Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (Frenchie Lunning)
Samantha Tecson, Guest Contributor
Imagine wandering into San Diego Comic Con where overwhelming amounts of people, Hollywood entertainers, video games, comics, anime, and industry marketers flood your vision. You see through the sea of attendees, individuals donning costumes from franchises you both do and do not recognize. These people dressed to the nerdy nines are cosplayers, an integral part of fandom culture. Cosplay is more than just a portmanteau of “costume” and “play” as it involves fans of particular fandom products (comics, manga, anime, video games, etc.) embodying a character from it. Commonly, cosplayers are attached to the anime community and anime conventions, but they also appear in themed cafes, on social media sites, and in other geeky venues such as Dragon Con or PAX. Beyond US gatherings, cosplay is a global phenomenon that traces back to Japan. With fandoms and different fan-generated content being globalized, the nature of cosplaying has changed since its humble beginnings. In Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence, scholar Frenchy Lunning pieces together a history of cosplay, exploring the multifaceted world of cosplayers. She employs cultural studies and anthropology to examine the questions of how cosplayers cosplay, who cosplays, and why they do so.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure cosplay gathering at CSU Fullerton’s Titan Con 2017 (source: author)
Lunning opens with a fantastic history of the cosplay community which she addresses is painstakingly difficult to piece together due to the scattering of sources. Despite that, she’s able to approximate the origins of cosplay, the decades of changes to perception, and the flows of how cosplayers performed. Reader looking for a comprehensive history of cosplay now have one. From there, Lunning utilizes cultural studies and anthropology to discuss the ways cosplayers “mask” themselves, “become” a character, perform in cosplay, and interact with fandoms. Due to these sections’ heavy emphasis on theory and method – French theorists like Pierre Bordieu and Michel Foucault make appearances – readers who struggle with traditional academic writing and references may struggle to understand what Lunning is saying. Although I’m a graduate-level media scholar, I still had issues grasping the fine points of how Lunning was applying some scholars’ ideas to her research and what their importance was.
Later parts of the book complicate the idea that cosplay is “only” about becoming one’s favorite character. Furthermore, these segments illustrate the sometimes unknown specific cultural or social ramifications a cosplayer may face. Lunning address that in the US and Japan being an otaku (fans obsessed with anime, manga, gaming, or Japanese pop culture) or nerd is generally socially unacceptable, with those labeled as such needing specific spaces, like conventions, to feel welcomed. However, these spaces have their own troubles because of the layers of “play” cosplayers have as their characters, with fans of the characters or series they are cosplaying, and as cosplay groups. These different styles of play enacted while cosplaying allow for the interpretations of fandom interactions and fetishization of series, character, or toward a cosplayer. As someone who once cosplayed, it was interesting to see an academic discuss the barriers present for cosplayers across different cultures and spaces. Due to cosplay’s growing mainstream popularity and the nature of online interactions, it’s hard to see when these complex issues of play and social standing are confronted. In some pages, I didn’t appreciate how Lunning alludes to larger issues in the cosplay world such as fatphobia only to state that most cosplayers overlook these issues, as everyone can and should be able to cosplay whoever they want. This viewpoint overlooks who are most affected by the ongoing body, racial, sexuality, skin tone, and gender-based disputes in cosplay.
World Cosplay Summit 2019 contestant group photo in Nagoya, Japan (source: World Cosplay Summit website https://www.worldcosplaysummit.jp/en/)
The book’s not without shortcomings. By painting a mostly positive worldview of the cosplay community, Lunning doesn’t highlight its problematic qualities. Lunning does mention gatekeeping processes in the community, yet she almost speaks of it as a relic of the past or an easy-to-overcome obstacle. Cosplayers across the world face different gatekeepers with the commonalities usually circling around anti-Blackness, colorism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and body shaming. Lunning’s decision to paint cosplayers as social outcasts is not inherently wrong, as she shows why and how cosplayers are treated differently. However, this gives fuel to reductive internet sentiments such as “gamers are minorities” and “anime fans are repressed,” overlooking the fact that even within socially-rejected groups, marginalized people still get treated worse.
Lunning’s assertions in the book that anyone can cosplay is correct, but for many, it’s simply not the reality. The fact that Lunning’s book was released in 2022 means that at some point in her research, she would have seen the negative reactions cosplayers receive especially as social media grew by leaps and bounds from when her research was first conducted in the 1990. I couldn't help but think of whenever Black cosplayers post a cosplay picture on Instagram or Twitter and quickly receive a mass of racist comments. Even if Lunning wanted to leave those discussions for other scholars to cover, she could have mentioned these issues in her chapters, rather than pushing them to the side or ignoring them. Lunning’s tendency to see the cosplay world through a positive lens emphasizes the need for community felt by socially-devalued cosplayers, but it tends to overlook the reality that nerdy spaces often exclude or harm marginalized peoples.
Overall, Cosplay The Fictional Mode of Existence by Frenchy Lunning is a good way to gain insight into the world of cosplay. Her years of research and personal involvement in the cosplay community, as well as her background in cultural studies, gives a credible perspective on the cosplay community, one not framed around belittling the practice.
Frenchie Lunning, Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Review copy provided by press.
