Keywords

1 Introduction

Cosplay is a fan practice in which the body of the cosplayer (who takes on various roles such as craftsperson, performer, editor, distributor, discussant, and audience) is crucial, both to their own performance and experience in real time and to the creation of digital media, which subsequently is disseminated online and used by themselves and other fans for various purposes. This chapter complements Emerald King’s discussion of gender and performance, examining the concept of authenticity through the lens of sexuality and gender in three types of cosplay: crossplay, “trans” cosplay, and eroticized cosplay. It suggests that while some cosplay practices are the site of deliberate and politicized articulations of gender, others move away from purposeful meaning-making and questions of identity-based gender and sexuality, privileging affective response to the various bodies and images in the fandoms in which they participate: the bodies of characters, of cosplay performers, and of the fans themselves, in person and online. The way in which these performances are received and evaluated is complicated by the concept of “authenticity,” which is valued highly within many fan communities but which can be interpreted in different ways, leading to the devaluation of certain types of cosplay, particularly of subgenres like erotic and pornographic cosplay that lie outside the mainstream.

The cosplay examined here is disseminated and used on the Japanese-speaking and English-speaking Web, primarily through cosplay galleries, forums, and social media. The digital has become an inextricable and vital part of cosplay: activities in the flesh, while involving their own unique pleasures, are invariably mediated digitally and become media to be disseminated, consumed, commented on, and used as inspiration. One of the central pleasures of and motives for doing cosplay in the flesh is being looked at, with “the ritualized practice of posing for photos” (Rahman et al. 2012, p. 331). Today, much observation of a cosplayer takes place online, via that cosplayer’s digital image. This analysis mainly makes use of video game cosplay examples, particularly Square Enix’s popular Final Fantasy series (1987 onward). Compared to Japanese cultural products like manga and anime, video games and cosplay both require a level of embodied engagement and activity (Lamerichs 2015, p. 132) as well as the production and consumption of digital content. Further, in terms of Japanese pop culture exports, video games are the most widely used abroad by a large margin.

The next section introduces two types of gendered cosplay performance that in broader social terms might be considered “non-normative”: crossplay and transgender (or more generally gender minority) cosplay, both of which are contrasted and discussed in fan commentary in terms of authenticity to the character and to the performer. The final section proceeds to a discussion of the genre of erotic cosplay, which further complicates the “authenticity” goals of mainstream cosplay. Utilizing affect theory (Massumi 1995; Galbraith 2009; Paasonen 2011), where affect is defined as a kind of gut reaction (Paasonen 2011), something “generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion” (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, p. 1) which cause the potential for bodily action, we will see that these cosplay practices can contain both affective and social or meaning-making dimensions, as affective intensity is what sparks social responses such as specific emotions and interpretations (Lamerichs 2018, p. 206). However, as the level of bodily engagement intensifies, particularly in a sexual way, the semiotic aspect decreases. It is important to point out at this stage that the social, or representation, is not superseded by affect (except, perhaps, in the instant, it is viscerally experienced), nor can it be entirely separated from it. This is something on which most affect theorists agree. In Susanna Paasonen’s work:

gut reactions, intensities of experience, bodily sensations, resonances, and ambiguous feelings[…]are impossible to mark apart from articulations of emotion[…][which are] imprinted[…]with personal histories, values politics, and many things besides. (2011, p. 387)

We are only able to make sense of affective responses by parsing them as emotions, which are tied to systems of representation (Paasonen 2011). This means that cosplay can make deliberate and even activist identity statements, and at the same time encompass and transcend apolitical, “fannish” gender play in which affective pleasure often supersedes questions of representation.

2 Aiming at Authenticity: Gendered Cosplay

Much cosplay scholarship takes an interest in its gendered aspects, particularly in the context of cosplay in Japan, where it has been discussed in terms of how it can impact specifically female resistance to normative gender discourses (Hjorth 2011; Okabe 2012; Tanaka 2009). One such cosplay practice often explored in both academic and English-speaking fan contexts is “crossplay,” which, in its most straightforward definition, involves cosplaying a character with the opposite gender to the cosplayer (Gn 2011, p. 588), e.g., a cosplayer who identifies as a woman cosplaying a male character.

There is also another, less widespread and somewhat marginalized type of cosplay that, on the surface, appears to be closely linked to crossplay but which is newer to academia. Unlike crossplay, this cosplay subcategory does not have a standard term by which it is referred to in English or Japanese; it is called “trans” cosplay by some of its practicing fans, so this is the term that will be used here. It involves cosplay by fans who identify as transgender (though some fan definitions also include non-binary and other gender minority cosplayers). Within the cosplay community, there are online groups set up by and for such cosplayers, with dedicated cosplay galleries, discussion forums, and so on, some of which are more than a decade old. The links and disparities between trans cosplay and crossplay are articulated in fan discussions on these forums: in particular the perceived differences in aims, pleasures, and authenticities experienced by these respective cosplay subcategories.

The following subsection suggests that crossplay, while including some identity-based meaning-making, generally prioritizes a set of values based on fan knowledge and affection for a character, relegating gender to a relatively insignificant role in the hierarchy of “good” or “authentic” cosplay. The next shows that some trans cosplayers set themselves up in contrast to crossplayers by claiming additional aims and pleasures based on a sense of strongly felt and fixed gender identity. These trans cosplayers hope to be accepted and recognized as the gender of the character they are cosplaying. Here, the cosplayer’s material body is subsumed by the identification they feel with the game character and the wish to deliberately “express their own identity through a costume” (Lamerichs 2011, n.p.): the authenticity they value is not only to the character but also to their own gender identity.

These subsections demonstrate that cosplay can incorporate the deliberate politicizing of identity performance in a way that is intricately involved with social signification and meaning-making, and also be the site of affect-based, playful pleasures that have little to do with engaging with essentialist gender and sexual norms.

2.1 Crossplay

To begin examining authenticity and gender in crossplay, it is necessary to take into account the previous literature covering cosplayer demographics as these may account for the way cosplay in the past has been written of as though it was an exclusively female fan practice, involving issues of gender pertaining particularly to women. Just as certain video game fandoms still tend to be persistently, though mistakenly, characterized as largely male in the press, the reverse is often true in discussions of cosplay in academia, especially those relating to cosplay in Japan; but the practices of male cosplayers and those who do identify as gender minorities can also provide valuable additions to an analysis of cosplay fandoms.

Perhaps the trend in cosplay studies to focus on female cosplays is because, as Daisuke Okabe states, the “majority of cosplayers in Japan are women” (2012, p. 225). His paper argues that “cosplayers see their audience as other women fans and not the heterosexual male gaze” (2012, p. 241). This is an insight into one sector of the cosplay world; however, there are multiple aspects of cosplay that may not fit this argument, including but not limited to male cosplayers, gender minority cosplayers and, as will be discussed later, cosplayers whose work is deliberately eroticized and almost certainly aimed at attracting a male sexual gaze. It is thus imperative to also consider other types of cosplayers alongside the assumed standard female fan creating content and pleasure for other women.

Having said this, statistically there are rather more female cosplayers globally than male (King 2013), in both Japanese- and English-speaking online fandoms. For example, a survey of cosplay galleries on the international cosplay photo website Cosplay.com (2014), which yielded over 4000 instances of photoshoots featuring characters from the perennially popular RPG Final Fantasy VII and its spin-offs (Square Enix 1997–2020), showed a ratio of approximately three female-identifying cosplayers to one male. The popularity of FtM crossplay in fandoms of Japanese games like Final Fantasy, then, could be partially accounted for, not by fan desire to change identity or to engage in some deliberately subversive gender performance but by simple demographics: male characters are very popular, and someone is going to cosplay them. Sheer numbers dictate that some of these cosplayers will be women. As Tōko Tanaka (2009, p. 40) suggests, “in many cases, the leaning of cosplayers towards ‘dansō’ [women cosplaying male characters] probably happens unconsciously,” without any conscious decision to perform a “non-normative” role (Lamerichs 2015, p. 141). However, this explanation is of course not meant to be a final or singular answer to the question of the motivations and pleasures of crossplay.

Female fans cosplaying male characters do comprise the great majority of crossplayers. Female-to-male (FtM) crossplay is known in Japan as “dansō” (男装), literally “dressing as a man”; given the lack of standardized English terminology for this practice in cosplay fandoms, this chapter uses the Japanese term, as well as “josō” (女装) to refer to the rarer practice of male-to-female (MtF) crossplay. Tanaka states that many cosplayers perform dansō (2009, p. 39), but makes very little mention of josō or reasons for the lack thereof. Dansō has become the majority crossplay in game cosplay, and this chapter suggests that it can provide a potentially non-normative performance of masculinity that is nevertheless not politicized in crossplayer commentary and which has been criticized by some trans cosplay commentators.

Joel Gn (2011, p. 586) claims that “there has been a growing fascination with… ‘ambivalent’ bodies that display shifting gender markers within contemporary Japanese animation,” games, etc., and that this trend is reflected in the cosplay world. It could be said that dansō serves to encourage this, not only by the choice of male characters being crossplayed but also by the ways in which they are performed. Okabe (2012, p. 238) states that female cosplayers who look good dressed as men tend to be popular in the community. However, Shinpei Yashima (2009, p. 275) points out that “the ‘male characters’ chosen are not masculine. There are no female cosplayers wishing to transform into macho characters.” Setting aside the problematic definition of “masculine” for a moment, the second half of her statement, that one never sees traditionally “macho” or hyper-masculine characters being crossplayed, rings somewhat true: the Cosplay.com galleries for FFVII character Barret, one of the few characters from the game whose design could be considered typically “macho,” do not contain any examples of crossplay, whereas the majority of the other male characters display many instances of it. Instead, there “are only dansō cosplayers who imitate androgynous characters or those like Sephiroth from FF who look…tall and beautiful” (Yashima 2009, pp. 275–276). Yashima’s citation of one of the most popular FFVII characters, Sephiroth, reflects the prominence of “androgynous” or “tall and beautiful” male characters within the Final Fantasy series, and their popularity in crossplay.

The proliferation of dansō in cosplay of these types of characters is perhaps less due to any ideological gender-centric stance than to the fact that the notions of “authenticity” and “[c]ommitment and adherence to the original character are important” (Rahman, Wing-Sun and Hei-man Cheung 2012, p. 326) in the cosplay community. Most female cosplayers’ features and builds are better suited to achieving a close resemblance to androgynous or bishōnen male characters than to “macho” ones, so these are the characters they choose to cosplay. This can be seen in the rates of crossplay in the Cosplay.com galleries for the various male FFVII characters, which rise as the characters display more recognizably androgynous or so-called “feminine” visual traits: from nothing for the hyper-masculine Barret, through an average of 60% for Cloud and Sephiroth, to 91% for Kadaj, who has particularly androgynous features.

Returning to the definition of masculinity, the assimilation of the kawaii aesthetic in wider Japanese culture, as well as in Western fandoms of Japanese media, might cast doubt on Yashima’s (2009) assertion that the male characters being mimicked by crossplayers are “not masculine”; to be sure, according to the standards of heretofore dominant and even stereotypical masculinity, they are not. But perhaps, through the cultural capital accorded kawaii in the last two decades, including the rise in male beauty practices (Miller 2010), definitions of masculinity are expanding to include traits previously defined as “feminine.” Hjorth (2011, p. 80) suggests that the use of kawaii in male and female characters “in such key games as Final Fantasy, has afforded many ‘flexible’ modes of gender performativity.” Talking specifically about Western fans of such games, she argues that fan use of Japanese texts like Final Fantasy can create a space in which to perform alternatives to binary gender norms through the fans’ attachment to characters with kawaii visual traits:

For non-Japanese, such forms of […] self-expression through the kawaii—characterized by youthful feminine or androgynous styles […] have provided an avenue for creative identity formation and gender performativity that seemingly transcends the gender tropes within Western culture […] (Hjorth 2011, p. 142)

This performativity is not, however, necessarily a deliberate engagement with or critique of gender binaries as such. Hjorth (2011, p. 75) earlier defines kawaii as a type of “affective” language. If we think of the affective in Brian Massumi’s terms as “a prepersonal intensity” (1987, p. x), a response to another body (physical or digital) that occurs before it comes into contact with social signification, it could be said that fan cosplay of male characters displaying kawaii traits in many cases has little to do with a desire to make a political or identity-based statement. It is rather based on a visceral and unreasoned attraction leading to an emotional connection and a cosplay performance that still incorporates the social (in the form of a set of rules based on peer-reviewed accuracy and authenticity to the character) while disregarding considerations of gender norms.

Thus, it may be that dansō crossplayers engage in cosplay of male characters of Japanese texts by highlighting their androgynous and gender-fluid aspects, not from motives of gender politics but through the influence of visual ideals generated on a peer level within the cosplay community Japanese pop culture more broadly. Participants in Cosplay.com’s Crossplay Construction ForumFootnote 1 have made it clear that, in the words of one user, “cosplay is cosplay. Gender and sexuality are trifling concerns compared with what series, what character and whether the safety pins will hold” (Faust 2003; usernames of forum users are altered for anonymity). This expresses the hierarchy of priorities among many crossplayers, some of whom also engage in regular (non-crossplay) cosplay: crossplay is not entirely free expression, as there are many user-generated rules and categories to be observed if one is to do “good” cosplay; but the most important are related to fan knowledge and fidelity to the look and personality of the character, rather than ensuring that genders match up. For these practitioners, insofar as they express their thoughts online, the point of cosplay is showing love for the character (Faststart 2013); they do it because they like it, not with any “deeper meaning” (sweetsin 2013). From this perspective, it would appear that for these crossplayers, the “playful engagement with the animated body and their own bears minimal relation to an expression of a certain gender identity” (Gn 2011, p. 587), but is based more on how attracted they are to the character (King 2013). Indeed, there are many members of these sites who do both crossplay and “straight” cosplay.

Nevertheless, it is suggested in cosplay forums that for the smaller group of MtF josō cosplayers, hegemonic gender norms have more influence, multiplying the pressures of social signification beyond the fannish hierarchy operating in dansō crossplay. In many countries, including Japan, it is still considered more “deviant” or “transgressive” for men to cross the dominant gender binary by crossdressing (outside a comedy context) than for women. A journal entry on gender in cosplay in the Trans-Cosplayers deviantART group points out that trans women and MtF crossdressers receive more criticism from society in general because what society perceives as transvestitism seems far more taboo for a person born with a biologically male body (Sacredfire 2010; username altered for anonymity). Cosplay.com user “Maylane” agrees in the Cosplay Construction Forum that the same holds true in the cosplay world, where there is not as much judgment aimed at women crossplaying compared with men who have been more likely to worry about the social stigma around “appearing to” subvert masculine norms (Maylane 2008). While the user does not explicitly state what these norms are, it might reasonably be suggested that in the process of engaging in a non-normative MtF gender performance, the unhegemonic possibility of queerness could also be raised as the two concepts are still closely linked in Japan and in many Western societies. In Yashima’s evaluation, “[a]t the ground level of cosplay, ‘sexuality’ has more stability than ‘gender’” (2009, p. 289), suggesting that it is less acceptable within Japanese cosplay to display fluid sexuality than gender fluidity. This might become a cause of uneasiness to male cosplayers for whom josō is not intended to be a statement regarding either gender or sexuality. According to Gn (2011, p. 590), “a particular act of queer simulation—such as a man imitating a female animated character—is deviant in relation to the gendered norms that have been naturalized within the subject’s socio-cultural locus,” even if the male crossplayer was operating initially within the field of affect—a spark of affection for a character—or with the goal of creating an accurate costume, and had given little thought to questions of norms or deviance. Not participating in josō could thus be a measure “to avoid stigmatization by outsiders” (Okabe 2012, p. 235) or by insiders who are not knowledgeable about crossplay. Here, normative identity categories impose additional constraints on the affective pleasures of cosplay based on the specter of social stigmas attached to practices still perceived as “deviant” in wider society.

The above discussion shows that the various practices of both dansō and josō crossplay display a tendency to evade fixed identity-based statement-making, with motivations based more on affective attraction to a character and a desire to produce “authentic” cosplay. Nevertheless, affect and social signification or “meaning” are not necessarily mutually exclusive but exist in different levels of connection within fan communities. Through affective pleasure crossplay, and cosplay more generally, “becomes a creative, pleasurable gesture that is at once incompatible with, yet not external to, the discursive effects of the gendered body” (Gn 2011, p. 589). Therefore, it is important to acknowledge the potential for readings of gender subversion or transgression that could be made in these cosplay performances, even where a crossplayer has no particular intention of challenging normative gender ideals.

2.2 “Trans” Cosplay

This subsection turns to the motivations and pleasures of transgender cosplayers and the tensions some articulate between themselves and the more affect-based crossplay fans. It suggests that such cosplay not only expresses fannish affection but also explicitly seeks to produce meaning in terms of gender identity, adding another dimension of authenticity, not only to the characters but to the cosplayers themselves.

“Trans” cosplay is represented on a fan level by various online cosplay groups, which offer a number of definitions. The deviantART group “TG-Cosplay” states on its front pageFootnote 2 that it offers “a haven for transgendered cosplayers” (TG-Cosplay 2010), suggesting that its focus is on specifically transgendered fans. The “Trans-Cosplay” group on the same site defines trans cosplay a little more broadly, advertising itself as a “Support Group Community for Transgender, Intersex and Gender Variant Cosplayers…to express their chosen gender identity irrespective of their assigned biological sex at birth or current status in their Transition, whether it be pre-operative, post-operative, etc.” (Trans-Cosplayers 2010).Footnote 3 The phrase “gender variant,” in particular, could encompass a wide range of identifications. The support offered is not only for cosplay-related issues (costume construction, chest-binding, etc.) but also for living as a trans individual outside the world of cosplay. In Japan, there are fewer organized groups for gender minority cosplayers, but individual trans cosplayers are represented in both cosplay and mainstream media.

Yashima (2009, p. 288) comments on the gender fluidity that many scholars and crossplayers see in current cosplay: “In a cosplay setting…the forms of gender/sexuality expressed cannot be understood in terms of a ‘nature’ or ‘true identity.’” Despite this frequently expressed opinion, what English-speaking trans cosplay groups do appear to agree on is support for the concept of a “true” gender identity, not based on biological sex at birth but nevertheless essential: TG-Cosplay insists it was for “those of us who want our true, inner gender to be acknowledged,” while Trans-Cosplay explains that for “trans-cosplayers, dressing as a character of their gender is a tool used to further their attempts at…presenting their true gender to society” (2010). On the Japanese end, this is reflected in a newspaper interview with a transgender woman cosplayer, Hiromi, who upon first cosplaying as a female character and being perceived as a woman by the people observing her states that: “at last, I feel natural” (47 News 2019). This is one of the clearest distinctions to be made between crossplay and trans cosplay. Gn, in his paper supporting an affect-based analysis of cosplay, is doubtful of the efficacy of explicitly identity-based challenges to normative gender discourses as such an approach, “with its constant reference to established gender norms, precisely ‘re-inscribes’ the dominant ideology it claims to work against” (2011, p. 590). However, it must be considered that trans cosplayers are not necessarily attempting to move beyond or break down gender and sex binaries as such; rather, many are concerned with locating themselves on what they see as the “correct” side of the boundary line for them. They may be considered non-normative according to hegemonic discourse that states one’s gender should match one’s birth body, but most do not appear to wish to undo these categories entirely.

Further, these online communities, in addition to supporting cosplayers who locate themselves under the “trans” umbrella, also profess to have a didactic function which takes such groups beyond personal support for their members and into the realm of the political. For this reason, they also welcome cosplayers and fans who are not “trans” but who are interested in and supportive of trans people (although pictures in the groups’ galleries are usually required to be trans cosplay), with the aim of disseminating information and understanding of transgender issues in general as well as the motivations of trans cosplay. The front page of TG-Cosplay (2010) states that “[w]e hope to educate the world about alternative genders and sexualities,” and alignes itself specifically with “the LGBT movement.” The manifesto of this deviantART group, then, is explicitly political and activist, in contrast to groups that focus on crossplay. The Trans-Cosplay group also identifies with the LGBTQ community, displaying its alignment through the presence of banners on its main page linking to other LGBT-related groups on deviantART, such as “LGBT Cosplay” and “Rainbow-Support.”

The main motive of these groups, it seems, is to provide a space in which trans people can express their “true” identity and become part of a support network; and the choice of cosplay as the medium through which to do this surely has significance. The reason many trans cosplayers give, apart from the fan-based motives for cosplay more generally, is that cosplay is a space apart from the so-called real world (Chen 2007) and everyday life (Rahman et al. 2012). The author of the Trans-Cosplayers journal entry discussed above explains that for trans cosplayers, cosplaying a character that matches their gender is used to support their attempts to present their “true gender” to society and be understood. Dressing as a character of their gender is a “step outside” of their real lives, which may be the site of discrimination and misunderstanding (Sacredfire 2010).

It is important to note, however, that cosplay in this sense is not necessarily viewed by trans cosplayers as “a form of escapism” (Rahman et al. 2012, p. 333) or pure fantasy, as it may be for some other cosplayers; the “real” world here is not opposed to a wholly imaginary cosplay world. Rather, for these cosplayers, the gender they present through mimicking a particular character is more “true” or “real” than the one they are (mistakenly and because of their anatomical sex) often presumed by others to hold in everyday life. They “use cosplay to further their gender image to the world, as a means to present themselves in the right gender” (TG-Cosplay 2010). In this way, instead of an escapist space or a site of fantasy that is primarily playful, trans cosplay “presents an alternative reality that functions as a more humane and democratic society than the real world” (Chen 2007, p. 22). Contrary to the “dreamlike states of hyperreality” (Rahman et al. 2012, p. 333), which scholars argue define many types of cosplay performances, for trans cosplayers it is a gendered performance that they feel to be more “real” or truthful than their everyday lives. This is how trans cosplay can be demonstrated to differ from crossplay and other forms of cosplay, where affect and playfulness are of great importance.

Nevertheless, this alternative reality in which one’s “true” gender can be presented is not without its difficulties, which many trans cosplayers in their online commentaries link directly with crossplay. One aspect of this appears to be connected to dansō cosplayers and the type of androgynous masculinity they tend to present. The author of the Trans-Cosplayers journal article reflects the opinions of Yashima (2009) and Okabe (2012) that female crossplayers, who are to be widely seen in most areas of cosplay, do not seek to give a traditionally “masculine” performance when they mimic male characters:

Crossplaying fangirls do not attempt to make themselves more masculine, and do not state that they are attempting to present as male. This creates a stereotype, a false benchmark, for watchers to think of all cosplayers they assume to be anatomically female as “just crossplaying fangirls,” disregarding the idea that there could be something more to the situation. (Sacredfire 2010)

The prevalence of dansō crossplay in the cosplay world, argues the author, can have a detrimental impact on the goal of some FtM trans cosplayers to present a “real” gender that is at odds with their anatomical sex; for, as one trans user states in the article’s comments section, “when I cosplay as a male character, this is not cross-dressing. I am a man” (active-bones in Sacredfire 2010). However, observers instead mistakenly view such trans cosplayers as “standard” crossplayers, who, according to active-bones, are getting completely different outcomes and pleasures from cosplay than trans people, making it more difficult for the intentions of trans cosplayers to be perceived. Though these trans cosplayers are arguably using cosplay as a form of coming- being-out, the dominance of “standard” crossplay, and the assumption that this is what they are doing, merely produces “different region[s] of opacity” (Butler 1991, p. 25): their performance is not understood in the way they intend it, and they are therefore forced to remain closeted as far as the cosplay world is concerned. It could be said that the author here is viewing the more playful and affect-based pleasures of crossplay as contrasting and even detrimental to the serious business of gender presentation in some trans cosplay.

Other fan commentary on the article also displays agreement with the author’s opinions. User “Prof-Nusken” points out that people regard crossplay as standard in the cosplay world and will not modify their ideas to include “transpeople” (Prof-Nuskenin Sacredfire 2010), while Sacredfire agrees that the different motives and pleasures of the two forms of cosplay complicate the identity-based aims of trans cosplayers, particularly when the two might be inseparable to the average observer (2010). This comment also highlights the importance for trans cosplayers of being gazed upon, and the importance of being observed in a particular way. This shows that it is not simply the performance itself that is significant in trans cosplayers’ attempts to make meaning through cosplay but also the reception of that performance.

This illustrates the fundamental difference, for trans cosplayers at least, between crossplay and trans cosplay. As Cosplay.com user “Ranma 1–2” explains, crossplayers are “playing” at being a character. “[At the e]nd of the con the makeup, wig, costume, all comes off and we go home. We don’t live like this” (Ranma 1–2 2009). As Nicolle Lamerichs states, “this practice is occasional and, to some degree, ludic” (2011, n.p.). It is here that the ludic element, or the “play,” of cosplay becomes a significant term: for crossplayers, while they are generally in earnest about displaying authenticity to the character and giving a “good” performance, in terms of gender at least it is playful in the sense of not being fixed or essential but something that can be assumed or set aside depending on the context of the performance. The trans cosplayers on the DeviantArt forum are precisely opposite in that they very much wish to “live like this,” to live and be recognized as the gender of the character they are cosplaying, something they may find difficult outside the cosplay world; for such fans, cosplay is not only “play” but also a gender statement of personal and political significance. This may explain the assertion of the above trans cosplayers that crossplayers do not “take it seriously.” The “it” in this phrase is ambiguous: what are crossplayers not taking seriously? Perhaps it refers to gender, which in these online groups is bound up with cosplay at a basic level. Although crossplay does generate discussions of gender and sexuality, trans cosplayers appear to recognize that the practice of crossplay itself is less concerned with meaning-making and more about various types of affection for a character or the desire to create so-called authentic, highly evaluated cosplay through the use of challenging costuming techniques and skilled performance. While trans cosplay politicizes the concept of a “true” identity—authenticity to oneself—crossplay revels in the in-between-ness born from affect.

Obviously, this does not necessarily mean that there is no element of fannish affect present in trans cosplayers’ choice of particular characters, or that these two cosplay practices are binary opposites. Further, not every cosplayer who identifies as trans is trying to make a serious identity statement; there are many who cosplay for purely fannish reasons or because the androgyny of the beautiful characters lets them engage in a more ambiguous type of gender play. This can be a draw for non-binary (in Japan “x-gender”) cosplayers, as Japanese pop culture (unlike Japanese mainstream society) abounds with gender-ambivalent characters. There is thus the potential for both affective and meaning-making dimensions to exist in both crossplay and trans cosplay.

Crossplay and trans cosplay fan practices, then, cannot simply be characterized as either apolitical play or deliberate gender transgression. Both the affective and social signification aspects of Patrick Galbraith’s (2009) discussion of affect exist within game cosplay fandoms, sometimes directly opposing one another yet both sharing physical and online space. Their coexistence, despite the tensions that have sometimes arisen between them, shows that authenticity is a key concept for both, though in crossplay it is authenticity to the character for which the fan experiences affection, while trans cosplayers add a dimension of authenticity to the gendered self. The next section brings in the concept of sexuality and its impact on the perception of “good” cosplay through a discussion of erotic cosplay production and use, and the ways in which this type of cosplay generates more questions around the notions of fandom and authenticity.

3 Sex Sells: Authenticity and the Eroticization of Cosplay

It is acknowledged by a majority of cosplay fans and practitioners that “cosplay is centrally concerned with embodying a character accurately” (Lamerichs 2011). It is by this measure that the authenticity of a cosplay performance tends to be judged, and a value of “good” or “bad” assigned to it. However, there is a particular type of cosplay that calls the primacy of this goal into question. Known variously as “sexy,” “erotic,” and “pornographic” cosplay, this group of practices has not yet been dealt with extensively in academia but is discussed and debated within cosplay and wider Japanese pop culture fandoms. Such cosplay offers another motivation for cosplay performance, namely eliciting a response based on sexual appeal and/or generating additional types of pleasure for the performer. This opens up a potential space for further considerations of affect and how it relates to the body and the digital image within fandom.

The following section explores the ways in which cosplay fans respond to eroticized performances and how this relates to community concepts of fandom and authenticity. It suggests that the concept of the social—meaning-making—decreases in importance as the cosplay performance becomes more sexually explicit and generates a different affective response in the user and/or performer. This in turn challenges the value of traditionally-defined cosplay authenticity as fidelity to a particular text or character.

3.1 “Sexy” Cosplay

In 2020, Japanese cosplayer Enako was selected by the Cabinet of Japan as an official ambassador for promoting Japanese pop culture overseas through the Cool Japan initiative (Baseel 2020). Known as Japan’s current “no.1 cosplayer,” she creates skilled and authentic cosplays in the traditional sense of the word. Displaying a kawaii aesthetic that is a large part of how the Japanese government promotes pop culture—cute, youthful, pastel, and feminine—Enako is also known for her bikini shoots in magazines for young men and for her cosplay in lingerie. This shows the prominent place that sexiness occupies in the public perception of cosplay today.

The terms “sexy,” “erotic” or “pornographic” suggest that issues of sexuality will be central when dealing with this type of cosplay. Indeed, the word “sexualization” is often used by English-speaking fans in online discussions of such cosplay, as well as “sexiness” and “sexuality.” Clearly, in fan commentary at least, sexuality is a theme of interest. The concept of sexualization in general not only raises questions of eroticism but also of gender, in that sexual images provided in Japanese- and English-language mainstream and cosplay media are even today most visibly images of women. Though some now display a change from an older stereotype of passive heterosexual femininity “towards a more active, confident and autoerotic sexuality” (Evans et al. 2010, p. 115), in Japan in particular this is not always the case. There appear to be two basic stances on mainstream images of active female sexuality: one viewing it as positive, in that passivity is no longer a valued characteristic of femininity (p. 114), and the other troubled by the view that such female subjectivities simply re-enact the male-gaze ideal and objectification of women (p. 116). It has also been argued that this excludes “those who are not young…heterosexual or otherwise conforming to a narrow, globalized homogenizing conceptualization of female beauty” (p. 115).

The latter issue can be seen as a topic of discussion within cosplay fandoms. Commentary on online forums includes fans who view the popularity of certain “sexy” cosplayers problematically, as promoting a particular ideal of femininity and thus marginalizing or illegitimizing bodies that do not fit this ideal, detracting from the idea that cosplay is for everyone. Okabe mentions that even his female cosplayer respondents made comments such as “I want cute girls to cosplay” and “To be honest, I don’t want unattractive girls to cosplay” (Okabe 2012, p. 242). Other fans disapprove of this stance: one, in an online forum discussion on whether sexy cosplay is “ruining” the fandom, comments that such cosplays lead to fat shaming or insulting a cosplayer because they “don’t have a perfect body” (D.L in Cute Lush 2014; usernames altered for anonymity). On the other hand, many other fans appear to support the idealized bodies of eroticized cosplay, with comments such as “only hot chicks should cosplay” (SimplyAlex 2013) on an anime fan forum.Footnote 4 These fans frequently identify as heterosexual and male. This gender-specific conception of sexual imagery is interesting in the context of cosplay, not least because the vast majority of eroticized or pornographic cosplay performances are enacted by female cosplayers; fan commentary on the subject also deals almost exclusively with women performers. The bodily display of cosplayers performing “sexy,” “erotic,” and “pornographic” cosplay can be examined in terms of affect and authenticity, in order to understand how fan commentary responds to such performances.

Both at live conventions and online, some cosplay performances are labeled by other fans as “sexy.” These appellations generally point to certain shared features, including clothing that reveals a lot of skin, and prominent display of cleavage, buttocks, and other typically sexualized body parts within the rules of the particular convention or website. It may also refer to certain poses or behavior that tend to be read as sexually suggestive. Some of these cosplayers are amateur performers, while others have carved out careers as cosplay models, working as independent professionals or as representatives of companies and events in the ACG (anime-comic-game) world (sometimes known in English as “booth babes”). If they have one thing in common, however, it is that they largely identify and perform as women.

Fan commentary on such cosplay also deals almost exclusively with female cosplayers. This may reflect the claims by Evans et al. (2010, p. 114) that articulation of the sexualization of culture is focused on a particular female subjectivity, which according to Sharon Kinsella also holds true in Japan, where various kinds of media “featuring girls dominate the content of contemporary Japanese culture” ( 2006, p. 68). The type of sexual subjectivity in Japan may vary from that articulated in English-language discourse, being centered on the figure of the teenage girl rather than women in their twenties; still, as Kinsella (2006, p. 66) notes, even “material about girls has rarely excluded a dosage of visceral titillation.” It is thus unsurprising that Japanese pop culture texts and practices would see issues of sexuality in cosplay as pertaining particularly to female cosplayers.

Fan commentary on sexy cosplay shows a split between fans who criticize it as distancing the cosplayer in question from an “authentic” fan position and fans who applaud it, either as a postfeminist performance of active female sexuality or as a source of sexual stimulation. This subsection examines these various fan positions using the example of American cosplay model Jessica Nigri, who was at the time of researching one of the most frequently discussed practitioners of sexy cosplay in English-language online cosplay communities.

Jessica Nigri became a successful professional cosplayer in the English-speaking ACG community; it is how she earns her living. Self-identifying as a gamer, anime fan, and cosplayer, Nigri attends ACG events in the USA, U.K. and other international locations, participating in cosplay panels and featured booths (for example at London’s MCMExpo)Footnote 5 and working for hire at conventions as a spokeswoman or model for various ACG-related products and companies. She has a strong online presence, not just in terms of fan discussion and dissemination of her images but also through her social media. Although her pages are full of her own fannish commentary on anime and games and the processes of her costume construction, Nigri has become best known for her commercial “sexy” cosplay images. As forum poster “Cute Lush” comments, “you can’t bring up ‘sexy cosplay’ and not mention Jessica Nigri” (Cute Lush 2014). It is this sexualized aspect of her practices that has generated such large amounts of fan commentary that relate to the wider issues of fandom and authenticity.

First, there is a body of commentary that applauds eroticized performances by female cosplayers on the basis that such performances contribute to a postfeminist kind of “freedom,” a neo-liberalist active female subjectivity. It argues that, as cosplay is supposed to be all-inclusive, it should allow for the freedom of expression of any identity. As “Cute Lush” puts it, people have the right “to show as little or as much…as they want,” arguing that there is no “right” way to cosplay. On another anime forum thread,Footnote 6 one commenter “AryaO” says of Nigri, “more power to her” because she does what she wants (AryaO 2013), suggesting that the ability to choose the sexuality one performs is a form of power in itself.

A second, larger body of fan commentary is opposed to Nigri’s performance, arguing that such sexy cosplay conversely makes too much of the performer’s eroticism, detracting from the prime objective of (mainstream) cosplay: “authentic” costumes and performance, and fidelity to the initial character. Such commenters argue that this is what demonstrates one’s fan status as an accurate costume shows the cosplayer is familiar with, and respectful of, the initial character and text (Rahman, Wing-Sun, and Hei-man Cheung 2012). Part of this criticism is of Nigri’s costume choices in general, even when the initial character dresses revealingly. This type of comment appears to be concerned about the way such cosplay could impact negatively on outsiders’ impressions, casting an unwanted pall of sexuality across the cosplay fandom as a whole. “AryaO,” while supportive of Nigri’s right to perform whatever sexuality she chooses, qualifies this by commenting that she does not altogether agree with mainstream ideas about cosplay being “something to be sexualized” (AryaO 2013). This opinion is echoed by a female cosplayer and member of the video game industry, who, in an article on the Japanese pop culture magazine site, Kotaku, about female sexualization in cosplay, says:

There seems to be an impression from those external to the cosplay community that the hobby is sexual at its core. Can cosplay be sexy? Absolutely. To assume that sexy is the endgame for all who participate, though, is very misguided. (Marie 2013, n.p.)

Because cosplayers like Nigri generate income from cosplay through photo sales and paid work at conventions, etc., they are particularly concerned with disseminating their images as widely as possible, which may make them visible to a larger audience of non-cosplayers than amateur cosplayers, who only share their images on specialist sites or using cosplay-specific hashtags on social media. Cosplay fans like those above thus see sexy cosplay as having become the unfortunate image of the fandom for outsiders, because it is specifically through eroticization that cosplayers like Nigri manage to reach audiences outside the fandom. ForumFootnote 7 user “Hedgehog” brings a gendered dimension to this argument, explaining that:

I object to the assumption made in our culture that sexy cosplay is mainly for women, or the assumption that, when observing a woman in cosplay who happens to appear physically attractive, it is meant to be sexy. To put it another way, it’s this obsession with sexuality, the linking of sexiness to women while excluding other qualities (like the standard of the cosplay) that I have a problem with. (Hedgehog 2012)

This shows that the commenter is not only worried about detraction from the importance of authentic costuming but also about the gendered aspect of sexualization discussed earlier.

One of the possible reasons why “inauthentic” cosplays are derided by critics of sexy cosplay, and their performers regarded as “un-fannish,” can be located in Galbraith’s conceptualization of the affective moe response. Used specifically within Japanese fandoms, the term moe is a type of fannish attraction to character elements and can be defined as “a word to express affect, or to identify a form that resonates and can trigger an intensity” (Galbraith 2009, n.p.). As he explains, “costumes and people inspire moe because they are associated with fantasy characters” (2009, n.p.). Some fans may not be able to experience pleasurable moe toward a familiar favorite character, therefore, without an accurate costume that conforms to the initial character image. This may lead to the low evaluation of cosplay that deviates from the original as “an insult to the source material” (Trees 2013),Footnote 8 because the observer is unable to be inspired with the response they feel when looking at the initial character.

This type of criticism appears to be especially marked when the cosplayer eroticizes a character outfit that did not originally display any markers of overt sexuality, as in the case of some sexy cosplay of childish, nonhuman or non-gender-specific characters. Nigri’s social media and Only Fans site, on which she sells signed prints of her cosplay images, show numerous examples of such alterations. While some, such as her Rikku from the game Final Fantasy X-2 (Square Enix 2003), are fairly faithful to the initial character design, others depart from the original designs dramatically. Nigri’s gender-bend cosplay of male character Link from the Japanese RPG series Legend of Zelda (Nintendo 1985 onward) features a figure-hugging short dress and tights that accentuate her hyper-feminine body shape, while her cosplay of the Pokémon (Nintendo 1996 onward) character Pikachu, whose initial design is not remotely humanoid, displays an even more radical departure in the form of cleavage-enhancing bikini and skin-tight dress. Fan responses to these cosplays vary, but a considerable number take issue with Nigri for sexualizing the characters she performs. Cosplayer and male-identified blogger “Larch,” in an article titled “Jessica Nigri: Cosplaying Controversy,” complains that she “over-sexualizes” some of her cosplays, and that he does not like it when she “sexualize[s] young characters or creates a sexy cosplay costume from a media text where sexiness seems incongruous, like a children’s anime” (Larch 2013, n.p.). It seems that cosplaying with a costume or performance that does not reflect the initial character’s represented level of sexuality is objectionable here: it does not “make sense” in terms of the text it was taken from, and may therefore hint that the cosplayers in question are not that knowledgeable about or respectful toward the text they are cosplaying and “are just doing it to show off” (IceToast 2013).Footnote 9 In a community where knowledge of one’s chosen media text carries a certain status and value, straying from authenticity to the initial character, particularly through sexualization, can clearly diminish one’s fan status.

However, Galbraith’s analysis of moe and sexuality (2009) suggests that sexy images of non-sexual initial characters may not point to lack of knowledge or fannish-ness at all but rather reflect the moe response that allows a double reading of characters as simultaneously non-sexual and erotic. This is possible, explains Galbraith, due to the postmodern characteristics of Japanese pop culture fandoms, particularly Azuma’s (2009) database of moe-elements, a concept which excludes a need for narrative coherency. Such a conceptualization renders the concept of “authenticity” somewhat redundant: both initial text and fan-created image are “unreal,” so it is rather imaginings of authenticity to which cosplay fans attach value. Therefore, “moe can be both pure and perverse because there is no grand narrative connecting moments of pleasure endlessly reproduced as simulacra”; so a “pure character can be approached as erotic, or vice versa” (Galbraith 2009, n.p.). In this theorization, both sexual and non-sexual responses to a character image are valid and “fannish.” It cannot be categorically stated that Nigri’s choices of costume are based purely on an affective moe response of unconscious attraction to the initial characters; cosplay is, after all, her source of income, and “the conventional wisdom that sex sells and attracts attention has been used since the late 1800s in Western societies” (Lambiase 2003, p. 60). Thus, her particular mode is at least partially a conscious business decision. However, we cannot say that there is not an element of affective response in her sexy cosplay choices and performances, or that the affective moe response—simultaneously fannish and sexual—is not present in both Nigri herself and a considerable proportion of her fans and supporters.

This leads to the third type of fan commentary surrounding sexy cosplayers. The popularity of cosplayers like Nigri and Enako suggests that one of the affective responses to cosplay has a very definite sexual element for some fans, who do not see fidelity to the initial character as the zenith of “good” or legitimate cosplay. These fans value deliberately eroticized cosplay highly as having a sexual function (for example masturbatory gratification), which they do not appear to rate lower than costuming skills or knowledge of the initial text. Commenter “SimplyAlex” gives a straightforward account of the response generated by sexy cosplay, writing that they openly admit to liking sexy cosplay because it provides “good fap material” (SimplyAlex 2013).Footnote 10 Another forum user on the same page articulates the stance that both fidelity to costume and eroticization can carry value for some cosplay fans, stating that all that matters in cosplay is a) if the costume and person suit the character or b) if it’s a real “hot babe.” According to this user, Nigri falls into the second category and is therefore “making cosplay better” (Ragex 2013).Footnote 11

Galbraith also accords sexualized interpretations of characters that inspire moe with legitimacy through his above theorization of erotic/non-erotic doubling in affective moe response, and also with his statement that the “pleasure derived from moe characters is not always physical, but is masturbatory because, even when emotional, the pleasure is derived by and for the individual” (Galbraith 2009). Neither emotional masturbatory pleasure (non-sexual affective fannish pleasure acknowledged by the majority of cosplayers as legitimate when responding to character images) nor physical is necessarily more “appropriate” or authentic than the other; they are both affective pleasures in the sense that they create potential in the affected body for action (though these differ according to whether it is emotional pleasure, which leads to cosplay or other fan activities, or physical, which can prompt actual masturbation), existing along a spectrum that spans the non-sexual, the erotic, and the explicitly sexual images present in online cosplay media. This calls into question the prevailing view in cosplay that fandom equals knowledge of a media text and that the prime motive of cosplay should be to enact and consume “cosplay as a respectful and authentic form of (re)presentation” (Rahman, Wing-Sun, and Hei-man Cheung 2012, p. 335).

3.2 Erotic and Pornographic Cosplay

Much as the enactment of “sexy” cosplay is performed largely by female cosplayers, the physical masturbatory response to such cosplay is characterized as coming from users who identify as heterosexual men (although, of course, one of the defining characteristics of online fandom is a high level of anonymity and choice of what identity to perform in a particular space). This once again draws issues of gender into the field of cosplay and sexuality. The final subsection explores the gendered sexual response to explicit video game cosplay images in terms of affect and authenticity, using four free and commercial websites that feature professional cosplay ranging from sexy to fully pornographic.

The four example sites offer sexual images described as “cosplay,” and purport to provide cosplay models who are also fans. Three of the sites, NSFW Gamer (n.d., no longer extant),Footnote 12 Cosplay Deviants (2007)Footnote 13 , and Cosplay Erotica (n.d.),Footnote 14 are also connected by advertising one another. The fourth, JCosPlay.com (n.d.),Footnote 15 offers the highest level of explicitness in its pornography as well as being the only site to feature exclusively “Asian” models and male performers. The latter three sites are pay-sites, while NSFW Gamer offered free content but displayed prominent links to Cosplay Deviants and Cosplay Erotica. The three linked sites all offer video game cosplay, including the Final Fantasy series. The fourth is far broader in its definition of cosplay. These sites demonstrate that just as a whole spectrum of experience exists in cosplay between social signification and affect, there are also various levels of sexual explicitness; and, connected to this, is another spectrum of “fannish-ness.” This subsection argues that as levels of explicitness increase and the type of affective response shifts from emotional to physical arousal and masturbation (Galbraith 2009), the display of fannish knowledge and the value attached to authenticity to the character decrease.

NSFW Gamer, in addition to posting cosplay images, published interviews with featured cosplayers alongside their images, which fall into the “sexy” (clothed) or “erotic” (semi-clothed) categories. These interviews highlight the cosplayer’s fan knowledge. For example, an interview with a sexy cosplayer performing female character Tifa from FFVII (DarkTifa 2014; usernames of cosplayers altered for anonymity)Footnote 16 stated that not only is she a cosplayer and game fan but also a journalist in the anime/gaming world, thus displaying status through a presumably high level of ACG knowledge in both her work and private life. DarkTifa locates herself as a FFVII fan, citing Tifa as one of the characters that “inspires” her. NSFW Gamer made a strong effort to portray itself as a site created with fans, by fans, and for fans, while in cosplay terms, its images remained in the non-hardcore sexy/erotic categories. Cosplay Deviants, likewise, does not stray into fully pornographic cosplay territory, and publicizes its models’ fan status, linking the cosplayers to the users of the site with statements like “[a]ll of the Cosplay Deviants are cosplayers/gamers/comic & sci-fi just like you” (Cosplay Deviants 2007) and “are cosplayers, geeks, fans, or nerds in some way…we do not accept the ‘random chick in a costume’ as Deviant material” (Cosplay Deviants FAQ 2013). The cosplay images on this site show partial or full nudity with recognizable character costumes and accessories, which enable the possibility of both a fannish moe response to the characters and sexual arousal.

Cosplay Erotica raises the level of explicitness to include solo and female-female sex acts, and, like the previous two sites, offers recognizable character cosplays from both Japanese and Western texts. It also provides links to blog pages ostensibly run by its professional models, such as “Lea” (LeaLee n.d.).Footnote 17 Lea’s page contains official Cosplay Erotica photos in the central panel, and, in a smaller side panel, content that might demonstrate fannish-ness, such as initial character images she would like to cosplay, and photographs of her early, non-erotic amateur cosplays. The insistence on the fan status of the models, however, is not so pronounced as on Cosplay Deviants. There is also a distinct lack of promotion of “Japaneseness,” which, in the absence of fannish-ness on the site, might be considered another trigger for a moe response in some pop culture fans who grant imagined Japaneseness high, almost fetishistic, cultural capital (Iwabuchi 2002). Indeed, the site conversely promises “EXCLUSIVE European Models” (Cosplay Erotica n.d.), thereby distancing itself from the intersection of cosplay and Japanese pop culture fandoms even when using Japanese characters.

The final site, JCosPlay, returns to the privileging of Japaneseness by calling itself “Japanese Cosplay” (JCosPlay.com n.d.). However, its promotion of “Japanese” elements (apparently interchangeable with “Asian” in the site’s text) rather comes across as a subgenre of pornography one might find on generic porn video upload sites like Xvideos.com than as an appeal to users of cosplay as the term is understood in fandom. As the only site featuring hardcore (penetrative) porn, it is also the loosest in its definition of cosplay. Rahman, Wing-Sun, and Hei-man Cheung point out that cosplay’s “meaning has expanded to include almost any type of dressing up” (2012, p. 318), at least in Japan, and this is clearly how JCosPlay is using the term: the site includes very few recognizable characters and is mainly populated with non-specific schoolgirl sailor uniforms, maid costumes, women in Japanese yukata, and housewives or “office ladies.” Compared to the way the previous three sites define cosplay, the word here is used more as an indicator of general sexual role-play, which is distinct from most fan understandings of cosplay. The text beside the images also mentions the performers by their industry names but does not state any character names; this clearly points to the focus of desire being the model rather than the character fantasy, which is what moe derives from (Galbraith 2009). It could be argued that this site’s more explicit sexual content is calculated to encourage the most direct sexual response in its users, with the height of the affective experience as the moment of masturbatory orgasm rather than the emotional “masturbation” of the fannish moe response.

For Simon Hardy (2004) and Adair Rounthwaite (2011), pornography is the media form with the strongest potential to cause an unconsidered response in the user (though other visual genres like horror are also geared to cause a visceral reaction). Hardy (2004, p. 13) states that “no other representational genre requisitions the emotional disposition of its audience in such a direct way.” Rounthwaite further insists that the potential of pornography to create a response goes beyond the spheres of representation and emotion, both of which are part of the realm of social signification. Porn is significant, she believes, because of its affective possibilities, or even more than this, its affective necessity. After all, porn “needs a certain kind of affect: without the ability to generate erotic pleasure, it is fundamentally unsuccessful” (Rounthwaite 2011, p. 64). Thinking of pornography in this way, she argues—as “a form of performance documentation that is designed to create a new performance…in the viewer” (p. 63)—enables us to look at the genre in a new way, “shifting away from questions of censorship, freedom of expression, and identity…toward a consideration of how porn records and produces affect” (pp. 63–64). Rounthwaite’s argument suggests that in the recorded document of pornography, the affective pleasure and response seems to be weighted on the side of the viewer rather than the cosplayer, though the affective responses of the performers themselves cannot be ignored.

The terms “sexy,” “erotic,” and “pornographic” appear to describe different levels of sexual explicitness for online users and also appear to operate in connection with the level of fannishness displayed in the performances they are used to describe. “Sexy” tends to refer to cosplay like Enako’s or Nigri’s, which includes faithful mimicry of an already skimpy character costume or which eroticizes an initial costume but remains within the boundaries of acceptance in the semi-public space of game conventions: short dresses and cleavage-enhancing bikinis, but no full or partial nudity. “Erotic” spans the gap between this sort of cosplay, which can be seen at live events and on dedicated cosplay websites, and cosplay that includes partial/full nudity and softcore porn (one or more female participants and no penetration), which can only be found online on websites targeted at adults for the purpose of sexual stimulation. “Pornographic” cosplay includes both softcore and hardcore pornography (with penetration and participants of all genders), and can also only be found on adult-oriented websites. The cosplay images under discussion in this subsection, then, are classified as “erotic” or “pornographic,” and differ from the cosplay of performers like Nigri in that they exist in a different sphere, where it is acknowledged that the prime motivation of creating and disseminating such images is to provide sexual gratification material to the user. This may lessen the expectations from users that the images and performers display “authentic” knowledge of or devotion to the initial media text. As forum user “monk” states, “it’s just another flavor of porn so porn rules apply” (monk 2012),Footnote 18 indicating that it is acceptable to have different expectations of erotic and pornographic cosplay and that it may serve a different purpose than mainstream cosplay. Another commenter justifies sexual content in cosplay by situating it in a Japanese pop culture context: pornographic cosplay, as well as sexy cosplay, is an important part of Japanese otaku/gaming culture, and does not damage the fandom (Philip in Cute Lush 2014). In this way, users of erotic and pornographic cosplay distance it from regular cosplay by assigning it a place within a wider pornographic media context but at the same time maintain a link to the concept of fandom by locating it within otaku culture.

Intertextual connections between pornographic cosplay and other Japanese pop culture fan media can be observed in the various visual and narrative (or absence-of-narrative) conventions shared by these cosplay performances, Japanese pornographic fan comics known as ero-dōjinshi, and even some initial digital character images. Aside from having a primary affective aim of sexual stimulation, media related to erotic/pornographic cosplay of female video game characters shares with such dōjinshi a tendency to dislocate characters from the initial narrative context of the game and portray them as purely sexual beings. Kinsella (2006, p. 77) finds this tendency not only within fan media but also in commercial animated material, which, “[h]aving brought into being the image of powerful female bodies, frequently armed with weapons or magic…has tended at certain points to humiliate and quite literally attack its creations.” In terms of pornographic game cosplay and fan comic images, this takes the form of removing any traits of physical or magical power from playable female characters and placing them in a setting of sexual desire: desire for the character by the user of the image, and desire solely for sexual pleasure by the character herself.

Website NSFW Gamer, which mixed fan media by providing both fan-drawn and cosplay images of “hot video game babes” (NSFW Gamer n.d.) for free, ran a regular feature titled “Gamer Catfight!” which hypothetically compares one female character with another, often from the same game series, and asks site users to vote on who should win. Use of the term “catfight” itself suggests a particular type of “bitchy” conflict, immediately setting up the contests in a gendered way and inviting a reading of somewhat petty femininity. The site ran a FFVII version of this feature with characters Tifa and Aerith (NSFW Catfight 2010),Footnote 19 who are also the most common female FFVII characters appearing in ero-dōjinshi. In the game, both these characters are playable and can be used in combat, and have considerable strength and magical power. Rather than NSFW Gamer’s contest between the characters being based on their in-game abilities, however, the article displays pornographic fan art images of Tifa and Aerith and asks, “who do we think is the hottest?” thereby turning attention away from their in-game martial aspects and transforming the contest into one of sex appeal. The article briefly refers to their roles within the game. Largely, though, readers are encouraged to view the characters as elements that have been extracted from a “database” of original and other fan texts (Azuma 2009), their main function now is to prompt a physical sexual response. Lamerichs (2015, p. 149) suggests that this dislocation is characteristic of video game cosplay in general as “attachment to a game can be directed towards specific elements of the text…This affective process has different entry points and affective moments,” meaning that attachment is not necessarily generated by deep knowledge or love of the original game but can come from the look of a character or even from the process of cosplaying a character. The Catfight article calls on its readers to make a judgment on the characters based solely on their ability to stimulate sexual desire, bluntly asking, “Tifa has the boobs and Aerith has the heart. Which one would you rather stick your penis in?” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this fleeting reference to Aerith’s kind and caring in-game persona did not carry much weight with the site users (who are clearly addressed here as male), as the hyper-feminine images of Tifa made her the winner of the “catfight” by a wide margin.

The pay-sites Cosplay Deviants and Cosplay Erotica also extract female characters from their initial contexts, engaging them with an erotic aim for which only the physical character elements appear to be necessary. Cosplay Erotica, like NSFW Gamer, features images (photosets and videos) in which female cosplayers appear together, but no male cosplayers are visible. The absence or lack of focus on male bodies (other than the penis or phallic objects) is something that is common to sexy, erotic, and pornographic cosplay as well as ero-dōjinshi. While the male body in pornographic images aimed at an ostensibly straight male audience has a penetrative function, beyond the erect penis it appears of small consequence in visual terms when compared with the centralization of the female body; as Hardy (2004, p. 13) points out, the male figure “is left largely un-drawn by the text… He is simply a phallic apparatus.” On the hardcore site, JCosPlay, male actors do not have profiles and are not named, unlike the female cosplayers; and on Cosplay Erotica, images displaying penetration are not featured and the male body is entirely absent. In this way, pornographic cosplay images echo the drawn or CGI art of the ero-dōjinshi genre, displaying the picking-up of moe-inducing costume elements (Azuma 2009) that remove the character from her initial setting. This creates images of hyper-feminine bodies that naturally give rise to the same criticism of women’s objectification found in wider discourse on porn. At the same time, it excludes male bodies from the affective pleasures that come with the role of cosplay practitioner, which may be extensive and involves both being looked at and looking, depending on how far the cosplayer controls the costuming, photography, and editing of her own image.

Sites like Cosplay Erotica use extensive editing to blur the boundaries between the physical human performer and digital bodies, which involves CGI to make the photographed or filmed cosplayers look more like 3D game characters, to the point where it can be difficult to distinguish between the cosplay of a character and the initial character image. CGI manipulation is also a common practice in non-erotic or regular cosplay, adding another layer of visual fidelity to the character. In erotic cosplay, it is imbued with a particular sexual nuance, suggesting that the users will be more likely to be sexually affected if viewing bodies that display the aesthetic traits of animated characters rather than embodied humans. Galbraith states that cosplay “is not mere eroticism, but rather a desire for the two-dimensional, the image” (2009, n.p.); the photo manipulation on Cosplay Erotica takes this idea almost as far as it can go, clearly recognizing that, for certain users, it is “precisely because the cosplayer becomes an image that the moe response is possible” (2009, n.p.). These sites demonstrate not only that the practices of pornographic cosplay create a network of links between types of video game fan media but also that they complicate the idea of authenticity to an original text.

Thinking about pornography as a genre designed specifically to produce bodily affect grants it another tie to cosplay, in the study of which the idea of social signification and affect operating across a spectrum has been a useful theoretical tool. It also dovetails with Galbraith’s view on moe, which draws on Azuma’s (2009) discussion of the concept, allowing us to theorize a continuum of fannish-ness that would appear to run almost parallel to both the spectrum of representation and affect and to rising levels of sexual explicitness. In the scenario presented by the aforementioned websites, the importance the user of cosplay images attaches to “meaning” (fan knowledge and character accuracy as authenticity and status, etc.) appears to decrease as the images rise in explicitness through non-eroticized (“regular” cosplay), sexy, erotic, and pornographic levels. At the same time, the type of affect that occurs could be said to shift from purely emotional moe, through the eroticized and sexual (but still fannish) moe response to “sexy” and erotic/softcore cosplay, to the most full-blown physical affect of sexual arousal and orgasm caused by hardcore images, which display the least fannish-ness or connection with cosplay culture. This shows that, as Massumi (1995) reminds us, we should not try to separate signification and affect completely: affect is always possible in cosplay fan practices. Instead, an examination of the different forms of affect and the way they intertwine with representation gives us a new way in which to look at cosplay, sexuality, and authenticity without subscribing to the notion that the sexualization of cosplay is detrimental to the fandom.

Thus, it is evident that the theoretical notion of the spectrum between social signification and affect in various cosplay practices is particularly relevant when considering fans and gender identity, and gendered connections to fannish and sexual pleasure. Moreover, alongside this spectrum runs another, which incorporates pop culture-specific concepts of fandom and authenticity. These impact on and complicate one another, and ultimately show that, while social signification or “meaning” is still important because of the values attached to it in different contexts such as josō or trans cosplay, it is constantly played with and troubled by the visceral and insistent experiences of bodily response. Authenticity in cosplay therefore has many meanings and may lose its importance in the eyes of users as the affective responses change from fannish affection to the contested sphere of sexual gratification.