#but watching txf for the first time since 2017 with fresh eyes and just after 2 years of succession fandom

[figureofdismay]

Anyway, I'll say this on main, with the abduction as abuse and consent violations metaphor that threads through the entire X-Files plot, and I feel like we could do more to occasionally acknowledge the fact that Cancerman can very easily be seen as a subtextual groomer figure in Mulder's life. In both senses of the word. Who has been in the perifery of his life since his childhood or adolescence.

Maybe he was a twisted paternal voyeur who always watched from a distance. Maybe the implied tests and memory suppression continued the metaphor commensurate with the female victims in the show. As it did with Mulder's adult abductions.

I'm in no way denying the medical rape subtext or plot around Scully, and obviously her story is much more explicit. I just find it interesting that the consent violations Mulder goes through, and the long term directly predatory presence of Cancerman hovering over him tends to get a different, less confronting framing in the show and in fic and analysis.

I put some of this subtext into a thing I was writing, and then I took it out because I was worried it would be too dark and off-putting, and then I stopped working on the fic altogether. But whether or not I go back to it eventually, I feel like I want to do more and see more about how mulder is a survivor of having his consent and free will regularly violated, long term in whatever literal or metaphorical ways, and how it contributes to his sense of powerlessness and also his belief that everything wrong is all his fault somehow because he hasn't figured out how to stop it, and also his totally unbalanced scale of risk versus reward.