. I definitely agree that if you think about the implications of the story too much it all comes to bits.

I think I managed to enjoy it still simply because the basic character connection was powerful enough to enable me to suspend my disbelief (which to be honest is often what happens to me watching both DW and XF). It was definitely uncomfortable at times, when my brain started to go 'but... but...!', and it continues to niggle me slightly, but I think what made me enjoy it overall was that it did manage to make me forget my objections, for the most part.