sispurrier:

[I scribbled some angry invective earlier today in a more specific corner of the internet, and yesterday all over twitter, in response to the latest bubbling-up of industry pros suggesting “cosplayers are ruining comics”. (I’m not dignifying the original complaints with a link – go find it.) It struck me that today’s rant is a pretty decent rejoinder to hang somewhere more public too, plus worth recording as my starting position on all this stuff. So.]

Basically: it bothers me that whenever someone decides to complain about cosplay on grounds of [insert bullshit here], their examples are almost always anecdotes about women.

To paraphrase Wil Wheaton, cosplay is the purest healthy expression it’s possible to make of your love for a fiction. IMO to argue that it even can – let alone does – harm that fiction is the bubbling arsehole of stupid.

If it’s true (which I don’t entirely believe) that cosplayers are less inclined to buy books at a show, it’s almost certainly because they’ve already fucking bought them. On account of being, y’know, proactive fans.

Comics creators being anti-cosplay is like a football player moaning about people wearing team shirts.

Pretty much the only moaners’ position I even begin to buy is people who make their living selling collectibles at shows – back issues, toys, t-shirts, all that – who believe cosplayers aren’t into that stuff and are hence restricting their marketplace.

…which, a) is probably also bollocks, honestly, but b) even if it’s true that’s fucking natural selection, baby. We finally live in a world where the story is becoming more important than the masturbatory nostalgia and rarity of the brand surrounding it. Evolve or die, fuckheads. Stop griping about cosplayers not buying your vintage superman lunchboxes and start selling fabric, leather stitching and cosplay tutorials.

(And at some point canny artists are going to realise they could make a mint selling sketches of fans in their costumes. And so on and so forth.)

You give it even the slightest thought and you realise the complaints are symptomatic of either an abject lack of imagination and flexibility on the part of retailers, or a really lazy excuse to call women narcissistic sluts.