Steampunk Shenanigans

For someone who didn't much enjoy Halloween costumes much past elementary school (my mother did sew my sister and me kickin' costumes per our requests!; I was once a raindrop!), I sure enjoy the opportunity to put on some steampunk trappings when the occasion permits. The Atlanta Steampunk Symposium at the end of October was just such an excuse, their Halloween Masquerade the pinnacle of several days of panels and plenty of steampunk funky.

I've never been attracted to the whole convention costume thing until I came across steampunk. I like Spiderman, but I would never don a superhero or Star Trek or Star Wars costume. I guess the cosplay you join has to speak to you deeply enough not to care what you look like, or convincingly enough that you just think you look awesome, no matter what others might think. One draw of cosplay is obvious--the more troubled the world we live in, the more we need the relief. If children recognize the escapist respite of costumes, then why not adults? And of course for many, the cosplay world involves friendships and gaming and literature.

Some con-goers talk about their cosplay in the possessive, like "I have a western character who is fleeing from the confederate army," or, "I have a steamboat captain who is searching for his wife," or "I have a zeppelin pilot who is female but hides her gender." Isn't the ownership of the character intriguing? Recently, I heard steampunk author and maker Steve Lee connect cosplay and writing and the growth of steampunk in an interesting way. Like all sub-genres and cultural trends, steampunk has experienced its ups and downs. I took Lee to be saying that if you have (inhabit) a well-developed cosplay character, this character can become a literary character with enough substance to propel a good book into the public eye, especially if the work should be lucky enough to become a film, which is really what steampunk needs--a blockbuster film.

So after Halloween but before Thanksgiving, I just wanted to say that wearing a costume is pure fun, and steampunk, if you haven't checked it out, is alternative Victorian culture (what the world might have looked like if we had stuck to technology we can see, like cogs and steam). Steampunk makes you think about the way history really happened, the way it could have happened, and even the way we might wish it was playing out right now. This is the punk in steampunk, a little social commentary. What kind of world do you want to live in?