I haven’t cosplayed a lot, but I want to do more. I’ve cosplayed characters mostly outside of anime, but it’s all the same game, as far as I know.

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(Just as an aside, I’ve done Near from Death Note, Naruto from Naruto [lol], Matryoshka!Len of VOCALOIDs, Jane and Aradia from Homestuck, a humanized Notebook [the one on the left] from the first episode of YouTube series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Alphys and Chara from Undertale, and Tsuyu from My Hero Academia.)

 

Now, cosplay just sounds like a hobby, like something fun to do, but… two things. 1) There are some dedicated people out there, as you can see in that Try Guys video. Half the fun of conventions is seeing the mastery and effort people put into their cosplays. People dedicate their whole lives to the craft, and it shows.

 

And??? The world’s started taking it seriously??? Love that for us. Shows like Heroes of Cosplay, Cosplay Melee… hell, even King of the Nerds. They bring these previously taboo aspects of nerd culture to light. Dramatized or not, I was hyped to watch King of the Nerds back in the day. Dreamt of being on there for a season before TBS cancelled it.

 

Anyway, 2) in November 2019, I attended a fan-run panel at AnimeNYC about cosplay and identity aptly named "Finding Yourself: How Cosplaying Forms Identities." The description currently on AnimeNYC's 2019 panel schedule has this for the panel's description:

 

"Over the past few years, conventions and cosplay have been fully inducted into the mainstream’s peripheral vision. With such a boom, we’ve seen a lot more cosplayers enter the scene and enjoy this hobby, in full! In this panel, we’re going to touch on how cosplaying has helped many of us break out of our shells and understand who we truly are, through wigs and makeup."

 

The panelists, Joeschmoe Cosplay, @rainbow_rex, and @sleepyheadcos—(all LGBT+)⁠—told their own stories of how they were able to explore their gender identities and/or sexual orientations through this creative medium. It was a beautiful thing, hearing how they (and attendees, once Q&A opened up) were able to discover parts of themselves they otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to find, whether it was due to family situations or prejudices, stigma, self-consciousness, internal phobias, etc. One panelist was, in their words, able to “try on” new identities with each new cosplay, get a feel for it and think, “Huh. I like feeling this way. I like how people acknowledge me and refer to me.” And so it goes.

 

And that’s another thing! For the most part? Anime fans/cosplayers will go along with and are accepting of anything. By that I mean: You identify as a cisgender female but are cosplaying as a male and therefore go by he/him pronouns? Done. You, as a person, go by they/them pronouns regardless of who you’re cosplaying as? No problem.

 

And that’s just incredible to me.

 

Back in ye olden days of me going to AnimeNext, I recall a time waiting in a line (as one often does at cons…) and chatting with other attendees, when one of said attendees, in referring to me, said, “Oh, and they can… [turns to me] Sorry, what are your pronouns?” Admittedly I was caught off guard for a moment before replying, “She/her.” And the attendee goes, “Got it. So she can…” Just like that. Simple. And it was just… so damn heartwarming, man. I’m gonna remember that moment for the rest of my life, lemme tell ya. The lack of assumption, the non-judgment, the ease of acceptance. Ugh, I’m struggling finding the right word for it, but… that small interaction was so easily navigable that it really boggles my mind that the whole of society isn’t this way and probably won’t be for a long time.

 

Though, I have noticed that it’s becoming more of a thing to talk about preferred pronouns in the workplace—particularly in adding them to email signatures. Shit, I just got an email recently where it said right under the person’s name “Pronouns: she/her/hers,” and… [sigh] I love that. Normalize that.

 

THAT’S IT! THAT'S THE WORD I WAS LOOKING FOR. Normalization. God, I could go off about that in so many contexts. First that comes to mind: trans characters (really any LGBT+ characters) in works of fiction don’t need an explanation to exist. They don’t need drama or a tragic backstory to explain who, how, and why they are. Please, I’m tired of artists/writers being bogged down by commenters asking why why why why. They just are. Let them be. Normalize their existence. In fiction and IRL.

 

Alright! Now that I’m thoroughly a mix of emo and rAGE, let’s move on.

 

Love for the arts + new inspirational content led to cosplay interest, which in turn led to my eventual theatre minor, which reawakened (in part) my want to cosplay. Huzzah, the circle of stupidity has been completed like 1.5 times (I really thought this was a general meme thing but it's from Homestuck smh). And in all that stupidity (don’t take that literally, it’s just for the meme), I gained crafting experience, innovation, character and dialogue inspiration for my own writing, socializing skills…

 

Steps towards independence were even taken when I started attending those conventions overnight with friends. So overall, a nice medium to Grow Up through, which was fitting because most of the anime that I’ve come in contact with has some sort of “coming of age” theme or trope (TV Tropes, like UD and fanlore, is a pop culture/fandom bible. Study up.). And there is many a trope throughout the madness of a spectrum that is anime. Any genre you wanna watch, character dynamic, plot line, etc., it’s out there. (I don’t watch soap operas, but I think animes are my soap operas.)

 

Makes for great writing research.

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Hence… my discovery of fanfiction.

 

That should be a whole entry on its own, to be honest. (Fanart was also present here, but not to the extent as fanfic, at least by way of me consuming and producing content.)

 

I’ve always had a love for storytelling, and once I heard that it was a Thing that people write stories based on published content For Fun… I started getting inspired. Wrote a bit in high school. One of them is unfinished to this day. I'd like to finish it one day but… life gets in the way, y'know?

 

There are whole communities for fanfiction—whole platforms, too—with a wild history to match the content these writers create. Which is absolutely not a bad thing. There's content there that you could never find in published works/novels—at least, not that I've seen. Explorations in plot, universe building, writing style, themes of sexuality, gender, mental health, etc. I could go on about fanfiction in its own entry, really, and how it's affected me as a writer and me as a person differently over the years. But! I'll reign it in.

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Real talk, tho. Some fanfics are masterpieces. Novel worthy.

 

In the meantime, I've talked about elements and ethics of fanfic in past class blogs. One in particular comes to mind. Go forth if you're curious. (CTRL+F "Fanfiction" to skip through the class-related babble.)

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(... God my writing was so 2017.)

 

Aside from development in my interaction with fandom spaces, jumping into anime also started me on The Path To Discovering How To Be A Fan Of Content From Cultures Other Than Yours.

 

I'm a white cisgender female from New Jersey, USA. I had a narrow range of cultural knowledge growing up (although I will say that the area in which I live is rather culturally diverse). But anyway, the way that I engage in this content can have an effect on how I present myself to the world, and I have a responsibility as the person that I am to respect whatever culture I have an interest in that is not mine.

 

At least, that’s my view. (And that explanation felt so clunky, forgive me. Maybe I'll be able to eloquently explain that mentality another time.) Anyway.

 

If only I knew of that mentality when I first got into anime. Sigh. There’d be a lot less botched Japanese interjections in my vocabulary with my friends.

 

God, I just cringed.

 

There's terms for this… enthusiastic level of involvement. Otaku was popular back when I was in high school, though it's a term one would roll their eyes at these days. Weeaboo was an insult back then, indicative that one (usually of non-Asian descent) is a fan of Japanese culture to an exploitative degree, a fetish degree. Nowadays, anime/manga fans my age have generally (generally) mellowed out, and we self-identify as a weeb, or, more likely, a f#^@in' weeb. Self-deprecating, but accepting. Pretty much sums up my friend circles. And millennials.

 

Long, excruciating story short, my (and usually all fans’) journey for the first time through a fandom of a culture that is not mine (can I make an acronym for this?) was one of learning, embarrassing myself (especially in hindsight) and refining/correcting behaviors that I realized, through my own realizations and the advice from others, was problematic and trivializing of a culture. I will admit that I was not a perfect fan (not that I am now or ever will be), but really… no one is. Everyone experiences this kind of thing differently, and may not grow out of that naivete into adulthood.

 

I’m not passing judgment on those people, but that’s how it is, and it can and probably will get them in trouble with certain people someday.

 

I, meanwhile, will not interact if I don’t know the particular problematic person (say that 5 times fast), but I will if I do know the person, just to inform how people could indeed have certain opinions about them.

 

This got really convoluted and cyclical, methinks. A couple of interviewees discussed this type of interaction and development of fans, particularly during the question: “Do you tell people inside of the fan community that you're in that fan community? Why or why not?” The answer was pretty split between “Yeah, why wouldn’t I?” and “Well, it depends on the fan.”

 

So……… yeah! Inter-fan relations and cultural sensitivity aside, from a personal perspective, getting into anime led to a deeper cultural openness in me. There’s a difference between wanting to learn more about a culture because you are genuinely interested in it and because “it’s cute/cool/niche and related to _____ so it’s clearly superior.” Nah. Nah, that ain’t it. 

 

Just… open-mindedness, sensitivity, understanding, gauging appropriate behavior so appropriation and exploitation doesn’t occur. 

 

I feel like I’m preaching again. Sigh.

 

I suppose I just want to be That Person for budding fans that tells them where the line is, y’know? I kind of had that for me when I started learning more about Japanese culture…

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… and I definitely had that for me when I started learning more about Korean culture. And that will be covered in my K-Pop Self-Doc. 

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BAM what a plug.

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...

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There’s so much more I would love to talk about with this topic… Subtitles v. English dubbed content—(PAUSE. I found a video that goes into the history and reasonings of that debate. CellSpex is cool, btw, check her out.)—introduction to music in other languages, fetishization, Vocaloids… (Jeez, I didn’t even mention AMVs, but I suppose I do talk about them in my YouTube entry. Shrug.)

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Alas. Perhaps tis for another section or another day. Or another thesis.

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Jeez...