New cosplays, new challenges — but Gojo is up for a challenge and he’s certainly enjoying creating cosplays as much as Marin and others enjoy wearing them. So, let’s see how their first photoshoot goes!
As Gojo finishes up sewing his fourth outfit at the end of the volume (one that admittedly has fewer challenges than the first three) it’s already easy to see how much his skills have grown. He’s putting more thought than ever into working with different fabrics for different effects and we see him starting to experiment with interpreting the source material, like by using slightly different fabric choices, embossed fabric on a cape lining instead of the plain fabric seen in the anime’s original designs. That detail in particular is one I’ve suspected is a popular stylistic choice in Asia for some time now; when looking at pre-made cosplays online (those Genshin Impact character designs have just too many details on them!), I’ve come across a lot of pre-made cosplays (from China mostly) using what looks like brocade or otherwise patterned fabric where I would expect a seasoned American cosplayer to use an unadorned fabric instead. To see that exact idea come up here feels like a confirmation of my suspicion that I haven’t been seeing one-off things but legitimately different stylistic choices in the real world.
But the most interesting cosplay in this volume was one that Gojo didn’t have to do any sewing for at all, when he helps Inui’s very endowed younger sister crossplay as another character from the series that Inui and Marin are cosplaying for their group shoot. It was fun to see Gojo and Shinju both racking their brains to figure out how to turn Shinju’s curvy figure into one straight as an arrow (apparently binders are called “b-holders” or “breast holders” in Japan), although this volume did have a couple of tasteless jokes about Shinju’s figure in the process. The story didn’t seem to leer at her body but a couple of gags were centered around “Shinju has big boobs, which she’s self-conscious of to start with, and when Gojo gets embarrassed by accidentally brushing into them she gets even more embarrassed!” which I just found rather tacky considering her age.
I am a bit concerned by what’s on the cover of this volume however: Marin’s next cosplay, which we see her and Gojo starting to plan at the end of this volume (and the inside cover page has another shot of the cosplay and is about as NSFW you can get with a character still, barely, wearing clothes). I’m less concerned about the skimpiness for once (though I would disagree with Gojo, that’s not a character design where “she comes across fit and strong, instead of smutty” that’s a horny design for sure) but how Marin has decided to change her skin color for the cosplay.
While it’s one thing to paint yourself a decidedly in-human color for cosplay (say the gray of the Homestuck trolls), it’s a totally different matter when darkening your skin to cosplay a character with a different skin tone. It’s like saying that your skin color is just an accessory to be manipulated, like changing a sweater, not an intrinsic part of how an individual is viewed by the world at large. Going by the preview for volume 5, it looks like Marin might be using a spray tan or similar to get that look and the discussion of “well, are spray tans racist?” is not one that I think society is ready to have yet but I personally would strongly advise against all of it. (In case anyone was wondering, the “correct” approach here would be to leave your skin color alone and focus on all of the other details that make a character visually recognizable, like hairstyle, clothing, poses, etc)
That said, I don’t think it’s wrong per-say to have Marin act like this, since she is a bit of an impulsive teenager living in a largely homogenous society so I can completely buy into the idea of her never even stopping to consider “wait, is this black face?” before doing it. I’m certainly apprehensive about how things will go down in the next volume (and how a larger group of viewers will react when the anime debuts in 2022 or so) but I’m also certainly coming back to find out.