Blogpost # 3: Discrimination in Cosplay

"Yuck"," Weird"," What's up with that?".... These are only some of the insights we have when we met people who is kinda different from us. We often judge others because of their physical appearance, indifference and social status. And to extreme point, others were being bullied or discriminated. This is not really new to us, since in every part of the world there are always cases like these.

Sad to say, Discrimination is one of the notions that is already part of the norms in our society. Being hooked into Cosplay and being an "otaku" are only some of the reasons as to why people are being discriminated. Actually, in cosplay alone there are lot of discrimination that can be sighted.  Some of these are the "cosplayers" itself having different sense of fashion, cross dressing and on how well the cosplayers imitate a certain character.

 According to an article, The Multiple Patterns of J-Rock: Insights on Crossdressing and Crossplaying, written by Paula Vicol," In the western part of the world, crossdressing is seen as something ranging from unusual to wrong, and most of the time crossdressing as a form of art falls victim to people’s ignorance. For many of those who interacted for the first time with Visual Kei it came as a shock to find out that “that cute girl” was actually a boy."

Crossplayer is the same as crossdressing in cosplay. Actually in visual-kei, it does not have any boundaries in being a male or female, it is pretty much universal so you could be whoever you want to become. In this article, it featured an interview on a crossplayer where this crossplayer had problems just because he is a "crossplayer".
 According to him, "Some people try to start fights with you, but it’s easy to just walk away and ignore them. (laughs) That’s what I usually do in that kind of situation. I like to look like I do, and I won’t change my style to please other people around me. If they don’t like it, that’s their problem. I think everyone should be able to look however they want to.”

There are lot of cases like these. People would make fun of you and even would start a fight. But the best thing to do is to ignore them and Don't change your self as well as your style just to please people around you. Another interview was featured, and the problem is some of the cosplayers bash her just because she is fat and she is not suited in imitating characters that are skinny.As a result, she lost her self-confidence and even thought of giving up as a cosplayer. But in the end, a friend of her told her that she looks like a fictional character named, Miyavi and she started cosplaying again. Until now, she is still cosplaying her favorite character and regained her self-confidence that was once lost.

These are only some of the problems encountered by most of the cosplayers. Although cosplay is now popular, there are still some people who use their insecurities to bash and look down to other people. Imitation is not really bad and being different is not a crime. But why most people still discriminate others?

Cosplaying became popular because of  some discriminations. But thanks to those discriminations, cosplaying became more known and was supported by lot than being hated. The good thing about those cosplayers are they are not afraid being looked down and they believed in their selves than those unimportant persons who keeps on insulting them. We cannot stop discrimination and people who thinks bad about cosplaying since its their perception. But the most important thing is that we know who we are and we stand proudly on being different from them.