Referring to Mountfort et al. (2018), in what ways is cosplay analogous to citation?
Cosplay is a play on the words, Costume and Role play. Where people will dress up and role play as their favorite characters or ideas from different fandoms and genres (Mckay, 2019).
Cosplay is an act where people take characters and ideas and form them into a costume that they can transform themselves into that character or idea. Yet it isn’t just a costume. Cosplay also boils down to understanding the character and/or idea so completely that you adopt the idea and mannerism that the character may have, how they behave, talk and walk and how they would be distinguished to others.
Cosplay becomes a performance art (McIssac, 2012), when people adopt how the character would act in real life. Believed to have originated from Japan when students would dress up as characters from their favorite anime’s and manga’s, the trend spread and now there are conventions where people go to show off and embrace the cosplay and the characters they have become, places like Armageddon also allow people to learn and create and come up with new ideas on how they will incorporate characters into their costumes and vice versa.
One of the ways that makes cosplay analogous is that the idea for most characters comes from somewhere, whether it is a book, film, show, anime, videogame or other game the ideas for cosplay are usually already fabricated by a fandom that already exists, the people who cosplay as characters usually only put their own spin on the design while researching ways that the charatcers acts because that character or idea has already been formed before. Mountfort (2018), says that ‘It can be regarded as a form of citation’ when addressing cosplay due to the fact that people take the idea from somewhere that has already composed the character. It can also be regarded as a citation as although characters has already been made and have stories regarding them, ‘cosplayers’ can take the ideas presented from the characters and put their own spin on them making each cosplay not an identical copy and using this to new meaning to characters and broadening how the characters themselves can be perceived.
Cosplay is the costume version of writing a fanfiction dedicated to a fandom, only instead of writing, you are wearing your depiction of a character or idea to transform into that character as they have been created. With the idea of this and the pervious points I believe cosplay is analogous to citation.
References:
McIssac, M. (2012). What is cosplay and why do people do it? Retrieved From https://ifanboy.com/articles/what-is-cosplay-and-why-do-people-do-it/
Mountfort, P. (2018). Cosplay as Citation. In P. Mountfort, A. Peirson-Smith, & A. Geczy, Planet Cosplay (pp. 21-24). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press Mckay, R. (2019). Cosplay101: Everything you need to know about it. Who.com. Retrieved From https://www.who.com.au/what-is-cosplay
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