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

On the other hand, now that I'm looking back on this stuff,
I don't think that a fan necessarily has to be a member of a
fandom. It *is* possible to be a fan in a vacuum--creating
without any reinforcement or feedback from anyone else.
However, most people, after the initial excitement wears
off, need a community (fandom) to keep their own creative
energies up. Thus, members of fandoms feed symbiotically
upon each other’s energies.
The problem for me that stemmed from Kira’s notion of a fan in a vacuum
was two-fold, a problem of definition as well as locality. Theoretically
speaking, it is possible to exist alone and in a vacuum as a fan. A fan can
spend years fantasizing on her/his own, creating stories within her/his head or
writing solely for their own pleasure. Practically however, as we have seen,
this is impossible in online fandoms. Even only passively consuming fanfics,
a fan is always a receptacle of the larger fandom community, and
consequently her/his fan-mode of identity is informed and re-inforced by the
existence of that community. Kira, however, is speaking of an active
community, a network of active connections, when she mentions
“reinforcement or feedback.” This would imply that lurkers, because of their
lack of online connections, exist as fans in a vacuum and on their own. This is
however not possible.
Even in the first few stages of avid addiction to reading fanfics, such
as Red is living at this period in time, we have established a complex process
of a formation of a fan-mode of identity, which involve ipso facto
psychological and cultural factors, and never stagnates. Furthermore, I have
described different lurkers’ situations, including my own, hoping to have
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