Keep That Bigotry And Racism Away From Us
In light of the recent outing of a well-known cosplayer — Junkers Cosplay / johnnyjunkers — as (at least) an enabler of hatemongering for marrying well-known hate monger Melonie Mac, it seems like a good time to clear up any doubt about what Nerd Caliber stands for. (See below for a Tl;dr of the Junkers situation.)
We are for diversity, equity and inclusion. We believe that cosplay is for everyone. But we believe that we want nothing to do with cosplayers (or anyone) who don’t also believe that. Racism and bigotry — even that kind of bigotry usually called “shaming” like fat shaming, age shaming or slut shaming — have no place in the cosplay or convention world in particular or the greater world at large.
Since it can be tough to identify people in costume, let me be clear that if you are a racist or bigot or shamer, keep walking.
We don’t want you to be in our photos or our videos.
What we do want is everyone else. Cosplayers of every shape, size, color, ethnicity and level of experience. Show up in your un-ironed, poorly fitting, Temu gatcha game costume; your months-long, hand embroidered obscure art book costume; your barely there sexiest version costume (convention rules allowing) or anything in between. We love to see and are thrilled to get photos and video of all we can.
We’ve also made it clear to those few conventions we work with in an official capacity, such as PAX East, Another Anime Convention, and PAX Unplugged, that we won’t work with any convention that doesn’t also have a policy of zero tolerance for racism and bigotry.
In light of that, we are pleased to once again be the official cosplay photo studio for PAX East in two weeks, March 26-29. Find us in Room 207 alongside the Cosplay Repair team from GiveWave Studios. Castro and his team feel the same way we do — everyone is welcome as long as they are welcoming.
In case you haven’t seen the storm around Junkers Cosplay Inc., he made a post last week with his new life partner Melonie Mac, a famous MAGA influencer known for her social media posts spreading hate and bigotry. He was called out on it by many cosplayers and of course responded with denial and slut shaming. Easy enough to look up the details, so I won’t fill up this article with them. Cosplayer (and lizard afficionado) daniellebaloo posted one of the first callouts and has this excellent response to his response to the cosplay community reaction.
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