Daijoubu

Fans are an interesting breed of beings. I sometimes wonder if it matters what they are fans of. Are the cosplayer, the Civil War reenactor, the guy in the Klingon suit, and the sports team fanatic, who’s equipped with all the fan gear, all just variations on a theme, or are they fundamentally different in some way? I know some reenactors. One guy does Civil War and Revolutionary War. I once saw him give a lecture on American Colonial era clothing and uniforms. These guys are sticklers for historical accuracy–they like things to be “authentic,” meaning the exact same types of materials as used originally, and put together in the same way. And don’t call what they wear a “costume.” For them its authentic “clothing.” It’s not just the men either: I know women who are fascinated by Victorian-era fashions and can identify the precise period of time a given dress comes from based on the sleeves and bustle and so on. On a surface level, anime/manga/game cosplayers seem similar, in that they “dress up.” But clearly they are creating “costumes” for fictional characters, often with no “official” model of what such-and-such outfit would look like in real life. So they can’t make claims of authenticity, beyond issues of whether they made the costume themselves or not. Cosplaying, therefore, seems closer to Halloween than the “serious business” of historical reenacting.

And yet, to anime fans, cosplaying, like other elements of fandom, can be very serious business. I don’t even want to imagine how serious it can be to some of them! ^^; And for costume judging, is there any criterion for how closely it looks like the character? I’m not talking about the person in the costume (that’s a whole other issue, lol), but things like the proportions of the outfit, the shade of blue of Haruhi’s skirt, whether its a Goku wig with real hair or just a cardboard headdress. I’m guessing not. But then, even among reenactors, its more about the authentic “experience” (I don’t even know if Civil War reenactors give clothing awards). Reenactors want to feel the same heat and sweat the same sweat the soldiers once did. They want to sleep in the same kinds of tents and run through the woods with the sounds of their guns going off. An anime cosplayer may run around screaming in a faux-moe voice or show off their Naruto poses, but they will never actually fly a giant robot or use their Sexy-no-Jutsu. At least they are having fun away from their parents.

But there is another way in which reenactors and cosplayers represent the same phenomenon for their different “fandoms.” But for every area of interest, just as there might be an avid sports fan, who knows all the trivia and wears the jerseys and what-not, but will never paint his body and really go wild, so the people who wear costumes represent an extremist fringe of sorts. They could be Trekies, Medieval or Renaissance fair-goers, or boffers. Imagine a Civil War historian or tour guide, who can tell you how many bullets such-and-such regiment had left at 10:17 during a particular skirmish. He’s extreme in his own way, but even he might look in bewilderment at the person running around in that sweat-stained uniform, screaming for the reinforcements to come up. Who is more “strange” or “nerdy?” This is not unlike the geek who can name the specifications of every Gundam, but is uncomfortable around the Char cosplayer, strutting around and getting his picture taken. How often are these two fan-types the same guy, I wonder? The cosplayer and the historical reenactor are not really that different. They are both seeking escape, whether in the past or an imagined world. They both have their ideas of what’s correct, their own structure of a hierarchy of what’s acceptable, and they can all enjoy “freaking the mundanes.”