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?
I was 13 when I got into it in season 1, so my memories are hazy to say the least. I remember that we were honestly dumb enough to believe Mulder and Scully would remain just friends.
I remember a bunch of “Luke, I am your father” jokes about The Smoking Man before he was Cancerman, but we were kidding.
I remember downloading the entire fic archive to multiple floppy discs before it was known as Gossamer and before I really understood what fic was. (Thanks for all the free porn, internet! 13-year-old me enjoyed it a lot.) FTP was just as annoying back then.