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Weekly Cosplay - Izzy Saeko's Kasumi from Dead or Alive Kicks Ass

Everybody, regardless of gender, ethnicity, physical build, etc should be able to cosplay whoever they want to cosplay

It's really unclear how the rules are when it comes to this kind of stuff.

My "rules" for cosplay are that, if someone's costume of a fictional character causes a real-life person -- whose race or culture that fictional character is supposed to signify -- to remark, "that's not okay", it's not my job to invalidate that reaction. Beyond that, though, I have to say that I can't recall ever seeing a photo of someone dressed up as Naruto or Goku and thinking to myself, "that person is dressed up as a Japanese man"... but I've definitely seen tons of Pocahontas costumes that have made me think to myself, "that person is dressed up as a Native American woman".

Goku, and by extension every other student of the Kame school wear a traditional martial arts Gi with large kanji emblazoned on it. Naruto characters wear various traditional Japanese clothing like geta, yukata, jika-tabi, and too many others to list. I'd even throw in the notion that a lot of popular female characters wear Japanese school uniforms and tend to be some of the most common cosplay outfits around. I'm not particularly sure how much more stereotypically Japanese they could make them without resorting to old WW2 era Bugs Bunny racist caricatures. Perhaps it's worth wondering why some people can look at someone dressed in explicit traditionally Japanese clothing and not see Japanese culture, but can do so for other characters and cultures with ease, even cultures that don't actually exist in real life like Wakanda.

The answer to me is America is very used to sweeping Asian culture under the rug, and not treating it with the same kind of scrutiny as other groups here. Full disclosure, I'm Asian, and while I don't particularly care that much about Americans cosplaying as Asian characters, I do notice the double standard that often gets applied to Asian media in America compared to everything else.

Personally I think she does justice quite well to the classic Kasumi outfit. Not just because she shows plenty of skin btw. Though I won't lie and say it's not an unwelcome site. I say be proud and cosplay who you want. It should be about the effort put into the cosplay itself, not race or even gender for that matter.

One of my favorite cosplays I have ever seen was one where these 2 friends cosplayed as Urd and Belldandy from Oh My Goddess at an Otakon many years ago. Oh My Goddess is my favorite series so whenever I see cosplayers from the show/manga I also stop to ask for photos and to chat with them a bit. You don't see many of them so it's always a treat for me. They said they purposefully "swapped races" for the cosplay (white friend went as Urd and black friend as Bell) to make a point that it shouldn't matter go as your favorite character. They both put a ton of effort into the outfits and they both looked amazing.