I do think people had more latitude back in the day to create whatever versions of Mulder and Scully they wanted, as long they could write well. If the people who are participating here are representative of the remnant of the fandom (and I'm not meaning this as a criticism, just an observation), I don't think there is much tolerance for coloring outside the lines.
Not sure. We had the Wicked X Witches, Godawful Trekfic (which expanded to XF and other fandoms) and the offshoot atxc discussion lists, which could get extremely volatile. Names were named and stories (and writers' personal characters and integrity, lol) were picked to pieces, sometimes in the interests of constructive criticism, sometimes not. It wasn't exclusively directed at "bad" fanfiction--very popular and objectively good writers were discussed widely too.
I'm not sure I'm current enough on XF fandom to be able to comment, but if anything I suspect the difference is just fandom output. For every Iolokus we had 400 less daring/less memorable fics.
That said, while the show was still being written the characters were more mutable. Now that there's no more canon (?), we can consider them more set in stone.
no subject
Not sure. We had the Wicked X Witches, Godawful Trekfic (which expanded to XF and other fandoms) and the offshoot atxc discussion lists, which could get extremely volatile. Names were named and stories (and writers' personal characters and integrity, lol) were picked to pieces, sometimes in the interests of constructive criticism, sometimes not. It wasn't exclusively directed at "bad" fanfiction--very popular and objectively good writers were discussed widely too.
I'm not sure I'm current enough on XF fandom to be able to comment, but if anything I suspect the difference is just fandom output. For every Iolokus we had 400 less daring/less memorable fics.
That said, while the show was still being written the characters were more mutable. Now that there's no more canon (?), we can consider them more set in stone.