Cosplay and Pop Mythology
The cosplay research project is definitely progressing and progressing quickly — and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’ve now signed an official book deal (which you can find out more about that means on Indiegogo here) and been going to loads of fan conventions and chatting online with cosplayers. If I’m not writing for the blog, I’m transcribing interviews, reading academic texts, or talking to cosplayers. So, let’s talk a little more about the project right now. We’ve already looked briefly at the definition of cosplay in an earlier blog post, so today let’s do another starting point: the relationship between cosplay and mythology.
Obviously for myself and my website Incidental Mythology, the relationship between pop culture and myth is of our particular interest. On this blog, we understand mythology as being inherently tied to emotional investment, and popular culture can have loads of emotional investment. When we are looking at pop culture investment and interaction, mythology and the connection to the story is inherently a part of this conversation. So what does this mean for cosplay? Cosplay is clearly one of the ways people interact with mythology, but how does the interaction between cosplay, pop culture and mythology manifest and what does it mean for the individuals or communities doing it?
I think the most interesting aspect of this is in how cosplayers decide on the characters they will embody. When I was first figuring out my own cosplays, this was actually a really hard decision — there was a lot to think about. I like a lot of things, so how do I choose who to cosplay as? Cosplayers generally think of two factors when deciding on their character: the cosplayer and the location of the cosplayer.
So let’s think about cosplay as a performance — the cosplayer being like an actor getting ready for a stage show. When deciding their characters, cosplayer-performers thinks about two aspects of the performance: the performer and the audience. For the performer, the cosplayer needs a character who relates to them as an individual. This can mean a few different things. One participant I’ve chatted to discussed looking for characters who have personality traits that they want to embody themselves. The cosplay-performance allows them to embody these traits, even if only temporarily. But the character relations can also happen another way. Another cosplayer I chatted to expressed enjoying finding a character that related directly to their own personal experiences or personality traits. They used the example of cosplaying a character who had lost their mother and still remained strong. The cosplayer had also recently lost their mother, and I wanted to embody strength in the face of grief. The cosplayer directly connected to the character’s experience because of how it echoed their own.
The other part of the cosplay choice is the audience. One cosplayer told me a story about their excitement at cosplaying Shiklah, a character from the Deadpool comics, and not one person at the con recognised the character. They felt dejected, and voiced regret at having made the costume in the first place, despite their excitement about it leading up to the event.
If the cosplay is for a con, the type of con and who will be there is an important consideration for the cosplayer. I just recently returned from CosXpo, a con completely devoted to cosplay. While there, one cosplayer expressed liking that at CosXpo, you can do more obscure characters because the primary interest from those around will be the quality and details of the costume rather than on the character. In contrast, at something like Comic Con or MegaCon, they feel more pressure to do a character that a wider array of people will like because attendees tend to want to see their favourite characters.
The two parts of a performance are therefore pretty important to thinking about what the performance should even be. These two aspects can also be explored through the different ways the individual connects to the pop myth of their cosplay: the performer’s connection to the character is demonstrative of how the cosplayer connects personally to the story; the performer’s understanding of the audience demonstrates the cosplayer’s personal connection to the community.
Both aspects of character choice feeds into the ultimate conception of the piece of pop culture being an integral part of meaning-making for the communities and the individual, while also relying on the cosplayer to embody the narratives in such a convincing way to allow the story to continue to live in new environments and new formations. Cosplay becomes part of the meaning-making aspect of the original narrative — both for the wider community, but also for the cosplayer more specifically.
This is not, of course, to say that cosplay isn’t fun. The whole point of the act is because it does give a great sense of fun and entertainment for the cosplayer and the audience viewing the cosplay — but fun can have a lot of meaning behind it for the cosplayer as well.
