/cgl/ - Cosplay & EGL

I swear this is mostly just an unfortunate downside of the bar being raised so high over the years.

I remember the days when there was at least one "ambiguously brown" character in almost every Japanese franchise. Like Ed from Bebop, Casca, Anthy, Aisha, Kaolla Su, several classic Yu-gi-oh characters, Kei from Dirty Pair. Most of the time brown skin was used as a way to indicate the character being foreign.

Yet, back in the day black or brown people in the community were rarer than unicorns. Still, no one seemed to even think of changing their skin colour for any character. Most of the Ed's on Google images are stark white. Those were also the days where hardly anyone batted an eyelash at things like cheap wigs, no wig, or poor fabric choices. These days standards for what's even considered mildly good cosplay are so high, people aim higher for spot-on accuracy to the degree that I've seen people try and dodge prescription laws and risk fucking up their eyes to get coloured contacts.

There's still very few characters overall who are black, and not just ambiguous. The blackface dispute first went big after that one Korra cosplayer. If people just stopped feeling like they absolutely need to paint themselves darker to be accurate for a character, this would hardly be a discussion. Even if people cry "whitewashing" over a dark-skinned character being cosplayed by a pale person, again there are very, very few truly black characters and calling "whitewashing" on a character with no defined race (Korra) or a character who isn't black (Arab, Desi, Native, Hispanic, Latino all have plenty of light skinned people- I'm Arab myself) is ridiculous and those people are better off not being listened to just because they think simply being able to speak on the internet gives merit to their opinions.