ISO an msr fanfic spreadsheet. There are so many fanfics which I love and adore but it makes it hard to sort through when I’m looking for specific tropes and ao3 filters aren’t specific enough. Can anyone in here help me find one? This fandom is over 30 years old there must be someone who made one. And if there isn’t one are there any people who would want to team up and take the time and effort to make one?
Also is there a discord or group I could join?
THANKS!
Thank you for tagging me, @calimanc and @randomfoggytiger! I started leaving a reply but had too much to say.
My masterpost of X-Files fic rec lists sorted by episode and category isn't quite what you're looking for, but it's something.
X-libris has searchable genres, tags, and categories for some X-Files fics.
Also, so they're not overlooked in the replies, there are two spreadsheets from @cecilysass (here) and @banannie_x (here) that organize and categorize some X-Files fic.
There isn't now and has never been a comprehensive spreadsheet or anything else organizing or categorizing X-Files fic.
Gossamer was how X-Files fanfic was organized for many years. It's hard to overstate how central it was to the XF fanfic community and how large an archive it was (and still is). Everybody reading XF fic used Gossamer - there was no AO3, there was no social media, but there was Gossamer. Fanlore goes through its history.
atxc was also hugely important. It was a hub that pretty much everybody who knew about X-Files fanfic knew about, and it was extremely active 24/7. Like, extremely. For a string of years during the show's original run in particular, if anybody wanted a specific fic or kind of fic, asking the question at atxc was practically like asking everybody in the fandom.
Web speed and online tools changed dramatically after the show ended its original run in 2002. Collaborative, sharable documents like Google docs did not exist. Loading or downloading a spreadsheet would have taken minutes, probably hours if it had any significant length, on dial-up Internet. Wholly not feasible. So: Gossamer.
By the time website speeds and document tools became viable web options, there were already many thousands of X-Files fics posted online. And many of the people who might have been keeping track of fics on their own, locally on their computer (or, gasp!, on paper) were no longer in the fandom (and their computers with that info may have been long replaced).
So the good news is that there is a huge amount of X-Files fanfics and that, if you want a particular kind of story, there's probably more than one of them out there. But the bad news is, X-Files fanfics can be hard to find, and that's not even considering how many of them are hard to find because they have been lost on deleted websites.
TL, DR: The links at the start of all this are the most helpful user-curated lists I know about for finding or sorting through categories of X-Files fic. And X-Files fanfic has been both blessed and cursed by riding through the Internet's capabilities for decades.
We also just didn't tag things by trope back in the day, beyond basics like AUs. The length of the fic was more important then because people had limited internet. Fandom has transformed since the 1990s in terms of depending on tropes to curate your reading experience. Just having an archive like Gossamer was a big deal. It focused on classifying stories by genre (angst, romance, etc.) and length. A shared document like that would have been impossible to manage and all the webrings and rec sites are gone. @lilydalexf posts great recs that are likely to help you find some stories, but there is no master spreadsheet classifying 30 years of fic by trope.
I absolutely was not expecting this to take off as quickly or as much as it did. I got into The X Files back in 2016 just before the revival came out and just demolished it as a whole and sort of just dove in but I was a baby so I didn’t have the preferences (or diagnosis’s lol) as I do now. With the show being moved to Disney + and needing something mindless but not totally mindless to watch I thought a rewatch was in order unaware it would reawaken my hyperfixation/special interest.
The best way for me to get into any fandom is by reading fanfiction to continue my interest without depleting my interest (I hate endings the amount of series books or tv that I have just dropped because I got too close to the end is too numerous to count). Currently in my rewatch I’m still in season 2 and I adore the baby agents and I like to read in conjunction to my rewatch I was hoping there was someway to filter fics more specifically than ao3 can allow.
I’m also VERY picky when it comes to the fics I read and since I do know the show has been pretty much the reason fanfiction and fandom as it is today exists and has been around for 30 some years I thought that there might be some archive or spreadsheet that had been made over the years. The only reason I thought it might be a possibility is because another fandom I’m a part of has made one (granted it is a much smaller fandom time wise and population wise).
For some reason when making the original post I had completely ignored that the show predates/grew with the internet and that would affect accessibility to the content. Since I’m sort of re-jumping into the show and fandom I had no idea where to begin, which blogs were still active, which tags got the most traffic, if the fandom itself was even still alive considering the revival ended 6 years ago.
I am actually so shocked and pleased at how much traction my original post has gained in like one day and I am so grateful to everyone who shared their own lists and tried to help me find what I was looking for despite me not being totally clear or knowledgeable about what I wanted. I would love to continue to chat and learn in this fandom with all of you. I just wanted to come back and actually thank y’all for the effort.
There are 33000 stories on Gossamer (give or take) and 26000+ on AO3. I assume there's some overlap, but assuming 50k stories archived between those sites, that still doesn't represent or preserve all the fic that used to exist - some people had their own personal sites and didn't use Gossamer or Ephemeral or ff.net. There's not really a centralized way to categorize all of that without it being unwieldy, although it would be an interesting project for some fandom historian(s). Like @lilydalexf said, there are also plenty of stories that are just gone now. I think your best bet is following people like Lilydale and @randomfoggytiger who do a lot of themed rec posts and adding to your follows based on who chimes in on their posts.
If there was interest, I'd be willing to start a spreadsheet to categorize the Gossamer stories with more modern tags and organize them by season, but it's not a one-person project.
