Posts tagged cosplay

Why Fandom Is Important?

J.M. Frey

Authors need fans, right? Sure we do – we need people who like our books, our writing, who recommend them to other people, who spread buzz and vote for them, who defend them and squee over them, who recommend them to their librarian and give them as gifts. We need fans, at the most basic, to buy and read our books or we couldn’t afford (financially or emotionally) to write more.

But what about fans? I’m talking the come-to-every-event-you-do, attend-every-signing, write-fanfic, build cosplay, analyze-the-crap-out-of-your-work kind of fans. Do we need those?

Yes. YES WE DO.

And I love you, too. I love you guys a lot.

Let me tell you why I love you – and why many authors love you too.

I was Once One Of You

• I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Fanfiction was my novelling training wheels.
• You encourage new creatives to take chances with their work, to stretch and grow, to learn, to explore. More than that, you encourage us to share, which is sometimes the hardest part of writing a novel or making a piece of art.
• You teach writers how to take praise, how to take critique, how to edit and how to build character and worlds and narratives every time you leave feedback.
• You provide a safe community in which to explore creativity.

…And I Still Am.

• I read fanfic constantly. I call it my “comfort food” because I already know I love the worlds I’m about to spend time in, already know I love the characters. It’s a safe, wonderful, happy, glowy kind of coming home but I get a brand new story/idea/AU/world.
• I still cosplay, when I can get away with being a professional guest in costume at Cons.
• I still roam Artists’ Alley and drool and buy way too many prints and bookmarks and buttons and cool things, because they are innovative, and beautiful, and fun, and for just a moment creates a thread of mutual understanding, respect, love of the media text, and a tingle of creativity passes between me and the artist/vendor.
• I still think like a fan – every story I create I approach with a fanficcer’s mindset: “How can I tell this from a new angle? How can I use the traditions, the clichés, the assumptions to push against the envelope of the narrative? Whose voices are missing and how can I give them the center?”

You Are Unabashedly Passionate

• You have the guts to wear the proof of your passion on your person: to cosplay, to wear tee-shirts, to attend cons, to get tattoos, to style your hair or your wardrobe as a tribute to your favorite characters.
• You spend hours, years, and sometimes a significant amount of money creating things based on other creatives’ works
• Really, Simon Pegg might have said it best.

You Engage in A Dialogue With Me About My Work

• Every fanwork you put up is your response to something that I said or did in my book. I have offered the opening and this is your reply. And the conversation is marvelous.

Read the rest of the post here at the original posting site, the blog of author Ruthanne Reid, who hosted the guest post.

Because of the fantastic positive feedback from the Leaving Mundania documentary, I’ve decided to post my 2008 academic paper on cosplay.

Identi-play: Cosplay, Camp, Cons and the Carnivalesque

J. M. Frey

Originally presented on April 15^th, 2008; updated April 11^th, 2013

Theoretical Approaches to Media And Culture

Abstract:

Cosplay: people donning home-made costumes patterned after fictional characters. A Japanese portmanteau of “costume” and “play”, Cosplay exhibits characteristics of both - dressing up like a fictional character, but also ‘inhabiting’ the character’s world; the filtered life of someone who does not exist, and an attempt to capture it for a fleeting moment. Photographer Elena Dorfman (2007) calls it a blurring of fantasy and reality, where identity is exploded, narrative is privileged and persona paramount.

What draws amateur artisans to Cosplay and the convention events that propagate it? Theorists (Butler, 1998; Mercer 1994) posit that switching, trying on, and performing other identities, genders, and in the case of Cosplay, personas and species, allow Cosplayers to fluidly define, stretch, discover, and augment their own sense of identity. Like other performative groups studied by identity theorists - such as gangs or drag queens - Cosplayers slip in and out of identities by slipping in and out of costumes, and perform themselves by surrendering to play. That the concept of identity is itself in flux is perhaps a sign that in an age of virtual hobbies and connections, we no longer know who we are. Cosplay allows participants to create and participate in the physical world, to move a hobby that is primarily screen-centric into a concrete medium.

I elucidate the passion for the art by drawing on Susan Sontag’s treatise on Camp, illuminating the excruciating work and joy Cosplayers wring from a pastime that makes most onlookers squirm, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the carnivalesque in comparison to the festival atmosphere of the convention hall. Straddling the gap between is an insightful essay by Paper Magazine editor Carlo McCormick (Dorfman 2007), which serves as a stark entry point to the cacophony of voices that is Cosplay.

Read Cosplay,Cons, Camp and the Carnivalesque by J.M. Frey.