Fan Conventions and Places of Imagination
Obviously I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about cosplay over the last year. Okay, maybe two years, and probably far before that as well due to how long I’ve been mulling over everything before actually delving into this. And for cosplay, the role of the convention is both incredibly important and also unnecessary at the same time. Many cosplayers can do their art whenever they want thanks to the internet, and this is definitely worth exploring. But today, I want to focus on the convention as a centred place for cosplay and the wider nerdy communities cosplayers come from more widely.
Nicolle Lamerichs, whose written a lot about cosplay, published an article in 2014 which discussed cosplay as a subculture. We’ll tackle the idea of cosplay as subculture next month. This month, we’re going to, instead, think about another idea Lamerichs floated past within this article - the idea of the convention as a “place of imagination”. Lamerichs is drawing on Stijn Reijinders, who in turn is drawing on the work of Pierre Nora. But let’s unpack this gradually.
Pierre Nora, a French historian, coined the term lieux de memoire or “places of memory”. The idea is many historical locations around us become centres for a collective memory, even for a memory that we may not individually have. According to Nora, a social group begins to search into its past in order to find something that roots them all together. Their shared history is something in the past, and not something they can touch and feel and collect around in any physical sense. So we think about monuments, and museums, and other centres of our past as a place in which this collective memory collates and lives. It becomes a physical presence that represents the less physical aspect of our social gatherings. This draws on an idea that humans need physical things that represent our non-physical ideas, thoughts and emotions.
Reijinders takes this as a jumping off point, and pushes the idea of lieux de memoire a little further. Instead of only thinking about memories, Reijinders starts thinking about imagination, thinking of lieux d’imagination or “places of imagination”. Reijinders started down this path due to seeing pop culture tourism - people who travel to different places that are depicted in fictional stories. Reijinders specifically focused on people who are fans of television detective stories, like people who travel to Baker Street in London to see 221B, the famous house of Sherlock Holmes, but I think many people would fall into this category. People travel to Japan as part of a Ghibli experience, for example, or people travelling to New Zealand because of the Lord of the Rings. In England, there’s a heavy presence of people traversing the English landscape to visit the many sites, both in the books and in the movies, of Harry Potter.
What Reijinders notes is that as much as people need physical spaces to exemplify their collective memories or identities as a nation, or another kind of social group, others also need physical spaces to exemplify their shared imagination. People who travel to Platform 9 3/4 in Kings Cross Station, for example, are under no illusion that Harry Potter is a nonfictional history. They know it’s fiction, but it becomes as important of a place as a monument for some important historical event.
Photo taken at MegaCon Manchester, July 30, 2022
And here Lamerichs picks the idea up. Lamerichs points out how Reijinders emphasised how individuals actualise stories through their shared imagination with others in the same fandom by visiting sites that are mentioned in, or directly related to, fictional narratives. For Lamerichs, something similar is happening at fan conventions. Rather than the fan convention’s location being something that is directly mentioned in fiction, it’s rather a temporary meeting space for the collective imagination of a fan group to actualise their collective imagination. In many senses, the actual location itself is not nearly as important as the ability to do it - the empty space of a conventional hall transformed into a space in which fans see their fictions come to live and walking around the space itself.
From a myth perspective, the idea of conventions as a place of imagination is actually kinda similar to the idea of legend-tripping, which is when individuals travel to places of urban legends or places in folklore in order to try and experience in some way the collective imagination of the story. The actualisation of the fan’s collective memory also, in some ways, sets up a type of ritual space. This is another thing mentioned by Lamerichs, but not really followed through with any kind of actual religious studies theory. I risk, here, doing the same though. Going through theories of ritual space and sacred space would be both really boring and quite frankly, unnecessary.
Photo taken at MCM London, May 18, 2022
Instead, I’m going to summarise the idea in the actual words of fans at conventions themselves. Many years ago, back in 2017, I attended CoxCon, which takes place in Telford here in the UK. I was very lucky to be able to attend for free as a researcher - I was there in order to study people’s responses and interest in horror video games as a supplemental part of my PhD. What I found was that people weren’t as interested int talking about that. They were, instead, massively interested in talking about the convention itself.
One attendee told me that, despite having social anxiety, they find it comforting and easy to talk to others at CoxCon because everyone there “shares the same values”. Many talked about the travelling to the con as the most important thing they do in the year - they save up for it all year just to be able to go. The travel there, and attendance there, is of equal importance as their collective interest in Jesse Cox, the YouTuber whose convention it is.
This was something I see echoed often in my conversations with cosplayers. The convention itself is important - not because this is the only place they feel they can do their cosplays, but because of the atmosphere of the place. The ability to live in their character, and to meet others who feel similarly is almost more important than their interest in the show to begin with. One cosplayer told me that they find the convention the best way to make friends - because it boils down to “you like this show, so do I. Let’s be friends.”
The convention as a place of imagination is a bit different than the way Reijinders imagined it. It’s a space that is constructed to reflect the imagination, rather than one that people travel to that already reflects it. It's a place that solidifies the collective identity of the community that inspires it’s existence.
