I was exactly the right age at exactly the right transitional period in history to have been an unsupervised preteen on dial-up BBSes, Usenet, IRC, and first-generation web forums, more or less in that order, so all things considered I think I'm doing pretty well.
In 1999, on the 30th anniversary of the first moonwalk, the members of rec.crafts.textiles.needlework shared their memories of the historic event. Transcripts in alt text.
I used to be an online fan on X-Files Usenet in the 1990s, back when there were still vocal noromos everywhere. This might be a hard thing for more recent fans to picture, but people genuinely debated whether (1) there was onscreen evidence for a ship at all (I know); and (2) whether it was a good idea for the show to go that direction. There were also always people taking more nuanced positions (like they shipped M&S but only for the very end of the show, or whatever).
Below, a 90s website (the "Institution for Relationshippers") gives advice on how to handle online attacks from anti-shippers, by which they mean people opposed to the Mulder-Scully ship.
Just in case anyone is new to the fandom and somehow doesn’t know this, this is, of course, where the terms “ship / shipper / shipping” originally came from. It was shorthand used in these early online X-Files debates that then jumped into other fandoms and eventually into mass usage.
Back then—at least in the later 90s when I first entered the conversation—a common anti-shipper argument was that shippers weren't really interested in sci-fi or plot or good writing; they just wanted substance-less, frothy, feel-good entertainment.
I think one thing fans in the thick of it didn't point out enough then (and maybe even now) was that this was often a gendered debate. Although I don't really claim to be an expert, I think this kind of gendered debate is still very much a Thing in other fandoms today (the Star Wars fandom comes to mind).
By "gendered debate" -- in case anyone is unclear -- I don't mean that everyone arguing one position is one gender and everyone arguing the other position is another. This was never the case and never that straightforward. But I do think more shippers tended to identify as women and girls, and more noromos / anti-shippers tended to identify as men and boys. Even more crucially, I think the ways shippers were denigrated often relied upon ideas that media aimed at women and girls was de facto silly, and media aimed at men and boys was more important and substantive.
Note: the below images come from posts on X-Files Usenet— a discussion board with the catchy name of alt.tv.x-files—which was a major fandom spot in the 90s. It looks like email because it was text-based, and also because it is now archived at Google Groups. I think alt.tv.x-files tended to skew more college student / academics / IT types because that is who had easiest access to Usenet in the 90s. There were other popular X-Files discussion sites (e.g. on AmericaOnline / “AOL”) that maybe skewed younger, as the Millennials were still youngsters at home dialing up with AOL on their parents’ computers. But I didn't know very much about those, and alt.tv.x-files is really well archived.
In those days I was a young woman, a people pleaser, and unfortunately not informed by the better sensibilities of today. I fear I often let people make me feel silly and frivolous, embarrassed that I actually wanted them to get together. I did consider myself a sci-fi/fantasy fan and someone who tried to be a serious, critical consumer of media, so I could be convinced that my shipping somehow made me lesser. I think this is an idea that online fandom since has sort of soundly refuted, but it was out there. (It's still out there.)
One of my lingering resentments of CC is that he played into this, and could talk about the "internet fans" and "shippers" in gendered ways. In one interview, he said directly about fans, "[t]here are these 'relationshippers' who kind of dominate the online chats. I’m a little dismayed because I don’t want to do a show about fuzzy warm Mulder and Scully. Never."
Elsewhere, he claimed: "As soon as you have them looking googly-eyed at each other, they’re not going to want to go out and chase these aliens. The relationship will supplant or subvert what’s going to make the show great, which is the pursuit of these cases." In an interview about the cancer arc in 1998, he maintained didn't write "gooily," allowing the characters to fall into one another's arms when they suffered. And tellingly, in 2000 he mentioned that people in the audience "are prone to want things that aren’t necessarily good for them."
The words Carter chooses to describe writing about an onscreen romantic relationship -- "fuzzy," "warm," "googly-eyed," "gooily" -- not only suggest a certain preconception of what a male-female relationship on TV will look like, but also, I would say, paint fan interest in a relationship as soft and unserious. He also clearly thinks it would change the show's genre, working to entirely displace the agents solving cases.
The concern that a relationship would cause the show to morph into a female-oriented genre made its way into the show's writing. In the script to Rain King, after Scully's "flicked switch" speech, the directions say: "This isn't the sort of thing we hear Scully articulate very often, so to remind us that we're watching 'The X-Files' and not a chick flick on Lifetime... [we see the sinks start to overflow]."
The "Mad About You" reference in season 8 to me always seemed like a direct reference to the writers' fear of the show becoming a light relationship comedy, too.
I would argue there is some irony to the anti-shipper argument that the show not be a soap opera. While trying to avoid a canonical ship while still perpetually teasing one, CC became rather addicted to using soap tropes (love triangles, who's-the-daddy, coming back from the dead).
And it wasn't until later that I really understood how inane this idea was at the core -- that you had to choose between being a sci-fi/fantasy fan and being interested in seeing romance/relationships. That it would have been impossible to have maintained a show about agents solving cases and resolved the ship onscreen. Of course there's nothing inherently frivolous or un-serious about being interested in love or relationships or sex as a subject matter; great literature has been written on the subject. It would hardly have cheapened the show to have addressed it, and while it was CC's decision to make, it was wrong to suggest that people who were more personally invested in the show's main ship than in the plot intricacies of alien bounty hunters were somehow intellectually lacking.
Whatever else the show was about, it certainly was about the relationship between Mulder and Scully. If many fans were interested in seeing shades and hues of that relationship, in seeing it unfold and develop, it wasn't something coming out of left field. It was baked into the entire premise from the Pilot on. People who watched the show from the beginning identified the possibility of a "romantic angle" instantly. Like, right away. (See a 1993 review of the Pilot in the San Francisco Examiner below.)
And I know some people argue CC always intended for MSR to happen, for Mulder and Scully to be a romantic ship, despite his many 90s (and more recent) denials of this intention. That what he said doesn't always match what he did in his storytelling. @Randomfoggytiger has argued rather convincingly that part of this is that he just literally does not use the word "platonic" the way most of us do; he means they might have attractions but are not acting on them. These kinds of explanations frankly just make his attitude towards fans asking about it even more galling.
To take this discussion into further speculation that takes me to the margins of my knowledge and is going to involve comparisons to other shows: my darling child is very opinionated on media (she and I are kind of a lot together) and has participated in the Sherlock, Supernatural and 911 fandoms to some extent. Thus the word “queerbaiting” comes up a lot in her vocabulary, meaning when a creator deliberately teases a queer ship to keep hardcore fans invested, but then doesn’t follow through. Sherlock and Supernatural are famous for queerbaiting, and 911 might be in the process of doing it (signs uncertain).
I mean, Supernatural did really do some wild shit (see below). If you never watched the show and weren't on Tumblr at that time, I'm sure you've still seen the meme. But it was some truly outrageous queerbaiting.
The “baiting” that happened with MSR and the X-Files was different, obviously; it makes a difference that it was a het ship, and the ship did become canon, albeit with frustrating ambiguity. (Actually, truth be told, there was mild queerbaiting on TXF. For example, the creators were amused by fans shipping Mulder/Krycek, and the result?)
But what TXF, Supernatural, Sherlock, and probably 911 have in common is that there is an inherent tension between pleasing fans who are eager to see the ship and fans who aren’t—fans who might even be outright offended if there were a m/m ship among leads on their genre show, or (in TXF’s case) even a romance at all. For all of these shows, they definitely wanted to keep the passionate shippers on the hook and watching breathlessly, but they also were worried about alienating those who didn’t want to think of it as that kind of show.
This is not only gendered, but comes back to money—especially because in the 90s, TXF for sure was judged “successful” not exactly because its overall ratings were so strong, but because it appealed particularly to the younger male demographic considered especially valuable by advertisers. I suspect this is also the case with Supernatural. (I know less about the money workings of British TV and Sherlock, and less about 911's world, the more complicated 2020s American TV business. Although I will say that 911 is kind of an old-fashioned network show.) But in the days of the original run of The X-Files it was certainly the truth: even if passionate online fans might be female, the fans that were always going to count with advertisers were male.
eternal september. it's kind of the starting gun of my entire life, and i never even knew it until i had been an active participant for over a decade. the first time i was online it was fall of 1997, and eternal september had already been underway for four years.
it was when internet service providers of the era began to broadly offer usenet access to their users. usenet was how we bothered each other online before forums or IRC or youtube comments or tweets. per wikipedia, new and inexperienced internet users flooded onto usenet.
usenet users were usually only expecting a crapflood of new users at the beginning of the fall college semester, because it was only colleges that had access to that kind of thing, pre-1993. now there were new users Every God Damn Day, and it really weirded up the flow of interpersonal communication.
this of course changed the expectation for how people were going to behave online, how webmasters needed to run their sites, and created the internet as we came to know it for about twenty years.
it led to "web 2.0," which was for the longest time the internet that millennials remember, where it's collaborative, full of user-generated content, and was kind of a burgeoning new third space, right there in your living room. in the cabinet. you know, the big wooden cabinet you had, where the computer lived.
it also led to like, SomethingAwful and the bodybuilding forums where they debated over how many days are in a week, and eventually 4chan- which, love it or hate it, was one of the iconic pillars of global human interaction before the behind-the-scenes conservative takeover in the 2010s.
all because you could suddenly get usenet at home, and annoy people who had been using it for years.
I like your blog, very tasty! At this point aren't we all older than the internet? 😁
Ah, but the Kids These Days will never know the joy of going to Usenet, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bondage (I’m amazed I still remember that), and spending 15 minutes to download a single picture of a bad scan from a magazine, hoping that a) it would be worth the effort, and b) no one would pick up the phone during the download and sever your connection.
This week’s featured article is .sig, short for “signature block”. Very popular during the golden era of forums, these personalized blocks of texts can contain a fan's name, their fannish affiliations, personal statements, in-jokes, shout-outs and many other things.
As .sigs grew in popularity, rules were created around their use and controversies quickly emerged. Learn more about those as well as the many creative uses of .sigs on the Fanlore page!
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TFW: Young person in their twenties starts talking about "the early days of the internet" and it turns out they mean .... ten years ago.
I'm old enough to have been online before the September That Never Ended, and even I know that wasn't the early days of the internet.
"When you are done, remember, libertarians are people who think they sprung from their own asshole, the free market is a plot to exploit your sorry ass, and all the real elite programmers are wobblies."
Craig Brozefsky via a 1999 USENET post. Archived on the ratpoison WM page.
