Everyone wakes up once in a while feeling like a slightly different person. Usually, it means listening to different music, wearing different shoes or just having a different attitude for the day. When members of Cosplay x Conflagration feel like a different person, their transformation is a bit more extreme, as evidenced by the six-foot-long broadsword.

“There was an anime con in my town when I was 16,” said Courtney Segota, club vice president and senior in anthropology, recalling her first Cosplay experience. “I heard some people dress up for these things, so I threw together some stuff from out of my closet and it looked really bad.”

Since her first Cosplay experience, Segota’s costumes have become more elaborate and she has found a troupe of kindred spirits around campus. Cosplay is a combination of the words “costume” and “play.” Conflagration is a word for a great fire – a fire members hope will catch on. Cosplay costumes are usually based on characters from Japanese cartoon series, but the group hopes to expand the hobby.

“We’re not going to be like, ‘Go Mario, get out of our territory,'” said Chealsey Thomas, club member and junior in English. “Hopefully we can get a lot of other groups into it.”

Whether dressing up as an anime adventurer, video game icon or movie hero, the first step to an impressive costume is choosing a character. Group members consider many criteria to choose their alter-ego, including characters whom they identify with or share similar physical proportions. No characters are out of bounds, size, species and number of appendages are all perfectly mutable characteristics, as is the fundamental issue of gender.

“Girls can be guys, guys can be girls, guys can be a guy who looks like a girl but is a guy,” said Ashley Robertson, club member and freshman in elementary education.

Fluidity of gender is partially due to the feminine ambiguity common in anime. However, group members said there are also more controversial motives for day tripping across the gender gap.

Anime series tend to center around one or more dominant male protagonists, supplemented by less developed female characters. This separation often prompts female cosplayers to swap gender and has generated a lively debate among anime and Cosplay enthusiasts.

“People complain about that all the time,” Segota said. “The majority of anime characters are either the big, muscley Dragon Ball Z-type guys or they are skinny, with elongated limbs and completely unrealistic.”

The call for stronger female characters has not stopped anime from becoming an increasingly popular entertainment genre. Cosplay members said anime offers a depth and reality rarely offered by American cartoons. People of all ages have become engrossed with the stylized artwork and intricate storylines of Japanese animation.

“There are all these cliches that anime is just breaking,” Robertson said.

Once a costume is completed, it is time to unveil it to the world, or at least the microcosm of an anime convention. Conventions are a chance to display costumes, as well as connect and swap lore with fellow anime fans.

Devotees of certain series flock together to find a complete set of characters and take pictures of each others’ master works. It is a lot of enthusiasm a fair amount of insomnia and occasionally a somewhat awkward.

“There are a lot of people who hug people way too much at anime conventions,” Segota said. “They get way overenthused.”

Not everyone is enthusiastic about anime. However, club members said they still enjoy homegrown cartoons, and encourage everyone to discover anime.

“There is an anime for everyone,” Segota said.