How Conquering the Disney Cosplay Universe Helped Me Finally Love My Body

As a kid, I thought I was too fat to dress up as my favorite cartoon characters. As an adult, I discovered a subculture that became one of the greatest joys of my life.

Illustrations by Roman

I spent hundreds of afternoons when I was in high school visiting the Angelfire website of Lady Saturn, a seamstress who specialized in Sailor Moon costumes. The show’s majority female cast was a rarity in a childhood filled with Disney Afternoon sausage parties like Goof Troop, DuckTales and Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and it centered around something girls in nowhere towns ache for — a great destiny, preordained by the universe. Plus, the characters got to transform into schoolgirl/go-go-dancer battle uniforms, so it was really firing on all cylinders for me.

It was through my love of Sailor Moon that I met my small group of weird friends, assembled from drama class, jazz band and Model United Nations factions. We were a clique with arcane interests and outsized aspirations, who bonded by tracking bootleg Sailor Moon VHS copies on eBay and doodling the characters in our notes to each other. It was one of these friends who tipped me off to Lady Saturn’s existen…