The remediation of the fan convention: Understanding the emerging genre of cosplay music videos

Abstract

Through cosplay (costume play), fans perform existing fictional characters in self-created costumes, thereby enriching and extending popular narratives. Cosplay is an understudied form of appropriation that transforms and actualizes an existing story or game in close connection to the fan community and the fan's own identity. Although the costume can be experienced firsthand at convention sites, it is also remediated in photography, thereby extending its potential audience and performative possibilities. In the rich emerging genre of cosplay music videos, commonly shot and produced at convention sites, fans juxtapose different cosplayers and texts. Informed by work on other fan videos, such as machinima, I propose a reading of a selected corpus of videos to analyze the dynamics of costume culture as it transcends the convention grounds.