Here’s the thing about the last 4 years.

We’re trapped in someone else’s cosplay, and it isn’t good.

A thread. /1

If it’s *your* cosplay, you are in costume and character and smashed into a sweaty hotel convention center and it’s the best goddamn day of your life.

/1b

Everyday is your best Groundhog Day.

You are dressed up and playing along to an imaginary world you adore.

/2

There is memorabilia to buy; you spend hard-earned money on it.

You love it. It will be cherished.

You will pick it up & swiffer the dust off & remember the amazing day when you too got to be a player that mattered, at home among other devotees speaking a strange tongue /3

You are queuing for autographs from other men and women who previously built this universe in costume, as players — now sitting behind the table as the normals, while you look in at them wearing their previous skin.

You feel powerful. In the know. Special.

/4

You pass non-cosplayers in the lobby—and you feel bad for them because they are so confused & excluded.

They don’t see what you see. They don’t see the magic & seductiveness of the cosplay world. They cannot step from drab blah lives into one with imaginary powers /5

There are no secret handshakes or clubhouse codes outside the cosplay. Nothing for them to feel included, important, in control. /6

But

If this is not your cosplay

If you have no idea what comic book or syndicated show these characters are from

If you don’t understand the secret call signs

Then

It’s an utter living hell /7

You’re surrounded by people who think this is all a joke — but you are terrified that they look on costumes and props and kabuki and see something that makes sense. That seems totally normal.

/8

You want to tell yourself you can see what the fun is.

Ok, you say. Dress-up was fun once.

But really, you don’t care what was in the background of minute 12:14 of season 4 episode 19 or why it explains *absolutely everything*

In your heart, you know it explains nothing /9

You don’t want to pretend it explains everything. This fiction is so much effort.

You don’t want to learn it. You don’t want to nod & smile.

You just want to walk to the hotel bar and drink heavily while posting a thread on twitter about the weird cosplay you wandered into /10

No. Really. You don’t want to read the 400 page PDF someone has posted in a Reddit group because if you do, it will somehow make this nightmare blind date seem normal.

You don’t want to waste time and money assembling your own cosplay get-up, because then you will fit in. /11

This is the easiest thing for some people. Buy a costume. Join the fun. Don’t you get how great it is to BE INSIDE THE PLAY?

They join wholeheartedly. They buy the tchotchkes. They collect every collectible autograph. They get a boob signed.

You do not want a boob signed. /12

If you ask the joiners later, they will say, oh, I was just running the follow-spot. I was assistant stage manager. That wasn’t me wearing the 10-foot-high foam penis costume with a cape, riding around on a broomhandle horse.

I was just watching. I knew it wasn’t real. /13

But they knew it was real enough to buy the memorabilia and display it in a visible but not-too-prominent place in the house so anyone they invite in who knows what it is understands that they are One Of You. /14

Maybe they even invite you in after a third date so that you *do* see it, and give you the chance to cut and run if you aren’t willing to live inside this nightmare fiction. /15

In the forever-convention-center-of-the-mind, it does not matter that bills aren’t paid. That people are dying. That the world is moving on and we are no longer at the table.

It only matters that your foam penis costume with a cape is the best foam penis costume with a cape /16

It only matters that the original foam penis said something nice about your foam penis, or maybe, if it is the best goddamn day of your life, *tweeted* about how nice your foam penis is, how your jaunty broomhandle horse is absolutely innocent and a victim of an FBI witchhunt /17

It only matters that you stay inside the fiction

Once you leave the fiction, you are just the asshole wearing the foam penis costume who needs to ride the bus home because the broomhandle horse wasn’t going to get you home, let alone come up with a plan to rebuild the county /18

The cosplay isn’t forever

The head players know it

It’s why they are in street-clothes signing your boobs with sharpies

They won’t be the one left in the penis costume when the music ends

/19

They also know that what was in the background of minute 12:14 of season 4 episode 19 does not explain *absolutely everything* — it only explains how they got you to ignore your history, values, principles, and constitution while they picked your pockets.

/20

They know that they are looking at a sea of redshirts in someone else’s cosplay universe.

We need a better way to remind the redshirts that they don’t need to be the chum in the shark hunt. /21

That if they have the time to learn imaginary languages & history and read 400-page PDFs on the meaning of minute 12:14—they can learn real languages & history, and find that it doesn’t cost anything to be in a world that doesn’t want you to dress up like a caped foam penis /22

Ok keep the cape. Whatever. Just stop being the chum that thinks it is the penis when the penis doesn’t understand that our real legacies & history are so so much better & braver, more daring and romantic, than any silly fiction that funds itself by selling plastic whatzits. /23

It’s. All. Cosplay.

https://twitter.com/john_sipher/status/1258918397611585536?s=21 https://twitter.com/john_sipher/status/1258918397611585536

Coooooooooooooosplay. And this is not very different than a 10-foot foam penis costume. https://twitter.com/jerrysaltz/status/1259255915137699848?s=21