The Philippine Online Chronicles

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Prior to my quest to go to the Cosplay Museum, I only had what could be called a mildly peripheral understanding of cosplay despite having been part of the subculture – the Philippine “otaku” culture – that ultimately spawned this vastly popular cultural movement.

My full understanding of  the hobby pretty much consisted of the definition and history detailed by the various contributors of Wikipedia and what I had observed in a number of acquaintances and friends I have who happen to be cosplayers themselves.

My limited understanding made me form a rather unsatisfying personal definition of cosplay as “a performance art that involves roleplaying in costumes/accessories focused on the portrayal of particular characters in comics, cartoons, video games and general popular culture – usually from Japanese culture.”

As it turns out, there are some things that I got right from my observations - according to one of the articles immortalized at the Cosplay Museum, cosplay IS a performance art; that fact is one of the main reasons why it caught on the way it did here in the Philippines (Filipinos are natural hams; one need only look at a politician).

My conversations with Cosplay.Ph members (notably a gentleman who prefers to be called “Retsu” and Tanya Obedoza-Bairan; both veteran cosplayers) helped me further understand this focused kind of performance art, one that hones in on a character that is either popular at the time or simply beloved by the person who happens to be cosplaying him/her. More often than not, both is true of the character cosplayed: beloved characters tend to be the popular characters of the time, thus leading to cosplay “trends” in which one character or several characters from a single anime/manga/video game is or are cosplayed by a large number of people.

The general motivation for cosplaying in the Philippines could be attributed to the Filipino's affinity with performance arts, combined with a great love for the character/show/comic. The result, then, is an almost unparalleled dedication to the cause of accurately portraying characters, which in turn result in some of the most impressive costumes that look both formidable and expensive. The fact that most costumes are actually made of either rubber foam or paper mache ended up blowing my mind – not just because that obviously meant a whole lot of dedication; it meant that these could be made cheaply if you had the skills, ingenuity, and all-out guts to go for it.

Creative and technical achievements!

For cosplay veterans like Retsu, creating a costume for cosplay could never be considered a waste. The costumes are creative and technical achievements – what’s more, some of those costumes could be rented out for certain events if carefully preserved (which they often are). Cosplaying, in this sense, could be considered one of the greatest forms of personal expression that a person – young or old – can engage in today.

By the time I left the Cosplay Museum, I realized that the question “Why cosplay?” no longer mattered to me.

 

Photos by author, some rights reserved. Click to enlarge.