I feel like I want to explain to young tumblr users who weren't born yet that MulderxScully was a revolutionary ship. No, it was not queer but that is not the only way to be revolutionary.
In the 90s when The X Files was airing, media was like misogyny soup. Yes, there were exceptions. But casual sexism was so ubiquitous it was like we were all frogs simmering in it and if you dared to say, hey, uh, isn't this joke a little shitty to the wife? Or maybe this female character could do something other than pose and ask questions so the male lead can answer them? Then you were a hairy feminist outcast loser.
Scully was a lot of things but she was not that. All the "You're not going to believe this, Scully!" memes are based on the fact that Mulder, an attractive white dude, wanted nothing more in his entire life than to share his passions with this tiny redhead. Was he nuts? Yes. But on many other shows, he would have talked down to her, would've ignored her, would've mocked her. He didn't.
When you go back and watch The X Files, there's these moments where Mulder and Scully look at each other like, "wait did Jack Black really just say that" and the significance to fan history isn't just the sexual tension. It's that, yeah, and the origin of the word ship, and the 'will-they-won't-they'. But the most important thing about those looks is how they told the audience that Mulder was looking to Scully for something. A man was looking at a woman and asking with his eyes "what do you think about this?" Was he also saying "and do you want to bone about it?" Yeah, yeah he was. But the first thing was sexy as hell.
Respecting a woman's expertise and folding information she provided into his worldview was a revolutionary thing for a man to do on television at the time. Thank you for coming to my MSR ted talk.
Also - sorry to tack on to your beautiful post but this won't fit in the tags and I was on the Fox Message Boards when shippers vs noromos was burning and I have feelings about the absolute subversion of gender roles here. Scully was a scientist. She was an (assistant? it's been a while) instructor at Quantico, for christ's sake. She rewrote Einstein for her doctoral thesis. She insisted on looking at things from pure, cold logic at all times. Did she have emotions? SHE DID, and she acknowledged them, but also acknowledged that they were emotions and that they should be treated as subjective. She was also Catholic.
Meanwhile, Fox Mulder was 100% emotions, instincts, gut feelings. He was a psychologist. He had to leave the forensic criminal profiling unit because he got so emotionally strung out over constantly putting himself into the minds of violent criminals that he was having constant breakdowns. His entire life was driven by searching for his missing sister, whom he 100% believed to have been abducted by aliens because this came up during (experimental) regressive hypnosis therapy (which he was undergoing, iirc, as part of his exit from the profiling unit). He was also a turbo atheist despite his belief in the paranormal.
This whole show was Mulder being like, "I am making leaps of logic based on pure instinct and emotions" and Scully being like, "Okay okay but can we spend some time examining if there are actual logical steps to get there or if maybe there's a better explanation," and over the course of the show? They were about 50/50 on who was right. And they respected each other through all of it.
I mean - the speech from Fight the Future kind of put the nail in the coffin for all shippers, I think. Like, yes they almost kissed at the end of it, but even without that! The sheer romantic submissive like a guard dog is submissive vibes of this argument:
Scully: Why did they assign me to you in the first place, Mulder? To debunk your work, to rein you in, to shut you down. Mulder: But you saved me! As difficult and as frustrating as it's been sometimes, your goddamned strict rationalism and science have saved me a thousand times over! You've kept me honest… you've made me a whole person. I owe you everything… Scully, and you owe me nothing.
Let's be real: They shaped my ideal fictional relationship from the very beginning because they were just that iconic.
Anyway, thanks for letting me (?) feelings-dump on this post. I haven't written MSR meta since roughly 1999/2000 so that was fun.
