Greetings Pitch,
Apologies for the time taken to reply.
"tension between the willing suspension of disbelief and the intentional
extension of imaginative belief", how excellently well you have
expressed this! I agree with this idea but would express it by saying
that cosplayers are not so much departing a mundane, or consensus,
reality, as bringing a piece of their individual realities into focus in
the consensus reality. My position is that the consensus reality is
actually less real than the individual reality tunnels that comprise it.
This is because the consensus reality relies so heavily on what we think
others believe while our own individual reality tunnel is comprised of
what we actually do believe.
I'd also argue that cosplayers are indeed the characters they portray,
in the same way that an image of a god is the god. This means that a fan
portraying a character who invokes Satan could indeed actually invoke
Satan as a result of the portrayal. This is the basis of theatre IMHO.
Regards,
Morgan Leigh
PhD Candidate
School of Social Sciences
University of Tasmania.
On 16/05/2014 2:12 AM, Pitch313 wrote:
> On Mon, 12 May 2014 20:49:45 -0700, Morgan Leigh <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> Pitch,
>> Musing on accidentally successful invocations.... So you are saying
>> cosplay isn't real? A real what?
>
> OK! Refining my closing quip about cosplay a little.
>
> Broadly, I think that a useful distinction in talking about cultural
> matters
> does exist between folks acting out their own world views in all
> seriousness
> and folks portraying world views in an appreciative yet not so serious
> manner.
> Costume play--cosplay--probably belongs with the latter.
>
> Let me add that I come at popular culture enthusiasms like cosplay as a
> lifelong fan of plenty of it myself. It seems to me that much fandom relies
> on tension between the willing suspension of disbelief and the intentional
> extension of imaginative belief. Activities like cosplay allow fans to
> depart
> the realm of the mundane "real" and participate in the super "reality" of
> the story universe. All the while remaining in the mundance
> reality--thereby
> giving us all those images of striking cosplayers on the balconies and in
> the corridors of convention centers.
>
> But cosplayers are not the characters that they portray.
>
> That was the not so "real" circumstance that I had in mind. The difference
> between a magic worker invoking Satan, for instance, and a fan portraying
> a character who invokes Satan in a story universe. Or a current member
> of the US Army and a Civil War re-enactor.
>
> Newswise--It looks like various protests have led to the cancellation of
> the Satanic
> Mass event at Harvard.
>
> Musing Magic & Fandom Have Have Blurred My Awareness Of Reality! Rose,
>
> Pitch
>
>
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