Over the years, anime and conventions have grown from being a niche, nerdy thing to a cultural phenomenon. Today’s fandom and communities are almost unrecognizable from the days in the 90’s and early 2000’s, but those who have lived through the changing times can tell you how different a time it was.
In fact, that’s exactly what author Erica Espejo is doing in her upcoming book, The Fangirl Diaries. In this autobiographical piece, Erica recounts her time as a young anime fan, finding community in fandom, and the growth of the convention world.
We spoke with Erica about her upcoming book, the changes she’s seen in the anime fandom, and what’s next for the state of conventions.
(Full disclosure: Erica and this author have known each other for several years from conventions and the Cosplay Wrestling Federation.)
G33k-HQ: First of all, congratulations. You’ve got The Fangirl Diaries coming out pretty soon.
Erica Espejo: Thank you, I’m looking forward to it.
G33k-HQ: Tell me about The Fangirl Diaries — what’s it all about?
Erica: The Fangirl Diaries is basically just about my lived experience as a teenage otaku living in the Los Angeles suburbs and what it was like to experience being an anime nerd back when it was very niche and you really had to put in a little bit of extra effort to search for anime.I grew up watching Sailor Moon on UPN channel 13, and when I found out there is more than what was shown to us on weekday mornings, my mind was blown.
Basically, The Fangirl Diaries takes you on that journey – my personal journey as a teenage otaku up to my university days – during this time period where anime was really booming, especially for millennials. I really feel that there’s not a lot of things written about the late 90’s and early 2000’s where we talk about getting into anime, discovering anime, finding anime beyond what is broadcasted on American television, and what it was like acquiring original Japanese versions on a college budget.
G33k-HQ: And I understand that part of the idea was inspired by your interactions with some of the newer fandom online and how you’re kind of an elder in the anime fandom.
Erica: Yes, I had this idea in my mind for like a couple of years since 2019, but what really pushed me to just say, “okay, I’m going to write this chapter” was when I posted a video on TikTok. It was just old photos of me and my friends at Anime Expo 2002 at Long Beach, and I set it to Plastic Love by Maria Takeuchi, a trending song on TikTok. I thought, “No one’s probably going to look at it, I’ll just leave it and I’ll just kind of go about my day.” And when I got home I went, “How is this getting 15,000? 30,000? 50,000 views?”
I was looking at the comments and the amount of people who favorited the video, and I realized “yes, these are the people who can run because we walked. I’m going to write that book because I’m getting all these views on TikTok.” I’m by no means TikTok famous or anything, but it was the final push to get me to write chapter one.
G33k-HQ: You and I grew up watching anime on television, so we’ve seen the scene grow and watched how anime’s acceptance in society has changed – it’s gone from a really niche thing to the point where you’ll see kids walking around on Halloween as Demon Slayer characters (which happened to me last year, and they were shocked I knew who the characters were). So, what has that transformation been like for you, and how do you really cover it in this book?
Erica: The whole transition from like anime being a niche thing to where I see kids at my apartment’s neighborhood wearing Naruto and Hatsune Miku t-shirts is just so mind-blowing.
When I was a kid in high school, I wanted to cosplay from Fushugi Yugi during Halloween and I couldn’t even figure out how to get the costume started. Now I see all these like kids in middle school who can get a Hatsune Miku costume at the Halloween Superstore. It’s just so mind-blowing to see how accessible anime is.
I also do volunteer work for a charity organization called Kids Can Cosplay. Sometimes I’ll wear my Shinobu from Demon Slayer cosplay and I’ll have kids come up to me and interact with me as if I was Shinobu. So I get all these wholesome conversations with kids who are much younger than I was when I first started watching anime (because I first started watching Sailor Moon and I would label my otaku days starting at the age of 12 or 13). I’m seeing like all these kids, who have to be around 8 to 10 years old, and they’re coughsling as Nezuko, Tanjiro, and Zenitsu from Demon Slayer. It’s actually really exciting.
I’m also very excited that people have it easier now to access anime – even Disney has anime, that was just mind-blowing. I have a Crunchyroll subscription, and it’s just so much easier to access the original Japanese versions of anime. And it’s so nice that we’re getting it uncensored, so we can enjoy the author’s original intent without worrying about having to deal with a watered down or censored version.
So I’m glad that we have all this coming in, because when I was growing up with anime, I had some elders (I call them weeaboomers) tell me that anime is a privilege. And I have to say: yeah, screw that. How dare you say that to high school me, who was just still saving up my allowance, and me in my broke college student days.
You kind of had to go with not-the-most-legal means to consume anime and keep up with shows like Fullmetal Alchemist or the Tokusatsu Sailor Moon. You couldn’t get the Tokusatsu Sailor Moon anywhere unless you had BitTorrent. And you had to go to the BitTorrent sites to just keep up with the next episode of Fullmetal Alchemist, because a lot of us weren’t going to wait until the official release months down the line. We wanted to keep up with the adventures of Edward Elric and friends.
G33k-HQ: Since we’re talking about how things have changed and how anime has become so much more accessible, given how much easier it is to watch with the simulcasts and simuldubs coming out the same day, what do you think that really accelerated this growth that allowed for such an explosion?
Erica: I think accessibility has a lot to do with it, especially when you have things like Adult Swim and Toonami consistently playing anime, especially from the mid 2000s up until Toonami just kind of faded out. And now it’s back again.
Also, I really feel that we had a lot of manga back when we had Borders. Now we have Barnes & Noble, and it’s the same thing. We had a lot of young kids reading manga at Borders, and I remember a lot of my friends were like, “Oh, why are they blocking the aisles?” But I was just happy they’re reading comics.
I’ve just also just been noticing that a lot of the “kids” that people were making fun of were like early adapters. They were reading manga at Borders while their mom was probably just shopping and looking at magazines. And you have these kids who were staying up late just watching anime on Adult Swim. I just really like the accessibility of it all, being able to watch something on Hulu or Netflix out of curiosity and have it hook you in.
Also, we have a lot of shounen titles that speak a lot to younger audiences. It was mind-blowing that one of my coworkers was just really obsessed with Attack on Titan. I have another coworker who does not identify as an anime fan, but just started gushing over Demon Slayer with me, because they needed someone to geek out with.
Anime has always had a lot of universal values and storytelling devices that just really hook you in, and I just really feel that whatever your vibe, you will find something in that in anime. So I’m very happy that all these different genres of anime and manga are reaching new audiences.
I remember in Boston, I was working in corporate education, and I had to hide my anime fan identity because it just wasn’t really a thing to show off your nerdom on your desk. Skip to 10 years later, now I have Genshin Impact and my League of Legends figures on my desk. I have a Bond plush from Spy Family on my desk. And I really feel that it’s in large part because anime and manga are so much more accessible, so now we have exposure to these different stories and different genres that just speak to so many people.
G33k-HQ: How far we’ve come. You mentioned earlier about how some of the anime that we were getting back in those days, the days of early Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and Sailor Moon, they were very much watered down, censored, and edited for US audiences, so there was that moment of “Wait a second – they [Sailors Neptune and Uranus] aren’t cousins!”
Erica: I always knew they weren’t cousins.
G33k-HQ: So my next question is: what was it like for you, seeing the changes in the amount of editing that went into anime, and what thoughts do you have behind what pushed that forward?
Erica: It’s very interesting, because I remember the two main censored animes that I watched when I was growing up were Sailor Moon and Robotech.
So when I watched Sailor Moon, I was just blown away by what I found online. “Wait, there’s more Sailor Scouts? Of course they have Sailor Pluto. Of course they have Sailor Uranus. Of course they have Neptune and Saturn. There’s more villains, there’s more episodes after this – this is still airing in Japan!”
As a 12 year old who was just getting into their first fandom, that alone was already mind-blowing. I alluded to this in my book, but there was this thing called the “Sailor Moon FAQ” by a gentleman named Ken. He compiled a huge text file of all the different censorship changes in Sailor Moon. It also mentioned that yes, in fact, Uranus and Neptune are lovers – I didn’t even know that, but I thought it was cool, and I hadn’t even seen them yet.
But then I heard, “Oh, by the way, Did you know that Zoisite was originally a man?” And I thought that was very interesting because they decided to change Zoisite into a woman. At the time, I had just started learning about homosexuality and accepting people, because I grew up Catholic and went to a Catholic school, but just learning about this censorship was fascinating to me.
Also, learning about the characters’ Japanese and English names was very interesting. Those were the ones that really surprised me.
And I was actually kind of surprised that there was this episode of Sailor Moon where they didn’t shy away from death. It was when they killed off Nephrite, and the DIC dub kept most of the original when it aired here. I thought it was very nice that they included a follow-up episode of Molly dealing with the death of Nephrite, and out of all the things they could have censored, I’m glad they didn’t censor that. Because after this dramatic moment that traumatized the poor girl, I’m glad they had that follow-up where she’s dealing with the death of someone she really loved.
And then, of course, there was Robotech, where, yes, they do keep a lot of the innuendo in there and they don’t shy away from death. But after learning that it was three anime strung together into one, the song changes, and personality changes (because Lisa and Misa are two different people), I finally saw the original Macross TV series and the ADV release, where Mari Ijima also voices the English version of Minmei. There are moments in there where the dialogue and inflection are so different. Lisa and Misa are just two completely different characters, but I could also say the same thing for Minmei.
So it was like they had Macross and wiped the slate. They kept your basic concepts here and there, but when it came to a character’s personality and motivations, they were completely changed. I still enjoy Robotech, because it was a part of my childhood and formative anime nerd years. It was what got me more into mecha anime and expanding outside of shoujo anime, because I was a shoujo girly-girl.
I was very privileged to live in a neighborhood where we had a huge Japanese-American population, so we had Japanese-American stores, supermarkets, and video rental places. So when I found out that we were getting Card Captor Sakura and Gundam Wing, I decided to rent videos from Japan Video. I thought we could rent episodes of Pokemon and be the coolest kids in school, because we’d know what was going to happen.
And then I started learning about fansubs. When I heard that we were getting Gundam Wing and Carcapt Sakura, I wanted to watch the original before it aired here, so I could feel like one of the cool kids and like, “I’ve seen the original.”
G33k-HQ: And then the dubs changed so much.
Erica: I couldn’t get through the Card Captor Sakura dub. Gundam Wing was alright, and I was actually glad that they showed the uncensored version on Adult Swim. But I was already keeping up with what I had on fansubs because I always made sure to just stay ahead.
G33k-HQ: I will say that though. The Cardcaptors opening is a banger. I know they edited so much, but… It’s still catchy.
Erica: I probably have to revisit that, because when the Cardcaptors came, the surfer dude Kero kind of threw me off. And the low pitch valley girl Madison (aka Tomoyo) also threw me off. But I thought, “I’ll stick around for a few episodes and… okay, I’m done.”
G33k-HQ: I know that this is very much an autobiographical book for you, but I’d also like to know what other research went into it to see how the anime market and culture shifted around us during that time.
Erica: Yeah, I had to look back and revisit some old websites, so I went back to the source. I went to websites like Hitoshi Doi’s Sailor Moon Encyclopedia, and just revisiting that website after so long, recalling my experiences and what information was on there, reminded me how that website really got me into shoujo anime.
In the context of 90’s children’s entertainment, there were not a lot of all-girl team-up types of shows available at the time. Those shows really spoke to girlhood, and did not punish femininity as a bad thing or treated the female characters like they were dumb or needed some mansplaining or whatever.
I appreciate Magic Knight Rayearth for that. I appreciate Cardcaptor Sakura for that, and Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, and when I got into my teen years, arguably Fushigi Yugi.
I also went back to fansview.com to see what conventions were like at the time, because I had to recall a lot to describe them to someone reading this book who probably wasn’t around when, for example, Anime Expo 2000 was at the Disneyland Hotel and Resort.
I also had to look at old photos and reports from other people who’ve attended, for example, Animagic up in Lancaster, which is basically the middle of nowhere, and ask: How was that perceived? Because I know what my perception was. I know what my experience was. But I also want to know how I can describe this to someone who’s never been to Animagic.
There was also some going back to see what was on Toonami, for example, at the time, or when Apollo’s Smile was on the Sci-Fi Channel. Also just revisiting what was appealing about cosplay.com, because I talk a huge deal about how it was a huge formative turning point in the cosplay community. Rest in peace, cosplay.com.
G33k-HQ: We’ve seen how convention and cosplay culture have changed over the years, how they’ve risen and become so much bigger, while we also have all these smaller convention offshoots. What has it been like, in your experience, seeing these changes, and how has the convention scene really changed for you?
Erica: Good question – I always like talking about this. I enjoyed those conventions from when I was growing up, because I was a queer kid in a Catholic school and I needed to be with my people. I wasn’t allowed to have an anime club at my high school, because anime was deemed too risque.
So my first anime convention was Anime Expo 1999. I went with my parents, and I was a 14-year-old girl, so it was like a dream. Then, as a teenager, I really wanted to make more like-minded friends, so my first solo convention was Anime Expo 2000 in Disneyland Resort. It was amazing just being able to find other queer otaku that I could talk to about shows like Utena and other anime where I was able to explore my queer identity. That was a space I really needed, especially when you compare it to being in an online space.
A lot of these conventions, especially in my teen years, really allowed me to be truly me. I felt like I could not have that experience in my everyday life, wearing my Catholic school uniform five days a week. But in my senior year of high school, I decided: “I’m just going to live it up. I’m just going to be my best otaku cringey self, and I’m not going to hide anymore.” So I would just wear cat ears with my school uniform and be like “Whatever.” I would carry a cat plush over my shoulder like I was a magical girl and it is my magical girl mascot, like Sailor Moon or Venus had.
But going back to convention culture: I cosplay just for fun, but there was definitely a shift when we had like a lot of nerdy things like Marvel going mainstream. There’s nothing wrong with the things you enjoy being enjoyed by more folks, but it’s also hard to get tickets to San Diego Comic-Con now, because everyone wants to go to.
Ticket prices are getting higher for cons like Anime Expo, and there’s a lot more demand for it and huge crowds. So when I tell people that Anime Expo in Long Beach in 01 and 02 was about 10,000 people, their minds are blown. I can’t imagine Anime Expo being that small now when you see the crowds in South Hall lining up to get into the dealer’s hall. It definitely has become huge and I’ll admit that it’s really hard to just go down and have a conversation with random people.
So I felt that with larger cons, it’s hard to make those connections now. We do have smaller cons, but there are a lot of conventions that are adopting what I call a “con in a box” kind of model. That’s where you invite X amount of voice actors, charge about $30-$50 for a day or two, and the programming there might not have panels; it’s just very limited programming. And yeah, they do have a dealers hall, but it doesn’t create the same kind of atmosphere.
My preferred version of conventions is the hotel three-day convention model, where everyone is just there to enjoy anime, connect with friends, make new friends, and attend cosplay meetups. Where you can meet people within your fandom do karaoke afterward, go to a game show, or watch a late-night programming type.
A lot of these new “con in a box” type things might have an after-party, but you have to pay extra. They probably don’t have a karaoke room. They probably don’t have a cosplay contest. And sometimes they don’t even have seats at their panels. I like to go to conventions where there’s accessibility for folks who need to sit down. Simple things like that make your conventions accessible.
G33k-HQ: It sounds like even though the community itself has been growing, the sense of community has kind of been shrinking.
Erica: In a way. When we look at major cons, I feel like the sense of community is not there as much anymore. I mean, you kind of need to know people who are already going. I’ve also seen the mentality of cliques at conventions, especially larger conventions; there are still opportunities to make friends, but it’s kind of not as easy as it used to be.
If I go to, for example, a convention that is a niche of the anime world, like Northwest Idolfest, I feel like it has that sense of community that I missed from when I was going to conventions in the early to around the early to mid 2000s. Because we’re just here for idols.
But I also spoke on a youtube show about toxic party culture and how that has invaded the anime and comic con scene. So there’s nothing wrong with your fandoms becoming mainstream, but at the same time, it also invites people who are there to take advantage of folks there, and corporations taking advantage of that geek culture. And they’ll use it to run a scam convention because they think that anime conventions are a money-making type of thing.
G33k-HQ: Congratulations, nerds. We’ve become marketable.
Erica: Exactly. For better or for worse.
I do a thing called Fansview Fridays every Friday on my Twitch channel to talk about old conventions, and as a way to pay homage to my friend Kevin, who passed away. He used to run a website Called FansView, which documented conventions in the late 90s up to the end of the 2000s. When I see his reports from around 1999 and in the early 2000s, there wasn’t a specific fandom like dominating over the other. There were cosplayers from Ranma ½, Fushigi Yugi, Battle of the Planets, and all these different fandoms just kind of mingling together.
I’m happy that we can have cosplay gatherings and meetups of the same series, but sometimes I feel that you can definitely see certain cliques, not necessarily based on fandom, but we don’t really feel like a community.
One of the things I really liked when I first started going to conventions was how I could have a conversation with whomever I was standing in line with, and that made the “Line Con” much more bearable. We could talk about how excited we were to go to the opening ceremonies, or what manga we’ve been reading, and we would just be in that kind of conversation. Sometimes it’s just really hard to have those spontaneous conversations now.
But I was able to have spontaneous conversations like that when I was at Northwest Idolfest, because it was very niche and everyone was there for idols. We were celebrating not only idol anime and video games that we liked, but we were also there to support folks in the community who made their own idol groups. That was just part of the fun of it, and just one of my favorite staffing experiences ever.
I’m hoping to check out GeekGirlCon because I was reading about what they were doing, creating a space for femmes in video games, movies, television, and comics. I would love to be in a space like this because they’re very specific; we get to discuss topics like feminism and intersectionality, and I actually do feel safer in a place where these topics are widely talked about.
I tried getting into YaoiCon when it was up in the Bay Area, but even as someone who’s bi, I didn’t think that was my scene. In the early 2000s, being a yaoi fangirl was not seen as a good thing. There was a lot of association of yaoi fangirls having “yaoi paddles” and just hitting anyone who they thought was a cute bishie or that they wanted to ship their character with, and they would do so without permission. And I’m glad those days are gone.
I didn’t really feel safe in a community where people would fetishize my identity like that, and that was not being talked about. Anytime I would vocally critique this aspect of the fujoshi community at the time, I would be labeled as a homophobic. No, I’m actually someone who identifies with the community, I’m just not comfortable in these spaces because I don’t want to be harassed for my identity.
And at the time, we didn’t really have the kind of language to talk about it. But I actually found much more happiness when I went to a gay comic con called BentCon. It’s no longer in LA, but I actually got to meet other queer people to talk about issues. For example, in the late 2000s, we were talking about Proposition 8, which was a huge deal in California. And I wanted to talk about that type of thing. I want to talk about how we can offer support for our community members who are looking to us for a safe space because they’re being bullied for their identity, and how we can create a safer space for them. These were more of the kind of conversations that I was looking for, rather than “who’s the top, who’s the bottom?”
G33k-HQ: It sounds like that even though the community itself has been growing to the point where we’ve got these “sub-communities” within them, you can still find that sense of connection and community, even within these sub communities under the larger anime umbrella.
Erica: Absolutely. Like I’m part of a couple of Final Fantasy XIV groups – it’s one of my comfort games. So I do feel like if you find your niche, you’ll definitely find your people. The community has really grown, but you just kind of have to look for something like “what are things I like in an anime?” Or “what are things that I like about me that I can find in the convention community?”
For instance, and I’m going to shout out to them right now: the Cosplay Wrestling Federation. I love acting. I love the days of cosplay masquerades where it was much more unhinged, and you could just go on stage and be funny without worrying about what people thought. And I kind of miss that unhinged part of performing in cosplay.
Then I found the Cosplay Wrestling Federation and realized: I could be Sailor Mars, and I can get the whole crowd to chant “step on me” and “girl boss.” And I love that.
G33k-HQ: And if I can just add: Cee-Dub-Eff! Cee-Dub-Eff!
Erica: Cee-Dub-Eff! Yes.
G33k-HQ: Full disclaimer: we are both members of the Cosplay Wrestling Federation.
Erica: Indeed. That’s why I’ve got to shout them out.
G33k-HQ: Oh, absolutely. On a related note, what would you say social media’s impact has been on the growth and change in the anime fandom and community?
Erica: I love this question. So social media has definitely been another game changer. We went from cosplay.com to using social media to share your cosplay in a way that is also accessible to everyone. Back in the day, you had to make a website showcasing your cosplay, then we had cosplay.com where you could just upload your photos onto your gallery.
And now, with social media, now everyone just comes directly to you, which I find to be a very interesting dynamic. When it came to social media, first there were these Facebook “Like” pages; I wasn’t sure if I should make a Facebook page, because that’s when people started becoming obsessed with numbers. To me, and I always say this at the end of any time I do a cosplay-related panel, we cosplay for the love, not the likes.
I mean, yes, I do use social media, mainly because now it’s a way to just keep up with friends after the convention and a way for me to share memes with friends. But social media has become a numbers game, and it’s just sad to me that cosplayers, especially younger ones coming into the scene, are given advice along the lines of “we all start at 100, and maybe one day you’ll get to 10,000 followers.” I think that’s such BS advice to give to someone who’s starting college.
First rule of cosplay: Have fun.
Second rule cosplay: Don’t forget rule number one.
G33k-HQ: That really is what it’s about in the end – we’re nerds, we’re having fun connecting over this thing that we enjoy. But we’ve talked a bit about how the anime fandom and anime in general has changed from then to now, so I’d like to know your thoughts about the future. Where do you see things heading in terms of anime culture, cosplay, convention culture, and the anime industry?
Erica: I’ve been thinking about this too, because I’ve been reading a lot on Threads, especially now that we’re having a lot of conversations about consumerism and maybe not supporting the “fast fashion” companies that cater to cosplayers.
Fast fashion has been a huge part of the new cosplay scene, because Cosplay, just like anime, is now much more accessible. I’m happy that it’s accessible – I can get a Beidou cosplay from China at a decent price, no problem. But we also have to balance that out.
We should be consumer conscious about how we’re spending, because sometimes you don’t know if you’re going to get a quality costume or not. I remember I bought a Nero costume from eBay that was going to be my CWF Nero cosplay, but it wasn’t not the quality that I wanted or that was shown. So I ended up just making my own version of Nero for that.
But looking forward with anime, I feel like it’s going to stay as big as it is as long as there’s different genres that cater to different audiences – it’s definitely going to be sticking around. I’m also very happy that the quality of voice acting that we’ve been getting, especially for dubs like Demon Slayer, is so much better than what we had when anime dubs were just first starting out. Just seeing a lot of these folks who are coming in from the fan/fandom world or the online voice acting world and into lending their voices to mainstream anime is amazing! I came from that world too, and that’s where I found my niche of friends, like anime/theater nerds.
Then with conventions, I do worry that we are going to be stuck in this “convention in a box” kind of model, because it’s an easy model to implement. However, there is going to be a contingency of us who do like to have that “weekend con” kind of thing.
I think my best advice to us convention-goers is to pick and choose which conventions you want to go to. You don’t have to go to everything that’s offered to you in your area. I would say pick quality, not quantity, because I want to see the conventions that really make an effort to (to quote a friend of mine, Rob Biles) “make it like you’re spending your time at Disney World.” This is a vacation for you and an oasis for you to really immerse yourself and delve into your fandom, rather than just some cheap, “con in a box” kind of model.
So I always look at conventions that invest and make attendees’ time from start to finish amazing. I like to look at cons that have karaoke rooms and late night programming, that work with the community that they’re with to bring in programming.
So I always advise conventions to work with the local community to really make your event work, especially with local resources, because there are people who want to give back to conventions. A lot of us are out there and we really do want to help.
When it comes to the future of cosplay, I think there is this movement now to be more fashion conscious and to be more conscientious of how we spend our money and how we consume, like advising folks to like get cosplays off the secondhand market. The conversation is still ongoing and it’s something fascinating that I’ve been seeing over social media.
And I do appreciate that masquerades are really stepping it up, but I also like the fact that we have a space called the Cosplay Wrestling Federation where we can be a little bit more unhinged.
G33k-HQ: I don’t want to spoil too much about what we’re going to be reading about in the book, but we’ve talked about the past, the present, and the future. So if there’s one thing that you want people to take away from The Fangirl Diaries, what would that be?
Erica: Good question. There’s something that I was thinking about as I was writing this book, because I really want parents of Gen Alpha and Gen Z to also read this too. Parents, if you’re reading, listening: Always be your kid’s number one fan. Be their number one supporter.
If you enjoy learning about or revisiting the anime fandom, community, and convention space over the years, Erica’s book, The Fangirl Diaries, will be available soon. You can preorder your copy from McFarland Books today.
