Tag Archives: cosplay

What does ‘cosplay’ mean?

I ran into an articles about Disney Princesses cosplay. The pictures were very appealing, but what the heck is ‘cosplay’?

I had to ask Wikipedia for help and found out:

Cosplay, short for “costume play”, is a type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea. Characters are often drawn from popular fiction in Japan, but recent trends have included American cartoons and Sci-Fi as well as other pop-culture. Favorite sources include manga, anime, tokusatsu, comic books, graphic novels, video games, hentai and fantasy movies. Any entity from the real or virtual world that lends itself to dramatic interpretation may be taken up as a subject. Inanimate objects are given anthropomorphic forms and it is not unusual to see genders switched, with women playing male roles and vice versa.

Cosplayers often interact to create a subculture centered around role play. A broader use of the term cosplay applies it to any costumed role play in venues apart from the stage, regardless of the cultural context.

All right, that makes a lot of sense, and now we can enjoy the pictures of a group of  pretty girls cosplaying (can you use that as a verb? – maybe I just created that now.) roles from all our favorite Disney princesses and the like. There is actually something I had admired about these princesses, or better about their creators. They had been created to appeal to the whole family. The little ones liked their cartooniness, but they also were pretty so that the older female viewers could use them as models to strive after. And for the older males the characters were just a bit of sexy with nice appealing curves. I was always amazed by this delicate balance.

Now, these cosplaying women have definitely lost the cartoon character and I don’t know if they still want to appeal to the female population, but they certainly do to the male customers.

So, here for the enjoyment of whoever wants to…