2023-05-27 00:18:34
Am; Lek
Imagine going to the movies with Captain America, having a romantic dinner at a restaurant with Superman, walking in the park with Super Mario or cuddling on the sofa with the Prince of Persia. Now imagine that dream, one by one, becoming a reality. For hundreds of girls in China it really is like this: for quite a bit of money they go on dates with their favorite superheroes. This happens as part of a phenomenon called cos commission, where actors put themselves up for hire to play admired characters in fantastical encounters, which may even end in a passionate kiss.
Rainy Ren (pseudonym), a 20-year-old Chinese student from Ningbo, a city in Zhejiang province, really wanted to meet a guy. She won a scholarship to study in Australia, and thought it was a great opportunity to cultivate new relationships, but the year was 2020, and the corona virus left her stuck in China until further notice. For the next two years, she attended online classes from home and knew almost no people.
● Imports have opened, the support has not arrived and the farmers are uprooting the olive groves
● The owner of Reuveni Friedan on parting with IPG: “We left when we started to feel under curfew” | interview
To pass the time, Ran spent hours playing the popular computer game “Tears of Themis”, whose main character is Zoo Ran, a rising star in a prestigious law firm. At work Ran is a cold and distant guy, but outside he becomes sweet and caring. Ren was fascinated.
But it doesn’t end here. She also managed to fulfill the fantasy that Ran would be her partner in real life. The two began communicating through the game’s chat, from there they moved to text messages and voice calls, until one day, last February, something happened that she never dared to dream about before: for a few hours, the knight of her dreams came to life – and she got to go out with Zuo Ran at last for a real date. They rode a carousel in the park, visited a perfume shop, where they created their own unique scent together, he walked her home – and there was a hot kiss too.
Rainy Ran and Zoo Ran. Emotions that characterize relationships in real life / Photo: Rynee Ren
All of this sounds extremely far-fetched, except that the guy Ran kissed is actually a cosplayer (the bread of costume and play), an actor who dressed up as her favorite character and played her completely – as if he was Zoo Ran himself. And no, it’s not a scam, since Ran did it at her request, and you’ll be surprised to find out that for all this pleasure, she’s also spent about 15 thousand yuan, which is 2,200 dollars, to date. “I really felt Zuo Ran’s presence go from 2D to reality,” she told the Chinese website The Sixth Tone.
Ren is not alone. It turns out that many young women in China usually hire cosplayers to play the characters they admire – mostly superheroes from the worlds of science fiction, anime, manga, video games and comics – on a romantic date. They go out with them to a movie, to dinner, to a walk in the park, and create a dream date for themselves. They don’t have to worry about having a match or fear a date from hell, they sew the illusion with their own hands. This phenomenon is called Cos Commission.
“Playing more, needing more”
In fact, women started paying cosplayers already a few years ago, but the custom only started gaining momentum among the mainstream during the pandemic. At the end of 2022, posts by young women talking about their dates with these characters began to go viral on Chinese social networks, and the hashtag for the phenomenon received more than 100 million views on Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok. When the corona restrictions were lifted in China last December, the number of these posts increased. The “dream girls” were called the members of the new cosplay subculture, and this is because they are mostly young women (although men also participate).
One of the phenomena that greatly contributed to the development of the Cos Commission is the culture of Otome games (“maiden” in Japanese). According to the Tokyo Weekender magazine, it is a genre of video games based on neo-romantic stories, first developed in Japan in the nineties, aimed at the female audience and encouraging female players to develop romantic relationships with male characters. The first known otome is called Angelique, in which girls vying to inherit the throne are aided by nine guards with special powers. The challenge: they might fall in love with one of the guards. If they choose love, they will give up the possibility of being queens, but they will be promised a life of happiness. Today, the heroes of the games are already getting a new lease of life.
Dream Girl Johnny Lin on a video game date with a cosplayer, Shanghai / Courtesy of Rynee Ren
Despite relatively average graphics, the male characters in these games have a powerful charm, especially for women with low self-esteem, Sun Yuannan, a lecturer at Shandong Normal University in China who studies the impact of otome games on women, explains to the Sixth Tone website. According to Yoanen, as women invest more time and money in these games, their feelings towards virtual characters can more closely resemble those that characterize real-life romantic relationships: “The more women play, the more needy they become.” Women spend tens of thousands of yuan on Otome games in pursuit of deeper connections with the male characters.
The cos commission scene is now becoming more organized. Dreamgirls posts recruitment ads for cosplayers on e-commerce sites like Xianyu or social platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Each ad states which character the cosplayer will have to play, what the payment is being offered and if they are asked to kiss. After that he can contact and arrange a date.
Such players usually charge 100-200 yuan ($14-29) per hour, and the dream girl also pays for all the expenses of the date. There are also those who provide the service free of charge, and are provided only for the emotional value they provide to women.
According to the sixth tone, the girls of the dream usually arrange especially luxurious dates with their loved ones. Now that the option is open to many women, Ran even considered offering the cosplayer a large sum of money to stop dating other girls as Zoo Ran. But she finally decided to give up the exclusivity, explaining that her love for the cosplayer is “a fleeting illusion. I need to spend the money on the game to support the real Zoo Ran, who won’t change his mind about me.”
“Fill what is missing in my personality”
This phenomenon of course arouses quite a bit of criticism in China. Many see those girls as loners who are unable to handle real relationships. But for their part, they claim that they simply prefer their virtual friends over men in reality.
China is certainly not the only country where women will testify to disappointing and sometimes dangerous romantic relationships. But in many parts of the country, there is an increased pressure to adhere to traditional gender roles in relationships – ones that bind the woman and free the man – and no longer suit the desires of young women in today’s China. It is possible that this is one of the factors that make it a more inviting platform for the development of cultures like Kos Commission.
A cosplayer named Wang, who usually dresses up as male characters, explained to the Sixth Tone the emotional motives from the other side: “Through these roles I tried to fill in what was missing in my personality, such as maturity, but I also had a funny but evil idea – to pretend to be a grown man for a day.” . She said that during a date she realized how introverted the girl who invited her was: “At that moment I felt that doing this thing is very significant.”
Cosplay is an activity that is far from just dressing up or playing. For the members it is a kind of art that is a part of life itself, and in which the actor identifies with the character he plays, far beyond the visual element, by adopting the modes of behavior, nuances and language. When both parties experience the fiction in such a total way, it is not clear what remains of the line that distinguishes it from reality.
Dr. Zen Troy Chen from the University of London conducted a groundbreaking study on the ACGN (Anime, Comics, Games, Novels) phenomenon, which is at the roots of cosplay and cosplay, which has attracted more than 200 million consumers in China to date and has generated almost 350 million to 2019. He did so using the platform that has been driving it for more than two decades – the Chinese video sharing site for animation, comics and games Bilibili, which has more than 223 million monthly users. He tried to understand what role ACGN plays in Chinese society, especially in the generation Z, and found that in an online world it gives fans a unique channel through which they can negotiate their identity.For Chen, this is a new kind of space.
In the 1960s, Michel Foucault wrote about the other space that Chen alludes to. Foucault described a space that is at once real and mythical, physical and imagined, that may offer alternative forms of social organization and provide opportunities for people to subvert society’s dominant values and practices.
Inspired by Foucault, Chen describes cosplay and cosplay as a space or platform where individuals use different tactics to challenge the values and practices of consumerism and censorship and the status quo and to express themselves.
In this respect, cosplay and cos commission are far from being simple acts of consumption. It is a culture with deep involvement and a statement – declared or played – whose developments can only continue to be imagined.
#date #superhero #cost #Meet #Chinese #industry