COSPLAYING RYUK Part 1: My cosplay journey
In part 1 of "Cosplaying Ryuk", I explore my lifelong love for cosplay as a way to process grief.
Background
Halloween has always been my favourite holiday. From a young age, I’ve always relished the idea of being able to step into another body, to exist as a different person for a temporary amount of time. It’s something truly magical. As someone who often didn’t feel at home in her own physical form, I gained the opportunity to explore my embodiment during Halloween, to feel beautiful or scary or empowered based on how I was perceived by others in my costume. At the age of 8, dressing as Dracula in a beautiful red cape passed down from my parents made me feel powerful. Fully wrapped in bandages as a mummy felt safe for 12-year-old me, like hiding behind a full-body curtain of my own hair. Beyond that, Halloween was always a fun excuse to work with my mom on a big crafting project, a chance to rifle through our costume trunk and make additions for future years.
In my teens, this love of costume began to extend to the realm of cosplay. While there is no hard and fast definition that distinguishes cosplay from regular costumes, one of the distinguishing features is that cosplay tends to be a costume of a specific character or from a specific world. One of my first forays into cosplay was in 2008, when I dressed up as Eric Draven from the film The Crow. I remember how at school, many of my fellow classmates asked if I was dressed an “emo” version of the Joker, following the release of The Dark Knight earlier that summer. While I think they mostly meant it unkindly, they were right to point out that I wanted the opportunity to explore what it was like to dress more goth/emo than I usually did. It was a chance to explore a new-to-me identity, a new-to-me subculture that I wanted to participate in.
Despite the negative reactions from high-schoolers, I found community in friends who also loved to dress up. Other early cosplays of mine included both Medusa, complete with dozens of rubber snakes hand-stitched into a crown, and a zombie-Spiderman. Then, when I met my partner in 2015, we started doing couples-cosplays together, averaging about one new cosplay a year.
The leadup – death and cosplay planning
2020 was one of the worst years imaginable for many people around the world. I was not immune to this. I was feeling isolated, and I was still processing the death of my father, who passed in March of 2019. And somehow, the idea of cosplaying Ryuk from Death Note slowly wormed its way into my mind.
Why Ryuk? Well, possibly because I knew it would be a challenge. Surely in part because I loved the creativity of this cosplayer’s execution of the character. And also, because the brooding emo child inside me was sad about her father’s death. In Death Note, the character Ryuk—a Shinigami, or god of death—symbolizes the indifference of death, the randomness of it, that it can strike anywhere and find anyone.
My dad passed away from bowel cancer at the age of 59, in large part because his symptoms were dismissed by doctors for years leading up to his diagnosis. Looking back now, I think Ryuk was a way to help me process this. Instead of resenting the doctors and the healthcare system that ignored his declining health, and instead of pitying myself and thinking how wrong the situation was, seeing my dad’s death as amoral, random, a fluke, felt somehow comforting.
The search for Ryuk cosplay tutorials also felt like an escape from grief. It was a pipe dream, completing a project so elaborate and involved and so difficult to execute, but it was a pipe dream that temporarily helped fill a father-sized hole in my life.
Years passed, and the project kept getting pushed off.
In 2023, I learned that one of my philosophy professors at Simon Fraser University, Alex King, had completed a Ryuk cosplay. She writes about it on her aesthetics blog here. At a school event, I remember talking to her for close to an hour, asking her about the details of the costume, the ethics behind the show, and other insights about cosplaying in general. In her blog post, King talks about how cosplaying as Ryuk offered her a chance to be objectified in a non-traditional way, not as someone in a female body but instead as an aesthetic entity that pushed back on societal norms and expectations. This rang true for me, tapping into my childhood intuitions about embodying different characters. If costume can help you be perceived as someone else, then maybe it can help you become someone else, at least temporarily.
Plans for my Ryuk cosplay continued to be nebulous. My younger sibling, a fellow cosplayer, would urge me for confirmation on Death Note-themed plans leading up to Vancouver’s annual Fan Expos each February. But each year it felt like too much.
Then, in May of 2024, my mom fell suddenly ill. Three weeks after entering the hospital complaining of lung problems, she passed away.
Again, I was confronted with death.
This time, despite months of grief, my life freed up. Having spent much of my spare time helping my mom through severe mental health issues, my spare time was my own for the first time in years. And the prospect of a complex project sounded like the perfect blend of escapism, both through the creation of the project as well as the donning of the terrifying death god.
So, in December of 2024, I started seriously planning. And in January of 2025, I started construction in earnest.