Simply put, cosplay is role-playing The following is detailed: As the name suggests, COSPLAY is an abbreviation of the English Costume Play, and its verb is COS, and the person who plays COSPLAY is generally known as the COSPLAYER. the earliest Chinese translation of COSPLAY from the general sense is from Taiwan, meaning role-playing. But because this translation and the game in the Role Play Game (RPG) with the meaning of role-playing, so in order to avoid similarity, the author prefers another translation - clothing dress up. In terms of COSPLAY nowadays, its form and content generally refers to the use of costumes, trinkets, props and make-up to play the role of ACG (anime, comic, game) in the characters or some of the Japanese visual bands and some of the characters in the movie, from which it can be seen that in the positioning of COSPLAY contains a fairly broad space to play, and it can be said that as long as there is a COSPLAYER in the place. It can even be said that as long as there are cosplayers around, this field is definitely the mainstream of today's youth pop culture. Origin of COSPLAY Speaking of the original origin of COSPLAY, what is generally recognized now is that the birthplace of COSPLAY is located in Japan, of course, if this is based on the concept of COSPLAY in the present era, then it is true that it can be said so. But if you look at it from a broad sense, the real birthplace of animation COSPLAY is definitely located in the western hemisphere of the United States, and even if you really want to explore the original form of COSPLAY, I can tell you without hesitation that the earliest emergence of COSPLAY was in the centuries before the first year of the AD! Whether it was the costumes of the Greek priests who existed around 1000 B.C., or the great troubadours of the 8th century B.C. who composed the two great Greek epic poems "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey", they were actually playing the roles of others. The former, who became the prophets and seers of later times, successfully COSPLAYED the existence of the apostles of the gods, while the latter, like the originators of today's stage dramas, COSPLAYED the deeds of those singable heroes in a marvelous way. As a matter of fact, the meaning of cosplay includes and dresses up not only a kind of visualization on the outside, but more importantly, it is to cosplay people's heart. Well, let's get back to the topic. Next continue to talk about the real birthplace of COSPLAY - the United States. American COSPLAY is such as can be formed? Since the 17th century, when the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher invented the "magic slide", the emergence of animation has become a necessity. The "magic slide" became popular in Europe over the next century, and it wasn't until the late 1830s, when Walt 6.1 Disney's little mouse appeared, that the American style of animation had a clear and certain definition, and it was during this period that the first true cosplay with animated characters came into being. Yes, there's no doubt that Mickey Mouse was all the rage in the U.S. and around the world. In 1955, Walt 6.1 Disney created the world's first Disneyland in order to promote the product itself. At the same time, in order to publicize the product itself and to better attract tourists, Walt 6.1 Disney also invited employees to wear Mickey Mouse costumes for tourists to enjoy or take pictures. Therefore, it can be said that this group of obscure "Mickey Mouse" dresser is the real ancestor of the world's COSPLAYERS in the present era. And from this, we can see that the purpose of COSPLAY's initial formation was still out of a kind of commercial form rather than a kind of consumption of popular taste as it is now. There is another important reason to consider the United States or, more precisely, Disney as the real birthplace of COSPLAY, and that is the professionalization of the COSPLAY costumes worn by the Disney costumers at that time. Although many of today's cosplay costumes are sewn by the costumers themselves, as a cosplayer, the costumes were made by a professional. However, as the origin of cosplay, it is necessary to have a standardized and systematic costume production organization. It was the Walt Disney Company's early props department that initially created the costumes for the group of people who dressed up as Mickey Mouse, Bluebeard, Goofy, Donald Duck, and other Disney characters in Disneyland at the time. Soon after the park was officially opened, Walt 6.1 Disney expanded the props department to make props for movie and television productions, as well as all the cosplay costumes needed to work in the park. Of course, these early so-called COSPLAY costumes were just a "big paper bag" with a fixed shape, which was not aesthetically pleasing, and the finished product was relatively rough, so it was easy for dressers to wear these costumes and suffer from breathlessness. But no matter what, compared to the time, Disney's COSPLAY costume production at this time has been considered to have a certain scale. Is Japan the real creator of cosplay today? At this moment in Japan, because the god of manga Osamu Tezuka in 1947, based on Sakai Nanma's original work adapted from the Red Book manga "New Treasure Island" of the front, and set off a wave of new manga boom in Japan. This led to a major boom in the entire ACG (Anime, Comic, Game) market in Japan, thus laying a solid foundation for the real establishment of ACG in Japan. It was at this time that Disney's promotional activities (COSPLAY) were introduced to Japan, and as a result, it became a trend that was copied by fellow ACG artists, and has become a regular activity in the ACG industry in Japan. The earliest form of cosplay in Japan was in the Showa 30's (1955), when the so-called cosplay was just a kind of costume for children to play with. It was the year when "Moonlight Mask" and "Junior Jet" were popularly broadcast in Japan, and many children were cosplaying the main characters of these two works at that time. Although cosplay was purely a child's game at this time, there was a lot of attention paid to the costumes, but only if you had the money, of course. At the time, there were no specialized cosplay stores in Japan, so if kids wanted to have the same costumes as the main characters in the anime, they had to have their designs drawn up and then go to a department store to have them sewn. When Prince Hiroi, a famous game producer, was a child, he had his cosplay costumes drawn by geishas in a geisha district near his home. This kind of crude situation was maintained for nearly twenty years, and it was not until Japan's ACG went through a period of exploration and growth in the 1970s and early 1980s that cosplay, as a subsidiary culture of ACG, gradually gained real development, and it can be said that the concept of cosplay nowadays was completely inherited from the Japan of that time. However, in the 80's, although Japanese cosplay developed in a wider range of age groups, there were still no real cosplay events. At this time, cosplay was more dependent on another peripheral culture brought about by ACG, the homoerotic community (whose works are known as homoeroticism). The term "homunculus" originated in Japan, and originally referred to "a group of people who share the same interest in creating their own literary works, called homunculus. That is to say, as long as like-minded friends, published their own literary works into a collection of books, not published by commercial publishers, but printed out of their own pockets, in the circulation of the same friends, can be called "homunculus". Due to the prevalence of anime and video game culture in Japan at the time, many good and popular works became very popular among the fans, and "adapting commercial works and compiling manga fanzines in the form of gaiden" gradually became the mainstream of the fan community. As a result, there was a proliferation of fan clubs, and in order to recruit members and sell their fanzines at fanzine fairs (the first fanzine fair started in December 1975 as a small one with only 32 organizations and an attendance of over 600, but in the 1980s it became a mega-fair that was held two to three times a year), members of these clubs dressed up as anime or manga artists and their members were dressed up as manga artists, and their members were dressed up as anime or manga artists. The members of each club dressed up as characters from anime and manga or video games to attract fans to their booths, a phenomenon known in Japan as "kanban-chan". This phenomenon was known as "kanban-chan" in Japan, and it was like an explosion that caused a trend among the fans, and the number of people joining the ranks of COSPLAY grew rapidly, and its popularity was even comparable to that of the homage book sale. After the naivety of the 1960s and 1970s, and the beginnings of the 1980s, the 1990s saw the rapid maturation of the GAME industry in the Japanese ACG industry (the most typical example of this is the next-generation machine battle between Nintendo, Sega, and Sony), as well as the proliferation of visual bands, and COSPLAY began to take its rightful place, and became a very large-scale subsidiary culture of the ACG industry. In the 1990s, the Japanese ACG industry successfully organized a large number of anime and manga shows and game shows, and in order to promote their products, Japanese manga and video game companies used these game shows and manga festivals to attract crowds by having men and women cosplay as ACG characters. This trick can be said to be the same as when Walt 6.1 Disney started Disneyland, thus showing that the key to the formation and development of COSPLAY is to build on the degree of commercialization of its own ACG, it can be said that it is the COSPLAY as a means of commercial promotion, COSPLAY itself may get a long way to develop and understand. What about COSPLAY in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong? COSPLAY was introduced into China late, Taiwan's first documented COSPLAY was on August 27, 1995, the location is located in Kaohsiung's SAGA WORLD first floor, but it is rumored that the scale of the time is not large, and the characters are also mostly to the characters in the video game is the main. After that, on October 13th, 1996, a fall party was held by the "Super Orange Group" at Taipei's Bear Bao Restaurant, but although it was widely publicized before the party and many people knew about it, the scale was still small. This situation continued until mid-February 1997, when three events were held in a row, and only then did the number of cosplayers start to increase, and from then on, the characteristics of Taiwan's cosplay community were also formed. Since then, the number of COSPLAY events in Taiwan began to increase year after year, and the location of the event has also developed from the north to the south, which shows the popularity of COSPLAY activities in Taiwan. And Hong Kong appears COSPLAY time seems to be earlier than Taiwan, it is said that the earliest in 1993 Hong Kong will have their own COSPLAY. at that time Hong Kong has not what homage that will be sold, generally speaking, homo associations are through the then Hong Kong will be held annually art festival venues for exhibitions and sales, and it is that year (i.e., in 1993), a homo organization called "400 feet" wearing the "Legend of the Galaxy Heroes", the "Legend of the Galaxy Heroes". In that year (i.e. 1993), a group called "Four Hundred Feet" put on the uniforms of the Allied Forces in "Legend of the Galactic Heroes" and appeared at the venue, thus they became the first COSPLAY in Hong Kong, and in the same venue in the following year, they played the role of Allied Forces, but this time, they also brought another group of homoerotic societies with the name of "UVRZ" and played role-playing together. UVRZ The female members of UVRZ dressed up as Japanese witches and prayed for the visitors with their wands, and in '95, Shikuru played the role of "Sweeney Todd", while UVRZ started to play famous ACG characters, such as Ukyo from "Gone with the Wind 1/2" or Belodendi from "My God of Love". From '96 onwards, the "Four Hundred Feet" group retired and stopped doing any more cosplay, but at the same time, the rest of the cosplay groups started to play with costumes one after another, which made the number of Hong Kong's cosplay community climbed up straight away. Shortly after this, the first cosplay event in Hong Kong was organized by "UVRZ", "Comic Babies", and "Fire Dog Workshop" (but it was the only one, and there were no more such events in Hong Kong), which of course expanded the influence of cosplay in Hong Kong once again. Because of the growing influence, the Hong Kong Comics Association started to organize the first real comic convention for comic fans from July 30 to August 3, 1998, with an entrance fee of HK$25 at that time. The cosplay at this convention was said to be one of the hottest ever, with many people taking on the roles of characters from fighting games such as Yagami and Kusashi. The winner of Hong Kong's first cosplay contest, the "Fun Fun Costume Costume Contest", was a girl dressed up as King Kandaharu from the Sacred Tales. After that, SE Corporation, TG Place and the Hong Kong Art Supplies Professional Center held the first Comic World on August 30, 1998 at the MacPherson Indoor Stadium in Mongkok, and for the first time ever, a "Costume Photo Zone" was set up in the venue to facilitate photo-taking by the exhibitors. What was quite surprising was that some people were already cosplaying Inuyasha at that time! In the following years, exhibitions among university clubs gradually began to emerge as another active venue for Hong Kong's cosplay scene. In contrast, COSPLAY appeared later in mainland China, and it wasn't until the opening of the Comic-Con in 1998 that there were some sporadic and spontaneous individual COSPLAY shows, and before that there weren't any homage book sales on a certain scale. Therefore, even if there is COSPLAY, the number is also extremely rare. But because of Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, three places COSPLAY maturity, mainland COSPLAY to rapid and steady growth, and in August 2000 successfully organized the first mainland China COSPLAY contest. In the following year, Huayi, with its great influence in online games, started the "2001 Stone Age Best COSPLAY Contest" under the name of its main product "Stone Age". At the same time due to Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing and other areas in the past few years in the frequent opening of the Comic Con and the exhibition of the same person, so that now the mainland COSPLAY also has a certain degree of scale. Hope to adopt