How it all began...
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| Title: | How it all began… |
| Creator: | badforthefish |
| Date(s): | August 16, 2015 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | The X-Files |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | How it all began..., Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
How it all began… is a post by badforthefish.
It describes badforthefish's introduction to fanfic via two X-Files stories -- Green Silk and Iolokus, as well as describes 1996 computer challenges in accessing fanworks.
Excerpts
The year was 1996, I was learning to use this new tool called “the internet” at Uni, and had just bought my first computer tower for a grand, which was an awful lot of money at the time. But it worked with the brand new Windows 95, which was so much better than 3.1.I had also just become hooked on a weird new show called the X-Files, so I looked for everything I could find about it on that internet by browsing with Yahoo or Alta Vista on a Netscape browser.
And one day I came across stories. X-Files stories. I can’t remember where, but it must have been on ATXC (the alt.tv.x-files.creative newsgroup) or maybe I’d stumbled onto Gossamer – anyway… I came across these stories written by fans, where Mulder and Scully fell in love, kissed and did… other things. It was all so, so different from the show. It was all so exciting, probably illegal and… deliciously forbidden. I had never read anything so outrageous, so blunt, and so, yes, dare I say, hot in my life. My mastery of the English language expanded exponentially. If my written English is more fluent than my written French these days, I owe it all to fanfiction.
I saved everything I found on floppy discs and brought it back to transfer on my own computer (because I could not afford an internet connection at home). And at night, I read, I read, feeling overwhelmed that such things existed, that people could make Mulder and Scully come alive, so ALIVE and could make them so much more interesting than they were on the show. I can’t remember much about that ‘Green Silk’ fanfic, It was probably very mushy and romantic like many fics were in those days. I had yet to spend entire nights without sleep, goosebumps on my arms, my breath taken away and my eyes burning because I could not stop reading ‘Iolokus’ – but it was the key which opened the door of what would become my most cherished hobby. Soon I would decide that I too wanted to shape and breathe life inside Mulder and Scully, soon I too would start writing. And I may have forgotten the specifics, but I never, ever forgot the sense of wonder, the thrill in the pit of my stomach that I experienced when I read my first fanfiction – the one where Scully wore a green silk dress.