Welcome to Gaia! :: cosplay

wow I didnt think anyone wouldnt know what cosplay was... oh well Cosplay, short for "costume play",[1]is basically describing a performing-art behaviour of self-rigging out as a character with corresponding costume, accessories and/or parameters.

In the society, interactions of "cosplay" behaviour forms a subculture centered on dressing as characters from manga, anime, tokusatsu, and video games, and, less commonly, fantasy movies, Japanese pop music bands, Visual Kei, fantasy music stories (such as stories by the band Sound Horizon), novels, and anything in the real world being unique and dramatic (or their more anthropomorphic form). However, in some circles, "cosplay" has been expanded to mean simply wearing a costume, without considering the mind of an actor and the common form of "cosplay" in a major "cosplay" culture.

The most specific anecdote about the origin of the word "cosplay" was that Nov Takahashi (from a Japanese studio called Studio Hard) coined the term "cosplay" as a contraction of the English-language words "costume play" while attending the 1984 Los Angeles Science Fiction Worldcon. He was so impressed by the hall and masquerade costuming there that he reported about it frequently in Japanese science fiction magazines. The word fits in with a common Japanese method of abbreviation: combining the first two moras of each word. "Cos" becomes kosu and play become pure hence becoming the nearest Japanese approximation of cosplay, which is kosupure.