#I don't understand this sausage fest going on but at least I can enjoy not being forced to romance anyone

[vivalgi]

😅

[myassbrokethefall]

I've asked this to a few people before & even done some research online but I still can't find an answer. What exactly did Kumail do to make everyone hate him? I can't find the tweets or any quotes of his saying anything unlikeable. I'm extremely confused as to why people don't like him. I love Kumail!

This just got really, super long so I’m putting it under a cut, sigh. Below is basically every thought I have ever had about Kumail, although I didn’t intend that when I started. 

Short answer to your question: As I recall, he pretty much joined in the “”””””teasing”””””” of shippers that 1013 thinks is hilarious and fun for all, and said something like “you THINK you want that, but you don’t really want it.” This is, y’know, patronizing and infuriating, and very gendered as the shipper-teasing always has been for the, y’know, 24 years that we have been subjected to it. And it was extra infuriating coming from someone who had been “one of us.” And then after fans responded negatively to that, he responded negatively back and got in a bunch of internet fights with fans about it, and when it was insinuated to him that condescending to shippers and telling them they didn’t really know what they wanted because they were sex-addled dumdums was offensive in a pretty gendered way, he got VERY defensive about that because he didn’t like being told he was being sexist and then it just got more hostile from there. I’m not on Twitter and didn’t directly witness any of this stuff, but that is my understanding.

That’s really all you need to read, but I typed all this other crap about the podcast and my feelings and how I feel it all unfolded so click the readmore if you care. 

One reason I liked Kumail’s podcast so much was that I thought it hit the PERFECT note, at the perfect time, of unbridled affection for the show, and revisiting it in a way that had to do with nostalgia and love and all that, while also not making excuses for the less good things that it did. But while doing that, remaining good-natured about it in a very generous way. He seemed very aware of, not only the sexist/racist stuff that the show would do, but just the general plot holes or bad writing moments that it would have, and he and his guests would talk about it and kind of poke fun at it – but in a loving way. Like, we love this show, warts and all. But crucially: not in a way that you would watch, say, Gone with the Wind and be like, my GOD this is horrible, it’s from another time, we just have to discount everything it’s saying basically but boy you can enjoy this old-timey acting and this irrelevant time capsule of a story or whatever. 

I don’t think he did this intentionally, or not entirely, but what Kumail did with his podcast for X-Files was, in essence, give a modern audience permission to love it in a modern way, to love it and not feel that they had to make excuses for loving it, despite its flaws. He basically was an ambassador from Current Times And Current Sensibilities that guided us through the show again. At least that’s how I felt about it. I would watch it and be like, this is so white-man-y, the synthesizer music, I love this show but it’s starting to feel dated. And something about that exact moment in time combined with Kumail’s cred as a fan and a personality (and yes, him being a POC didn’t hurt in that area either) just kind of renewed the show, I feel like for me and probably for other people as well. He helped make it cool again. His unabashed fanboy love for it, combined with his ability to good-naturedly acknowledge and lance, in a way, its bad parts just made me love it in a way I hadn’t in years. It felt like some time capsule around the show had been broken and it was living and breathing in our current world again. It felt like an acknowledgment that it was worthy of love, and not in an “aw, isn’t Grandpa adorable” way, but a vital, current, modern-day love; that it was still holding up as a real piece of art. He didn’t pretend it wasn’t 20 years old, but when he would say something like how great an effect still looked and how amazing the work on it was it didn’t feel condescending; it felt like he was embracing all aspects of it, its age included, with a respect that came naturally. It invited the show back into our everyday affections again, warts and all. And he did it a HUGE, HUGE favor, I think, in that way. 

I’m probably not explaining it well. I never stopped loving the show and I don’t need the show to be popular or trendy to love it. But it hadn’t felt like a particularly relevant piece of culture for a long while, and it was kind of exhilarating to hear all these people talking about it and giving it such close attention, and putting it to the test almost, and it holding up. Most of the people on the show were fans but they weren’t, like, FANS. They hadn’t been posting on message boards about the show for years. They were regular-ish people and they were talking about the show in a serious, in-depth way that showed both how much they respected it and how much they genuinely adored it. I’m sure there were a ton of other factors, but it’s my belief that this gave a big boost to the “cred” of the show in a way that helped pave the way for the revival. The time became right to love X-Files again, not just for us faithful but for everyone, and I think part of that is just timing, but I think the podcast was a bit of a catalyst in moving that along. 

And one of the things I liked about the podcast was that Kumail always loved the Mulder/Scully relationship. He didn’t talk about it that much, it wasn’t really his priority, but he would mention the sexual tension and whatever sometimes. He wasn’t one of those people who were like “ew, no, they’re like brother and sister!” or “that would ruin the show!” or “it’s not about them, it’s about the aliens!” or whatever. He never seemed like a person who would be like “come on, you don’t really want them together!” Sometimes he would even seem ever so slightly starry-eyed over it, in the good-natured way of someone who just likes everything about the thing he likes. 

And then pretty much the one thing I objected to about how he was on the podcast (other than it being a sausage fest most of the time) was that he would agree, I felt, too easily with whatever people were saying, especially if he admired them (e.g. if they were from 1013). I would hear people say stuff that was not what he had said on previous podcasts and he would just kind of unthinkingly (it seemed) go along with it in a way that sometimes bugged me. 

So, yeah. What it felt like to me was, he became buddies with Glen and Darin and all the folks and sort of jumped on that insider bandwagon, and went along with what they were saying in the way he tended to do, which, as we all know, is: the shippers don’t know what they want, the fans want the same thing they’ve always had, Chris knows best, the best thing about the show is the stories and the great writing and that’s always been the case, the people who have always made the show should continue to make the show because they know how to do it and what it needs and they understand it the best and outsiders wouldn’t know how to do it right, there have always been cliffhangers and nothing has ever been resolved and questions are never answered and that’s what people like and there’s no reason to ever do it differently because it’s always been successful in the past, the shippers are a “vocal minority,” and so on. It felt extra maddening when he would say stuff like that because, in my view at least, when he was on the podcast he was never like that. I always felt he loved Mulder and Scully and cared about their characters and enjoyed their interactions and was rooting for more of them, and also that he was pretty attuned to how the show worked and what was good and bad about how it operated, and he loved and forgave it but he never seemed to just handwave the dumb stuff. For me, whether he sat in his room daydreaming about Mulder and Scully boning was not the issue; he seemed to understand that the characters and their interaction were a major appeal of the show to many people and an important part of what made the show special, which to me feels like the biggest divide anyway. 

I’m rambling, but it felt like he was this innocent third party who was unaware for the most part of the undercurrent of discontent in the fandom, not only having to do with MSR, but in general with all the “teasing” and the retconning and the “the audience says they want answers/resolution, but they really don’t, that’s how they like it, they love being tortured, no one is ever safe on The X-Files.” And it was like, he went into the circle almost as our representative in a way, and 1013 got hold of him and was like “so don’t listen to these people, they are whiny idiots” and instead of thinking critically about that or maybe having some understanding as to why people were frustrated, he just jumped straight to “got it! They are whiny idiots!” And we had been cheering him on and he was ONE OF US and it was like, he TURNED on us. That’s how it felt. 

This is already way, way, WAY too long and I’m not going to harp on the whole thing of how the fans who have always loved the show the most and been most passionate about it and kept it alive and produced creative works about it and supported it the hardest have been the shippers and the people who were in it for the character stuff, and how the majority of those folks have been women, and how 1013 has never seemed to take the female portion of its audience particularly seriously and has always seemed to have a very love/hate relationship with the parts of its fandom that it doesn’t consider to be the “real” audience that’s watching the show the “right” way. But it felt, to me at least, that on his podcast Kumail was breaking down some of those old walls and was embracing the show in a way that felt more like how I had always loved it and less like the ‘90s neckbeards who were just in it for the conspiracy theories and the violence and would scoff at the shippers for not understanding the show. It felt like he was about the new way of watching the show in this current time in which the world has opened up more and things are more inclusive and more diverse and there are more voices and it’s no longer OK to just shut out a portion of your audience and make fun of them because they’re not you. And so, when it felt like he was just jumping right in with 1013 and going along with their inflammatory party line, it felt like a betrayal. I think that’s one reason folks got so angry. It was like, we were all on this journey with him, he GOT IT, he got why the show was so great but he was like, a modern person that we could trust, and then it was like, he turned around and said, not YOU, not YOU annoying types who have always said you wanted this SILLY thing that no one REALLY wants, YOU don’t get to come, I didn’t mean YOU. It felt like that. 

And then, you have the other part of the story, which was: after becoming aware of who Kumail was, his podcast, how popular it was, after he came on set to do his role that Darin wrote for him and he was excited and starry-eyed, and he was this media personality that had all this cred (including, again, POC cred), of course they would be glad to have him on board as far as boosting the show and going to Comic Con and doing official stuff for the show and tweeting about the show, etc. And all the while they were doing that and happily accepting the younger, modern, more diverse audience that Kumail had helped bring to the show, they were writing Babylon. I mean, among other ways they fell short, but they wrote Babylon, and whether they knew that was offensive or not almost didn’t matter, because they didn’t CARE if it was offensive, or at least, not enough to check with anyone who would actually be able to give them a qualified answer on that, such as, for example, the hip young personality who was giving them a bunch of free promotion and cred that they were delighted to make the most of. So it was like, they were glad to have Kumail around while he was being a starry-eyed deferential fan, but it wasn’t like they actually got to know him, or know people like him, or see people of his background as human beings or the “real” audience any more than the shippers. So then he got the same treatment, in a way: he thought he was part of it all, they were happy to use him for ratings or whatever, but then at the last minute he got this very loud reminder that, they didn’t really mean YOU, not if you’re going to be like THAT, not THAT kind of person, not THAT part of the audience, not “special interests,” the REGULAR people and the NORMAL people who make up the REAL audience won’t care about this niche issue. So that has to have felt bad. And part of the reason I know it must have felt bad is that it felt bad when 1013, including Kumail, did it to me (in a completely different way of course) weeks before. (And before that, but the backlash to the breaking up of Mulder and Scully really brought on 1013′s “shippers are crazy” rhetoric in a way that hadn’t happened since pretty much before FTF, when they started monetizing it. Retro indeed.)

So it kind of sucks all around. Kumail said some shitty stuff to fans, and I also feel like 1013 really used him in a way. I pretty much feel crummy about the entire thing and every time I remember how excited we all were that Kumail was going to be in an episode, I wince. Not because I hate Kumail, because I don’t, but because the whole thing just went sour and it sucks, for us and for him. 

That’s my way overcomplicated take on it. As I said, I’ve also known people who have had unpleasant encounters with Kumail online and in real life, and it sounds like he’s a little pugnacious and reactive in a way that I don’t like. So I can understand people not liking him, and that’s allowed. I still like him, even if some of my enthusiasm for him has dimmed.