A. Luxx Mishou

Cosplay is fun. Cosplay is an art, an act of textual analysis, a performance, an investment, and an argument.

Best first lines of an academic text in my memory. We're off to the races, and a fine contest it will be. Will I emerge victorious over my own very limited and discomfort-laden notions of cosplay? (I still have trouble distinguishing it from LARPing.) Will the clarity and vigor of Luxx's prose allow my COVIDified attention span to take a back seat and follow her careful and well-cited and -founded discussions of the many aspects of cosplay?

Cosplay is a narrative site that represents intersections of fantasy and reality performed by real people in real spaces.

The appeal might not reach me; the importance of it definitely does. After reading this informative explanation of cosplay's community and its many, often uneasy, intersections with our cultural expecatations as well as Fandom in general, I think I'm far better equipped to begin asking better questions than I was before.

I have been Luxx's friend in the online world of LibraryThing for over a decade. I am mightily impressed with her scholarship, of course, but I also experience a friend's overwhelming delight in her accomplishment in this book: She has explained my elderly self to me by way of paths I never thought to take. In five concise chapters, Luxx has brought her readers to a state of informed readiness to learn. That she has done so in an enjoyable way is her gift.… (meer)