Who we choose to be (photo entry) in The irresistible urge to rant, riff and ramble

I put up a picture of Xueling recently,

commenting that she was reading (well, "reading")my copy of Devil May Cry 3, and using it to show me that it was ok for people to eat pizza with their hands because, see, Daddy?

(I got nothing)

And someone said (jokingly) "Dante: What a great role model for kids."

And.. well.

See, some people do cosplay solely as an intellectual exercise-- they select what they want to be solely on the aesthetic aspects of it-- will the outfit look good? How hard is it to make (note: the more difficult or impossible the better)? Holy hell, how do I make my nipples glow like that?^

That's what happens, I suppose, when you're a professional. And then there are those who basically ask how awesome is this character?. And their definition of "awesome", sadly, comes down to how Hollywood portrays strength.

I don't see it that way.

Fig 1

To me, when I put on a character, I put the mask on to hide my own face, but, as Pratchett says, only the one on the outside. If I'm going to put a character on, he exists to allow me to amplify a chosen part of myself.

I channel myself through that character

Fig 3

and the more the character matches mine, the more comfortable I feel walking around in his skin.

Fig 4

I joked, last year, that I'd been playing Kyo Kusanagi for almost 20 years

Fig 5

(you can see why in the pic below)

Fig 6

but the truth is that in a large part of that time I was pretty much wanting to be Dante, or at least the way Dante looked in my eyes.

And I don't mean in terms of powers, although obviously he's pretty cool, given that the moment his full power awakens he immediately does... er, you'd better see it for yourself

Yeah. His power is basically Ok, what's the most awesome thing I could be doing right now? Here we go.

But that's not, to me, what's the best thing about him.

The best thing about him is, as I told the guy who joked about Dante being a role model:

Dante teaches you that monsters can be fought, that evil should be mocked, and that it doesn't matter what power you have or what temptation lies before you, you choose humanity first.

And Caffeine agrees with me. Not in what she thinks about Dante, but in choosing characters who reflect something in her, too.

Fig 7

So she played as Squall for a while because she understood him

Fig 8

although I suspect that she also had great fun hunting down a Rinoa to pester(as I said, my life is complicated)

Fig 9

So it amuses me-- amuses me greatly-- that, apart from Kaito, whom I've said is pretty much a tabula rasa to inscribe any personality you want (she agrees on that), the character where her full personality shnies through like a plasma torch is this:

Fig 10

This, of course, gives rise to wonderful possibilities.

Fig 11

Not to mention symbolism.

Fig 2: Photograph by Giam Siaw Kiat (full album here)

Fig 3: Photograph by Dharma Seeker (full album here)

Fig 4: Image from ビンアブドラ ムハンマド 's phone and taken with him. No album, but his page is here

Fig 5: Picture by Sam Tan and Simply Amazing Memories (full album here)

Fig 6: My graduating class from UMIST. That was more than a decade ago and I still wear the jacket on occasion.

Fig 7: Picture as Vanessa (KoF) with Lavina Tang as Chun Li (Street Fighter). (full album here) Photograph by me

Fig 8 and 9: Picture with Loh Jialing Daphne. Photographs by me. full album here

Fig 10: Caffeine as new Dante, from DmC (full album here)

Fig 11: Caffeine and myself, Dante and Dante. Pictures by Geniuth photography; (full album here)

^No, seriously.