When Cyberbullying Meets Cosplay: A Fangirl’s Story

by Shamindri De Sayrah

What is it that makes someone hate on someone they don’t even know, so much and repeatedly, online? That makes them press send on such hateful, insulting and sometimes downright destructful things be it in the comment section or in the privacy of your messages. In my opinion it’s the mindsets people have grown up with. “We only hate what we don’t understand.”

I for one have been through Cyber Bullying more than once, and have learned from it each time. I am a massive entertainment fanatic, who absolutely loves movies and TV, being a certain size people think it’s wrong of me to do certain things and dress a certain way. However, despite what people think, I am a cosplayer. I first started cosplaying as Supergirl in 2015 at Lanka Comic Con. the second time I cosplayed Supergirl was in 2017, although what I didn’t know was behind my back there were people laughing at my cosplay because I had been turned into a meme.

I soon found out thanks to my friends, a picture of my cosplay had been used in different insulting memes that said stuff like “Super Big Girl” and more. My friends, my geek community and my family soon rushed to my defense, reporting pictures, taking them down and as new ones popped up doing it all over again. I could not have fought that battle without them. At the end of the day that entire experience gave me so much strength and confidence. However as strong as I became, that didn’t change the fact that some of those words still stayed with me, and no matter how much confidence I had in myself, that one incident shook my self esteem. Despite everything, I am thankful for the experience because it toughened me up for what came next.

Throughout the years there were a few comments online about my different cosplays but the next main instance of Cyber Bullying in my life was when I cosplayed Black Widow for a special project I did for the Black Widow movie, I had cosplayed this character before and got a few mean comments years ago, however in 2021 after sharing the recreated posters I had made on Facebook, I faced a lot of backlash and a lot of hate from both local and international trolls.

I received a lot of hate comments and there were a number of trolls laughing at my cosplay, sharing my post, commenting and laughing more, because to them I was not the right size to do it. But to me it wasn’t about being the right size, it was about my love for the character, my passion for cosplay and wanting to pay tribute to a character I love.

People refuse to accept change, we were raised to believe that Fat is bad and thin is good, that dark is bad and light is good, we were raised in a society that believed that there were only two genders and that there were only two sexualities, but this is the 21st century, times are evolving and so should we.

To anyone out there who has been or is being cyberbullied, just remember don’t care about what other people think of you, the only thing that matters is what you think of yourself, and I know it can be a long journey to get to that place, but all you have to do is take their words and turn them into armor.