Saturday 24 January 2004

Pic of the day: Cosplayers. When everyone thinks the same way, nobody thinks very much. (Screenshot from anime Narue no Sekai, which is actually quite good.)

Cosprayer

Watched an episode of a fansubbed anime called Cosmopolitan Prayers. I downloaded it based on the title. It took most of the increasingly frustrating episode 1 before I realized that it was a pun. The title shortens to "cosprayers".

Now in Japan there is this subculture where fans dress up as characters from anime (cartoons), manga (comics) or video games. This hobby is called cosplaying, and the fans who do this are called cosplayers. It is pretty big in Japan ... or perhaps there are just a lot of Japanese. But the hobby has also spread to American "otaku", fans of Japanese entertainment. On conventions where these (mostly young) people gather, cosplaying is a main attraction. Now bear in mind that Japanese pronounce "r" and "l" with the same sound...

The anime Cosmopolitan Prayers was incidentally so bad I would not watch more episodes even for free. It was chaotic and disjointed like a MTV music movie only without the music. There was too much mixture of religion, violence and panties; mixing even two of these is more than dubious in my book.

***

But some good may have come from it, for the pun itself is thought-provoking. For us believers it is said that prayer is the breath of the faith. But I think we should at some point in our life take a few moments to ask ourselves: Am I praying or cospraying?

For a Christian it is worth remembering that Jesus told his disciples to pray in private, behind closed doors, and not outside where people could see them. Even so, he did pray by Lazarus' grave, and at the Last Supper with his disciples. The young church did have communal prayer according to the Acts of the Apostles. And as far as I know, all Christian churches have prayer as part of their gatherings, whether as part of a ritual church service or a less formal meeting.

I know from experience how hard it can be to pray honestly when other people listen. That's when it may be useful to ask: Prayer or cosprayer? Am I myself in my prayer, or am I dressed up as some kind of hero or stereotype?