A Little Fanwork Manifesto, pt. 2: Cosplay, drag, secret aesthetic radicalism

The material in the little fanwork manifesto had been on my mind for years, but it crystallized because of some Death Note cosplayers I found on DeviantArt.

What initially interested me about the group, besides their skill, was their disregard for context. Sometimes the shots were pretty faithful, but sometimes L was a geisha. The characters exist independently of the series. They have their own lives, separate from whatever they originally symbolized.

That’s common in fanwork, which is secretly pretty aesthetically radical. It deviates very much from the mainstream mode of reacting to art, which is still much more driven by allegory and stiff 1:1 interpretation than it wants to admit.

Of course, a lot of female fans of shounen anime, or any kind of similarly macho media, are aesthetic radicals in disguise.  They’re taking some intensely plotty show about men being violent and sweetly saying, “No, sorry; in fact, this is a series about the subtleties of the human heart.” Take a step back. That’s not deluded; it’s audacious as hell.

(And it’s even more audacious, by the way, if the series is not good. It requires an intense, willfully perverse creative passion to care deeply about crap.)

In the case of the cosplayers, the intense masculinity of the series also leads to some layered, funny drag. A favorite is a scene with L and B that borrows its iconography from Psycho — a woman impersonates a man who’s acting out a famous film scene in the role of a man who impersonates a woman; s/he threatens a woman dressed as a man who’s taking a woman’s role in the film.

It goes on. Women imitating male characters best-known for parodic imitation of other men, but who are here dressed in unconvincing drag, presumably imitating other archetypical male characters who famously wore unconvincing drag. Women impersonating male characters in convincing drag in which only a hand, made artificially large by proximity to the camera, supposedly gives away the subject’s gender.

You can have drag that’s multilayered in this way, and has this tone of mixed parody and sincerity, outside of fandom. But it would be a lot harder. You could achieve it by drawing on the images of famous men, or from earlier drag traditions, but the level of irony that would require would inevitably become the point — and this stuff is often witty, but its affection doesn’t seem ironic to me.

Is It Art?  Well, we can dismiss it if we want. Fans are widely held to have no thoughts, but only drives; we can draw on this false assumption, and simply say that they’re titillating folks while gratifying their own egos — which is doubtless a bit true, as it is of every artist.

But of course it is art. Cosplay is art. Fan fiction is art. Fanart is art. This is something upon which we should all agree before we continue. Some of it is bad — much of it is bad — indeed, as with any form, most if it is awful — and pretty much everything I said in the first part of this post  has a negative side as well, but it is nonsense to suggest that fanwork has nothing to say, and it is cruel and ridiculous to suggest that its creators are not conscious of being artists.

Advertisement