one of my favorite cosplayers on here is worried about their cosplays now after looking for examples. Its an SU character, and I guess there’s a bunch of posts that say cause they are black-coded, if you aren’t black you cannot cosplay as them. Firstly, cosplay whoever the hell you want, that’s the point. Second, isn’t racial coding literally the same as stereotyping???
I’m no cosplayer, but aren’t a lot of cosplays of Japanese anime characters, anyway? Unless these are examples of yellow-face:
then who cares, right? People clearly adore the character that they want to cosplay as. They’re putting in time and effort to do their best to look like them. And look at those two and how happy they are. I mean, I get the point if someone were to “black up” because there’s no need, but – you’ll have to forgive my disability here, I can’t tell the difference between colours that are very similar – isn’t the allegedly “black-coded” character purple? So a cosplayer would have to make paint their skin purple to cosplay as her, just like a cosplayer would have to paint their skin green if they wanted to cosplay as the original cartoon Maleficent?
But secondly: of course “–coding” is the same as stereotyping.
That would be like you coming to me and saying, “Hey, Shal, there’s this character who’s Jewish-coded.”
And I’d say, “What? Jewish-coded? How?”
“Well, they’ve got a huge nose, curly hair and really, really love money. That means that they’re definitely supposed to be Jewish, right?”
And then I’d have to slam my head repeatedly into a wall, because that would be you outing yourself as an antisemite.
I just cannot believe that there’s “discourse” about this. It’s basically dressing up and playing pretend with something that you love. People need to calm down and just let others enjoy things without turning it into some kind of life-or-death battleground.
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