.@spacespecs shortly after I moved to NYC, some friends of mine contacted me because they knew I would be interested in this project: the BBG was looking for a few cosplayers to attend a dinner/event in costume. I agreed to participate, packed up Zidane and rolled down to the BBG on the night of the event.
It turned out it was a bonsai tree event, with performances by a few Japanese troupes, with a catered dinner for the audience. When I arrived I was informed that my friends who had asked me to join them in costume had all bailed on the event, but the organizer encouraged me to get into my cosplay and get ready to participate.
I was far too embarrassed to get into my costume all by myself. Besides, now that I was there it was clear to me that running around in a costume of any kind would be wildly inappropriate. Fortunately I had dressed in a suit to the office that day, so I just stayed in that suit and helped cater the event (thank you 8 years of serving tables). It was a really lovely experience, to be honest. The performances were fun to watch, I got to help prepare and later eat a lot of really delicious finger foods, and I met some really sweet people among the caterers and performers.
But to this day I'm kind of superbly confused as to what *any* cosplayer was supposed to add to the event. It wasn't about anime or manga or video games; cosplay isn't something that homogeneously mixes into every aspect of Japanese culture. Why was I there?? WE JUST DON'T KNOW.
I feel like cosplay is being used as a weird tool to shoehorn in Americans/WHITE PEOPLE/non-Japanese people voices as if they have a place in an event that is about Japanese culture and. yeah. anyway. Just hashing stuff other people have already said now.
.@ahaharukard okay I promised I would write a thing about Suzaku that's a bit of a different perspective so here it is! :D
I say that I really have a soft spot for Suzaku but tbh it's not that it puts me in opposition to, or makes me dislike Lelouch in any way. Like I was tweeting yesterday, I don't think you can have one without the other ... and that's not to say you can't hate one or the other or both (but then WHY ARE YOU HERE :V ) but rather that my being a Suzaku fan makes me no less of a Lelouch fan. Er. Anyway
So actually one of the things I like about CG is that season 1 goes out of its way to make Suzaku and Lelouch perfect foils to one another, and one of those ways is how they respond to personal tragedy and difficulties, I guess you could say. Both suffer a lot in different ways, and both shoulder and endure their suffering in different ways. But their attitudes towards 'why is this happening to me' are also very different, and that plays in to how they react. They also both do very destructive things over the course of the series and their reactions to the fallout of those things are dramatically different. Code Geass as a series, especially in R2, settles on presenting Lelouch's way of handling these difficulties as the 'correct' one, or at least 'the way that gets things done', while Suzaku's way of handling these things becomes utterly ineffective, but I'll get to that I guess. (when did this become an actual essay orz)
The thing is, Suzaku and Lelouch are in very different mental places in relation to the world. Lelouch's mother is killed and he is disgraced by his father, then thrown to Japan as bait. In about the same timeframe, Suzaku kills his own father in an effort to prevent additional suffering for people he knows, and thus throws Japan into chaos, allowing it to fall quickly to Britannia. Lelouch perceives that the world has betrayed him; Suzaku perceives that he has betrayed the world. As a result, Lelouch is a constant state of 'betterment' - he wants to make the world a better place so that he and his sister will not be betrayed by it again. Suzaku is in a constant state of atonement - he too wants to make the world a better place, but to correct the things he did to make it awful in the first place.
(There's something about sweet, sweet revenge in there against his father for being an arrogant dick, but it's not like that won't better the world too. XD; )
Anyway. So as you've noted Suzaku is constantly all apologies and self-hate, and yet he does continuously more destructive shit over the course of the series culminating with FLEIJA and, on a more personal level, attempting to inject Kallen with Refrain, both of which are huge violations of human rights and terrible tragedies, not necessarily in that order. It's terrible. So let's talk about what brings him down this terrible route, starting with:
1) killing his dad! or more specifically, what happens after he kills his dad per the season 0 novel. Kururugi senior is no picnic of a man; the novel paints his relationship with Suzaku as distant, and as Suzaku is a pretty violent, aggressive child who is still intimidated enough by his father to not act up around him, it's not really a wonder that he concludes that nothing less than a show of lethal force will be enough to stop his father from hurting/killing the vi Britannias.
but honestly it's Kirihara who kind of left me going 'OH SO THAT'S WHY' because he just straight up tells (10-year-old Suzaku who just killed his father in a desperate attempt to save his friends' lives) that he should kill himself. Just like 'yo kid this was really useful and all but if you don't have the guts to kill yourself for this, then you're worse than dirt'.
Suzaku takes that to heart and I... <<<<<< N.B from Jumbotweet: auto-truncated at 4K characters on index page - Click here or on the "view" link to see entire jumbotweet! http://www.jumbotweet.com/ltweets/view/58002
@ahaharukard OKAY so basically I fell in love with the idea of Suzaku before you really get to know him? He's kind and chivalrous and takes a lot of shit from other people just by existing and keeps smiling; he's heroic, and willing to sacrifice for others, and basically NOT THAT DISSIMILAR from Syaoran (in Tsubasa specifically). It certainly helped that he was drawn similarly? But then of course you find out that all these 'good' traits are actually motivated by him being a mental wreck/passively suicidal and thus he's incredibly selfish and that he's so mentally fucked up over everything that he does horrible things to Lelouch and everyone else and honestly that made me outright STOP WATCHING THE SERIES for a long time? I went back to finish the first season about a month after it ended and I was less angry at Suzaku for turning out to be a big selfish douche. Didn't watch R2 until @alabaster_heart showed it to me and by then I was still wrecked over him but I was no longer horribly betrayed by how screwed up he is, haha. So in short no he's not like Syaoran but at first I thought he was so I was really disappoint when he wasn't :(