When Help Becomes Harmful in Cosplay
The Reality of ‘Being Nice’, When Good Intentions Miss the Mark – part 5/8
This is Part 5 of an 8-part mini-series examining how well-intentioned kindness in the Malaysian cosplay community can sometimes achieve the opposite of its intended effect, and what genuine inclusion actually requires.
Published on 2 December 2025 by Maya Sharma
Series Table of Contents
- The Performance of Kindness in Cosplay Communities
- The Problem with Lowered Expectations
- Infantilization: The Hidden Power Dynamic
- The Burden of Being ‘Special’
- When Help Becomes Harmful (current)
- Learning Through Genuine Relationship
- The Challenge of Community Education
- Building Genuinely Inclusive Spaces
In Part 4, we explored the emotional burden of being marked as “special” and how differential treatment creates isolation even within spaces that claim to value inclusion. This burden intensifies when community members move beyond passive differential treatment to active intervention—imposing help that has not been requested and may not be wanted. These interventions, however well-intentioned, can cause significant harm by denying agency, disrupting relationships, and reinforcing assumptions about incapability.
The Intervention Impulse
Perhaps the most problematic manifestation of misguided kindness occurs when cosplayers intervene in situations that do not require intervention. These interventions stem from assumptions about what people with disabilities need rather than from observation of what is actually happening or, crucially, from any request for assistance.
The impulse to intervene typically comes from a place of compassion. Someone observes what they perceive as a difficult situation for a person with a disability and feels moved to help. The intervention feels like the right thing to do—like protecting someone vulnerable, like standing up for someone who cannot stand up for themselves, like fulfilling the community’s commitment to inclusivity.
However, this impulse operates on several problematic assumptions. It assumes the person needs help when they may not. It assumes they cannot handle the situation themselves when they often can. It assumes the intervener understands the situation better than the person actually experiencing it. Most fundamentally, it assumes that having a disability means requiring constant protection from normal social challenges.
These assumptions drive interventions that feel heroic to those performing them but infantilizing and frustrating to those receiving them. The intervener experiences themselves as doing good, while the person with a disability experiences their autonomy being denied and their capability being questioned.
Disrupting Normal Social Conflict
When Help Becomes Harmful
A particularly clear example involves situations where someone with a disability is engaged in normal social conflict or receiving appropriate feedback. Perhaps two friends are having a disagreement, with both expressing frustration with each other. Perhaps someone is receiving constructive criticism about their costume construction technique. Perhaps a person has acted rudely and someone else is addressing that behavior directly.
When an observer notices this interaction and rushes to defend the person with the disability, assuming they need protection, several harmful dynamics come into play simultaneously. The intervention suggests that the person cannot handle normal social challenges or advocate for themselves. It interrupts their ability to navigate their own relationships and social situations. It reinforces to everyone present that the person is fundamentally different and requires special protection.
Consider a specific scenario common at Malaysian conventions: Two cosplayers who are friends get into a disagreement about where to eat lunch. Both are expressing their preferences somewhat forcefully, as friends often do when making decisions. One of them has autism. An observing cosplayer, noticing the raised voices and seeing the person with autism, intervenes to “rescue” them from the conflict.
The intervention communicates several harmful messages. To the person with autism, it suggests they are too fragile to handle a normal disagreement with a friend. To the friend, it suggests they are doing something wrong by treating their friend normally rather than with special care. To observers, it reinforces stereotypes about people with autism being unable to manage conflict. The actual situation—two friends having a typical disagreement—becomes distorted through the lens of disability assumptions.
The person with autism loses the opportunity to navigate the conflict themselves, potentially reaching a resolution or learning something about managing disagreements. Their friend feels accused of mistreatment when they were simply engaging normally. The relationship itself becomes complicated by the intervention, with an outsider’s assumptions disrupting the natural dynamics between two people who actually know each other.
Denying Accountability
The assumption that individuals with disabilities cannot handle being held accountable for their behavior represents another form of harmful intervention. When someone acts in a rude or hurtful manner, addressing that behavior directly represents a sign of respect and a foundation for genuine relationship. It communicates that the person is viewed as a responsible adult capable of understanding how their actions affect others and capable of modifying their behavior accordingly.
Accountability looks different depending on the relationship and context, but it generally involves someone saying, clearly and directly, that a particular behavior was inappropriate and explaining why. In the cosplay community, this might involve telling someone they were rude to a vendor, that they made an insensitive comment, that they damaged someone’s costume through carelessness, or any number of other social missteps that occur in community spaces.
When the person who engaged in the problematic behavior has a disability, observers often rush to excuse them or intervene to prevent them from facing consequences. The intervention might take the form of explaining away the behavior (“They didn’t mean it, they have [disability]”), making excuses for it (“You have to understand, they struggle with social situations”), or directly preventing someone from addressing it (“Don’t say anything, you’ll upset them”).
These interventions deny the person with a disability the accountability that helps maintain healthy relationships and personal growth. Being held accountable, while sometimes uncomfortable, serves crucial functions. It provides information about which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. It maintains the boundaries necessary for healthy relationships. It creates opportunities for apology and repair when someone has caused harm. It reinforces that the person is viewed as capable of learning and changing their behavior.
Excusing someone from accountability because of their disability sends the opposite message. It suggests they cannot learn, cannot change, cannot understand the impact of their actions. It positions them as permanent children who need protection from the consequences of their behavior. It denies them the respect inherent in being held to the same standards as everyone else.
Imposing Unwanted Assistance
Beyond interventions in conflict situations, harmful help often manifests as physical assistance or practical help that has not been requested. At conventions, this might involve someone grabbing a cosplayer’s wheelchair to push them without asking, assuming a person with a visual impairment needs to be guided when they are navigating fine on their own, or jumping in to “fix” a costume element without being asked.
These interventions, while meant to be helpful, deny the recipient autonomy over their own body and situation. The assumption is that the helper knows better than the person themselves what assistance is needed and when. This assumption positions the person with a disability as passive, as someone things are done to rather than someone who makes their own decisions about what help they want and when.
The imposition of unwanted assistance also often creates more problems than it solves. Someone who grabs a wheelchair without asking might push it in the wrong direction or at an uncomfortable speed. Someone who tries to guide a person with a visual impairment might actually make navigation more difficult by disrupting their established methods. Someone who “fixes” a costume element might damage it or alter it in ways the cosplayer did not want.
Even when the imposed assistance technically helps with the immediate task, it creates negative emotional impact. The recipient feels their autonomy has been violated, their capability has been questioned, and their clearly stated or implied boundaries have been ignored. The “help” comes with a cost that outweighs any practical benefit.
Operating on Stereotypes
These interventions typically occur because observers lack experience with disabilities and operate on stereotypes rather than understanding individual circumstances. The mental image of what someone with autism or another disability needs or can handle often comes from limited exposure to these conditions, filtered through media portrayals and cultural assumptions rather than real relationship and understanding.
Without direct experience, well-meaning cosplayers default to treating all individuals with a particular diagnosis as though they share identical needs and capabilities. They imagine that having autism means needing protection from all conflict, or that having anxiety means being unable to handle any stressful situation, or that using a wheelchair means wanting help with everything. These stereotypes, however benevolently applied, do not reflect the diversity of actual lived experiences.
The stereotype-based intervention also tends to erase individual personality, preferences, and context. A person with autism who enjoys vigorous debate gets treated as though they need protection from disagreement. A person with anxiety who has developed strong coping mechanisms gets treated as though they are on the verge of breakdown. A wheelchair user who prefers independence gets treated as though they need constant assistance.
The erasure occurs because the intervener is responding to their idea of what the disability means rather than to the actual person in front of them. They see the diagnosis first and the individual second, if at all. This ordering fundamentally inverts the relationship between disability and personhood, making the disability the defining feature rather than one factor among many that shapes someone’s experience.
The Compounding Effect
When these interventions occur repeatedly over time, they create compounding negative effects. Each individual intervention might seem minor—a momentary disruption, a brief denial of autonomy, a passing assumption. But the cumulative impact of constant unwanted intervention can be significant.
The cumulative effect includes increased frustration and anger at never being allowed to simply navigate situations independently. It includes erosion of confidence as the constant interventions suggest incompetence. It includes social isolation as the interventions mark the person as different and in need of special management. It includes exhaustion from constantly having to assert boundaries and refuse unwanted help.
For some individuals, the cumulative burden of interventions becomes significant enough that they withdraw from community spaces entirely. The conventions that were supposed to offer escape instead become another space where they must constantly manage others’ misguided attempts to help. The energy required to navigate these interventions outweighs the enjoyment of participation.
The Alternative: Asking Before Acting
The alternative to intervention based on assumptions is remarkably simple: ask before acting. Before rushing to defend someone from conflict, observe whether they actually need or want defense. Before offering help with a practical task, ask if help is wanted and what form it should take. Before intervening in someone’s relationships, consider whether your intervention has been requested.
This approach respects the person with a disability as the expert on their own needs and situation. They know better than any observer whether they need help, what kind of help would be useful, and when intervention would be welcome. Asking rather than assuming positions them as the authority over their own experience rather than as passive recipients of others’ decisions.
The practice of asking also creates opportunities for education. When someone asks, “Do you need help with that?” and receives “No, I’m fine,” they learn something about that person’s capabilities. When they ask, “Would you like me to say something?” in a conflict situation and receive “No, I can handle this myself,” they learn about the person’s ability to manage their own relationships. This learning helps counter the stereotypes that drive harmful interventions.
In Part 6, we explore how genuine relationships built on sustained interaction provide the foundation for real understanding—and how learning through friendship reveals that individual reality bears little resemblance to general stereotypes about disability.
Maya Sharma
Hello. I’m Maya Sharma, a psychology student with a deep curiosity for how people think, feel, and navigate the world. Writing is my way of making sense of it all—sharing my thoughts, challenging perspectives, and reflecting on the moments that shape us.
“Life isn’t just about having the answers; it’s about asking the right questions, and I’m here to explore them, one article at a time.!”
