Mrs. Evil Captor alerted me ot the fact that costumes from the anime Bible Black are getting to be common in cosplay at cons. Thing is, Bible Black is an ADULT anime, in fact, it’s a hentai, a hardcore adult anime. Hardcore as in XXX ish.
(For the uninitiated, cosplay is just wearing costumes from favorite anime, SF, comics and so forth, and cons are conventions devoted to science fiction, comics, animation and so forth.)
I did some research – I did a Google image search on “Bible Black” and cosplay and discovered that there were indeed a lot of Bible Black cosplayers out there. (You can do the same, even with moderate safe search on, you get a lot of hits because the particular costumes that Bible Black cosplayers wear is kinda tame – a Japanese schoolgirl outfit). This is true of hentai cosplay generally – the costumes are mildly sexy at most. In many cases you would not know the hentai costumes from non-hentai costumes if you weren’t familiar with the hentai themselves because they’re very much in keeping with the general run of hentai costumes. I also visited a few cosplay fansites and read comments from the wearers … they seemed to think they were “neat costumes” and little more.
I did more research and discovered that cosplayers have been known to wear gear from La Blue Girl, Wordworth, Kite, Dragon Pink, G-Taste, Venus 5, Devil Hunter Yohko and Cutey Honey (which is not so much of a hentai but does feature nudity) to cons. There may be others, I didn’t bother going through the names of every hentai I know of.
Point is, there’s a lot of hentai costumes sliding into cosplay. Not that surprising, in the sense that a lot of young adults are into cosplay and would tend to be more aware of and friendly to hentai costumes than the younger wearers. But it is surprising in the sense that there are many cosplay fans who make a big deal out of how much they hate hentai.
Judging from the hentai-inspired costumes that I have found, the criteria for which hentai are chosen for cosplay to be that it has to possess an outfit that the general run of cosplay fans will find snappy, generall the characters are warrior types: La Blue Girl, Kite, Devil Hunter Yohko and Cutey Honey definitely fill that bill, or they have to be “crossover” hentai that have gained some measure of attention among general anime fans – G-Taste and Kite for example.
I don’t have any strong opinion on this topic, though I generally like it when sexual aspects of culture spill out of the ghetto, so I have to say I generally approve of this trend.
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. You want the crowd to be weird, but benign weird – and while for you and me it may be healthy mainstreaming of eros in culture but you know there’ll be a couple of Losers around taking it as an invitation to act up.