Month: March 2012

I’ve used the webmail of a certain very large website as my primary email for years. Recently I lost patience at last with my glitchy inbox, and switched to another email address as my primary. Let me tell you, it’s been rough. How was I to know I had so many things linked to that one address? I’d done the linking one thing at a time, over the last eight years or so. My social networking sites, my forums, my send-me-a-recipe-a-day-that-I’ll-never-make memberships. Even my 750words.com account–and I can’t change that. I’d have to make a new account, and lose my Albatross badge earned by writing 750 words every single day for going on a hundred days in a row. (Soon I’ll have the phoenix again!) It has been rough, but it’s also been a good thing. I can’t believe how much garbage I was signed up for.

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Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite poets.  For a long time, I had a section of my website devoted to her life and poetry. She’s pretty well-known.  Mostly for her tragic suicide at age 30, leaving her two children without a mother.  One of those children ended up taking his own life as well.  From what I understand, Sylvia Plath suffered from depression.  She had ECT (electroshock therapy) and apparently, it didn’t help.  She had everything to live for, but apparently the darkness was too much to bear.

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Last week, Siri brought up the way fans interact with their favorite books, shows, and other media – fanfiction, fanart, crafting, and cosplay. And while I try not to always float along on Siri’s coattails, I find that, as this is a subject near and dear to my heart, Siri’s coattails are rather attractive at the moment, and on we go. I especially wanted to focus on cosplay, as I feel it is perhaps the rarest of the fan-based interactions. Fanart and fanfiction especially are things that can be enjoyed in anonymity, where you can lurk on the internet without people in your everyday life being aware that you really, really like that anime. Crafting and cosplay require more…dedication. When you dress up as someone from something, it’s pretty hard for the people around you to not realize that you like it.

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Today I want to talk about the intersection of fanfiction, cosplay, and crafting. You’ve probably heard of fanfiction – people writing unofficial stories set in the world of Harry Potter or Star Trek or what have you. You may also have heard of cosplay – people dressing up as characters from their favourite books or anime series or science fiction/fantasy movies (usually during fan conventions such as San Diego Comic-Con). The impulse for both of these activities comes from a love of the source material, the desire to stay in the world of the book or movie a little longer, to delve into the characters a little (or a lot!) more closely. There’s also a strong aspect of community or kinship with other fanfic writers or cosplayers, a kinship born of that shared love.

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