Colors of Cosplay

Madeleine Dresden is a student producer at BYU radio who specializes in writing nonfiction segments about unique life experiences and life lessons. We’ve all got that one thing that we’re super nerdy about: Superheroes, Harry Potter, or maybe Japanese anime. And sometimes, we get the chance to do more than just imagine our favorite heroes—we get to dress up as them! There’s Halloween for that, of course, but let’s not forget the ever-growing phenomenon that is known as Comic-Con. The San Diego Comic-Con alone boasts more than 130,000 attendees per conference. And for all those attendees, perhaps the most attractive part of Comic-Con is the chance to “cosplay,” which means to dress up as a fictional character, like we do on Halloween. But for some attendees, the experience of costuming can be a difficult one, especially when it exacerbates their feelings of racial dysphoria. Madeleine Dresden, our Life Lessons producer, discusses how difficult it can be to find the perfect costume as a non-white American.