Jane sat at her bedroom desk, twitching with a mixture of nervousness and excitement. Her slender finger rested on the mouse and the cursor hovered over the submit button but did not click it. Her pulse raced and she could almost feel her heart pounding in her chest.
Her voice was tense as she spoke aloud, “Am I really doing this?”
While the rest of her apartment was cheap and dingy, the bedroom was beautiful, like something out of a glossy magazine. Against one wall was a queen-size bed with a fluffy, pure-white quilt lightly textured with stitched designs of snowflakes. The pillow was pale, ice blue and the bed frame black iron with cobalt blue highlights. At the foot of the bed stood a series of glossy, white pots on a stand, with arching shoots of white orchids bursting forth. These contrasted nicely with the dark blue morning glories climbing a white trellis behind the orchids, the flowers opened wide in the brilliant morning light streaming in from the large window.
The floor was light pine, as was the desk opposite the bed. The white walls were lightly splashed with posters and shelves of merchandise featuring top games and anime, with cool guys and sexy girls prominently displayed.
The computer on the desk was top of the line, as was the camera setup around it that she used for streaming games and making videos, from cosplaying to makeup tutorials to everyday things.
She wasn’t known to most people as Jane Eula, her real name. She was known as Beloved Maiden. That’s because most people only knew her online personality. On all social media sites combined, she now had over 2.5 million followers. That was a far, far higher number than she’d ever imagined achieving, but it was still leagues below legends like that pikachu cosplay girl or real celebrities. Still, she was proud.
Her foot tapped the wood floor. She bit her lower lip, as she often did when nervous or excited. If she’d been wearing more than this lacy, black lingerie that she had on, she might have even sweated.
She’d been posting for years. But this was the first time she’d posted something like this since…
With a burst of trepidation, she clicked the submit button. In the blink of an eye, her latest cosplay teasers whooshed off across the internet, finding new homes on social media sites of all kinds, and bringing her before millions of eyes.
How would the new content be received?
What kind of reactions would she get?
She could guess, yet she also hoped for the best.
Jane hadn’t started out trying to achieve the kind of popularity she had. At first, she hadn’t even been trying to make a career of it. She’d been a very geeky teen in love with anime and cosplay and Halloween and just being imaginative and creative. Of course, like crazy amounts of people in her generation, she’d naturally started sharing her enthusiasm online, posting pics of her costumes and convention visits on social media. It’s not that she was a particularly public person or that she craved attention. Originally, she’d just wanted to show off what she was passionate about and found exciting. She’d wanted to share the costumes that she’d had so much fun sewing and crafting and wearing. She’d wanted to connect with others who were just as into the dream worlds that she was into. Sharing what we love is a fundamental human desire, a deeply seeded need that brings us together.
People had liked and happily commented on her pics and she’d taken that as encouragement to follow her hobby even further.
Things had carried on in that fashion for a few years. Then, in her second year of university, her popularity had suddenly gone viral. A certain global behemoth in the entertainment industry had decided to collaborate their blockbuster superhero franchise with a long-running anime franchise that had been celebrated by children for generations in Asia. While everyone else had been dressing up as superheroes, she’d dressed up in a particularly sexy version of a certain time-travelling cat robot.
In truth, it had just been a throw-away design that she’d put together between the much nicer and more elaborate ones she’d been working on, just something she’d thought would be a cute and funny idea, nothing serious. The costume had been really simple and, without really thinking about it, far sexier than anything she’d done before. And it should have been impossible for anyone to turn that silly cat robot into something hot. But, perhaps for those two factors, simplicity and sexiness, her costume had taken off. Overnight, she’d become known all over the world. She’d gone from hobbyist to internet sensation.
She sat now in front of her computer, knowing it was silly, yet unable to stop herself from refreshing the browser every thirty seconds to see the first likes for her new picture set. Her foot tapping grew even faster.
Back in the day, Jane’s newfound stardom had, of course, gone straight to her young head. She’d found herself suddenly invited to conventions to cosplay for game companies and animation studies, even in different countries. She’d been immensely flattered, crazy excited, and had very much lost all interest in continuing to study microbiology. Her university studies had fallen to the wayside and her marks had plummeted.
Bouncing around in her computer chair, she finally got to read the first few comments coming in:
!!!WOW!!!
OMFG. What happened to you! So hot!
Splendida
This is insane. Beloved Maiden I worship you!!!
(heart)(heart)(heart)(heart)(heart)(heart)
Kawaii yo
0.0
Perfection!
(fire) what a princess (fire)
It was good! So far. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself.
With the increase in attention from her cat robot costume, however, had come not just happy fans, but an outpouring of criticism as well. It was no longer just friends, family, acquaintances, and a few randoms following her, it was people from all over and all walks of life. For the first time, she’d been bombarded by comments from followers and others that weren’t just throwaway compliments. She’d started experiencing a lot of toxicity and slut shaming as well. Most people were great, but she’d finally been exposed to a lot of trash talking from both males and females: jealous insults, sexual suppression, and attempts to destroy her self image and self confidence.
By and large, these weren’t really targeted at her costume, either. They were targeted at her body, and who she was.
Jane had been nervous enough beforehand to post pictures of herself in an anime cat costume that showed off a belly that could be much flatter and legs that weren’t terribly toned. Then she’d been exposed to all that criticism, people taking apart every inch of her body in one comment after another, most of it flattering, but many hurtful comments decidedly not.
She couldn’t help but come to feel that certain lacklustre dimensions in her body made her look a bit too much like an out-of-shape teen girl instead of the grown woman she should be and wanted to be. And no matter how average she actually was, she’d started looking in the mirror and seeing herself as fat. Always fat. That stupid muffin top rolling out over the top of her clothing. Every time she’d sit down and bend over, and her belly bunched up, she’d hated her own body. Her sister had told her that she was being ridiculous, that her body was fine, but Jane had been unable to take those words to heart.
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