The fans have spoken, and they choo-choo-choose Stella Chuu.

Cosplaying since high school, Chuu's first ever attempt was Sakura from Naruto. She was president of the anime club at the time, which should tell you everything you need to know about her tastes. Throughout her career, Chuu has portrayed iconic anime characters like Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Casca from Berserk and Rem from Re:Zero.

theScore esports caught up with the prolific cosplayer to talk about her interest in burlesque, how she incorporates it into cosplaying and the origins behind Underwatch.

Tell me a bit about yourself. How did you get involved with cosplay?

I’ve been cosplaying for over six years, but I really started like six years ago — [that] was when I hunkered down and taught myself how to sew and make costumes and stuff. Before that, I was busy with school so I mainly just bought my costumes, but I did go to a lot of conventions back in the day. I was president of the anime club and I was always a nerd and then cosplay was the next part of my adventure. So, six years ago was when I really started and really jumped in full blast.

You’ve been featured in Business Insider, Mashable, Kotaku and more. How do you keep a level head after all this fame and growth you’ve experienced in your time of being a cosplayer?

I look at my paycheck (laughs). I don't know, I mean...maybe it's the way I was raised or something. My parents always made me, you know, remind me that no matter how hard I work, I could always work harder and I could always do better. So it keeps me from like getting comfortable where I am, and so I never feel like I'm doing good enough in what I'm doing. So I never think I'm big enough, I never think I'm worthy enough because I always think that "I should've been doing way better than that, this is not me at my maximum and stuff." And like I don't like to look back and think about how great it was, that I did that thing, I mostly just think back about how I could have done that thing better and then what's the next project. So I'm always like doing a retrospective but also just pushing forward, because I don't want to get comfortable.

How has technology helped you with the creation of your costumes? I read that you said you sometimes use 3D printing.

Back in the day it was like the dark ages and you had to ask your friends, you had to figure it out. Nowadays there's just tutorials everywhere which has really made it easier with cosplay but also harder at the same time because it's harder to standout and harder to look interesting anymore because the bar has been raised. Like every cosplay back in the day looked like a three or a four, and if you looked like a five people will notice you. But nowadays almost every cosplay is a nine or a 10, and its hard because I feel like my base skill level is more like a six or a seven. I would like for it to be a nine or a 10 and I'm working real hard at that and trying to become the master of everything else.

I would say it's just made things easier because it's faster to learn something but harder to feel like what you made is good enough because every single year there's more and more things coming out, more and more techniques coming out that make costumes look good, and if you don't learn those then you're going to be left in the dust.

I've been using [3D printing] a little bit, not a whole lot because of the cost and benefit of it is still not there. If I wanted to make a prop out of 3D printing, it won't last as long as and as well as if I made it out of EVA foam.

The problems with 3D printing is that what you make ends up being almost a replica, and not a cosplay prop.

So, you are a burlesque performer. How did you get started with this and how did you cross that over into cosplay?

It actually happened around the same exact time. What happened was I went to Katsucon [2011] and right after Katsucon I went to Steampunk World's Fair I think, or maybe it was another convention — some kind of steampunk convention. It was one after another. It was a few weeks after Katsucon, and so it was at Katsucon was when I decided "Hey, I want to be a cosplayer full-time and I want to cosplay all the time and I want to try and travel around the world and just have fun with it."

And then I went to Steampunk World's Fair and I went there because I was with a group of my friends who were improv people and they wanted to do a old-timey steampunky brothel reenactment in which we were the hussies of the age and we'd show a little bit of shoulder type of thing. It was us having fun and being silly and we had some people join us who were burlesque performers and because it was totally okay to perform burlesque at the convention, they would perform burlesque for us. I'd never seen burlesque before, I had no idea what it was and it blew my mind and I asked these girls 'How do I get into this? 'Cause this looks awesome.' And they told me about their troupe which was called D20 burlesque and it was all nerdy themed. Like their next show after that was boardgames and their feature performer did something from settlers of Catan, so it was just super-deep-nerdy, like really, really nerdy. My first show was their internet memes show and I dressed up as Pedobear. It's been like that ever since, all of my burlesque acts are all super nerdy and super fun.

What was the most memorable burlesque/cosplay performance you have done so far?

The best show we've ever done — there's two of them — one was recently at Anime Matsuri. We had a show at 3 a.m. and 5,000 people showed up. Yeah, that was pretty intense.

Yeah, that was like stupid how many people showed up. I'm like 'Go to sleep! Why are you guys here?' And then I had a show at New York Comic Con [2015] and that was at the Hard Rock Cafe, so that was a big deal for us because it was the Hard Rock. And it sold out and we filled the house and it was in Times Square so, huge theatre, really big deal for us.

And so, those were basically milestones in terms of my burlesque career, because mostly burlesque is performed in front of small audiences. 0.1 percent of burlesque performers are as big as Dita Von Teese and then everyone else is just a small local no-named performer. And so, most shows, 99 percent of the shows I perform in, are in a dive bar somewhere in New York City where the audience is maybe 40 people and it's jam packed. There's no room to walk around and it's loud and it's fun, but dirty and it's at all hours of the night.

Tell me a bit about Underwatch (NSFW, but we're not stopping you). How did this idea come to be?

Underwatch was super awesome. I came up with the idea because I saw a lot of people doing Overwatch lingerie, and they were doing it in a way where it was the characters' colors and some logos slapped on it and they called it underwear. And I was like 'yeah but like lingerie is different.' Lingerie is supposed to be very fancy, and there's a whole history of lingerie, and there's certain kinds of lingerie. So I wanted to tackle that and design like a whole line inspired by fancier, boudoir-y, French lingerie. A lot of people took liberties with the designs because its really hard to sew lingerie and I wasn't really strict about it. I was like 'Yeah guys I just wanna have fun, like I don't give a shit. This isn't me trying to start a company or anything, I'm literally just here having fun with you.' So some of the designs changed overtime based on some peoples' limitations, but overall like I was really happy that everyone dressed up and we all had fun and everyone looked really good.

What did you think of the meet up at Katsucon earlier this year?

It was super great. I'm so surprised with the amount of people who showed up. It was about 20-30 people who showed up. Even some people randomly joined us, they were like hey, 'I'm just gonna take my shirt off,' and I'm like, 'you go for it man.'

We ended up drawing a huge crowd because it's lingerie. It's Overwatch. Like everyone loves that stuff. Also we had a lot of really fun personalities with us. We took a bunch of really stupid photos [and] there's a really hot Genji, he's my friend and he has like so many abs, and we took this really fun photo of all of us blessing his butt, it was great.

If you want to see more of Stella's work and see which con she'll attend next (hint, the answer is Fanime in San Jose), check out these links:

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Photos courtesy of Stella Chuu.

Navneet Randhawa does stuff and things at theScore esports. She has not blessed any Genji butts today. You can follow her on Twitter.