When you spend an absorbent amount of time tailoring a suit just like Spike’s in Cowboy Bebop or styling your wig into perfect Super Saiyan spikes, you’re going to want to show your cosplay off to as many people as possible. But while there are plenty of groups online for cosplayers— people who dress up and perform as characters for fun—there’s never been one that services the entire globe.
WorldCosplay is the latest social network to cater to this global network of fans. And, some would argue, it’s the first of its kind to do so.
Though still in beta, the network already comes in an impressive 12 languages. A sister site to Cure, Japan’s most popular cosplay network, WorldCosplay has managed to attract 8,500 users.
Cristian Botea of Cosplay Gen, a worldwide cosplay magazine with 21,000 Facebook fans, told the Daily Dot that while he thought WorldCosplay had a lot of flaws to work out, he could see it becoming the first truly global cosplay network.
“It certainly seems to be aiming to do that, yes, but I still think it has a long way to go before it gets that crown,” wrote Botea, a Romanian content coordinator. “I’m seeing it get a lot of attention in the past month, with a whole lot of the cosplayers I follow joining it.”
There are already three big social network players in the cosplay community: the American based Cosplay.com, the Japanese Cure, and the general art site Deviant Art. Since the first two focus on their home countries and the third was never designed to be a cosplay community, Botea said WorldCosplay might have a chance to become the cosplayer’s social network of choice.
While Botea thought the site could focus less on votes, rankings, and popularity contests. “[T]hat’s not what cosplay is, and not how cosplay should be promoted,” he wrote.
But Botea saw great potential for the platform to open up new lines of communication between cosplayers.
“I like how they have a lot of asian languages there, because there are plenty of talented cosplayers in Asia which are pretty hard to find or aren’t findable at all on English websites,” Botea wrote. “So, it’s a good start to be bringing these people in the attention of the rest of the cosplay community, because I think they have a lot to learn from each other.”
Photo by SHINEZ photo