Have a look on wayback at Autumn Tysko’s site. I lurked wide eyed on Haven from 1996 through 2000 and read every piece of fic I could find. Ephemeral would have pages and pages of new post ep fic after an episode aired. Is @dashakay around?I find myself really yearning to explore and understand early XF fandom culture. I get little snippets of clues, I sometimes play with the waybackmachine, livejournal, and fanlore.org, I’ve heard crazy stories of people faking their deaths and lawsuit panic. How, even, certain fics caused absolute shockwaves in the fandom (looking at you, Iolokus). It’s incredibly interesting from a sociological perspective. Have any of you been here from the start? What are your experiences? What do you remember?
Iolokus was crazy divisive! I remember when it came out. I pretty much lurked throughout my teens in the 90’s and bailed after S8, but online culture was so different. The idea of intimately interacting with strangers was a pretty new idea, and it’s why a lot of older fans are a lot more private than younger ones.
It’s really fun to explore the archives on the XF alt.tv.xfiles list. You get a sort of real-time flavor of what went down. I was definitely a big lurker back in the day. I didn’t participate as much but I absorbed everything with wide-eyed delight.
The fic wars were amusing to see. A lot of good writing, but a lot of swiping at each other and spreading rumors, nastiness, etc. Ah, internet, never change.
It has to be mentioned that “XF fandom” and “crazy stories of people faking their own deaths” immediately conjures Evie Whiting. It is impossible to fully capture the total insanity swirling around at the time, but @dashakay has a write-up about it here. I’ll also add that Evie said her twins (Dana Katherine and Fox William, naturally) were born on 10/13 and that somehow nobody noticed (publicly, anyway) that the episode “Eve” has a scene at the “Whiting Institute for the Criminally Insane.”