Juliette Michele watched Harry Potter for the first time as an adult.
Her church had banned it.
Pokémon went the same way, along with most of the games and films her friends took for granted, and at 28 she earns a living from the interests she once had to smuggle past her mother.
Juliette, from Dallas, Texas, describes the family she grew up in as “super evangelical”.
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The expectation was not complicated. She would be a good Christian girl.
That ruled out a lot.
“I was not allowed to watch Harry Potter,” she said.
“I only watched Harry Potter when I was an adult because that was super banned. Pokémon was banned.
There were a lot of things that our church banned, so I wasn’t really allowed to do a lot.”
Her workaround was her best friend’s house, where the rules were looser and there was a GameCube.
“I’d have to hide a lot of my interests,” she said.
She thinks the whole project backfired.
“I think that kind of just worked against what my family tried to do because they were trying to force me to be a very good Christian girl,” Juliette said.
“And I’m not really that.”
eBay parcels, a closet, and her grandmother’s credit card
The anime figures started in fifth grade. She ordered them online and hid them where her mother would not look.
“I would order them on eBay and hide them in my closet so my mom wouldn’t see,” she said.
“I actually got really internet savvy when I was quite young. That’s the way I got around a lot of things.”
Her grandmother let her use the credit card. Juliette handled the rest.
The crush that started the unravelling
Fifth grade brought something else. A crush on a girl, and with it a belief that something in her was faulty.
“I just felt really bad about that because of my religion,” she said.
“I always just thought, ‘Maybe I was built wrong or something.’ But then I was like, ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can’t choose your preference.'”
What followed she describes as “deconstructing that really hateful mindset that I was taught”.
She does not present it as unusual. “There are a lot of people like me that have gone through that, that have gotten out,” she said.
Costumes first, then the house
By her early teens she had found cosplay and was making her own costumes.
At 18 she started posting them publicly. The costumes got bolder as the audience got bigger.
Then, in 2021, she bought a house and made good on a promise.
“I was sort of getting bored with the kind of content I was doing,” she said.
“I was like, ‘I want to be naked. I love being naked.’ I told my fans, ‘Once I buy my house, once I buy my first house, I will do this.'”
She now has more than three million followers on Instagram and makes adult content built around elaborate cosplay, drawn from the same fictional worlds her church had a problem with.
Her parents have picked a side, sort of
“They’re still pretty mad about it,” Juliette said.
“They’re very proud of how much money I make. They’re not super happy about how I make it. But we don’t really talk about it.”
The relationship holds anyway, on terms she has thought about.
“We sort of have unconditional love for each other, even though our relationship probably isn’t healthy,” she added.
Why It Matters
Restriction is turning out to be a decent origin story for creators.
The hobby that had to be hidden becomes the niche, and the niche becomes the audience, because the specificity is the product.
Cosplay has been one of the most reliable routes from fan content into paid adult work for a decade now, and Juliette’s version comes with a backstory that does a job most creator bios cannot.
Fans who grew up under similar rules recognise it immediately.
Deconstruction content has become its own genre online, with ex-evangelical creators building sizeable followings out of the specific texture of what they were not allowed to do.
The cosplay-to-adult pipeline has been running alongside it, quietly, for years.
Juliette has not made her upbringing the centre of her output. She talks about it when asked.
Whether the church that banned the wizards ever finds out what the costumes are for now is a separate question, and one she does not seem especially worried about.
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