Remember when you were a kid and you’d fight with your friend over who got to be what Power Ranger? You all wanted to be the pink one, let’s be real. But there is only one pink one. Most of us grow out of this behavior, even if it’s just in less acute ways. You realize that you can all wear the pink one. There are no rules in make-believe. 

What matters is that you treat everyone with respect and realize that we’re all on our own journeys. That’s not what happened in this situation, when a group of teenagers acted about a decade younger than they actually were. When two couples invited their 5th friend to a Ren Faire, they had very specific parameters for how they wanted them to participate. Despite nobody being anyone’s boss, some people couldn’t help it and tried to exert control over the whole situation. One woman was left wondering if she was in the wrong for planning to attend in a costume of her choice. Everyone was going to be wearing similar costumes anyway, right?