TOOOOOOOOOMS

[scooly42.livejournal.com]

Ladies and, well... ladies!

Are you ready for some Tooms celebration?!

I certainly am.

I'm happy to present y'all with three drawings, one of which is NC-17, so don't click the cut unless children/coworkers/bosses are out of sight. Oh and don't worry, only the PG-13 ones involve bile, because, ew.

I've also made you a bit of meta because I have a great appreciation of all things first season.


1. "You can get the next mutant"



Mulder in the vent/crawlspace under the escalator. I know, I know; the vent wasn't that high. Maybe there were fragments that were higher, aughhh

The light on his feet comes from the hole he entered by.

What else. Mulder is always sweating. And his season one fashion is really weird sometimes. It always struck me how oversized his clothes were sometimes - just like the dress shirt in this scene.

But seriously. Let's have the tiniest bit of meta.

I tried to capture the fear he is starting to feel once he is in the dark vent. Mulder loves to play the big G-man: flash his flashlight, put his fingers in stuff, chase monsters in the dark with his coat flapping, shouting "FBI! Drop your weapon!". But now, the situation's a bit different than your regular MOTW: he's here to get Tooms, who hates him personally, who he knows is dangerous and fast like hell, and who is, first of all, a cold-blooded murderer, mutated or not. So what our hero Mulder is just starting to realize here is that if something goes wrong, it can go wrong in a milisecond, and he can die although he has a gun because the location is so uncomfortable for him to try and defend himself in anyway. This isn't a sunny Baltimore street by Tooms' Animal Regulation van anymore; it's a dark, cold vent smelling of bile, and he's just realized he can't really turn back in it. Scully's no help up there on the surface, because no matter how fast she reacts, if Tooms wants to, he'll slash his throat open with his fingernails faster that she opens a can of root beer.

Mulder knows he has to be here, but it doesn't mean he likes it.



2. "AUGH OH MY GOD NO I LIKE MY LIVER WHERE IT IIIIISSSS"



Yup. What was I saying? Oh yeah, fingernails, throat, liver.

Of course, in a few moments Mulder will once again prove to be stronger than an infuriated hungry mutant and escape to safety with nothing more than a few bruises. And icky bile stains on that nice big shirt. But right now, in this scene, I doubt he thinks he will.

For those of you who care about technique: this is not oekaki because I suck at it, but I defnitely enjoy oekaki artists and tried to achieve a similiar feel in Photoshop.



3. "Get the bile off"

When I was musing about what Tooms scenes to do, I joked that I wouldn't be doing porn because ew, bile! And of course, some crazy lewd wenches that I swear I'd never met before started saying, "Ooh! Scully could help him wash the bile off, leading to shower sexy times!" And they must've drugged my iced tea, because guess what, I surrendered to their ways.

This is actually fanfic illustration, so... double fanart? Because my Partner in Porn icedteainthebag wrote the super steamy "Get the bile off" to inspire me (go check it out).



Now, this image by itself is just bad porn, but in combination with the fic it lead to some meta I would like to share.

First of all, my PIP and I talked a bit after she first showed me the story, and I thought I'd share:

me: I love the psychology in it: that she's so strong, that although he invites her, she chooses to get in because she wants to. And she's in control, and she feels good because of making him feel good. And still, their respect for each other is there, equal and mutual; i love that he doesn't try to paw her, and that she doesn't want his thanks. And that after the fact no one gets sappy, no one gets angsty, and no one gets silly, either. It's pretty light although really hot, and i think they never get OOC.

icedteainthebag: This piece needed to be very first season. I've never written first season pr0n before, and it needed to be reflective of their careful balance, and it needed to be uncomfortable, and a little more professional and standoffish at times than say, S7 pr0n. The respect is important, that she makes her own choices is important, that they don't get sappy or angsty is super important because that's just not how I see them being if they really did do this way back then.

me: Yes, my thoughts exactly. (...) This is s1. Scully is still really young, but professional, fierce and sure of herself, and Mulder is, before all, her very good friend. This is really important. All their gestures of comfort, all their easy flirting in s1 can be viewed with or without the shipper goggles; I, personally, prefer the without variant. I mean, there's a difference between being a shipper blindly and being realistic and analytic about the characters' dynamic. I don't believe they loved each other in s1. What they were was very good friends, perhaps even better friends in this earlier period than they were later. I read in a fanfic once that the s7 Scully thinks something like, 'We used to be friends, i miss that, what happened?' It always struck me as very true. That it seems that although they grow to love each other, their relationship becomes a bit awkward at times as they are driven a bit apart from the easy friendship they used to share, due to external factors like personal tragedies and frustrations and trust issues as well as the fact that they realize they're in love so completely. This is clearly the atmosphere in s8.

Back to Tooms: as I said, I don't believe they loved each other back then. Many people read the "iced tea/root beer" scene in a very obvious way. Let's take a look:

SCULLY: Fox...
(Mulder laughs. Scully looks at him.)
MULDER: And I... I even made my parents call me Mulder. So... Mulder.
SCULLY: Mulder, I wouldn’t put myself on the line for anybody but you.
(They look at each other.)
MULDER: If there’s an ice tea in that bag, could be love.
(She takes out the drink.)
SCULLY: Must be fate, Mulder. Root beer.
(Mulder kiddingly sighs.)
You’re delirious. Go home and get some sleep.

As we all know, because of this exchange, Tooms is an important episode for all shippers, and many a videotape has been worn threadbare by frequent rewinding. Of course, there's UST in the scene, but a different kind than in the later seasons. Not as... dark. Scully with her effort to get a bit closer to him in this scene can be read equally well as lovesick or just friendly. I prefer the friendly variant. She does seem to have a slight crush on him in s1, especially in the first episodes, but I think it wears off after a bit. I mean, she surely does think him handsome, but first of all, she just likes him a lot, as in, as a friend, coworker, interlocutor, and partner. In Tooms we learn that if she "puts herself on the line", it will only be for him, and we know how much she values her professionalism and loyalty to authority. She's come a long way from "the little spy", altough it didn't take her long.

In this conversation, she wants to call him by his first name because she's a normal person, and normal people call their friends by their first names. She's still in the stage where she would welcome him calling her by her first name, where she thinks that would bring them even closer; she thinks there's still time to change it, and there is. But I think this conversation, this nervous laugh from Mulder, with which he signals explicitly "No, I don't want this, I really like you, but you wanting to get this close to me still makes me feel awkward, don't go there,"* puts a definite end to her wondering whether to change the way they call each other. She gets the message and never, ever calls him "Fox" again; they'll always be Mulder and Scully from now on.

An interesting thing is that Mulder later maybe regrets closing the topic this way. He calls her by her first name a number of times before and after this conversation, and no matter how weird it sounds to us philes (and to Scully herself?), for him it seems important and right to call her that in those situations. He doesn't look awkward when he does it, and by that he probably wants to signal "You're not as warped as me. You are a normal person. You deserve normal communication. I see and acknowledge that. I like your being a normal person. I want to make you feel normal, like you should, and I want to show you that I feel you're normal. I want you to feel good both because you are normal and because I acknowledge it"*. (By normal here I mean normal by Mulder's standards, that is probably "not as crazy, scared of commitment, and alienated as I am".)

In conclusion: No, I don't think they loved each other in Tooms. Thank you for your time, we're back to our regularly scheduled program



Okay! I hope you either enjoyed it, or were comfortably bored (as opposed to "outraged" or "bored to death by Captain Obvious"). Any addition or discussion regarding the meta is greatly appreciated.



*The style of Mulder's "underlying communication" between the quotation marks is a bit akin to the style of the so-called semantic explanations, which are precise definitions written with the simplest, most universal terms, and therefore can be quite long. Such explanations are used in defining emotion concepts and cultural scripts, that is, my area of academic interest. I'm making this note in case anyone thought it sounded weird or had any redundancy. ;) Please feel free to ignore/amend them.