“Cosplay is evil!”, “Why do people do this?” or “Aren’t the costumes too scary for kids?” As a nerd-core mom, I hear this one a lot. So we’re going to take some time to address this one.

First off, what is cosplay? Well here it is: is a type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea (taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosplay).

Cosplay is not evil, well not any more evil than dressing up for Halloween. If you have an issue with Halloween, then yes, you will have an issue with cosplay. (Nuf said on that)

Why people do this, well, for lots of reasons. It’s fun to dress up. It takes skill to make these costumes, and you can win prizes for them. Not only that, this is a great way for someone who wants to breakout into costume design to show off their skills.

Here are some great examples of great cosplay from Emerald City Comicon

Steam Punk Guy

Sophia with Rogue

Awesome Costumes

As you can see a lot of work and mastery went into these costumes. The hand on the Steam Punk Guy was fully articulated and really cool to watch it work! Rogue made her own costume and I love the Victorian/SteamPunk couple! (What can I say, I’m a sucker for the Victorian era!)

Are the costumes too scary for kids? I addressed part of this in an earlier post. However I will address this again. Yes, some costumes can be a bit scary for kids. But for the most part they are not. You will get some wild, crazy and scary costumes at times, but the people wearing them are generally nice people who will take the time to try and calm the kids down if they have freaked them out. As I mentioned in the post about kids and conventions, there was a very realistic zombie guy who yelled Boo to startle me at PAX, what he didn’t know was that I had the kids with me (he couldn’t see them). He scared the lights out of Sophia (6yrs) and made her cry. He apologized profusely, but I asked him if he could tell her about his makeup. So, he got down on her level and we talked about his makeup and color contacts. After that, she declared that not all zombies are bad. (Let her learn the truth later…) While some kids are scared of people in masks, the people in the masks are pretty aware of this and will usually take off the masks if asked, or will just take them off without being asked to show the kids that there is someone under there and usually that calms the fears. I think that kids genuinely like to be able to see a person’s eyes and face and when they can’t it scares them. I think this might be due to the fact that younger kids, who aren’t fully communicative relies on facial expression on how they perceive a person, take that away and the kids gets scared. (Enough psychobabble, get back to point!)

Cosplay in and of itself is not evil, weird or really scary. A lot of times it is just plain cool. Taking the time to educate kids about cosplay and how they made their costumes can be awesome. This can foster a kids creativity and excitement about something. Maybe they having a hard time with something in their lives and this could be a great outlet for them to create and have fun. This is also a great way to teach kids to sew, knit, create jewelry and etc. Sophia told me that next year, she wants to dress up for Comicon, and I encourage it!