#it’s this awful compensatory assignment

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

hhhhhhhhhh gonna try to finish my assignment today (tonight* it’s almost midnight here;;) so i can order sushi and gyoza and binge trigun all day tmrw…

[carefulfears]

it’s the way that mulder wants so badly to believe that the world is kind and that choices matter and that people can be helped that he’ll stand there and counsel a villain or tell a monster they can overcome anything all fucking day, because he needs to feel like it matters and like something can be done.

but this show knows who the real monsters are, and so does mulder, and there are some things that he won’t rationalize. there are some things in this world, where it just doesn’t matter. it doesn’t matter if it was a human or a werewolf who kidnapped these kids. it doesn’t matter if there’s something psychic about the man lobotomizing women with an ice-pick. it doesn’t matter if the person who abused and killed 16 little girls can be talked down, or holds every answer.

it’s not that he can’t rationalize, he could hold out that hope for a good world. he could extend some of those wishful “leaps” to explaining away every human evil, the way he always tries to find another way to answer for it. he could still believe that these men are good somehow, could be helped somehow, couldn’t really be humanity somehow. but he doesn’t. he shoots them in the back, and he deals with how fucking awful it feels that they aren’t.

it’s why, at the end of the day, the cases where there’s nothing to find are the ones where he sits alone, or cries over a victim’s body.

and that’s a very important line to me, in a story all about “compensatory fantasy.” a story all about the ways that we view the world after trauma, in order to be able to look at it, in order to walk back into it. that there are some things that cannot be explained, there are some darknesses that cannot be reasoned with, there are some evils that cannot be understood. sometimes it is just the world. sometimes it is just human.

and mulder spent his whole life trying to redeem human nature, to assign blame somewhere else, but never at the expense of ignoring its harm.