Did you hear about the cosplay situation where HeR asked a cosplayer to promote their 31 days of cosplay thing, she asked for compensation, they ghosted her and then stole one of her photos and pasted a fake name on it? I'm shocked it isn't a bigger deal. I only found out yesterday on Reddit.
I did NOT but seeing this ask made me do some digging and I don't know if anyone else has posted about it on Tumblr because all the ND posts are about the CW show these days, so here's a primer for those who didn't (anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; I'm piecing together this information from what's currently available and my understanding is things have been deleted):
At the beginning of October, HeR announced their Nancy Drew 31 Days of Cosplay Contest. Not much different than their other contests, you make a cosplay, you send a photo in, they pick the best, etc.
A Reddit post suggests that HeR was also planning to post their own content during the month of October, such as costume guides or previous costumes. Fair enough.
A few weeks before the contest timeline began, HeR contacted cosplayer Sarah Elkins (@sarahchristineelkins on Instagram) and asked if they could use one of her CAP cosplays in their contest. Sarah, who was being asked by HeR to provide value to their brand and potentially increase their revenue, asked if she would be financially compensated for the use of her image and likeness. HeR left her on read.
12 business days later, HeR went ahead and shared Sarah's image as part of their "31 Days of Cosplay" promotion. Though the image itself literally contains her actual fucking face, HeR not only did not credit Sarah for the labor she put into the image, but they had the AUDACITY to say "Emily S recreated this EPIC scene!" so as to suggest to their audience that they were giving proper credit.
Since then, it seems that HeR has scrubbed their social media page of any and all references to the 31 Days of Cosplay Contest.Ā I think everything was just on their stories and nothing in their feed? So itās still up in the story section like it was. I believe they privately apologized to Sarah and have been providing boilerplate apologies to people in their DMs.
To give any sort of credit to HeR, this probably happened because they outsourced their social media marketing and didn't give them any budget to work with and so when some poor intern got asked about compensation and had no idea if they could do that, they just panicked and filed the image away in the folder of things to post.
But still, even if you're hiring independent contractors, there is a degree of responsibility you still have, both legally and ethically, for the consequences of the actions of your agent. This is especially heartbreaking given that women specifically are so frequently dismissed or belittled for asking for compensation for the actual work that they do to provide value to brands. It's one thing to call yourself "Her" Interactive and put "strong capable women" in your games, but it's a whole other thing to put your money where your mouth and actually engage in this capitalistic world we live in in a way that gives women tangible benefits.
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