Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

connections with others will only serve to reaffirm one’s fan-mode, and to aid
in its evolution. There exists, for most, a process which leads one from
addiction (escapism and pleasure) to a formation of a mode of identity (a
sense of community, and pleasure in being in that mode). In this medium
(online) this process never ceases, and, thus, addiction, escapism and pleasure
do play into one’s fan-mode of identity.
What does change, is the priority given to one specific mode of
identity over another. According to Kielle’s Fanfiction Glossary (refer to
appendix), “to gafiate” in old fandom, i.e. offline, convention, and fanzine
based fandom, is derived from the acronym GAFIA or “Get Away From It
All.” As she explicates:
Once used to describe the act of immersing oneself in
fandom to escape the mundane world, this verb has now
come to mean the exact opposite: to drop out of fandom
completely. It is also possible to gafiate from one fandom
to another.
What Henry Jenkins has once described as the “Weekend World,” a refuge of
no less realistic properties than the mundane world, but at the same time
completely different, has, linguistically at least, risen to even more “equality”
with its evolution and relocation to new media. Many fans will announce their
intention to leave – though many come back – either due to stress or problems
IRL (in Real Life), or because they are fed up with the community interactions
within fandom. Whether these fans have truly completely vanished online, is
of course not easy to prove, as they could very possibly lurk as opposed to
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