Overdue memes and other things
First, many thanks and much squeeage to
eponine119 for getting together the Lost fandom love meme, which you can see here. (It's ongoing, too!) There are still a few people on whose entries I need to comment - I haven't forgotten; I'll get to everyone, I promise!
Second, an overdue reply to a meme that gakked from
gottalovev. Simply comment if you want to be included. I'll list 7 of your interests from your profile page in a reply. Then you write a post about what they mean and why you are interested in them. She pointed out that my interests list is actually a little bit bare... There are perils to having a fandom lj and not following many fandoms, I suppose! But she managed to cull the following: alex rousseau, angel, daria, desmond hume, rupert giles, slash, x-files. My answers are under the cut.
Alex Rousseau: Sexy like her mama! No, seriously... a number of reasons, I suppose, all of them related to the plot line that the show was pretty clearly setting up to emerge before Mira Furlan quit, apparently with prejudice - i.e., no guest appearances or anything. I'm still really unhappy with the way the show worked with that, but I really don't have any choice but to give them credit for having set up a legitimate Danielle-and-Alex storyline that they intended to follow through. It's a storyline about which I still like to speculate, one that I think will be the basis for some fic in the future. So, with that in mind...
On the surface, Alex is very much a stock kind of character. She's the rebellious but good-hearted teenage daughter who's there to provide our heroes with help (and the possibility of increasing their own valour by helping her) and our villains with opposition. We expect that character to be spunky (if emotional), smart, cute, and on the side of good - after all, that's what those characters are.
Alex Rousseau walked onto Lost and smashed all those expectations at a stroke. She's a teenager, but the story that was written for her was not of her development and moral awakening. She's already had that off-screen: the first time we saw her, she was defying Ethan and Ben to help Claire escape. Her moral epiphany took place in the past, and given what we've seen of life with Ben's Others, we don't really need to know the specifics. Her problem is strategic, not personal: she needs a way to get out. The personal/ emotional and "discovery" issues we normally associate with the Teen Angel belong to Alex's mother, not to her. And while she defies and even genuinely hates her father, the Evil Patriarch (at least in relation to Alex's story; as is typical, he's usually nice to her), she hasn't severed all ties emotionally. She's a complex, human character, not a cypher - this despite the fact that, while she's a normal teenager in thinking that her parental authority figure is repressive and horrible, she's quite abnormal in being largely correct. And the story set up was not only about breaking away from a parental figure; coming to another one was equally important.
I like that she's neither a Mary Sue nor a damsel in distress. (Well, actually, she sort of is a damsel in distress, but she's no weakling.) She can't take Ben down, she can't beat Pickett and his men in a fight, and she can't save Karl alone. But she was smart and strategic enough to figure out what she could do, and find ways of doing it, even if they were quite risky. Despite all the odds, she's figured out right and wrong on her own, and she usually does what's right. She's bold enough to storm in and just do what's needed (good little Gryffindor) - cf. storming Bear Village, giving Locke her gun, demanding to accompany Ben - but she knows how to use Ben-learned slyness to her advantage as well - acting as a spy, using the boat as leverage with Kate and Sawyer. And while she generally does the right thing as best she can, she's not a plaster saint about it. She doesn't hesitate to knock people unconscious and drag them off for their own good, hand out weapons, and use violence when it suits her needs. She's not an anti-hero of the Snape type, but she's no Pollyanna.
The whole story line is so richly allusive as well, which appeals to me. Danielle is very much a Demeter/Ceres-type figure, staying alive out of instinct because it's the only chance she has of getting her daughter back, and unsentimental about anything that needs doing in the service of her goals. (Demeter, remember, spent years searching for Persephone/Kore, and finally leveraged Zeus into making Hades return her by killing nearly everyone on earth.) Alex herself is more Ariadne than Persephone, learning on her own to go against the evil she's been brought up to accept. (It would be bitter of me to comment, apropos of canon's progression, that Theseus wound up abandoning Ariadne on an island while she was pregnant and never gave her another thought, but I am commenting it anyway.) The way the show worked with those allusions, taking what could easily have remained archetypes and really turning them into dynamic characters and situations, struck a chord with me from day one. The excellent casting choices didn't hurt either.
Speaking of casting, I think it's only fair to move from Alex to Tania Raymonde at this point. She was only seventeen when she started in the role, which I'm guessing she landed because she looks so much like Mira Furlan in non-Danielle mode (cf. her publicity stills from about the Babylon-5 era). Despite her youth and her relative lack of acting experience, in my opinion she always did a good job with the role. So many non-seasoned actors in that teens/twenties age bracket give the impression of being star-struck pretty young things with no talent whatsoever and give performances making it painfully clear that they got the starring roles in plays in high schools without very good drama departments. They're either robotic or melodramatic, or sometimes a bad mix of the two. But for what it's worth, Tania Raymonde always sold me on the genuineness of Alex's emotions (often complex, and often even unvoiced) and her actions, without ever coming off as more dramatic than Alex was supposed to be. That, and there are pretty much no teen roles that don't deliberate showcase the actor's/character's physical beauty - even the ugly duckling on the playground turns into a swan with contact lenses and better-tailored clothes. Tania Raymonde is extremely pretty, but she was never a glamour princess in the role. We saw Alex wearing rough, battered, unwashed clothes, and with dirt on her face and hands. When she cried, she didn't sniff discreetly in a corner; she got red-eyed and blotchy-faced on screen. Her face was scrunched up in grief or rage throughout most of S3, and Alex never looked concerned-yet-pretty when she was supposed to look terrified - she did look terrified, which is not a good look on anyone. Okay, okay, so her hair was perfect. Let's chalk that one up to the island's magic and leave it at that.
Angel: This is a bit of an odd entry on my list, because for the most part I actually hated the show. As far as most roles are concerned, David Boreanaz cannot act his way into a paper bag, let alone out of it, and the guest-addition of Elisabeth Rohm (she of Law and Order shame as ADA Serena Southerlyn) in S1 and 2 only made the cardboard chewier. Hell, DB's acting chops were actually well matched against those of Bai Ling when she guest-starred in one episode. (Okay, full disclosure: while it was an awful episode, I will give Joss Whedon a lot of credit for at least tackling the issue of FGM in a barely-veiled way - public awareness is a huge component on that one, but it's really unbelievably difficult to discuss at all.) But in those first few promising episodes, when Angel was his broody, overwrought self, Doyle was a wonderful little leprechaun of an actual Irishman, and Cordelia was still completely superficial and a glorious bitch... that, my friends, was golden.
Daria: This was a never-exported American animated TV programme in the 1990s, quite possibly the only intelligent thing MTV has ever aired in its 27-year history. (They've since proven their stupidity by not releasing it on DVD.) It was about an intelligent, caustic teenager named Daria Morgandorffer, poor girl, who lived in a bland, anonymous suburb with what one reviewer called "her corporate jellyfish father and workaholic careerist mother" and her bubbly, popular, cute little sister Quinn. Daria and her best friend Jane just tried to get through high school, commenting on the absurdities of the world around them with biting wit and humour and rather devastating sarcasm. (Daria didn't have low self-esteem. She had low esteem for everyone else.) Pitch-perfect visual caricatures, unfailingly clever writing, and inspired voice casting brought it all together: Daria and her family, Jane's lethargic fuck-up musician of a brother, Quinn's vapid posse, the other high school students in their myriad forms of insanity, and of course the school staff: the unctuous, corrupt principal, Ms. Li; the bitter man-hating feminazi science teacher, Ms Barch and her eventual boyfriend, the effete, spineless English teacher; the bitter, misanthropic, gambling-addicted, student-hating, PTSD-having, eye-bulging Mr. DiMartino; and then back to Quinn, who along with Daria grows up a little and turns out not to be so bad after all. I was Daria type in high school (although I'd like to hope I was a little bit nicer), and my sister was very much a Quinn (albeit smart all along and very nice - and we got along!). I loved Daria. I don't think I'd have survived high school without it.
Desmond Hume: I'll admit it: well-written fanon Desmond is often a whole lot more interesting than canon Desmond, who about 60% of the time seems to be onscreen to give us something pretty to look at. But when there's a point to Desmond - the hatch, the non-tortured portions of the Widmore subplot and the flashes one - it's an interesting one, with a lot of complex, understated, subtle psychological baggage, something very much tied in with the mythology of the show. Plus there's the sexy accent - it doesn't sound remotely Glaswegian, but it's very nice to hear nonetheless. And Desmond is just so pretty. He's so, so pretty. And I love him.
Rupert Giles: The geeky, tweedy, cross-referencing, British librarian and propriety-mindful Watcher on Buffy - or is he? As it turns out, he's all those things - but he's got a bad-boy past and a rebellious side with which he remains very much in touch, he's got a beautiful singing voice and plays a mean guitar, he's smart and brave as all get-out, he's got a great sense of humour, and he cares about Buffy more than life itself. (And, in his mid-forties, he's younger than two of Buffy's three serious boyfriends. By decades! At least!) Giles follows Indiana Jones and Fox Mulder in the line of genuinely original hot geeks. From his gorgeous smile to his sexy glasses to his book- and artifact-laden house (inherited from the set of Melrose Place), from being mostly incredibly nice but also really hardcore and known to screw up a handful of really important things because of moral rather than intellectual failures... Giles is fictionally-living proof that someone with feet of clay can also have a heart (and head) of gold, and on top of that, he's sexy as hell.
Slash: I think I was about fifteen when I first discovered slash. It was in the X-Files fandom; Mulder/Krycek, which I think is pretty beyond words but really lacking in substance. (Skinner/Doggett is something else altogether.) Anyway, for some reason just the idea intrigued me - I clicked the link knowing I'd like it, and I wasn't proven wrong. Screen captures, photo manips, essays - everything but the actual fic, because I was very rule-abiding and it was marked not for under-18s, and because I could explain the rest of it away if my parents came across it. (Looking back, that was an odd concern: at that time, neither of my parents used the internet. At all.) And even that did something for me.
Anyway, holding out of reading the fic lasted less than a month. I think the first one I ever read was set in a scenario of Mulder and Krycek escaping the gulag together in Terma, and involved what the author described as (I still remember) "mildly non-consensual sex." I don't think I'd touch it with a ten-foot pole today, but at the time... it really had an effect. Needless to say, I went back for more.
As for what's kept me reading slash... it's certainly not that I don't find well-written het sexy, because I do. But for me, there's something uniquely hot about the combination of two really attractive men - and, let's be honest, the principle that two dicks are better than one. Maybe it's the straight-girl equivalent of the straight male taste for the sight of lesbian sex: two sex objects (potentially in a non-derogatory sense) for the price of one, or rather combined in a single scenario. [*Disclaimer: Not that female slash fans are straight.] Maybe part of it is the fact that in so many TV/film fandoms, the (het) canon relationships are established really badly on the show, but the same-sex relationships are established really well. That lends itself to other directions in fanfic... although, again, the hotness doesn't hurt!
X-Files: This was the first show that I ever fell in love with and followed in a serious, fandom-participating way. That was partially a function of my age - I was in my mid-teens at the time, which was also when online fandom was absolutely beginning to explode. There were Star Trek listservs and such before then, but it was The X-Files that really brought it into its own. There weren't really 'shipping wars - either you were a 'shipper or you weren't, and while the two factions (and the compromise faction, which I supported) didn't agree with each other, there wasn't much real animosity. There were Mulder/Krycek 'shippers too - very pleasing to the eyes, and in that sense extremely hot, but without any real connection or substance to it, IMO - but the slashers knew they were never going to have their day, since even the het shippers were largely denied it, and no one was bitter about any of it. There was nothing like LJ prominent at the time, so everything was archive-based, but recommendation sites and generally very friendly fic awards and contests made it actually quite easy to find the gems and avoid the crap.
In terms of canon, Scully was, I think, a role model to all geeky teenage girls. She was smart and pretty, and she was sexy because she never did anything that seemed overtly sexy. Not prudish, but she dressed conservatively, she didn't go clubbing, and like Mulder she didn't have much of a social life. Actually, she was incredibly emotionally unhealthy and screwed up, but I didn't realize it at the time. Similarly, Mulder was hot - tall, fit, gorgeous eyes, adorable forelock, witty sense of humour, relaxed, jocular manner - until, as a slightly older viewer, you realized that he had the frozen psyche of an extremely messed up twelve-year-old. Oh well. Their boss, Skinner, a good-hearted hard-ass out of central casting, was incredible and interesting in his own right, as were the perfectly conceptualized villains - the Cigarette-Smoking Man, the Well-Manicured Man, our ratty friend and international man of mystery and beauty Alex Krycek - and Mulder's various badass crazy informants. All perfectly cast, and that's hard to do when two actors really have to carry an entire, extremely demanding show. Even harder when the two actors politely but rather evidently can't stand each other... But for the first five seasons, the show managed to have incredible emotional impact despite being one of the most understated programmes ever put on television, and balanced the greater "myth-arc" with stand-alone monster-of-the-week episodes perfectly, just as science, skepticism, and belief combined and argued in a labyrinth of relationships and conflicts. The fabulous cinematography didn't hurt either, and neither did the intelligent, allusion-dense, multi-layered writing.
The X-Files was also the first show that really let me down, although it took a few more for me to realize that most shows ultimately would. Season 6, the first one after the first movie, was a disaster: moving shooting to California and trying to turn the whole thing into a comedy rather than a sci-fi drama. (Fans liked the comic relief and the occasional screwball episode, and the show's creators gave them such an excess of a good thing that it ceased being good.) Throw in a mix of mostly new writers, the majority of whom hadn't watched the first 2-3 seasons, and the diversion of the original creative team to other projects... Season 7 recovered a bit, only to fall completely to pieces with David Duchovny's departure. The addition of Robert Patrick's John Doggett - an interesting, well-conceived, well-directed character played by a very good actor - wasn't enough to save seasons 8 and 9, and neither was Gillian Anderson's continued, brilliant presence. I swore at one point that if the show ever went down, I'd go down with it. I broke that promise, and I've never regretted it. And I've never regretted getting into it in the first place, either.
eponine119 for getting together the Lost fandom love meme, which you can see here. (It's ongoing, too!) There are still a few people on whose entries I need to comment - I haven't forgotten; I'll get to everyone, I promise!
Second, an overdue reply to a meme that gakked from
gottalovev. Simply comment if you want to be included. I'll list 7 of your interests from your profile page in a reply. Then you write a post about what they mean and why you are interested in them. She pointed out that my interests list is actually a little bit bare... There are perils to having a fandom lj and not following many fandoms, I suppose! But she managed to cull the following: alex rousseau, angel, daria, desmond hume, rupert giles, slash, x-files. My answers are under the cut.
Alex Rousseau: Sexy like her mama! No, seriously... a number of reasons, I suppose, all of them related to the plot line that the show was pretty clearly setting up to emerge before Mira Furlan quit, apparently with prejudice - i.e., no guest appearances or anything. I'm still really unhappy with the way the show worked with that, but I really don't have any choice but to give them credit for having set up a legitimate Danielle-and-Alex storyline that they intended to follow through. It's a storyline about which I still like to speculate, one that I think will be the basis for some fic in the future. So, with that in mind...
On the surface, Alex is very much a stock kind of character. She's the rebellious but good-hearted teenage daughter who's there to provide our heroes with help (and the possibility of increasing their own valour by helping her) and our villains with opposition. We expect that character to be spunky (if emotional), smart, cute, and on the side of good - after all, that's what those characters are.
Alex Rousseau walked onto Lost and smashed all those expectations at a stroke. She's a teenager, but the story that was written for her was not of her development and moral awakening. She's already had that off-screen: the first time we saw her, she was defying Ethan and Ben to help Claire escape. Her moral epiphany took place in the past, and given what we've seen of life with Ben's Others, we don't really need to know the specifics. Her problem is strategic, not personal: she needs a way to get out. The personal/ emotional and "discovery" issues we normally associate with the Teen Angel belong to Alex's mother, not to her. And while she defies and even genuinely hates her father, the Evil Patriarch (at least in relation to Alex's story; as is typical, he's usually nice to her), she hasn't severed all ties emotionally. She's a complex, human character, not a cypher - this despite the fact that, while she's a normal teenager in thinking that her parental authority figure is repressive and horrible, she's quite abnormal in being largely correct. And the story set up was not only about breaking away from a parental figure; coming to another one was equally important.
I like that she's neither a Mary Sue nor a damsel in distress. (Well, actually, she sort of is a damsel in distress, but she's no weakling.) She can't take Ben down, she can't beat Pickett and his men in a fight, and she can't save Karl alone. But she was smart and strategic enough to figure out what she could do, and find ways of doing it, even if they were quite risky. Despite all the odds, she's figured out right and wrong on her own, and she usually does what's right. She's bold enough to storm in and just do what's needed (good little Gryffindor) - cf. storming Bear Village, giving Locke her gun, demanding to accompany Ben - but she knows how to use Ben-learned slyness to her advantage as well - acting as a spy, using the boat as leverage with Kate and Sawyer. And while she generally does the right thing as best she can, she's not a plaster saint about it. She doesn't hesitate to knock people unconscious and drag them off for their own good, hand out weapons, and use violence when it suits her needs. She's not an anti-hero of the Snape type, but she's no Pollyanna.
The whole story line is so richly allusive as well, which appeals to me. Danielle is very much a Demeter/Ceres-type figure, staying alive out of instinct because it's the only chance she has of getting her daughter back, and unsentimental about anything that needs doing in the service of her goals. (Demeter, remember, spent years searching for Persephone/Kore, and finally leveraged Zeus into making Hades return her by killing nearly everyone on earth.) Alex herself is more Ariadne than Persephone, learning on her own to go against the evil she's been brought up to accept. (It would be bitter of me to comment, apropos of canon's progression, that Theseus wound up abandoning Ariadne on an island while she was pregnant and never gave her another thought, but I am commenting it anyway.) The way the show worked with those allusions, taking what could easily have remained archetypes and really turning them into dynamic characters and situations, struck a chord with me from day one. The excellent casting choices didn't hurt either.
Speaking of casting, I think it's only fair to move from Alex to Tania Raymonde at this point. She was only seventeen when she started in the role, which I'm guessing she landed because she looks so much like Mira Furlan in non-Danielle mode (cf. her publicity stills from about the Babylon-5 era). Despite her youth and her relative lack of acting experience, in my opinion she always did a good job with the role. So many non-seasoned actors in that teens/twenties age bracket give the impression of being star-struck pretty young things with no talent whatsoever and give performances making it painfully clear that they got the starring roles in plays in high schools without very good drama departments. They're either robotic or melodramatic, or sometimes a bad mix of the two. But for what it's worth, Tania Raymonde always sold me on the genuineness of Alex's emotions (often complex, and often even unvoiced) and her actions, without ever coming off as more dramatic than Alex was supposed to be. That, and there are pretty much no teen roles that don't deliberate showcase the actor's/character's physical beauty - even the ugly duckling on the playground turns into a swan with contact lenses and better-tailored clothes. Tania Raymonde is extremely pretty, but she was never a glamour princess in the role. We saw Alex wearing rough, battered, unwashed clothes, and with dirt on her face and hands. When she cried, she didn't sniff discreetly in a corner; she got red-eyed and blotchy-faced on screen. Her face was scrunched up in grief or rage throughout most of S3, and Alex never looked concerned-yet-pretty when she was supposed to look terrified - she did look terrified, which is not a good look on anyone. Okay, okay, so her hair was perfect. Let's chalk that one up to the island's magic and leave it at that.
Angel: This is a bit of an odd entry on my list, because for the most part I actually hated the show. As far as most roles are concerned, David Boreanaz cannot act his way into a paper bag, let alone out of it, and the guest-addition of Elisabeth Rohm (she of Law and Order shame as ADA Serena Southerlyn) in S1 and 2 only made the cardboard chewier. Hell, DB's acting chops were actually well matched against those of Bai Ling when she guest-starred in one episode. (Okay, full disclosure: while it was an awful episode, I will give Joss Whedon a lot of credit for at least tackling the issue of FGM in a barely-veiled way - public awareness is a huge component on that one, but it's really unbelievably difficult to discuss at all.) But in those first few promising episodes, when Angel was his broody, overwrought self, Doyle was a wonderful little leprechaun of an actual Irishman, and Cordelia was still completely superficial and a glorious bitch... that, my friends, was golden.
Daria: This was a never-exported American animated TV programme in the 1990s, quite possibly the only intelligent thing MTV has ever aired in its 27-year history. (They've since proven their stupidity by not releasing it on DVD.) It was about an intelligent, caustic teenager named Daria Morgandorffer, poor girl, who lived in a bland, anonymous suburb with what one reviewer called "her corporate jellyfish father and workaholic careerist mother" and her bubbly, popular, cute little sister Quinn. Daria and her best friend Jane just tried to get through high school, commenting on the absurdities of the world around them with biting wit and humour and rather devastating sarcasm. (Daria didn't have low self-esteem. She had low esteem for everyone else.) Pitch-perfect visual caricatures, unfailingly clever writing, and inspired voice casting brought it all together: Daria and her family, Jane's lethargic fuck-up musician of a brother, Quinn's vapid posse, the other high school students in their myriad forms of insanity, and of course the school staff: the unctuous, corrupt principal, Ms. Li; the bitter man-hating feminazi science teacher, Ms Barch and her eventual boyfriend, the effete, spineless English teacher; the bitter, misanthropic, gambling-addicted, student-hating, PTSD-having, eye-bulging Mr. DiMartino; and then back to Quinn, who along with Daria grows up a little and turns out not to be so bad after all. I was Daria type in high school (although I'd like to hope I was a little bit nicer), and my sister was very much a Quinn (albeit smart all along and very nice - and we got along!). I loved Daria. I don't think I'd have survived high school without it.
Desmond Hume: I'll admit it: well-written fanon Desmond is often a whole lot more interesting than canon Desmond, who about 60% of the time seems to be onscreen to give us something pretty to look at. But when there's a point to Desmond - the hatch, the non-tortured portions of the Widmore subplot and the flashes one - it's an interesting one, with a lot of complex, understated, subtle psychological baggage, something very much tied in with the mythology of the show. Plus there's the sexy accent - it doesn't sound remotely Glaswegian, but it's very nice to hear nonetheless. And Desmond is just so pretty. He's so, so pretty. And I love him.
Rupert Giles: The geeky, tweedy, cross-referencing, British librarian and propriety-mindful Watcher on Buffy - or is he? As it turns out, he's all those things - but he's got a bad-boy past and a rebellious side with which he remains very much in touch, he's got a beautiful singing voice and plays a mean guitar, he's smart and brave as all get-out, he's got a great sense of humour, and he cares about Buffy more than life itself. (And, in his mid-forties, he's younger than two of Buffy's three serious boyfriends. By decades! At least!) Giles follows Indiana Jones and Fox Mulder in the line of genuinely original hot geeks. From his gorgeous smile to his sexy glasses to his book- and artifact-laden house (inherited from the set of Melrose Place), from being mostly incredibly nice but also really hardcore and known to screw up a handful of really important things because of moral rather than intellectual failures... Giles is fictionally-living proof that someone with feet of clay can also have a heart (and head) of gold, and on top of that, he's sexy as hell.
Slash: I think I was about fifteen when I first discovered slash. It was in the X-Files fandom; Mulder/Krycek, which I think is pretty beyond words but really lacking in substance. (Skinner/Doggett is something else altogether.) Anyway, for some reason just the idea intrigued me - I clicked the link knowing I'd like it, and I wasn't proven wrong. Screen captures, photo manips, essays - everything but the actual fic, because I was very rule-abiding and it was marked not for under-18s, and because I could explain the rest of it away if my parents came across it. (Looking back, that was an odd concern: at that time, neither of my parents used the internet. At all.) And even that did something for me.
Anyway, holding out of reading the fic lasted less than a month. I think the first one I ever read was set in a scenario of Mulder and Krycek escaping the gulag together in Terma, and involved what the author described as (I still remember) "mildly non-consensual sex." I don't think I'd touch it with a ten-foot pole today, but at the time... it really had an effect. Needless to say, I went back for more.
As for what's kept me reading slash... it's certainly not that I don't find well-written het sexy, because I do. But for me, there's something uniquely hot about the combination of two really attractive men - and, let's be honest, the principle that two dicks are better than one. Maybe it's the straight-girl equivalent of the straight male taste for the sight of lesbian sex: two sex objects (potentially in a non-derogatory sense) for the price of one, or rather combined in a single scenario. [*Disclaimer: Not that female slash fans are straight.] Maybe part of it is the fact that in so many TV/film fandoms, the (het) canon relationships are established really badly on the show, but the same-sex relationships are established really well. That lends itself to other directions in fanfic... although, again, the hotness doesn't hurt!
X-Files: This was the first show that I ever fell in love with and followed in a serious, fandom-participating way. That was partially a function of my age - I was in my mid-teens at the time, which was also when online fandom was absolutely beginning to explode. There were Star Trek listservs and such before then, but it was The X-Files that really brought it into its own. There weren't really 'shipping wars - either you were a 'shipper or you weren't, and while the two factions (and the compromise faction, which I supported) didn't agree with each other, there wasn't much real animosity. There were Mulder/Krycek 'shippers too - very pleasing to the eyes, and in that sense extremely hot, but without any real connection or substance to it, IMO - but the slashers knew they were never going to have their day, since even the het shippers were largely denied it, and no one was bitter about any of it. There was nothing like LJ prominent at the time, so everything was archive-based, but recommendation sites and generally very friendly fic awards and contests made it actually quite easy to find the gems and avoid the crap.
In terms of canon, Scully was, I think, a role model to all geeky teenage girls. She was smart and pretty, and she was sexy because she never did anything that seemed overtly sexy. Not prudish, but she dressed conservatively, she didn't go clubbing, and like Mulder she didn't have much of a social life. Actually, she was incredibly emotionally unhealthy and screwed up, but I didn't realize it at the time. Similarly, Mulder was hot - tall, fit, gorgeous eyes, adorable forelock, witty sense of humour, relaxed, jocular manner - until, as a slightly older viewer, you realized that he had the frozen psyche of an extremely messed up twelve-year-old. Oh well. Their boss, Skinner, a good-hearted hard-ass out of central casting, was incredible and interesting in his own right, as were the perfectly conceptualized villains - the Cigarette-Smoking Man, the Well-Manicured Man, our ratty friend and international man of mystery and beauty Alex Krycek - and Mulder's various badass crazy informants. All perfectly cast, and that's hard to do when two actors really have to carry an entire, extremely demanding show. Even harder when the two actors politely but rather evidently can't stand each other... But for the first five seasons, the show managed to have incredible emotional impact despite being one of the most understated programmes ever put on television, and balanced the greater "myth-arc" with stand-alone monster-of-the-week episodes perfectly, just as science, skepticism, and belief combined and argued in a labyrinth of relationships and conflicts. The fabulous cinematography didn't hurt either, and neither did the intelligent, allusion-dense, multi-layered writing.
The X-Files was also the first show that really let me down, although it took a few more for me to realize that most shows ultimately would. Season 6, the first one after the first movie, was a disaster: moving shooting to California and trying to turn the whole thing into a comedy rather than a sci-fi drama. (Fans liked the comic relief and the occasional screwball episode, and the show's creators gave them such an excess of a good thing that it ceased being good.) Throw in a mix of mostly new writers, the majority of whom hadn't watched the first 2-3 seasons, and the diversion of the original creative team to other projects... Season 7 recovered a bit, only to fall completely to pieces with David Duchovny's departure. The addition of Robert Patrick's John Doggett - an interesting, well-conceived, well-directed character played by a very good actor - wasn't enough to save seasons 8 and 9, and neither was Gillian Anderson's continued, brilliant presence. I swore at one point that if the show ever went down, I'd go down with it. I broke that promise, and I've never regretted it. And I've never regretted getting into it in the first place, either.