Confessions of a Girl Geek: Cosplay
I’d like to start off by explaining a little bit about what CGG will be. Mostly it’s gonna be me hopping on some topic or another from the geekdom and giving you something to chew on about it. I promise to at least try not to sound soapboxy about certain topics, but we will just have to see how it goes. XD Alrighty, that being said, here we go!
Confessions of a Girl Geek presents…
COSPLAY
As someone who loves cosplaying at conventions and at Halloween and… basically any other time of the year I can get away with it, I felt it would be a great intro topic for me to cover.
For those of you who may not know what cosplaying is, here’s a quick definition for you: “Literally ‘Costume Play.’ Dressing up and pretending to be a fictional character (usually a sci-fi, comic book, or anime character).” – Urban Dictionary
The trouble with cosplay, as many, many people have pointed out to me, is that a lot of the people inclined to cosplay aren’t exactly the kind of people who “should” be cosplaying. Whether we want to admit it or not, many denizens of the geekdom tend not to fit the body types of the characters they wish to portray. I myself am well aware how difficult it is to cosplay as someone like, say, Black Widow. (Whom many of you will recognize from the Avengers and the second Iron Man movie.)
A great deal of characters from animes, videogames, and comic books tend to have admittedly inhuman proportions, and that can be very off-putting to some people. On the flip-side are the people who don’t care and dress up as the character anyway.
The thing to understand about cosplay is that a lot of the people who participate in it are doing it because they love these characters and want to pay homage to them by dressing up as them. So yeah, you’re going to get flat-chested girls dressed as Rangiku Matsumoto from Bleach and Bayonetta. You’re also going to see fat girls dressed as Misa Misa from Death Note and Harley Quinn from Batman. Lanky boys dressed as Dante from Devil May Cry and Thor.
Granted, you’ll also see people like my friend Courtney who looks like Final Fantasy X-2 Rikku incarnate, body type and all, but that isn’t always the norm. For every hot cosplayer, male or female, you have at least 20 people who are too tall/short, skinny/fat, old/young, etc. to play the characters.
Another reason people love to cosplay, besides it being a form of homage, is to show off our skills as creative people. Some of these people have MAD sewing/crafting/carpentry/welding/everything else skills. There is a reason that every convention has a costume contest. A lot of it has to do with craftsmanship. People spend months, and sometimes whole years putting together these costumes and places like conventions are where they go to show off all of their hard work. They might not look good in it to you, but they spent a lot of blood, sweat and tears making it and by golly, I bet you anything they’re pretty darned proud of their work.
And then we have things like crossplay. I’ll just point you to this link instead. It explains it way better than I ever could: http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2011/08/crossplay_anime_manga.php?page=4
Cosplay is a wide-spread phenomenon in the geekdoms. It is a fun, creative and admittedly liberating way of showcasing your love for your favorite characters, your mad skillz or maybe just your ability to be someone else for a day. Any way you look at it, cosplaying is E for Everyone and should be enjoyed by those bold enough to try it out.
If you still don’t believe me, check out the links below. Fem!Geek, out.
http://fuckyeahfatcosplay.tumblr.com/
http://www.cosplay.com/costumes/showcase/p1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t4m6CrBUvWw#!
We would love to give credit where it’s due, if you know where something comes from or who it should be attributed to let us know here and we will get on that asap
(after all we can all be awesome together, right?)
