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Short for "costume play". A type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea. Characters are often drawn from popular fiction in Japan, but recent trends have included American cartoons and Sci-Fi.

Favourite sources include manga, anime, tokusatsu, comic books, graphic novels, video games, hentai and fantasy movies. Any entity from the real or virtual world that lends itself to dramatic interpretation may be taken up as a subject.

Inanimate objects are given anthropomorphic forms and it is not unusual to see genders switched, with women playing male roles and vice versa.

Cosplayed characters should be tagged as characters in the picture, but they do not count towards the character count except in the potential case of living clothing.

Generic costumes (cat, witch, angel) with no pre-existing source are better suited to the basic costume tag.

See Also

• crossover_cosplay
• wearing_character
• alternate_costume