Cosplay as Sympathetic Magic

Ever since I started researching cosplay, I’ve had this one idea bungling around in my brain which has helped me approach certain topics with an open mind: cosplay is a form of sympathetic magic.

Now, before I get too into it, two primary things should be addressed: (1) this is not to trivialise sympathetic magic, nor is it assuming sympathetic magic is not used directly by participants on a regular occasion; and (2) I do not think cosplayers are actively partaking in sympathetic magic through the act of cosplay, rather the connection between the two is metaphoric. Essentially what I want to talk about today is how we can learn a lot about how cosplay functions by seeing it’s similarities with sympathetic magical practice.

Sympathetic magic is a magical system which understands the ability to affect a person or thing through a representational object. One of the more common images of this found in popular culture is the voodoo doll - an object which represents a person, and the pin pricks into the doll are copied over to the person you want to affect. But voodoo dolls are not the only place sympathetic magic pops up.

Some rain dances are sympathetic magic - mimicking the sound of rain in small places, and in some cases actually sprinkling a bit of water on the ground. This asks for the gods to understand the smaller act and bring it into the wider world. The entire idea of this magical system is the idea of using one aspect of the world to represent another.

To understand the connection of cosplay to sympathetic magic, I should talk about one of the people who were nice enough to chat with me about their experiences. For the purposes of the research, I’m calling them Sam. When chatting about character choice, Sam mentioned they’re choice to play Tohru Honda, one of the primary characters in the anime Fruits Basket, was intimately tied to a shared loss.

“I felt so moved to become her,” they said, “because all the things she had ben through in her life. She had lost her mom, I had lost my mom, like… all these things that happen. I was, like, I wish that I could still go out there with a smile on my face at that point in my life. And so I did that, and I did everything I could to be like her when I was in cosplay.”

Jessica Nigri as Ranni from Elden Ring.

Sam’s experience is not unique either. In a documentary about her cosplays, professional cosplayer Jessica Nigiri commented that she chooses characters who have some aspect of their personality she wishes to embody. Several cosplayers I spoke to mentioned something similar - commenting on the wish to find elements of fictional characters to take on and embody within themselves through the act of cosplaying.

There are a few things happening here, but for the time being let’s focus on the relationship between fiction and cosplayer, and in particular how that relationship is affected in a way that is vaguely similar to sympathetic magic. Obviously, the core of what’s happening is an attempt at transformation: Sam wished to transform their experience of grief, Jessica wishes to transform aspects of her personality. The avenue of choice for this transformation is cosplay.

The individual cosplayer is the object to be changed, and the representation chosen is the piece of fiction. The act of cosplay could be seen as the ritual action of transformation in which one wishes the transformation to be brought onto the person in question.

Let’s use Sam’s cosplay as our example case. Sam is the one Sam wished to change - it was themselves, rather than someone else. Instead of using a doll, Sam chooses, instead, a fictional representation, a character they see connection to but that there’s still a separation from. But the connection needs to be actualised through the ritual action of the consecration of the doll - or, in the case of cosplay, an act of performance.

Unlike the traditional doll example, the individual in cosplay puts on the representation in order to transform. The point of cosplay is to bring the fictional into the physical. For cosplayers like Sam, the goal is to bring particular aspects of that fictional into the physical manifestation of self. Sam wants to, at least temporarily, be like that fictional. So they transform the fictional actively by bringing into the physical. By bringing the character, and embodying that character, they are transforming the representational object in hopes that it also transforms the object of the activity - themselves.

I think cosplay is an interesting element of this transformation - it also allows us to see cosplay as something that can be transformational. Because it is transformational - it transforms people like Sam in a way that lasts far longer after the removal of the costume.