Letters to the Editor
smallfox
Published Letters: 111 Editor's Choice: 8
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@ Juliebird
[Read the article: Peep this: Anime eyes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm wondering -- is your exposure to cosplay and "cosplay as lifestyle" limited to what you've witnessed in passing, or people you've talked to who are parading around "normal life" in costume? I've been involved both as an insider and outsider-facilitator in several costuming and alternative fashion hobbies and I must say, what you quote as the norm is fairly rare. A very liberal estimate would put the predominance of that sort of hobbist around 20%. That leaves about 80% of participants normal people with an unusual hobby, which gets indulged, on average, 1-3 weekends a year. A lot of people like the hobby because, yes, it's escapism (so is doing Civil War recreation) but it also gives people a chance to make things, which can be a big deal for crafty people with desk jobs. They enjoy constructing elaborate props, they enjoy the attention they get, akin to the attention a character actor at Disney World gets from kids, from fans. It's a way to be socialable and popular for a couple days. I did it periodically and casually for a few years simply because I liked to sew, and the scope of creativity in every day clothing is narrow. It was fun and challenging to make something totally off the wall once or twice a year. It was enjoyable, and when I stopped consuming the original product, I moved on to other hobby-crafts. It's really not that incomprehensible, and for most people it *is* confined to those few weekends a year, not something they do daily after work.
Also, you appear to be conflating fashion with costuming. The big "Alice bows" are more often than not affiliated with street clothing, and while expensive, pointing out the several hundred dollars the outfit cost as bizarre is not really on-point, unless you simply want to point out how much people spend on clothing you find ugly. Though mimicked at costuming events by people who dress normally day-to-day, the fashion itself is not a costume, and a discussion of why people like to wear gothic lolita (and/or live a "lolita lifestyle") is a completely different discussion than why people want to dress up like fictitious anime characters.
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@ Julie
[Read the article: Peep this: Anime eyes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]1-in-5 is the max for a very liberal definition of "too into it." It depends on who's defining "too into it," of course, as some people think they all are. (I have a wide variety of hobbies, am a grad student, am in a healthy relationship, etc, so I tend to look at people with no other hobbies, even if perfectly emotionally healthy, as being part of that 20%). If we only want to consider people who truly need to step back and take a dose of reality (i.e. they spend into debt for the hobby, have trouble dating real humans, costume outside of events, etc), the percentage is much, much lower. I know for certain that the prevalence of World of Warcraft addiction is significantly higher than the prevalence of being too invested in your pikachu pjs.
As for the money, it is a sinkhole, but so are most adolescent hobbies. I actually did make costumes for others at one point, but that was before the big influx of budget-priced, massed produced costumes from Chinese seamstresses following the recent surge in popularity of anime. The majority of what you're seeing now is cheap and imported, certainly not out of the range of the average teenager with an allowance/babysitting gig. Average prices run about $50 - $120, clustering around $65. This priced me out of the market for things I enjoyed making. At the time I was working in the hobby, most of my customers were early-20-something -- so employed without kids -- and were spending a few hundred dollars on a costume rather than a snowboard or Coach handbag. (Teenagers have almost always turned to self-made, or parent/grandparent-made costumes.) SCA, hardcore Renfaire, steampunk, etc, fans tend to spend a whole lot more on their costumes because they tend to use them longer and they require more time, skill, and costly materials. There's a little bit of overlap, but by and large anime costuming is its own unique beast, and more accessible to many since it runs the gamut from basically-free-from-Goodwill to several grand.
Escapism, adulation and imitation of a respected character, and self-image probably drive a lot of the hobby. Mainstream people dress and get haircuts like celebrities for the same reasons. When your object of admiration is stylized 2D, I suppose it only follows that things like these contacts would be available to make you look more like your idol. It's a lot less extreme than plastic surgery, at any rate, and there's something seductive about a temporary but noticable change in one's appearance. Is it immature? Perhaps, but of course the hobby is vastly populated by the under-25 set, which suggest that lots of people grow out of it and move on.
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wait -
[Read the article: Stop rape, punish victims?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the UK pays you for being raped? Why are we not talking about this instead?
And why is it so immediately offensive and anti-feminist to address the fact that people put themselves in situations in which they have a higher likelihood of being victimized? If someone runs out into traffic and gets hit due to negligence of the driver, the driver is still at fault but that doesn't change the fact that the person ran out into traffic. How is it not useful to teach teenagers not to put themselves in vulnerable positions to begin with? One can be not only raped, but robbed, beaten, run over, arrested, etc etc, to say nothing of other risks of getting plastered and trying to get home.