How Conquering the Disney Cosplay Universe Helped Me Finally Love My Body

As a kid, I thought I was too fat to dress up as my favorite cartoon characters. As an adult, I discovered a subculture that became one of the greatest joys of my life.

Illustrations by Roman

I spent hundreds of afternoons when I was in high school visiting the Angelfire website of Lady Saturn, a seamstress who specialized in Sailor Moon costumes. The show’s majority female cast was a rarity in a childhood filled with Disney Afternoon sausage parties like Goof Troop, DuckTales and Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and it centered around something girls in nowhere towns ache for — a great destiny, preordained by the universe. Plus, the characters got to transform into schoolgirl/go-go-dancer battle uniforms, so it was really firing on all cylinders for me.

It was through my love of Sailor Moon that I met my small group of weird friends, assembled from drama class, jazz band and Model United Nations factions. We were a clique with arcane interests and outsized aspirations, who bonded by tracking bootleg Sailor Moon VHS copies on eBay and doodling the characters in our notes to each other. It was one of these friends who tipped me off to Lady Saturn’s existence, offhandedly, as another crazy thing she’d seen on the internet.

From the home page, I’d click on Sailor Neptune’s link and sit back as the photos downloaded one millimeter at a time. Sailor Neptune was my favorite character only through reputation. Her seasons weren’t allowed in the United States because of her lesbian love affair with Sailor Uranus. Neptune was the most stunning of all of the girls, with aquamarine hair cascading in perfect waves to graze her delicate shoulders. Even though her seasons were absent from Cartoon Network during my youth (eventually showing up years later on the network with her relationship censored and rebranded as Sailor Uranus’s “cousin”), she snuck into the country via the translated Japanese manga comics I scored at Hot Topic.

Eventually, my screen would fill with real-life versions of Sailor Neptune’s uniform. Lady Saturn’s outfits weren’t anything like the character costumes I’d grown up with — the sacks of disappointment that lined Target shelves every Halloween, packed with limp, sagging versions of what had shimmered and sparkled so vividly on the screen. In Lady Saturn’s pictures, the short, flared skirts of the Sailor Moon characters weightlessly grazed over the hip, and the bows were starched sharp enough to cut glass. The clothes were buoyant and kinetic, just like the ones worn by gravity-free girls battling evil in Tokyo without incurring so much as a wrinkle.

Once or twice a week I’d click the “purchase” button and fill out the form. Name and address; height; waist, hip and bust circumferences. “All my costumes are made-to-order in any size,” Lady Saturn promised — which was, to me, a revelation. Nothing came in my size. Not the mariposa prom dresses at the mall, or the sequined baby tees at Wet Seal, and certainly not sexy costumes sold off-the-rack.

I’d reach the last box, where Lady Saturn needed a credit card number for her $120 bounty. At this point, I’d imagine hauling my hodgepodge of babysitting funds and allowances and birthday card bills downstairs to Mom in exchange for her digits.

“Why do you need a Sailor Moon costume?” she’d ask. “I don’t think that’s the best use of your money. When are you going to wear it? And why?”

There was no good reason I could give her for wanting an expensive reproduction of a cartoon’s clothing. There were no masquerade costume balls happening at White River High School in Buckley, Washington. Honestly, all I wanted to do was cake on blue eyeshadow, strap a wig to my head, and take a hundred pictures kneeling in the backyard, gazing wantonly at the sky. I craved this new form of expression, this invitation to be a fan not just by watching a show but also by wearing the story like skin.

But I had no words for this yearning at age 16, and this was when the doubt crept in. When I tried to formulate a reason why I needed the costume, I only reminded myself how much it wasn’t meant for me. An avalanche of adolescent microaggressions about my size 16 proportions had conditioned me to try not to be seen, to laugh at myself before someone else did, to head the pain off at the pass. I wasn’t pretty enough for photoshoots, and boys didn’t want to look at me. Even in my head, I became flustered and embarrassed, the initial excitement at the possibility of transforming into a sailor senshi tarnishing as I remembered what I always had to remember: I was too big for this. Too broad, too thick, too soft, too much.

I could hear the questions my body in such a small, beautiful girl’s clothes would garner. Who does she think she is? Why would they make that past a size 6? I was supposed to know my place, and what I could and could not wear. I wasn’t desired to be seen, and to attempt otherwise was undignified and, quite frankly, disgusting.

This was, after all, the golden age of Britney Spears. The “curvy” women allowed on screens were limited to Kate Winslet, Drew Barrymore and Renée Zellweger, who we were told had “meat on their bones.” I did not see my body in movies or shows or magazines. Its possibilities did not exist.

I always closed the credit card window without ever asking. I watched the girls from the sidelines of my screen, promising myself I could always come back, if I woke up magically narrowed.