when i say i care for mulder's fish it's because on literally every scene in his apartment, i would look for the fish tank and try to see the fish. i was so happy it was taken into account when scully went there after mulder flew to Puerto Rico and the policemen asked her what she was doing there, and she said she was there to feed the fish <3. also when mulder came back from his abduction and went to see the tank, then noticed molly died unu. and in season 9 you can see scully kept the fish :D! so sad they had to flee at the end of season 9 and leave them behind 😔
mulder fascinates me for so many reasons but one of them is his genuine interest in/fondness toward the idea of aliens while he firmly believes that they are what took his sister. he has every reason to think that aliens are Pure Evil Sent to Destroy Us but instead he approaches the topic of extraterrestrial life with interest and nuance and even enjoys things like silly alien-shaped mugs and area 51 merchandise. personally if i thought aliens took my sister i would be really pissed off at seeing alien bumper stickers treated as quirky souvenirs, but to him, part of wanting to believe means believing in good and bad and the possibility for each individual, human or not, to choose, and that's what makes the search for answers different than a revenge quest.
I often see people talking about the “ice queen” trope in XF fanfic from the 90s as an example of fanon becoming ubiquitous in fanfic. If you don't know what I'm talking about, this is it in a nutshell: basically, fanfic in the 1990s began to make reference to Scully as a perceived “ice queen,” both at work and in her personal life, meaning that she didn’t express her emotions, that she was repressed and cold. And then that became a thing, a standard trope that other fanfic writers drew on.
My theory is that the “ice queen” / Scully association didn’t actually come from specific works of fic or from specific individuals. I also don’t think it necessarily originated in fic and then crossed over into fan perceptions of Scully. I think it’s easy for 21st century fans to get the causal arrows mixed up on this because we're missing some historical context. I believe many viewers in the 1990s—not just fanfic writers—actually interpreted Scully differently than viewers now because they interpreted female characters differently. I think people in the 1990s were simply much more likely to interpret women serious about their professional lives as “ice queens.” Especially if their professional lives involved science.
Consider the below female scientist (P.K. Newby) writing about her graduate school experience in the 1990s.
Of course this still happens today, and of course it didn’t always happen in the 1990s. But I think it’s important that this impacted actual women living their lives in the same time period, because it’s reasonable that this also affected TV audiences’ perception of a character.
I give you this message from the Usenet discussion group alt.tv.x-files, the first season of the show, from before the fanfic Usenet group was even created. This user characterizes Scully as an “ice queen,” claiming to notice a change after Darkness Falls, and even associating it with her skepticism specifically.
(This is me showing you the whole message with the date, then showing you parts close up because it's so tiny. I'm very dedicated.)
So in this (very early online fandom) conversation, we have a fan who already read her as an “ice queen” on their own without the filter of fanfic to sway them.
Now please don’t get me wrong. Fanfic definitely took hold of the Scully / ice queen thing and ran with it. There are many examples in the Usenet group during the 1990s of people asking, “Hey, which episode was Scully called ‘ice queen’ again? and people saying, ‘Oh never, ha, that’s just a fanfic thing.’” It was a well-established trope by at least 1997. See below.
I just want people to consider that it didn’t have to be one writer, one fic, or one incident that led to the popularization of this piece of fanon. This would have been something people understood right away because it already was culturally out there in the interpretation of the character and in associations with professional women. And like the person asking the question in the above message infers, it probably did come organically from several people at once.
That said, some 1990s fans actively questioned it, observing it didn’t seem to fit with their interpretation of the show.
Notice that in the below conversation, Scully as ice queen is mixed up in perceptions of GA as ice queen, too.
(Side note: I mean, you can totally get where that person was coming from, right? Gillian Anderson was TOTALLY giving repressed, cold, virginal saint in 1997.)
As a prolific reader of fanfic, old and new, I think it’s also important to add this: it seems to me that fanfic writers more often made “Ice Queen” a hurtful nickname that Scully was called by other people (like Mulder being called “Spooky”), not an actual characterization of her personality. And actually, especially given her mostly-male workplace, this seems not unrealistic in the 1990s? Some fanfic writers may even have been writing from experience. (At least, I think I'm right in saying that tendency was true. I'd be curious to know if other readers of old fanfic think Scully herself is characterized as an "ice queen" more often than I'm saying.)
I’m an Old Person. I’m ashamed to admit that in the same time period, I had a high school friend who always studied really hard in school and prioritized grades over social life, and sometimes we jokingly called her an “ice queen.” There was no male equivalent term. So unfortunately, I know this was most definitely a thing outside of Scully and the XF fandom. Fortunately, it does seem to be something we see less of in the 2020s. (At least I think?) I just want to point it out because it’s one of those things you could think was just a little fanon quirk concerning this character or this show when really I do think it’s about gender perceptions overall.
Very interested to know, though, if others think I'm wrong.
