Author: Tania Escobar
At Wondercon this year, I attended a panel that immediately caught my interest. It was a panel topic that I had never heard of before at any con, and I thought it was a topic that definitely reflects any con goer. This panel was actually very eye-opening with panelists who come from very different career perspectives and standpoints. I learned a lot and forgot that the word “cosplay” does convey different social views.
Our panelists consist of Lisa Richter, a kindergarten teacher; Brian Robison, a pastor; Irene Yu, a school counselor; and Shelly Grace, branch chief of the California Department of Social Services. A diverse panel in careers, experiences, and points of view from professional places of work, they discuss how they still try to implement their love of their favorite fandoms into their professional environments.
“In the professional workplace some people will find it weird that you cosplay, and they notice or learn you’re a nerd. It took some confidence to take some bits and pieces to work.”
Grace, who runs state investigators at her job, tells us, “in a time before social media and the pop culture of today in fandoms, it was uncommon to be an adult and a gamer or a geek.” People around her at work would wait for her costume on Halloween because of the effort put into her cosplays. I’m pretty sure I speak for some cosplayers when I say, dressing up for Halloween and dressing up for a con are two totally different kinds of dressing up. You just have some sort of advantage when you cosplay.
Robison used a line from Star Trek in one of his sermons one day, and some of the people in his church had approached him afterwards and expressed that they were Trekies, and were very happy to hear the references in his sermon. Robison and that small group of Trekies got together and started a group, and eventually started to cosplay a bit at church. Robison eventually told his congregation about the community of conventions, and it’s what Jesus talks about when it comes to community.
Yu got to cosplay and dress up on spirit days, and people started catching on about her being a nerd due to her choices of costume or bound. Her students are very positive about it and have an interest. Her colleagues think of cosplay as hentai or something along the lines of 18+. She believes it’s a matter of educating them about it, and whether or not they choose to be open-minded or want to understand.
Even in an era where comic book-based movies and TV shows, video games, and anime dominate pop culture, there is still a stigma on cosplay. As a millennial and someone who is fortunate enough to live in a city like Los Angeles, where these types of interests are almost everywhere, and in my personal opinion, almost a requirement if you want to have friends or even something to add to your personality. I forgot that cosplay, being a geek/nerd, was “not cool”, even weird somewhere in the past.
Ritcher says, as a kindergarten teacher, it’s hard to be a geek and cosplay. She said some parents didn’t like that she cosplayed outside of work as her hobby, and had reported her to the school district. She had to get investigated due to the concern and how these parents reacted towards it. Her ex-husband went so far as to try using her comic con lifestyle in divorce against her, as a reason why they should get divorced. The lawyer thought it was silly, of course. But it’s matters like Ritcher’s that coincided with the views some of Yu’s colleagues had at her school.
Robison luckily didn’t have a negative experience with his congregation except for one. He was holding a gun in a cosplay. As a geek, some characters, whether it be in comics, movies, or video games, always have some sort of weapon, and in the cosplay community, that fake weapon is all a part of the cosplay. A parishioner didn’t like that her pastor was holding a gun in a Facebook photo. After that incident, Robison had to post mostly on Instagram and not Facebook because most of his congregation is on Facebook. Most of his parishioners, when the photo concerned the women, were accepting of it because he wasn’t cosplaying anything bad. He was cosplaying a protagonist and hero.
Grace had a similar negative moment at her job. She was told by her director 20 years ago that she had to drop her entire cosplay lifestyle if she wanted to progress in her career. She didn’t think that was okay, and neither did the audience listening. She was really having her hobby and something she loved held against her in career progression. Which she didn’t understand, as some of the work she does is charity work for children in hospitals. Whenever she and her team were going to visit children, her director would ask her to dress up as a certain superhero. She didn’t understand how it was okay to cosplay for kids whenever her director asked her to, but it wasn’t okay for her to dress up at cons? She ended up making a simple decision and deleted everyone from work off of Facebook to be able to cosplay and post her pictures.
A focal point that the panelist reached to bridge the gap between them as cosplayers and the people and colleges around them was the children they work with. It opened some eyes and some minds at their place of work and broke the stigma.
Ritcher works with international children where there’s a language barrier, and the best way she was able to communicate with the kids and meet them halfway was through their favorite fandoms and dressing up at school whenever she got the chance.
Grace was told to show up as Black Widow to a meeting to motivate her team and staff for their very hard jobs. When Yu’s students are applying for college and they have to write a paper on themselves, she brings in fandoms to tell the students that everyone has a story to tell, to help motivate discouraged or nervous students.
Robison once used special effects to beam himself into church. Halloween landed on Sunday, but his congregation doesn’t celebrate Halloween; he wore Star Trek colors on that day. He cosplayed as Ant-Man for a community event, got a friend to be Spider-Man, and they took pictures with a thousand kids in 2 hours.
The culture is different in different states, according to Ritcher, and I was lucky to be in a school where the principal encouraged cosplay with other colleagues. She would reward her kids if they did well in school, and she would have someone come in dressed as a superhero to visit the kids to make their day.
“California is a lot more supportive of the community and the culture.”
Grace says during the pandemic, for work, she got to preach about the community and what it really is and means to people. Robison says after some time, no one rolls their eyes anymore when he brings fandom into his sermons because he’s been able to speak about community on both cosplay and religion.
Their best advice to the audience that all the panelists agreed on was, “If you want to cosplay at work, look for the little opportunities where you can bring cosplay into work.” And I absolutely agree.
As someone that works in a theme park and gets to dress up in costume everyday for work, the perspectives of the panelist were very interesting and shows that somehow in a world where the world is right at our fingertips, cosplay is still brand new to people even though it’s been around just as long as Star Trek and Star Wars. As a frequent con goer and a theme park employee, I think nothing of dressing up in cosplay or a bound of your favorite character or fandom, but sometimes living in our own worlds, we forget that there aren’t that many like minded people, which is why community is important, to find your own and yourself in the process.