Cosplay and the Apocalypse

Surfing blogs I happened upon By Other Means who had a post titledBeCos(play) It’s Friday. A quick trip to Wikipedia revealed that Cosplay is basically a new subculture where people adopt personaes from fantasy series to roleplay, and then they all meet up in costume at some venue. A lot of pretty girls who you wish didn’t have tattoos mingle and pose in their scanty costumes pretending to be superheroes, while the perfunctory fat guy with facial stubble, dressed up only in a neon wig, hangs out in the back taking it all in. (What do you mean I can’t get in because I’m not a Cosplayer? You think I’m only here to look at the girls? Do you see the wig?)

Again, deep down in young people’s psyches, this world is seen as some drudgery to escape from. Some deep reverberation of discomfort is trembling their amygdalae, and it manifests as a subconscious desire, not to go for a hike in the mountains, or snowboard Whistler, or see the Grand Canyon, but to dress up as a fantasy character and walk around an auditorium imagining they lived in that fantasy world.

Part of why things got so weird this turn of the r/K cycle is our technology. From video games, to movies like Avatar, the technologists who create that media have gotten the eliciting of dopamine down to a science. What is the Grand Canyon when you’ve not only lived in Avatar’s perfectly neon colored world, you’ve saved it from destruction, and gotten the girl, in a story so fantastic it could only be fantasy? Once people’s minds acclimate to that level of stimulation on a regular basis, the rest of the world just seems too bland. They need that intense fix, even if it is just imagining themselves to be a female Warrior from another more interesting world, destined to kill Goblins and Orcs, and save the universe from evil.

I’m not judgmental in any way. To each their own, and some of those girls are cute, if probably certifiable. But when the hammer drops on the economic turmoil to come in this turn of the cycle, I suspect the pendulum will swing much harder and faster the other way. Like grumpy junkies who can’t get a fix, none of those people are going to want to hear about how they need to redistribute what meager income they can eek out in the aftermath to some poor unfortunate whose sense of economic entitlement created the problem in the first place.