We were lucky to catch up with Liz Vazquez recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Liz, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
I’m a cosplayer; my very first cosplay was Sailor Moon back in 1998. I continue to cosplay because for me, it’s fun to challenge myself with various creative projects. I love sewing, painting, jewelry making, amongst others, and through cosplay I am able to use all of those hobbies to make something incredible. I love tinkering with makeup, styling wigs, building props, crafting accessories, and playing with photography and posing to end up looking like the characters I love that have shaped my life in various ways. It lets my creativity run free while allowing me to make memories with my cherished friends, meet new friends, and become more comfortable within my own body and skin. It’s incredible. I’ve met my husband thanks to cosplay and anime, as well as the majority of the friends I have now. It’s shaped every aspect of my life.
Now in 2024, I cosplay for fun but I am also the Cosplay Coordinator for two Long Island events: Long Island Retro Gaming Expo and Long Island Tropic Con. I have been a facilitator of panels, photo gatherings, and workshops at various events such as the Long Island Mini Maker Faire, Anime NYC, Katsucon, New York Comic Con, I-CON, Otakon, and more. In 2017, I started teaching Cosplay 101 workshops in libraries and at various comic book events throughout New York, focusing on Long Island. I’m so grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given to travel, to teach, and to simply thrive as a result of cosplay.
Through all of this work I’ve been doing, I have met so many cosplayers of all ages, from the tiniest kids in elementary, to tweens and teens, and even adults in their 20s-70s and older. I’ve explained what cosplay is, how people do it, why people do it, and how to get started if it’s something that interests them. Through these workshops and conversations, I have met so many kids throughout the years that have all grown up, gone to college, graduated college, and have changed their lives in various ways with cosplay as a part of the process. Workshop attendees have shared stories with me regarding how cosplay helped them decide their majors and minors in college, to how cosplay has helped them make friends or significant others, to how it’s become a source of relaxation and peace for them, amongst others. I’ve had cosplayers come to me expressing how watching my group of friends and I inspired them to go outside the box and make their own groups to play creatively as well, to start teaching panels as well.
It’s vague, but the most meaningful project I’ve ever worked on is the library of interactive events I’ve helped run and coordinate: the Cosplay 101 workshops, the photo-gatherings, and panels. To have attendees of all ages share their excitement, concerns, questions, and be in a space where they can share and seek advice from their peers is amazing.To have people tell me they felt seen and included, they felt heard and like someone cared… that’s it right there. That’s why I keep doing it. It doesn’t matter if you’re 5 or 55, you want to be seen and heard. I’ve had adults tell me they thought they were too old, or that no one would understand, but have found inspiration in me and my story and have since begun to cosplay and have blossomed with their self confidence and crafting skills. This just brings me such happiness.
For example, in one of my workshops, I shared my injuries and health conditions that sometimes make cosplay and simply everyday life difficult. I had so many teenagers come to me with gratitude, saying they didn’t think they could cosplay because of needing a back brace, or because of a disorder or permanent injury they have. However hearing me say what I do with my conditions has inspired them to proceed. I’ve since watched those teenagers grow in their crafts, one winning a major award at a large competition in New York City last year, and another deciding on going to college with a focus on fashion thanks to getting into sewing as a result of cosplaying. It brings me such happiness to be a resource for cosplayers of all ages in a way I truly wish existed for me when I first got into the hobby in 1998. It wasn’t known or discussed back then, and was wildly made fun of. Now it’s very popular and well known, and has become mainstream. We have celebrities like Megan Thee Stallion cosplaying on their social media and music videos, Olympians like Noah Lyles openly competing with Yu-Gi-Oh cards, it’s amazing.
I hope to continue running these cosplay events and see what the next generation has in store for the craft – as well as seeing what the older generations still have up their sleeves. Inclusivity, diversity, community. Cosplay is for everyone.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Hi! My name is Liz but I’ve been going by the nickname Rizuki since 2000. I always say my age is immortal but I may or may not be somewhere in my 30s. I was born and raised in New York to my sassy Colombian mother and hysterical Puerto Rican father, may he rest in peace. I am a marketing coordinator by day, and by night (and weekend!) I am a cosplayer and Twitch streamer. And yes, because people always ask, yes I do get paid to wear costumes and play video games. 7-year-old me is super hype about it.
I first started cosplaying in 1998 when I attended a friend’s Halloween party, but didn’t know what the word cosplay was. I had never heard of conventions, and I kept my love of anime, manga, and video games very hush hush. It wasn’t popular or cool to like wrestling or be playing games, so I only spoke about it with my brother and super close friends. In 1999, I received an iMac to help me with my schoolwork as we were transitioning from handwritten assignments to typed assignments. This iMac was also my gateway to the internet, and to America Online (AOL). It was there that I found the public chat rooms, including ones for fellow anime fans and more specifically Sailor Moon fans. I ended up finding a group of like-minded people of all ages and we became friends – in fact, we are still friends and they attended my wedding two years ago. I love them dearly and am so grateful that a silly anime brought us online and to each other 25 years ago.
It was through these chat rooms, this group, and the conversations about anime that I learned what cosplay was and what conventions were. I attended my very first convention in 2002, Big Apple Anime Fest in Manhattan. I went dressed as my favorite character, Yaten Kou from Sailor Moon Sailor Stars, and I had an absolute blast. From there, I attended I-CON on Long Island in 2004, 2006, and 2008. Then I transitioned to New York Comic Con in 2009. I began going to out of state conventions in 2014 starting with Otakon in Washington DC, AnimeNEXT in New Jersey, Katsucon in Maryland, Power Morphicon in California, and Sakura-Con in Washington.
As the years went on, I began meeting more friends and understanding cosplay more to the point that I began making my own cosplays. I loved the new challenge of making things myself because I enjoy arts & crafts very much. It allowed me to play with various types of crafts, I learned how to sew, and am exploring playing with makeup and hair styling for wigs. It’s so fun and helps to erase my self consciousness that’s grown throughout the years. I mostly cosplay from Sailor Moon but I’m also known for my retro video game cosplays including Aika from Skies of Arcadia, Amy Rose from Sonic the Hedgehog, and Aerith Gainsborough from Final Fantasy 7. I love the challenge of bringing these characters to life in my own way.
Through all these years of cosplaying and being silly, I began gaining a reputation in the local community. The main factors that transitioned cosplay into a career for me were in 2017. In 2017, I went back to I-CON, the Long Island sci-fi and geeky convention I attended as a teen. It had changed significantly and sadly hit a weekend of bad weather. Due to the weather, some of the staff could no longer attend and I found myself in my first judging role as one of the judges for I-CON’s cosplay contest. I also ended up running a panel for the Overwatch character, d.VA, as the scheduled panelists had a timing conflict. I then went to run my own panel for Sailor Moon immediately after. 2017 also marked the year of my very first Cosplay 101 workshop at the Brentwood Public Library. The following year, East Meadow Public Library needed another cosplay guest for their event, EmCon Anime Festival. My brother, Peter Vazquez, was one of the artists attending the event and recommended me based on my work in 2017. I’ve been working with EmCon ever since, and my list of events and roles kept growing and growing ever since. I’ve been a judge and cosplay guest at Mount Vernon Public Library’s Mount Vernon Comic Expo, InbeonCon, Copiague Public Library’s CopiaCon, Oceanside Library’s OceanCon, Baldwin Public Library’s Pika Pika Anime Mini Con, Cradle Con, and Long Island Tropic Con. I also became the Cosplay Coordinator for Long Island Comic Book Expo in 2018, then Long Island Tropic Con and Long Island Retro Gaming Expo in 2020.
Along with my judging, guesting, and staffing roles, I also gained a reputation for my photoshoots and meetups. At larger conventions, fans of various series gather together to meet fellow fans and take pictures. It’s an easy way to find like-minded individuals that love the same characters you do, and are dressed as the same characters at the same time. 2017 also marked the first year of the convention Anime NYC, and my first time hosting the Sailor Moon Meetup at that con. Now every year, I run that meetup with the goal of bringing the Sailor Moon community of fans together to have fun, meet other fans, and to make memories at the convention that they’ll be able to look back on fondly. This year will be my 7th meetup and I am so jazzed to once again bring the community together for 45 minutes of fun. In a world with stress and struggles, it’s really nice to just relax and forget… even if only for an hour.
My objective is to showcase that cosplay is for everyone, to bring diversity and inclusion and community into the world of cosplay, starting with my local community. My goal is to help people get into cosplay, and to help people be motivated and inspired and be able to enjoy the hobby with their friends while also helping parents better understand what it is their kids are into. There is no age limit to having fun; you don’t suddenly stop enjoying things when you hit the age of 18 or 21. Dressing up, playing games, collecting, having fun – anyone of any age can do that, and that is my hope, to help normalize it more, to help showcase that it’s no different than being into collegiate football or into Team USA at the Olympics or hardcore into golf and pickleball or into playing the guitar or collecting fancy cars or knitting or anything else. It’s a way to relax and enjoy yourself, to make friends, to gain skills and even learn more about yourself.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Social media is a fickle beast with algorithms that change on a daily basis and platform rules that don’t even make sense to people in marketing. My three best recommendations to anyone: 1) Pace Yourself. Create a schedule that works for you of how often you post. Don’t try to post daily if that’s too much for you. Find a way to be consistent. 2) Be Authentic. Don’t lie, don’t make up grand stories unless your platform is being a storyteller. Be you, be yourself. Be the you that you are on a daily basis, just digitally. 3) Ignore the Numbers. Some people hyper focus on follower counts and engagement and honestly? Don’t. It kills the fun of social media. Your social media page is your little corner of the internet; decorate it and use it how you feel. Have fun with it. If you want followers, it’ll come with your consistency and your content in time.
My main platform is Instagram but I also float around on Threads, Twitter/X, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitch. On every platform, I am very 100% and I say that often because I know I have followers from my library workshops that are minors and I also have followers that are 18+. I talk about my self consciousness, about my sewing struggles, and about daily things … as well as my current cosplays, my current plans, video game schedules, and more. What they see is what they get whether it’s via a post, a livestream, or in person. Nothing changes. I try to be very cordial and helpful for the younger followers who are looking for advice, while also not leaving out the followers that are around my age and are happy to find another account to chat with in our weird millennial slang.
I’ve grown my platform mostly through my interactions but I think it’s via my silly content and livestreams the most. I’ve been in the process of moving so I haven’t been as active lately, but I always love to go live and talk to my followers. Talk to them about upcoming events, cosplays I’m working on, video games I’m playing, and more. I often ask them to throw questions to me about anything, and we end up having hour long conversations about things as silly as cereal, or the lore of Kingdom Hearts, reviewing a convention that just passed, World Wrestling Entertainment in the ’90s, or as deep as mental health check ins.
My content is all over the place, like me! I’ll post professional photos but also selfies, behind the scenes photos, and my new favorite thing are videos of silly moments at events and photoshoots. I think those videos give a great view on who I am and what my platform is all about in a short form before someone ever even hits the follow button.
But here’s the funniest part of it all: my Instagram account was created about a week or two after Instagram hit the App Store in October, 2010. I never changed accounts or usernames. My account has evolved crazily through these almost-14 years and I’m sure people following me from 2010 are very confused now! So I’m an Insta veteran and it’s my most used platform behind Twitch once I am able to stream again (moving is rough). Marketing is my day job and truly I just don’t care about marketing on my social media. I’ll test ideas and trends, sure, but I’m on social media to have fun, showcase my work, and meet people – not to stare at numbers.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
My goal has always been to bring community to the cosplay community, but in 2020 there couldn’t be a community the way we knew anymore. We basically went back to the starting line from all the work we had done. Then personally, My father passed away as did various people on my street, my dad’s friends. My brother was hospitalized twice and almost died. I got furloughed from my day job and all the conventions I worked were cancelled or postponed indefinitely. Major opportunities I had were cancelled because the events were cancelled. In my stress, I gained a lot of weight and gray hair and felt so very alone. I cried a lot. I spent hours upon hours playing Animal Crossing New Horizons. I wasn’t sewing at all and didn’t for months. I was struggling mentally, emotionally, and physically for two years. I went from having it all to having…nothing. I could see all of this affecting my cosplay and gaming and my work related to them. I lost everything. I was upset all the time and didn’t sew, didn’t create, didn’t write. I did nothing.
Since 2020-2021, I have gotten married, got a new job, regained my Cosplay Coordinator role at Long Island Tropic Con and Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, brought my meetups back to Anime NYC, Otakon, and Katsucon, went back to streaming, went back to events, went back to the gym, and got back into sewing. I’ve made so many cosplays since that tough time, and have learned a lot about the craft and about myself. My goal is still to bring community to the cosplay community, but in these wild few years I’ve also learned that I thrive on creating, on interacting, on being with my friends, family, and loved ones. So I will continue pushing for inclusion, pushing for diversity, and pushing for community… But I’m also pushing for my dad. My dad really didn’t understand cosplay at all but loved to see me happy. He was so intrigued by the different costumes, colorful makeup, and eccentric wigs. I like to think he’s still watching, still confused, but still happy that I’m happy; he never liked to see me upset and I think he would’ve been so hurt that I was so broken for a while once he passed. He’s on a cloud judging me in Spanish, and that pushes me to do it more. Gracias, Papá.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/rizuki
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/rizukicosplay
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/rizukiann
- Other: https://twitch.tv/rizukiii
Image Credits
Allison Stock
instagram.com/allisonthephotographer
https://www.allisonstock.com/