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

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automated archives and before LiveJournal became popular, so that it really<br />

just consisted <strong>of</strong> one personal webpage <strong>of</strong> a girl <strong>who</strong> would archive the fanfics<br />

sent to her. As the owner <strong>of</strong> the site did not want her favorite music stars to be<br />

confronted with these kinds <strong>of</strong> narratives about their personal lives, she<br />

decided to shut down the archive. Once she decided to close down the<br />

webpage, the MAX fem-slashers dispersed. Since then MAX has grown a bit<br />

less popular in Japan, and the English-speaking fans are rarely newbies, or<br />

new fans.<br />

Several factors explain why no new MAX fem-slash archives have<br />

emerged: temporally speaking, as already mentioned, the peak <strong>of</strong> the MAX<br />

fem-slash fandom happened at a time in the history <strong>of</strong> Internet development,<br />

when “surfing” was not quite as easy and codes were only at the beginning <strong>of</strong><br />

their development process (which is still ongoing). Big web archives serving a<br />

<strong>who</strong>le fandom, with databases searchable for specific pairings, genres and<br />

ratings, have only be<strong>com</strong>e widely circulated once the codes were simplified to<br />

a specific degree and available to use online. Earlier fandoms <strong>of</strong>ten existed<br />

only on personal websites. Since the MAX fem-slash fandom was collected in<br />

one locality, the fandom went down once that one webpage was closed. Quite<br />

obviously, space and time are linked in distinct and <strong>com</strong>plex ways on the web,<br />

but now that there are the spaces, means and ways to create a MAX archive,<br />

we have to consider people. Though fanfiction is available for every fandom<br />

and in overwhelmingly many spaces, the truth is that most fans do not write,<br />

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