Week 8 Questions – Cosplay

  1. Referring to Mountfort et al. (2018), in what ways is cosplay analogous to citation?

Cosplay, more or so often refers to the promoted phenomenon known to be “costume play.” With establishes situated in both American and Japanese culture, it includes the demonstration of taking on the appearance of a character. The word “cosplay” itself correlates to the demonstration of getting changed into such ensembles in order to reproduce the presence of a character from a work of fiction. Mainstream types of cosplay include dressing yourself up in the outfits of characters from for example: computer games, comic books, well known anime, cartoons and additionally movies of more or so realistic nature, and so on.

Cosplay can tend to also include dressing for non-character costumes that could be unrelated to any series or movie. Such as for example dressing up in school uniform (often more popular amongst females). The concept of cosplay is generally viewed as a sort of execution workmanship, as the individual endeavors to move their personality to the character they are ‘cosplaying’ using ensembles, adornments, even motions and mentalities in an approach to embrace the persona of the character. It tends to be viewed as that the individual possesses the part of this character which is both true and intellectual. That being said, the idea and uses of cosplay in today’s time is a means of engagement in terms of culture. It can both be seen in person ( especially in conventions of manga/anime or conventions such as comic con/armageddon) as well as on the online community. Asides from that they (cosplayers) also tend to have their own cosplay communities (Mountfort et al, 2018).

The idea of cosplay is very different due to an element which then isolates it from other means of costume exhibitions like festivals, theater or circus. The element being that cosplay relies generally upon messages from present or overall popular types of media. A source or a reference text is required, and this is the place the fundamental motivation for a cosplay is gotten from. Another component which recognizes cosplay from theater or potentially screen exhibitions is simply the length of the given overall execution.

A cosplayer doesn’t reproduce/showcase the whole content/plot of their picked text. They often just perform what can be called ‘portions’ of the first source of the text, ones which the cosplayer himself/herself sift through as being critical to the real exhibition. In correlation to that, cosplay can be viewed as a type of reference as cosplayers ordinarily reference their picked text, and play out a large number of citational acts (Mountfort et al, 2018). This is more or so because it is the cosplayer’s own costumed body which at that point goes about as the content or as a ‘cite’ referring to a book, on such accounts of cosplay, this would be the particular media source which is picked by the cosplayer to be performed. This overall brings the theme of citation to full circle.

References:

Mountfort, P. Pierson, Smith, A. Geczy, A. (2018) Planet Cosplay Intellect Books.

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