Nithitsuki's Website

This blog post is an entry to IndieWeb monthly prompt, which I'm taking part from the lovely IndieWeb club - bangalore

and here's the prompt of the month:

For this month’s prompt, I invite you to consider what masks and cosplay mean and how they interact with identity, for you. Write about it on your website, or do a photo essay, or a comic, or whatever creative expression works for you. But I expect an essay will say plenty.

To me,

a mask is an identity that we put on which we wouldn't normally do alone or with someone that we're comfortable enough being ourselves with, while cosplay is just going all out and taking the identity of someone with costumes, makeup, and the whole identity theft arsenal.

Usually, masks hide some part of our face, sometimes little, sometimes much, but they are an accessory that almost always involves hiding/distorting some feature of our face. Following that line of thought, I feel like a mask in an act of personality we put on which isn't fully ourselves

lets take a Doctor for example, they've been invited by a middle school to teach kids about hygiene lets say, at the time they would be wearing the mask¹ of a teacher (If the doctor doesn't really identify as a teacher while still trying to teach the kids)

and cosplay? well just searching it up online reveals people dressing up wildly with makeup, costumes and so much more beyond the mask, so I'd say cosplay is going all out pretending to be someone that you are not.

So to me, you can wear a mask to be hide your anger issues to your boss on how much you hate them, or trying to be a good role model for your cousins when in reality you might not be the same person that they get to see during their vacations

while cosplay on the other hand is straight up LARPing (in the truest meaning of Live Action Role Playing) where a person goes all out and tries to be someone else that they aren't.

P.S