cosplaying

Japanese cosplayers steal hearts as Love Live! plus-size idol unit Debu Raibu!

Meet the group that cosplayers and fans are falling in love with.

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Popular cosplayer’s school photos reveal amazing transformative powers of cosplay

Over the past just half decade or so, cosplay has gone from being a niche hobby that some people found intolerably nerdy at best (and a sign of social dysfunction at worst), to being not only accepted by most, but even celebrated, with some of the best and most frequent cosplayers even enjoying a sort of minor celebrity status.

Cosplay’s growing popularity no doubt has a lot to do with the ongoing explosion of superhero films and the growing mainstream acceptance of other “nerdy” hobbies like video games, comic books and even anime and manga. Suddenly, the idea of using cosplay to escape your own skin and explore other identities on a regular basis is nearly as socially accepted as donning your Robo Pope costume for Halloween.

And some masterful cosplayers have used the medium to explore such drastically different identities that seeing them sans costume can be a shock, as Japanese Netizens learned recently when a popular cosplayer revealed some old yearbook photos.

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