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Why I'm Closing Down My Cosplay Board on Pinterest!



After 5 years long (and nerdy) years, I've decided to stop feeding my Cosplay board on Pinterest, which has more than 60,000 pins on it. Note: Unfortunately, if I unsubscribe from the board, it will disappear…

The purposes of my cosplay collection were:

  1. To introduce visitors to a variety of new, fictional characters.
  2. To offer the cosplay community creative costume alternatives to traditional takes on characters.
  3. To share the joy of viewing well-done cosplay and photography by others.
  4. To provide a clean resource of tasteful cosplays, where you don't have to worry about sifting through dozens of source materials exclusively featuring scantily-clad ladies before getting to ones that you could actually wear to a party or convention.

My personal purposes in creating it were to:

  • Learn more about all the characters out there in the geek and nerd universes.
  • Honor the creativity people put into recreating and personalizing their favorite characters.
  • Curate a reference of cosplays for all those looking for inspiration.
  • Learn how to leverage Pinterest as a social media tool and enjoy the overall Pinterest experience.

What types costumes and cosplays you'll find:

  • Anime, manga and light novel series.
  • Comic book characters.
  • Games (board, role-playing, video) in franchises, with some sub-groupings of popular characters.
  • Films, non-animated by films (everything from Star Wars to Alice in Wonderland).
  • Animated series, films or popular characters (from cartoons to movies to animations that are not anime).
  • TV series, non-animated by series (like Monster High and Sucker Punch).
  • Toy cosplays (a few toy exclusive toy franchises like Ken and Barbie).
  • Kid cosplays (great if you have kids, or just love adorable kid cosplays).
  • Pet cosplays (mostly for dogs).
  • Mash-ups and mods by kind (armored, Rule 63 reverse gender, anime and steampunk modifications of cosplays).
  • Steampunk-related costumes (very few).

This is my most popular pin with 373,260 interactions and repinned to 63k boards.


Q&A

What was your number one reason for dedicating hours and hours a week to this?

This collection is essentially a useful by-product of my personal efforts to expand and improve my knowledge of geekdom.

What got you into Pinterest originally?

When I was first exposed to Pinterest in early 2012, I was searching for a costume and found myself feeling a bit frustrated that there wasn't a board out there that just featured clean cosplays.  I felt like what was currently available was giving costumers a bad rep.  So I decided to fill that niché myself.

Other than offering the world a photo bank of clean cosplays, what sets your board apart?

As I began posting, it was also important to me to give credit where credit was due.  In an effort to fulfill my goal of familiarizing myself with the myriad characters out there, metadata was very important to me. Any information about the cosplayer or the photographer or the costumer or makeup artist or whatever, I try to either include or provide the link to their information.

Also, I try to post directing from primary sources.  My favorite resources have been websites by cosplayers and photographers on DeviantArt, Flickr, Tumblr, and facebook.  Occasionally I stumbled upon a decent aggregator.

What is your board's message?

Primarily, I wanted "TheGreatBerton" to re-enforce the idea that cosplay doesn't need to adhere to the stereotype that it's all about bare skin and latex.

What was the hardest thing about maintaining this board?

Avoiding duplications! It's not easy to keep track of what images I've already saved after viewing tens of thousands of photos.  After a while, I had to stop following all other cosplay Pinterest boards because it was becoming too incestuous.  By that point, it felt like every other pinner had repins from me on their cosplay boards.

Why did you decide to conclude your board?

...there are a lot of pervs out there.  I no longer want to have to dig through "trash" to find the good stuff anymore.  I think I'll always love cosplay, but I've found some sources that I trust; I'll let them to the digging for me now.  Also, it was a time suck.  I loved it, but my priorities have shifted.

What did you learn from this 5 year exercise?

The community of costumers and cosplayers is full of incredibly imaginative and nice people!  Some of the tiny details they come up with—including naming their photos—I would never have been able to dream up.  Also, the cosplay community is generally very respectful and supportive. You'd think by virtue of the artform that fanboys and critics would be resentful and critical of other's costumes, but I typically see nothing but praise and admiration.  Even when I mislabel something terribly, my kind followers leave comments like, " I think might that's Spongebob, not Cinderella. :)"

Do you feel like you accomplished your goals and purposes?

Yes (x4).

Comments

  1. A very introspective post. I'm happy to hear that you feel like your board accomplished your goals and that you are shifting priorities. A noble goal for sure to provide a place away from the skin and latex but I'm happy that you are ok to let someone else do the digging for you.

    ReplyDelete

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