- A feature on LonCon in The Guardian discussed various fanworks including filk and cosplay. “While most attendees save dressing up until Saturday night’s masquerade, Jonathan Hall, 21, who studies physics at Oxford, spent Friday of the convention fully clad in a homemade Thor costume. For him, while comics breaking out in the mainstream was ‘only a good thing,’ he said the big comic book and fantasy films made by Hollywood had a lot of catching up to do in terms of representing minority groups in the way the fiction and fan fiction did. ‘I’m quite into queer fandom,’ Hall added. ‘I watched Doctor Who and Torchwood when it came back on television and being 14 at the time and starting to realise I was bisexual, having Captain Jack as a figure on television who become a role model in many ways was a huge help to me. So I think representation is really important and in many ways these big budget movies don’t do it as well as books have been doing for a while.'”
- SyFy interviewed designers who took part in San Diego Comic Con’s Her Universe Fashion Show. Asked about whether geek couture is becoming a movement in fashion, one designer replied “Geek culture right now is coming into a really strong time because people are being themselves, they are embracing what they like and embracing who they are…and saying if you don’t like it, that’s ok because I like myself.” (No transcript available).
- While some fans are creating cosplay for animals, The Inlander profiled cosplay as animals in a piece on Spokane’s First Night. “Escapism is nothing new to the human experience. Ask the guy who drops his paycheck on Zags season tickets, or the people waiting in line for a movie on a Friday night. Ask comic book fans, artists, musicians, gamers, woodworkers, distance runners, Civil War re-enactors, avid fans of Game of Thrones. Odds are they’ll all tell you they’re just looking for a vacation from the norm, a few minutes when they can forget the bills to pay, the obligations to meet, the 9-to-5, the problems they don’t want to address. ‘When we fantasize, we experience the same emotions we would feel if we were in reality. Think of the fear you feel with a nightmare. Happy fantasies make us feel good,’ says Norman Holland, author of Literature and the Brain and a researcher of psychoanalytic psychology…’Fantasies — escapism — give our emotions a workout. That’s why the imaginative arts are good for you.'”
Have you taken part in cosplay or attended cosplay events? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.
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