made him read a cursed book and now he glows oops
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Deep breath.
I am a solidly middle-aged fangirl, and my last real fan community before OFMD was the X-Files. (I feel like I am not the only one here who fits that description).
The news that we aren’t getting a new season of Our Flag Means Death is hitting me harder than I expected.
So I am thinking about Scully.
There’s this X-Files episode called “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” The plot is about a guy who can see into the future and tell people how they die.
Scully asks him, "How do I die?"
And Clyde Bruckman replies, simply, "You don't."
I've seen fans speculate that Scully winds up becoming immortal by the end of the series. But, 22 years after the end of the show's original run, that line has taken on a new meaning for me.
Scully doesn't die, she can't die, because I still think about her. Scully is immortal because there are fans still writing her into stories, still making art, still getting inspired by her and pursuing medicine and science.
You cannot truly kill a story. You can cancel a TV show. You can, if you're an asshole, make fun of fan creators and their ideas. If you're really an asshole (and a media conglomerate), you can send them cease and desist letters and tell them to stop making art that breathes new life into that story. But the story will not die.
I draw a lot of hope from the long, long history of fandom. The people who loved stories enough to keep them alive, even when it wasn't clear that there would ever be another "official" work in their lifetimes. The Sherlock Holmes fans. The Star Trek fans.
How does a story die?
It doesn’t.
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