They Were Best Friends and Cosplay Stars. Then Snow Killed Helen

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https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/cosplay-tiktok-manslaughter-yandere-snow-helen-hastings-1234452/

This is how Helen Hastings, 18, would have spent the past year: they would have been a sophomore at Oberlin College, a small liberal-arts school about an hour outside Cleveland, playing Dungeons and Dragons every Saturday in the dank basement of Burton Hall on North Quad, trying to sidetrack the game by reciting the entirety of the “Shrimp Heaven Now” dialogue from the podcast My Brother, My Brother, and Me. Helen, who used both the “she” and “them” pronouns, would have chased her Siberian therapy cat Willa down the halls of their dorm, picking up the tufts of fur she shed between her paws. They would have flounced around the snow-blanketed campus in shorts or a floral skirt, refusing to put on a coat even when their friends begged them to; and when the frigid Ohio winters started to thaw, they would have spent lazy Sunday afternoons in the swing chair on the lawn outside their dorm.

She would have completed the first year of what she hoped would be a triple-degree in art, psychology, and neurobiology; maybe she would have decided to focus on only one of those things, or two, or none at all. They would have gone to Anime Matsuri, the giant cosplay convention held in Houston every year, where maybe they would have dressed as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, the surly mutant telepath from the Deadpool franchise; Helen bore such a strong resemblance to the character that kids at cons would routinely stop in their tracks. She could have done an internship, in art or calligraphy or biochemistry. She had done bacterial microbiology work at the lab of her mother, who works in molecular biology, the prior spring, and was excited about the opportunity to possibly have her name put on a paper. They could have traveled around the country. They could have done anything.

Instead, Helen was killed; shot in the head in an apparent accident by her friend, a TikTok-famous cosplayer. Mary-Anne Oliver-Snow, a.k.a. Yandere Freak, a.k.a. Yandere Snow, a.k.a. Snow the Salt Queen, was a minor celebrity in the cosplay community, racking up 1.6 million TikTok followers for their performances of various Japanese anime characters. Snow, who goes by “they/them” pronouns, was particularly well-known for cosplaying characters from a series called Danganronpa, a Japanese video game in which teens are locked inside a school with a murderous bear and forced to fight to the death.

Snow, 23, was the leader of a tight-knit social circle including Hastings that was extremely popular on the Houston cosplay circuit. “They were like celebrities,” says Gem Piinker, a friend of Helen’s in the local community. “I hate to admit it, but the drama that follows Snow is what brought [that group] together. There was always something to talk about.” Snow was also notorious for stoking controversy among cosplayers in Houston, where they lived. “They were the Regina George of the community,” says Dolly Lace, a Houston cosplayer who knew Snow.

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