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100 days of enemy recs: 43. Mulder/Krycek
And today is the fandom the word "shipper" was coined for!
I remember way back meeting a few old XF-only fen who thought "shipper" meant liking buddy pairings and "slasher" meant liking enemy pairings, because in XF "shipper" meant Mulder/Scully and "slasher" meant "Mulder/Krycek". (I know, there were some people who "shipped" Skinner too, but let's face it, Skinner fans weren't the ones reshaping all of fandom.)
It must have been a trip to be watching along as the Krycek storyline originally aired, and not knowing if the fresh-faced young agent who had just been assigned to Mulder was trustworthy or not. And then get it confirmed for sure that he wasn't!
My first big reading jag in this fandom must have been c. 2003, when my sister sat me down to make me watch the whole thing, and I barely even had an LJ and definitely wasn't keeping track of things anywhere (After all, there's only so much fanfic, I can always find it again....) so choosing recs for this was not easy. I have so many vivid memories of stories! And they are so not things that are googleable! And diving back into the archives I was reading in then is a journey. All the sturm und drang about headers and limiting people to 75 tags per story, back in the days where you had to post to alt.tv.x-files.creative to make sure your stuff got archived, you were lucky if a story had a pairing. Much less a summary!! Warning tags, pfeh.
If you're interested in pre-lj fandom and you weren't there for it, the Gossamer archive is still up, and I recommed just. Poking around. Exploring. Seeing if you can find anything.
(That said, Mulder/Krycek as a ship needs a warning. Because Mulder is constantly beating Krycek up. Which is canon from the show! And to be fair, everybody beats Krycek up. But a lot of the fic dances along the line to partner abuse, and doesn't always acknowledge that's what it's doing, or expects you to follow along as Mulder slowly realizes who he's become. I remember finding a lot of it uncomfortable but visceral twenty years ago; the uncomfortable is a bit stronger now. For me at least it's sometimes worse to read than some of the stuff in Hannibal/Will fic, where at least they *know* they're crossing lines.) So if you're a person who's sensitive to partner abuse, have someone trusted pre-vet Mulder/Krycek fic for you.)
I remember way back meeting a few old XF-only fen who thought "shipper" meant liking buddy pairings and "slasher" meant liking enemy pairings, because in XF "shipper" meant Mulder/Scully and "slasher" meant "Mulder/Krycek". (I know, there were some people who "shipped" Skinner too, but let's face it, Skinner fans weren't the ones reshaping all of fandom.)
It must have been a trip to be watching along as the Krycek storyline originally aired, and not knowing if the fresh-faced young agent who had just been assigned to Mulder was trustworthy or not. And then get it confirmed for sure that he wasn't!
My first big reading jag in this fandom must have been c. 2003, when my sister sat me down to make me watch the whole thing, and I barely even had an LJ and definitely wasn't keeping track of things anywhere (After all, there's only so much fanfic, I can always find it again....) so choosing recs for this was not easy. I have so many vivid memories of stories! And they are so not things that are googleable! And diving back into the archives I was reading in then is a journey. All the sturm und drang about headers and limiting people to 75 tags per story, back in the days where you had to post to alt.tv.x-files.creative to make sure your stuff got archived, you were lucky if a story had a pairing. Much less a summary!! Warning tags, pfeh.
If you're interested in pre-lj fandom and you weren't there for it, the Gossamer archive is still up, and I recommed just. Poking around. Exploring. Seeing if you can find anything.
(That said, Mulder/Krycek as a ship needs a warning. Because Mulder is constantly beating Krycek up. Which is canon from the show! And to be fair, everybody beats Krycek up. But a lot of the fic dances along the line to partner abuse, and doesn't always acknowledge that's what it's doing, or expects you to follow along as Mulder slowly realizes who he's become. I remember finding a lot of it uncomfortable but visceral twenty years ago; the uncomfortable is a bit stronger now. For me at least it's sometimes worse to read than some of the stuff in Hannibal/Will fic, where at least they *know* they're crossing lines.) So if you're a person who's sensitive to partner abuse, have someone trusted pre-vet Mulder/Krycek fic for you.)
- The Gift of an Enemy (125000 words) by
sylvia
Chapters: 6/6
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Alex Krycek/Fox Mulder
Characters: Alex Krycek, Fox Mulder, The Consortium
Additional Tags: Witches, Aliens, Case Fic
This is on the AO3 via the Open Doors import from The Basement, but it's archive-locked, so I'm linking to the off-archive non-locked version the author points to from the Ter/Ma Open Doors import. (There is a LOT of messiness on AO3 with old XF fic and Open Doors imports, unfortunately. On the plus side, Open Doors means nearly all if it *is* there *somewhere*, which is amazing.)
Because sometimes you need to read a novel-length 90s slashfic where the assassin cuddles his FBI nemesis, who is catatonic from angst, and murmurs "You're like a silver blade. It burns my soul to look at you." - Truth or Dare (6969 words) by Jane Mortimer\
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Alex Krycek/Fox Mulder
Sometimes you need a story about two grown men playing truth-or-dare in the dark. - Approaching Concinnity (66160 words) by Verily
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Alex Krycek/Fox Mulder
Additional Tags: Romance, Angst, Fiction
I don't remember anything about this except that I liked it fifteen years ago.
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And while there's the beating up Krycek issue, there's also the positively bizarre torture in general. I can't recall another fandom that had to create a Torture Archived with serious ratings :) [Though, of course, everything pales next to Hannibal!!!]
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I mean, a lot of newer fandoms have a great deal of character torture. Bucky Barnes comes to mind! But we have tags and things now! You don't have to have an entire separate archive to find a trope you like! You don't have to make an entire separate archive just to so people who don't want to read your stuff can avoid it! It's amazing!
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Heh. I had a sudden flashback to ship = get and slash = m/m. I hadn't even noticed how "ship" had merged into both.
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The pejorative usage of "fan fiction" does bother me, but also a lot of it isn't even fan fiction, it's just wishful thinking or whatever.
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OH, IT WAS. The gun! The banter! The kiss! I think the first ep Krycek shows up in is where Mulder's in the red Speedo? Such good times.
Krycek was such the LBD of fandom and he was also the writers' LBD for just getting constantly fucked over. Lock him in a silo with alien goo! Cut off his hand! Set him on fire! And Nicholas Lea had those beautiful very deep green eyes. sigh.
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And he had such a rough time in canon. No matter how much you whumped him in fic, it was worse in canon, and he still bounced back, even *without* Mulder to tenderly stroke his hair.
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I don't know how much presence this still had when you were reading XF, but while the show was running there was a small but active contingent of Mulder/Krycek/Skinner OT3ers who were clearly heavily inspired by the classic episode where Mulder and a shirtless Skinner beat Krycek up and left him chained to a balcony. The fic, of course, had loads of partner abuse, BDSM, and authors who frequently failed to differentiate between the two. Good times.
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The balcony scene! So much fic derived directly from the balcony scene. (So much dom!Skinner BDSM. Although I feel like a higher proportion of the Skinner stuff than the m/k actually attempted to be SSC? not sure why.)
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So all I know of XFiles is "I want to believe" and watching a couple episodes and then just highlander crossovers, and I am not fully sure I actually knew that detail at all.
OTOH, I knew he only had one hand? I think?
But until RIGHT THIS SECOND, I didn't know he was also played by a guy who was on Highlander, too. I suspect there were many many many references that went over my head. XD
I need a "superwholock" term for the X-Files/Highlander/Sentinel/due South/etc stuff that was everywhere.
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There's actually relatively few references in fic to how things actually were when Krycek was Mulder's FBI partner. Usually Mulder will scream something about betrayal and then punch him. But even after rereading a bunch of fic for this recs set, I can't remember how long that phase even lasted.
(He does lose an arm eventually, but it's iffy whether that shows up in the older fic or not, since a lot of it was written before it was confirmed that he lost it.)
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Goldeneye was so small that for a while, I kept a LJ post with links to every single goldeneye fic I could find. So this may not even have been a "trend" so much as one author doing it.
But you know. You'd be reading some random fic in a completely different fandom and then Mulder would show up. ;)
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There's also
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Yes, I DID need to read this story. Thanks!