Spider Jerusalem cosplay. SOMEDAY. From earthdog's photostream.

[Notes on the hiatus: I LURKED MOAR. Some other very loud 'commentators' could use a bit of it themselves. Get over it.]

Once upon a time, if you wanted to dress up as a famous character like Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald, you either had to be doing it at a costume party or have permission from the copyright holders.

One day, a bunch of geeks (most likely Japanese) decided that no party was necessary to wear costumes, possibly because they weren’t invited to enough parties. When they actually got out of the house to meet up, possibly at a school festival or comics convention, cosplay was born.

Cosplay, like doujinshi or fanfiction, is first and foremost an act of love. It is also an act that would embarrass normal people, which demonstrates that all cosplayers are a special kind of crazy.

It is also an act in violation of copyright. But like fanfiction and doujinshi it is tolerated. Why? Because fans who write fanfic or draw doujinshi or dress up as fictional characters are a special kind of fan: The kind who can publicly turn on his or her own chosen fandom with the passion of a jilted lover if crossed. This is due to the previously mentioned love and lack of shame.

Back in the late 90′s, Fox tried to shut down X-Files and Simpsons fan sites in an attempt to exert more control over its copyright, with predictable results. Faced with the fury of a hundred thousand paranoid fans, Fox relented. You can’t stop the signal.

Firefly reference. Still got it.

Like all niche fandoms after the wake of this act of defiance, cosplay found a home on the Internet. The Internet allows foreign (and let’s face it, fresher) memes to spread its seed around the world. Things like anime, and indie comics, and /b/ronies.

And cosplay.

Once local awareness of cosplay hit critical mass, a local convention was held. A convention that warmed the hearts of people who were longing to meet other people ‘just like us’. In this case, ‘just like us’ meant ‘people whose love for character X outweighs their sense of personal shame’, a trait I actually find admirable.

A convention that must have also subconsciously reminded Sandman fans of a certain Cereal Convention.

Cereal Convention Guest of Honor: THIS GUY!

Cosplay now had a forum. I don’t mean the particular competing forums (which are differing levels of private containing even more private circles).

I mean forum in the technical sense: an open public space. Roman society worked because each city had a forum, a place where people could meet and exchange opinions with people outside their immediate social circles. Prevented people from becoming insular and isolated. In cosplay’s case, its forum began as an abstract idea, existing entirely on the Internet, and then as a string of conventions held together by chattering about them on the Internet.

Two things happen when you have a public meeting space.

First, some people want to own that space. Claim divine right based on some hazy line of succession or on popular opinion or by strength of ideals. Approve only certain types of gatherings within that space, according to law or custom or public morals. Exercise the power to exile or excommunicate. This is the aristocratic stance. Remind you of anyone?

Second, some people build markets right next to the space. Wherever people meet, no matter what kind of people they are, there’s a market. And if there’s a market, people will cater to that market. Even if they don’t actually care about the forum itself, if there is a market, merchants will meet demand.

These are both facts. They’re happening right now. I’m not writing to complain about either. They’re the natural consequences of a large community. Even the Church makes a killing selling prayer books and unleavened bread and has overbearing self-appointed leaders telling everyone what REAL spirituality is about. (It even has kiddie-fiddlers too.)

And I don’t know if cosplay can continue its little experiment with corporate capitalism. I pointed out that cosplay is in a legally gray area, and other bloggers have written about this. If enough money is being made, the copyright holders are going to start sniffing around. And not everyone has the corporate clout to be ‘official’ cosplayers.

No, I’m just here to point out that both of these things only exist because of the people that matter. The people in the forum. The people who participate. The people who dress like fools because of love.

The cosplayers.

I salute all of you. You magnificent, freaking weirdos. The cosplay ‘state’ and the ‘cosplay’ market exist because of you, not the other way around. Some of you already realized this on your own. And when enough of you finally realize what that really means, it’ll be a real interesting day.

And I’ll be here.

Lurking moar.

Back in 1995, the only place where I could access the internet was at the College of Science Library, for ten pesos every fifteen minutes. With the slow connection it would take five full minutes to download a crappy gif of Sailor Mercury. (And it wasn’t even H.)

1996 brought the opening of Global Cafe, an internet cafe in Katipunan that was open from 10am to 9pm. Membership gave you free hours, a mug with the cafe name and logo, and your very own email account, which I barely used, because I had no one to send emails to. Instead I spent hours downloading pics from anime galleries and reading FAQs for untranslated anime and games.

Incidentally, I still have that mug.

One of the permanent fixtures at this internet cafe was Scriviner, who spent most of his time role-playing on RanmaMUCK, a text-only roleplaying server, and Tapestries, a furry-themed server. It was through this strange individual that I discovered the world of fanfiction.

Fanfiction occupies the same copyright gray area that doujinshi and Hatsune Miku covers of popular songs occupy. Enthusiastic fans take the characters from their favorite (sometimes multiple) books or shows or comics, and write new stories for them. This is similar to ghostwriting a Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew book, except we were doing it for no pay and without permission. Star Trek, X-Files, Charlie’s Angels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no fandom was safe from being reinterpreted (with varying degrees of success) by fans hungry for more of their favorite characters’ adventures. In my case, I preferred anime fanfiction.

I started out like everyone else, collecting fanfics without regard for quality as long as they matched my preferences, which at the time were Ranma ½, Evangelion, and Oh! My Goddess. I learned the lingo as I lurked on the Fan Fiction Mailing List (or FFML). Words like lemon and self-insertion and slash became part of my vocabulary. Soon I learned to distinguish between bad and good fanfiction, paying attention to characterization, description, pacing, dialogue. I started paying attention to the work of particular writers, with names like RpM and Andrew Huang and Sean Gaffney and John Biles.

And Scriviner.

Then in 1997, when I finally got dialup and could access the net from home, I crossed over from lurker to writer. Almost reluctantly, urged on by myfriends, I wrote my first fanfic. It had the ridiculously simple premise of transfering Shutaro Mendou (the ultra-rich playboy from Urusei Yatsura) to Furinkan High School (the high school Ranma goes to), and from this simple change I extrapolated the hijinks that would ensue and simply wrote it down as it occurred to me.

Writing the fanfic itself was a blast. I tried to predict how all the characters would interact with each other without violating the sacred principle of staying ‘in character’. It was almost like running an RPG starring my favorite characters. I posted this work on the FFML as as a labor of love, using the pen name ‘Timerunner’ which came from a homebrew RPG I used to run in high school.

What happened next ensured my transformation into fanfic otaku: I began receiving fan mail. Apparently, being able to write a coherent story with decent characterization made me a better writer than 90% of the existing fanfic writer population.To say nothing of simply being able to spell properly, for that matter.

I followed up with a Ryouga character piece called Closing the Chapter. People wrote to tell me how they cried while reading it, how it helped them gain closure over their own life chapters.

Come again? I was writing amateur, melodramatic fiction using characters I didn’t even own, and somehow this didn’t detract from the meaning or enjoyment readers derived from it. I followed this up with a fanfic that was almost too cleverly post-modern for its own good entitled Gratuitous Self. It was a fanfic about a fanfic writer who gratuitously inserted himself into his own Ranma ½ fanfic as a form of wish fulfillment, so he could hang out with Ranma and the gang, and carry on a romantic tragicomedy with Tendou Nabiki. Despite (or because of) its intentionally self-referential nature, it became a hit.

I became well-known within the tiny niche community of the FFML. I was viewed as an authority on plotting and characterization. My website (completely with circa 1997 hit counter and animated gifs) received thousands of visitors. People would await the release of new installments of my stories. I was invited to be part of a fanfic panel at a con in Chicago, an offer I unfortunately had to decline since I was in the Philippines and couldn’t afford air fare on my college allowance.

I wrote prolifically, branching out into other fandoms, using other pseudonyms. I would come out with a new story once or twice a week. I honed my writing, taking every piece of the C&C (comments and criticism) I received on a regular basis. As far as my little corner of the net was concerned, I was made.

And then, suddenly, I stopped.

I don’t even remember why. Maybe it was because I’d finally shifted to Creative Writing and spent all my time writing to meet my course requirements. Maybe it was because the object of my affection had finally said yes to me and I no longer needed writing as an outlet. Maybe I just got bored.

Whatever the reason was, I left the fanfic community and never returned, leaving most of my continuing series like Yen Town and Shadow of Revolution and Sum of all Parts and even Gratuitous Self unfinished. I stopped being a fanfic otaku, just like that.

I remember thinking that I would get nowhere using other people’s characters. I could never claim credit for my stories outside the tiny subculture because they were technically illegal. All my stories contained a disclaimer that I wasn’t violating copyright for profit. So what good would it do me even if I somehow managed to write the greatest piece of fanfiction ever made?

I needed my own characters. I needed my own stories. I had tried my hand at original speculative fiction before (if you manage to find copies of Firewalker I’ll be very impressed), but what I really wanted was to stop hiding behind other people’s intellectual property, and tell my own stories, letting myself be judged solely on the merit of the work instead of relying on the goodwill of devoted fans of the fandom I was writing for.

But when I stopped writing fanfiction, I forgot this desire too. It would be several years before I would remember.

(to be continued)