Lecturer by day, country winner at World Cosplay Summit

When 16-year-old Emerald L King went to Japan for an exchange year, she never expected to return one day to represent her home country, Australia, in the world’s biggest cosplay competition.

Today, King is a lot of things apart from being the Australian representative for the World Cosplay Summit. She’s a PhD graduate and a humanities lecturer at the University of Tasmania too.

“I’m also the current head of the Japanese major at the University of Tasmania, and I work across Japanese women’s literature, kimono in Japanese literature, and cosplay studies,” says King.

A self-described “geriatric millennial” despite her packed CV, King simply sees herself as a literature nerd who “gets to do cool things.”

And it all started with her feeling “not cool enough” to cosplay.

A newspaper clipping from 2012 featuring Dr King and her PhD. Source: Dr Emerald L King

From scared teen to spider lady

During high school, King spent an exchange year in Japan and would return again as a double major in Japanese and English literature in Nagoya.

“I didn’t start cosplaying until I lived in Nagoya,” she says. “This was around 2003, when World Cosplay Summit was first founded – I knew what cosplay was, but was too nervous to do it at first. I didn’t feel like I was cool enough.”

She would find the courage a few years later.

Her university was hosting a convention and had invited her to talk about Japanese pop culture and literature.

At that point, she was a fan of a manga by CLAMP, an all-female Japanese manga artist group, called “xxxHolic.”

The choice to assume the “spider lady”– called the Jorōgumo – was obvious.  In Japanese folklore, a Jorōgumo is a yōkai (loosely translated to supernatural entity or spirit) that can shapeshift into a beautiful woman to lure men into her web.

With her mother’s sewing machine, King made her very first cosplay.

Back then, the series only existed in manga form – in black and white – so there were no colour references.  King had to look up what an actual Jorōgumo spider looked like.

“The actual spider has a sickly yellow stripe on its back, so I used it as a reference to match the colours of her dress and ribbon,” she adds. “Everyone else who cosplayed the same character just defaulted to white, but I wanted to make it pop a little more.”

This project kicked off a life of making costumes from scratch, attending events, and rapidly improving her crafting skills — all while juggling her degree.

To King, the most essential part of the entire experience was telling the stories of her characters.

Just like when she made her first cosplay from a spider’s design, she continued to imbue research into everything she does, especially for both cosplay and academia.

“In my early days, I did a lot of samurai warrior costumes, which was cool since I was studying in Nagoya at the time,” she recalls.

“Whenever I made a costume, I liked to make sure that the fabrics made sense, and there was enough depth for the character’s personality to shine through.”

For many, their cosplay journey would have probably ended here.

For King, this was just the start of path that would lead her to some of cosplay’s biggest icons.

While not the first cosplayer in Japan, she is the earliest documented instance of cosplay at a fan event in the country. Source: Sanna Pudas

Meeting one of Japan’s earliest cosplayers

Shortly after graduating, King was inspired to pursue a PhD focusing on Japanese literature. She returned to Japan to complete a doctoral degree at Ochanomizu University.

This time, she was determined to be a serious academic, especially when her mentor introduced her to Mari Kotani, a famed Japanese science fiction critic, best known as the author of “Evangelion as the Immaculate Virgin” and one of Japan’s earliest cosplayers.

As a literature fan, King was thrilled – until her mentor introduced her as “Emerald, a cosplayer” instead of an academic.

“I was initially devastated,” she jokes. “But it was great because I then realised I could do all the serious, high-brow, academic stuff I wanted to, but also do fun things like cosplay. I decided to embrace it.”

Throughout her PhD, King continued to dabble in cosplay but only considered joining competitions after submitting her thesis in 2012. Her high school junior, a representative for Australia in the World Cosplay Summit, invited her to join a competition at a local convention.

“The competition was a week after I submitted my PhD, so the Monday right after, I met her at a fabric store, cranked out my costume in a week, drove to the convention two hours late, got dressed in the car park, and won the competition,” she says.

“I think because I just finished my PhD, I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I made an award-winning cosplay,” King adds, laughing.

Top cosplayers from around the world take part in World Cosplay Summit every year. Source: AFP

How her World Cosplay Summit journey began

During her PhD, an opportunity came up for King to attend a cosplay event. It wasn’t just any random event, either – it was World Cosplay Summit, the biggest cosplay competition in the world.

Every year, cosplayers compete to represent their country on the world’s biggest stage – Nagoya. Each participating country would hold preliminary rounds with aspiring contestants, who had to present their cosplays as a skit with music and special effects. The winners would then represent their country in Japan for the finals.

Aside from promoting cultural exchange and international relations, it’s also a way to celebrate creators and their work, as all costumes worn during the competition must be handmade.

Props like swords, masks, and staffs had to be made from scratch. Judges will examine footage and compilations of each team’s sewing and crafting.

“I managed to get in touch with the team that was representing Australia to become part of the entourage,” she says. “I took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Nagoya and hung out with the rest of the supporters, and it was a really great experience.”

She didn’t expect to return to World Cosplay Summit anytime soon, but another opportunity popped up in the form of a research grant. After completing her PhD, King found a job as a Japanese lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, offering her a grant to return to Japan for research purposes.

By then, King already held a steady repertoire of cosplay experience, including participating in and even judging at events across New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. She explained that it was a way to submit her work as research, since competitions meant that a panel judged her cosplays.

“In academia, research journals or books aren’t the only way to be assessed – as long as a jury of peers was present to judge something, it would qualify as a piece of research,” she says. “I made costumes for cosplay competitions, wrote skits for performances, created historically accurate pieces, and then wrote articles about them to submit.”

After growing comfortable with the process throughout the years, her first thought was to return to the big leagues i.e. the World Cosplay Summit.

“I ended up reaching out to World Cosplay Summit organisers that I knew through events, and asked if I could go over there to do some research for my academics,” she says. “I think they didn’t really know what to do with me, but offered me the chance to volunteer, so I did.”

King ended up working eight-hour to 14-hour days in Nagoya, translating, interpreting, and even assisting with website-related work.

She even helped participants get on and off the stage or hold onto their costumes and props,  but she enjoyed every minute.

“I did this for a few years, then COVID happened,” she says. “Then I ended up doing online events with World Cosplay Summit and our Australia representatives as well, and even got to judge some of the costumes, which was so great.”

After years behind the scenes, King was ready to steal the scene.

“I had an idea for the World Cosplay Summit 2019, so I called my friend and asked her, ‘Hey, do you want to lose the World Cosplay Summit together?’” she joked. “We ended up planning a skit in ‘Akira’ cosplays, and came in second place. We didn’t get to represent Australia, of course, but it was super cool.”

After returning to Australia and landing her current position as a humanities lecturer at the University of Tasmania, she started giving competing another thought. This time, she set her sigh on an even bigger project for World Cosplay Summit and won the right to represent her country in Nagoya.

Dr King and her partner performing on stage for the World Cosplay Summit preliminary rounds in 2023. Source: World Cosplay Summit Australia

With the same friend, they worked on making cosplays from the series “Magic Knight Rayearth”, which was also produced by CLAMP. King adored the doomed lovers in the series – Zagato and Princess Emerald.

“I’ve always wanted to work on these costumes, especially since I share a name with the princess,” she says. “But as I was so much taller than my partner Amy, so I settled for becoming Zagato – a male – while she dressed up as the princess.”

While King worked on the costumes, her partner worked on designing the lighting, recording the script, and even composing music for their skit. It was a magnificent project that ultimately let them represent Australia at the World Cosplay Summit 2024.

The competition may be huge, but King loves that every cosplayer supports one another despite language barriers or cultural differences. Teams would offer suggestions to each other to improve their skits, fix their costumes, or help communicate with one another. When the summit ends, everyone tends to hang out or exchange social media handles.

Today, King is taking a break from cosplaying as a whole and is back to teaching full-time — but not without always applying everything she’s learned from the cosplay community.

“It’s important because I teach language and literature, which can be a vulnerable space if you don’t have a good grasp on sentence structure or pronunciation,” she says. “Much like the backstage of World Cosplay Summit, I try my best to make my classes a safe space and ensure everyone takes care of each other.”

But perhaps the best part of her entire journey is when students come up to King and tell her that they joined the University of Tasmania specifically for her classes. They are mostly fans and followers of her work and enthusiasts of Japanese literature and culture themselves.

“It blows my mind when people tell me this, and it’s honestly such a privilege,” she says.