During her final years of high school, Chinese teenager Xu Yunting found an unusual way to make some pocket money: transforming herself into male video game characters and taking their female devotees on dates.
The trend, called “cos commissioning,” has gained traction in China recently, with social media posts garnering millions of views as an increasing number of young women use their purchasing power to engineer a meeting with their dream man in real life.
One early morning in Shanghai last month, Xu carefully inserted contacts to enlarge her irises and adjusted a tangerine wig to transform into “Jesse,” a character from the romance quest mobile game “Light and Night.” A tall and sensitive musician, he is one of five characters that woo players throughout the game — and for client Feng Xinyu, a vivacious 19-year-old, the ideal partner.
Photo: AFP
“I don’t have a boyfriend because I’m not interested in 3D men,” Feng said, using a term for “real-life” men. “I like anime characters a little bit more, they’re more appealing to me.”
“Light and Night,” made by tech giant Tencent and aimed squarely at young women, promises a “brand-new interactive experience of highly immersive love.”
Players like Feng, who form strong emotional connections with characters in such games, are known as “dream girls” — and cos commissioning takes the immersion to the next level by dragging those 2D beaus off the screen and into the real world. Feng has commissioned Xu twice before, for a fee of around US$70. Last month, she spent US$2,800 on a multi-day trip with another Jesse cosplayer to a different province.
Photo: AFP
But she decided she preferred Xu’s portrayal and hired her for a third date. “We really click,” Feng said. “She’s just like the character from the game, it feels like we were meant to be together.”
RECONSTRUCTING GENDER RULES
Feng was waiting for Xu at a metro station, and grinned in unabashed delight when she spotted her. The two appeared relaxed, holding hands and chatting happily as they headed to their first activity.
Photo: AFP
Their date — all planned and paid for entirely by Feng —lasted all day, beginning with tea and ending with a hotpot meal and a romantic stroll. At both a doll-painting workshop and cake-decorating class they attended, they were one of many cos commission pairs. Staff at the latter business said they had noticed more and more couples coming in over the past year — sometimes dozens on busy days.
Part of the appeal, experts studying the phenomenon say, is that it gives young women a way to perform an idealized heteronormative relationship. Conservative social attitudes towards women remain widespread in China, often reinforced by state media and popular culture.
Aside from assuaging safety concerns, hiring a female cosplayer ensures a level of equality and understanding not necessarily guaranteed in a real-life relationship.
Photo: AFP
“I don’t think it’s important what gender the person being commissioned is,” Fudan University’s Tian Qian said. “What is important is that (the cosplayer) is a vessel, because the client needs a vehicle for their emotions.” Another academic, Zhou Zixing, wrote that cos commissioning allows women “to gain a voice that is fully respected by the opposite sex ... responding to, breaking, and reconstructing the gender rules of the real world.”
HEALING EFFECT
At the cake-decorating class, Feng leaned over the table, fondly watching Xu pipe generous amounts of icing onto a sponge cake. Afterwards, Xu gently helped Feng remove her apron, modelling Jesse’s gentlemanly behavior.
“The guys in the games are all quality guys,” Xu said. “I think (clients) will be able to improve their requirements in real life in terms of what they want from a man, so that they don’t settle for low-quality guys.”
Her mother Fang Xiuqing admitted her initial reaction when she learned what Xu was doing was: “How could this happen to my daughter?” But she has since come around to the idea. “I don’t think it’s a profession, it’s a hobby,” said Fang. “She gets enjoyment from it, and she also brings joy to others.”
Tian said cos commissions can act as “emotional sustenance.” “Although this is a paid interaction, it still gives a sense of being seen, which has a certain healing effect to it.”
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
Nov. 3 to Nov. 9 In 1925, 18-year-old Huang Chin-chuan (黃金川) penned the following words: “When will the day of women’s equal rights arrive, so that my talents won’t drift away in the eastern stream?” These were the closing lines to her poem “Female Student” (女學生), which expressed her unwillingness to be confined to traditional female roles and her desire to study and explore the world. Born to a wealthy family on Nov. 5, 1907, Huang was able to study in Japan — a rare privilege for women in her time — and even made a name for herself in the
RSS