X-Men/Memories

• tell us your memories/oral history of X-Men fandom

anenko's Memories

I haven't seen anyone else work on the "memories" pages, so I'm not quite sure how to structure this. I've been a fan for years, but until X-Men, my fannishness was a solitary hobby. I usually place my discovery of online fandom sometime around 1997, back in the days when AOL was offering free trials.

Being a fan of the X-Men cartoon at that time, I ran a search on the series and ended up at a personal fanfic archive. I can still remember the front page: a green background, with a lantern on each side of the text, which said: welcome to the parlour, said the spider to the fly. The author primarily wrote fanfic based on the cartoon, with details from the comics for a bit of added depth. She wrote Age of Apocalypse-verse Wolverine/Storm, and perhaps Gambit/Rogue (my memory on that front is a bit fuzzy). There was a separate page—with warnings!--for the adult fic. Naturally, I clicked ;)

I've done a lot of editing of the X-Men page itself, so it feels a bit repetitive to mention CFAN, Lori's X-Men Archive, Shifting Sands, Untold-l, and Outside The Lines, but they were all huge parts of my early experience with fandom. I posted my first fic to Shifting Sands (that hugely embarrassing effort is probably still there. . .), and I felt as though I'd made it big when Lori asked permission to archive my fics at her site. I posted a ton of sillyfics to Untold-l and OTL; as ridiculous as those stories were, I've never received more feedback than I did in the X-Men fandom through those mailing lists.

I had my very own X-Men archive hosted on GeoCities (creatively titled Northlight's X-Men Archive). I colour-coded the author's notes based on what character the story was about. Heh.

I remember that a lot of the fics posted at that time were multi-part epics. Very few of them were primarily ship fics, although a romantic relationship might play an important role in the story. There was a tiny bit of slash (I can remember stumbling across my first slash fic—Gambit/Iceman—on Lori's page), and not much femslash until the end of my stay in the fandom. I remember Gambit/Rogue being a popular pairing (I was a member of the Southern Comfort mailing list), and the backlash against Rogue after issue. . . 350? The one where she ditched Gambit in Antarctica. (I still remember that Indigo named Rogue "Mona" because she whined too much!) There was also a backlash against the Scott Summers mocking, and he became more popular as a character in fic, especially after the Itty Bitty Archives opened.

The fandom was generally positive, although there were some heated discussions on the OTL. One such discussion was about Wolverine's OC girlfriends getting raped by Sabertooth (and that one such character, a telepath or empath, ended up experiencing Sabertooth's enjoyment of her rape). Some members of the list also got annoyed with the focus on the X-Men over all other comic titles, although there was a small handful of people who wrote about other teams (Marvel and DC). I sometimes had the feeling that male members of the list were amused or annoyed by 'shippy stories.

There were a lot of detailed team and character information sites, which I loved (and miss greatly). --Anenko 19:07, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Northlight! Awesome! I love matching up old fandom peeps with their new names! I doubt you remember me - I was one of the third gen, mostly active on OTL, Subreality Cafe and TCP - but it's great to have another old comics vet. ;) Rossi (talk) 03:15, 31 March 2023 (UTC)