Sponsorship! In the past few years, Craft Club has been giving major sponsorship deals to the crowd favorites at Controverse. And other businesses are starting to tap into the young, influencer-driven craft market, too. The cosplay scene at Controverse has become a hotbed of recruitment and sponsored content. And if I want to have a future after high school that isn’t passing mini Bellinis at my mother’s shows, I need to make it happen.
Put simply, I need money to pay for art school, because Evie is not about to waste her wealth on that shit. She doesn’t believe in formal arts education at all. She says that any artist worth their paints is guided by talent and instinct. She didn’t need college to be a success, after all. And it’s a major point of pride for her. (She has many points of pride; she’s a sea urchin of prideful points.)
I’m less prideful and far less pointy. I know I need to go to art school. And I will need money to pay for art school. And, to a lesser degree, I will need money for food and Crunchyroll dot com.
I’m not just here to win a competition or my mother’s respect. At the end of the day, I’m after one thing: a future, on my terms.
“Name?”
We’re at the tables where they give out the badges. I pull my ID from the pocket I smartly sewed to the inside of my robe.
“Raphael Odom,” I say.
The lady looks at my ID, then at me. My ID says that I am seventeen, that I am five foot six, and that I have brown hair and brown eyes. In this moment, though, I am an ancient spirit of the forest, a druid, wearing six-inch platform heels. My face barely shows beneath a hooded robe clotted with fungus and ferns. One of my eyes is pure black due to the scleral contact lens I spent the entire Uber ride trying to put in.
But then the registration lady’s scrutiny breaks into gleeful recognition.
“You’re Evelyn Odom’s kid, right? I grew up with your mom in Everett! We went to high school together! Oh, she must be so proud of you. She was always an eccentric one, too.”
“And I’m May Wu,” May says grandly, cutting off the conversation like a benevolent guillotine. I suffer through check-in, refusing to look at anyone else directly until the woman finally hands us our badges.
I pull May into Controverse, one determined step at a time. No matter what I make myself into, there is no escaping who I am. No amount of makeup will cover it. Not the thickest of latex. Not even platform heels make me big enough to escape my mother’s shadow.
But this weekend, everything will change.
As we enter Controverse, I start to breathe a little easier. These are my people. Geeks and weebs, but also a handful of nerds and a dash of dorks. The kind of people who sit through family dinners silently contemplating the fact that Carol Danvers got a haircut between appearances in the Captain Marvel movie and the final Avengers movie, which means that somewhere in the MCU, there are scissors powerful enough to cut the hair of a woman who has broken several spaceships apart with just her body. Without suffering a single scratch! Thanos should have grabbed those scissors and added them to his bejeweled oven mitt.
This is the con in Boston; it materializes every October, gathering together a million-person family made up of every fandom. Lately there has been a lot of Marvel and DC because of the movies, of course, but if we’re being honest, the anime contingent (to which I proudly belong) holds the con together. And then there’s the noble Star Wars fandom, which has more rules than a ballet academy for assassins. The Trekkies used to be like that, too, I hear, but now they spend most of their time chasing after their little grandkids, because all of them managed to couple up and start nerd families. Weird. Oh, and of course there are the Doctor Who people. Every single one of them put on their TARDIS dresses this morning thinking, “No one will see this coming.”
I kid. I like the Doctor Who people. But they get very, very angry if you don’t have an opinion about which one of the seemingly infinite number of actors who have played the Doctor was best. Oops.
Fandoms, families, fans—they form a buzzy, diverse congregation that makes the annual pilgrimage to the Boston Convention Center at the city’s seaport once a year to celebrate their mythologies and their lore and, of course, pay tribute to their gods.
And by gods, I mean cosplayers.
Trust me, cosplay is the cool thing to do at these events. Costumes don’t just transform the people wearing them; they transform the world around them. At a con, one second there’ll be just a crowd, and then Goku enters, and suddenly everyone is screaming. But not just regular screaming. I mean full-on, throaty, anime-power-up screaming. It’s something else.
I love cosplay. I’ve always been good at creating things, but I only got big into creating cosplays in the last couple of years. It took convincing. And, admittedly, some spite. I kept watching other people’s follower counts skyrocket after they put on ratty shake-and-go wigs and called themselves Sailor Mars, and it annoyed me. I always said to May, Why doesn’t anyone brush out their wigs? Do they like looking like microwaved showgirls? I could do so much better. And she was finally like, Okaaaaay, then why don’t you?
So now I do. And I was right. I’m great at this. I create almost compulsively, my stuff isn’t bad, and I’ve even won a few titles at smaller regional cons. I’m not big or anything, but like a young god, I have gained a small but devoted following. About fourteen thousand people, give or take a thousand, tune in to watch me hot glue shit together on my Ion livestream twice a week.
But that count is going to double by the time I’m done with this year’s Controverse. For the first time, I’m entering the Controverse Championship of Cosplay (Trip-C, pronounced “Tripsy” if you’re cool). It’s the biggest, baddest cosplay competition in Boston—a multiday contest famous for its weird rules and twists. Just about all the criteria change from year to year, except one: People must compete in pairs. Controverse famously considers cosplay a team sport.
Enter May and myself. We’re doing a twist on the classic game Deep Autumn, in which the hero gets trapped in an enchanted forest and must battle through each season to escape. The character designs are nuts. Perfect for a team of cosplayers looking for a recognizable but difficult build.
I’m dressed as a druid, a keeper of the Spring Temple, and May is dressed as a Pinehorn, a low-level beast common on the temple grounds. Except we’ve been corrupted, which means we’ve been overtaken by fungus and mushrooms, turning us evil. As a result, I’ve taken the usually playful design of Deep Autumn and rendered it with gory realism.
I straighten May’s helmet and step back to admire my work.
May is gone. In her place is a creature hunched atop four clawed-footed legs that bristle with pine cone scales. Glowing red eyes glower from beneath a spiked mask of deep aubergine, a lethal spike slicing up from the snout like a gargantuan Japanese horned beetle. A riot of leaves and rotting flowers grow from the creature’s ridged back, where two ragged wings of transparent cerulean twitch. Its whole body sprouts clumps of neon moss and fungus that glisten in the fluorescent lights of the convention center. It looks powerful and decrepit and diseased at the same time. Shockingly monstrous.