Cosplay - role-playing in costume - is a material practice of fan communities that emphasizes reproduction. Fan-creators customize and extrapolate, crafting new material to fill in gaps in canon and beyond. These practices reproduce ideas and items in order to create transformative narratives, which call attention to characters and stories and their co-construction between source and receiver, producer and consumer, artist and audience. The essence of cosplay involves affective labor where fans appropriate a character and story, transforming it in relation to the fan community and fans’ individual identities, by constructing and wearing costumes, learning signature character poses or dialogue, and masquerading at fan conventions, photo shoots, or live-action-role-playing events. Cosplay is a participatory, and often communal, activity that produces meaning and personal fulfillment by enabling role/identity-transformation from audience to actor and from ordinary to extraordinary.

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For me - a former theatre kid - it is not only a means of expression, but also a way to explore texts and relate to fandoms in different ways.