Comments | xf_book_club: Story 258: "SN 1572" by prufrock's love

wendelah1 in xf_book_club

Story 258: "SN 1572" by prufrock's love

Jul 01, 2015 14:48

I'd been thinking about posting this so when it was nominated by an anonymous lurker, I decided to go ahead. It's a major new work by a talented writer. Dear Anon, thanks for the suggestion. I hope you will join the discussion.

Title: SN 1572 ( Read more... )

season 8, post-col, season 7, msr

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somewhat spoilery response to story zinnia03 July 11 2015, 16:16:04 UTC

I have read many of the stories but seldom comment. Thanks for continuing to post these in the face of apparent apathy. I think we are out there but speaking at least for me, RL doesn't allow me much time to indulge myself in reading (I'm the half-hour before bed kind of reader these days), or even much brain space to think about the things I read when I get a chance to read them. This story I stayed up late to read over two evenings ( ... )

Re: somewhat spoilery response to story infinitlight July 18 2015, 09:07:50 UTC

I'm glad you mentioned the women's choices aspect of the story because I have been mulling this over myself. To be honest I was quite perplexed that when Scully was presented with a patient she immediately believed to be in captivity, the first thing she said (to the men she believed were the woman's captors) was that she would not perform an abortion. I'm not sure if there's something I'm missing there, but I also found the "prostituting herself" phrasing confronting. I think because these instances are presented from Scully's point of view - if one of the men in the story spoke like this, it wouldn't be as noticeable to me.

Re: somewhat spoilery response to story wendelah1 July 18 2015, 13:46:46 UTC

So, you don't accept that this Scully would refuse to perform an abortion on a rape victim? She's also portrayed as disapproving of polyamory and strongly against prostitution. Whether I agree with the characterization is another matter, but I think it's internally consistent. From the character's perspective, these practices are all immoral. For many people who believe abortion is murder, there is no exception to be made for rape. She believes that allowing women to trade sexual favors is degrading, for them, and for what's left of humanity. She doesn't want sex to be a commodity, she doesn't want women's value to be reduced to sex and procreation. From what I read in the text, she thinks procreation is immoral because if humanity survives, the alien colonists will return to harvest us again.

Re: somewhat spoilery response to story infinitlight July 19 2015, 09:06:08 UTC

It's not so much that I have trouble with Scully refusing to perform an abortion, it's that that is her first thought and first action, before consulting her patient, before examining said patient, and in this scene the most important thing to Scully is that (the people she believes to be) her patient's abusers know that she will not perform an abortion. I have trouble with this because it completely removes the autonomy of her patient and also puts the needs/requests of the abusers above her patient's needs ( ... )

Re: somewhat spoilery response to story whithersoever July 21 2015, 16:29:56 UTC

You've touched upon something that wasn't sitting right with me, also. I knew Scully didn't feel like Scully, but I was having trouble figuring out exactly why. I think your comment gets it exactly right.

Re: somewhat spoilery response to story wendelah1 July 18 2015, 14:34:52 UTC

I didn't go back and re-read the original story but I remember it as being relatively short, sharp, and having a fairly hopeless view of the future. I was new to fanfic and devoured pretty much everything in my path at that time, but "Negative Utopia" is one that stuck with me.

I did reread it and your memory of it is accurate. It was much shorter, told only in the present, and the post-colonization world it portrayed was bleak and hopeless.

I like this re-working of it for the way it fleshes out the post-colonization world. Also, it's unusual for Prufrock to write from Scully's POV - most of the stories I've read by her are Mulder POV. In them, Mulder often seems to view himself as somewhat inept and socially backward, so to see him through the filter of Scully - where she finds him almost as much of an enigma as he finds her -- is interesting.I haven't read everything, but I always thought prufrock's love wrote an unusually competent version of Mulder. And I don't recall him being mystified by Scully either. In the non- ( ... )

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