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.
I actively cosplayed from 2007-2010. I’ve always loved to sew, but have never been terribly wild about making clothes, not when they’re fairly cheap as is. Costuming scratched my sewing itch without making me feel like I was re-inventing the wheel. I’ve always made elaborate Halloween costumes, but I didn’t truly become aware of cosplaying as a thing until I attended a convention in 2007 and discovered that about 80% of the attendees dressed up. (Cosplay is short for costume play – and it specifically is applied to dressing up specifically as a character from something. There are related fashions – gothic Lolita, for example – but they are not technically cosplay unless you are dressing as a character that wears gothic Lolita.)
So probably everyone’s done cosplay at one time or another without realizing it. I dressed up as one half of Team Rocket in high school – that was cosplay. My husband and I did Shaggy and Daphne a few years back for Halloween – cosplay. I also have an original series minidress uniform that I spent way too much time on (drafted my own pattern off the originals, hunted down authentic fabric on the interwebs) – cosplay. If you’ve ever dressed up as anyone you liked, whether it was from a movie, a TV show, a book, a comic, or a graphic novel – you’ve done cosplay.
And I gotta say, it’s pretty fun. When you pull off a character from a little known video game well and someone chases you down the street to tell you how awesome you are, it feels pretty good. Or when you happen to attend a convention where you know the person who created the character you’re portraying is and they tell you you’re amazing, well. It makes the hours you spent fighting with your sewing machine all worth it.
I could go on all day, honestly. But instead I will leave you with a picture of the last one I did (inspiration here) and let us all get on with it. But if the urge hits – give in to the cosplay.
