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

affected not simply by the object of worship, but more strongly by the act, the
change this act undergoes with a translocation, equally affects the process of
identity formation.
Consequently, being a fan thirty years ago, though related to the
concept nowadays in appearance and activity, significantly differs from what
it means to be a fan in the here and now. It has become easier for an individual
to be a fan of many media, to connect to other fans (actively or passively), and
perhaps more importantly to immerse him/herself in this different world. This
facilitated immersion may account for the growing number of people who
become exposed to the deeper dimensions of a source text they may have
initially only “liked”: as they research this source text in an online setting,
which will a priori connect them to a spider web of links, a plethora of both
production and consumption possibilities becomes available to them. Paired
with the constant notion and presence of an existing matching fandom
community, the processes of being and becoming a fan, as well as being a part
of fandom, the world a fan is associated with, have evolved considerably. This
is perhaps best illustrated with a term used in the introduction of this text’s
“From Pleasure to ID” section: the fandom-specific term “to gafiate,”
originally derived from the acronym GAFIA (Get Away From It All), has
mutated from a connotation of “getting away from real life,” to its meaning
today: “getting away from fandom,” exemplifying the excessive accessibility
of fandom nowadays.
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