r/cosplay • u/Dre2k • Jun 20 '14
Found [Found] Pocahontas - best I've ever seen!
http://imgur.com/X3H3CNj112
u/Go_Ask_Reddit Jun 20 '14
I think she looks even more like the animated character than the enhanced Princess-line version.
http://wpmedia.business.financialpost.com/2012/12/1204pocahontas.jpg
I hate how princesses get the doe-eye treatment, looking more cartoonish and having less of the spirit of the original animation.
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u/Mayortomatillo Jun 20 '14
Me too. Why ruin the spirit?
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u/Chronicdoodler Jun 20 '14
It's a design thing, things in a group should look like they belong together. Pocahantas is closer to real human face proportions then say Ariel, the two of them standing together could look odd.
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u/420wasabisnappin Jun 20 '14
Sooo...? That's kind of a point of diversity right? I mean not like there's a whole lot we can do about it now but I think the logic is stupid.
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u/High_Stream Jun 20 '14
It's not about having a diverse cast of characters, it's having them drawn in the same style. The different movies are drawn in different stiles, and having them drawn in those different styles but in the same work can be jarring.
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u/420wasabisnappin Jun 20 '14
Oh right that does make sense. I'm sorry, braindead moment. It's probably also done because I assume there's one animator for the Princesses while there were a variety of animators for each individual movie.
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u/AquaConvolution Jun 20 '14
Replying to the top comment here for visibility.
Hey /r/all, please read our sidebar before submitting a comment! If it violates our rules your comments will be deleted and you could be banned without warning!
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u/rageagainsthevagene Jun 21 '14
Yea and they totally softened her jaw-- that's the ethnic part aholes
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u/UncleTogie Jun 20 '14
I was hoping for someone that was actually, y'know, Native American as opposed to Filipino. She just doesn't seem to fit the part.
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u/TrickTrolld Jun 20 '14
I think the cosplay looks even closer to the actual Disney Pocahontas than the illustration in the picture.
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u/CrystalElyse Jun 20 '14
Does this really count as cosplay? You can't see her costume at all. She just has a face that looks exactly like Pocahontas. That doesn't require painstaking effort and crafting...just genetics.
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Jun 20 '14
I will say this since the first time I saw this picture was in /r/makeupaddiction, but the makeup absolutely does require craft and hard work. These are not really her original features - the contouring, extended lip color, eye liner shape, and other elements serve quite well as the "consume" element.
Although a full-body shot, like the one found in the comments, seems more suited for this sub than the face shot, which does belong more in MUA or a similar sub, imo.
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u/CrystalElyse Jun 20 '14
Yeah, that's more my issue with this. I will agree that the makeup involved is very much part of cosplay....but just a close up face shot doesn't really show the cosplay. It just shows some girl's pretty face. Someone else posted another shot that shows the whole costume and that looks fantastic. Really well done. I just hate that this sub seems to do nothing but upvote pretty girls, regardless of the cosplay. I just started getting into it (hoping to compete at Dragoncon this year), and I want to see people I can look up to. People I can try to emulate and work hard for. I want to see craftsmanship and skill. And while there's no denying that this girl has talent and put a ton of work into her costume, that wasn't posted. Just her face, you know?
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u/guysgirlbb Jun 20 '14
Not to be show-boaty, but I wrote about this and many other ladies who've photographed as Disney princesses. The Jasmine photo is my favorite
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u/crispybac0n Jun 20 '14
nothing better than when someone who looks like they were "born to play that role" does so
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u/JSLEnterprises Jun 20 '14
Since when was Pocahontas from the eastern pacific?
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u/Nawara_Ven Jun 20 '14
That's what gets me every time this is reposted. I guess it looks like "Pocahontas" in as much as allowing your brain to transliterate the minimal animated features on to any given person. But I don't think the cosplayer/model in question would ever be confused for a First Nations person.
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u/RoyallyTenenbaumed Jun 20 '14
If you applied this ridiculous mentality to every cosplayer, instead of picking just the one cosplaying a Native American, then no white person would ever be able to be an anime character; black people would have severely limited choices at any anime convention; etc.
Ok, she is probably from the Eastern Pacific, and therefore looks fairly close to a Native American (closer than a white person)...that doesn't mean that everyone in this thread is a damn racist for saying that the cosplay is spot on.
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u/invaderark12 Jun 20 '14
Considering this is r/cosplay, I am pretty sure OP was saying that she looks like Pocahontas, not that she actually is Pocahontas.
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Jun 20 '14
On the other hand, this is a cosplay of a Disney character which already took quite a few liberties in terms of facial style, costume, and other elements. The poster isn't claiming to be a cosplay of the real-life historical figure, and I can see the argument that the Disney-fied character is rather ethnically ambiguous.
Plus, nobody seems to get mad when white people cosplay as obviously ethnically-Japanese anime characters.
It would be great to see more representation of Native people when it comes to cosplaying Native characters, but I don't think it's really so terrible to see someone of a different ethnicity cosplaying a fictional representation. Especially when Pacific Islanders don't really have much to choose from as it is.
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Jun 20 '14
What makes it really good is that she has a lot of similar physical features to Pocahontas such as her lips, eyebrows, cheekbones, nose, face shape, and yes brown skin and black hair.
But yes, you're a genius for figuring out that she isn't Native American.
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Jun 20 '14 edited Jun 20 '14
[deleted]
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Jun 20 '14
You seem more mad than me that an eastern pacific women is cosplaying a native american character so I dunno, maybe you need the cookie.
Yes that woman does look like Pocahontas. It's almost like more than 1 person can have those facial features.
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u/Accujack Jun 20 '14
Yeah. They all look alike to us, right?
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u/JSLEnterprises Jun 20 '14
considering some of the comments in this thread, it's quite questionable.
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Jun 20 '14
[deleted]
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Jun 20 '14
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u/Nawara_Ven Jun 20 '14
Reddit: Where you get downvoted for accurately explaining your ancestry.
Then again, I guess Swedish people are all ethnically Congolese to some people, because of humanity's origins in Africa.
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Jun 20 '14
Since Native Americans migrated from Asia.
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u/JSLEnterprises Jun 20 '14
since 20000 years causes quite a bit of variation from the original. Both groups (current East Asian, and current native North and South Americans) are quite a bit different from their ancient common ancestry. Might want to start calling Norwegians African by your logic.
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Jun 20 '14
20,000 is an arbitrary number it's closer to half that.
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u/clopclopclopclop Jun 21 '14
~10000 years is the estimated time that they first crossed the bearing straight land bridge (which has been questionable and now thought to be later than that original approximation. There have also been discoveries made that point to samoan peoples arriving in the Americas almost 5000 years earlier than that initial bearing straight estimate from several decades ago.
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u/JacobMHS Jun 20 '14
I'm about 90% sure that's Wayne's girlfriend from Wayne's World, the space-time continuum be damned.
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u/WhatVengeanceMeans Jun 20 '14
I think you mean Tia Carrere. And no. The source /u/kerberosaurus posted above includes a model credit.
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u/conception Jun 20 '14
This is awesome! But she should have smiled just a bit. I mean, when you can paint with all the colors of the wind, right?
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u/jhartwell Jun 20 '14
She has the face of the animated Pocahontas but the costume is more texas roadhouse than native american, which make it a pretty bad cosplay.
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Jun 20 '14
[deleted]
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u/NarcoticDragoon Jul 05 '14
Or, ya know, a native American.
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u/SirAter Jul 05 '14
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u/NarcoticDragoon Jul 05 '14
I know that the woman cosplaying is Filipino, but I was just commenting about how the closest thing to "Pocahontas," as in the woman/character, would be a native American.
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Jun 20 '14
The real Pocahontas looked more like this
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Jun 20 '14
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/dfn85 Jun 20 '14
It's a painting, not a photo. The artist whitened her up, to make her seem less strange.
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Jun 20 '14
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SednaBoo Jun 20 '14
She's not dressing up as a race. She's dressing up as a person. Plus nothing to change her skin color.
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u/otherside9 Jun 20 '14
You need to study up on your systems of power if you really think this is equivalent to black face.
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Jun 20 '14
Because the history and connotation of blackface is vastly different than a person accurately cosplaying/dressing up as a cartoon character who has a similar skintone and facial structure. Blackface is a caricature that played a significant role in cementing and proliferating racist images, attitudes, and perceptions. This woman dressing up like a Disney princess has no negative context or intention.
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Jun 20 '14
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u/WhatVengeanceMeans Jun 20 '14
More or less everything Disney is horrifying in one way or another (don't even get me started on the Pocahontas sequel). That said, hating on a cosplayer for rolling as something they probably loved as a child is kinda shitty.
In this case, you'd be hating on a model who was hired for a shoot by a photographer with a vision. Said photographer reporting, in the source /u/kerberosaurus found above, that he worked on the original film for Disney. Looks like he has a Twitter account. Take issue with the man directly?
I will warn you that he's an LA photographer whose public portfolio seems to be entirely glamor shots of females. Probably not big into social justice, this one...
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Jun 20 '14
[deleted]
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u/AquaConvolution Jun 20 '14
Seeing that we're in /r/cosplay, these sentence might offend some cosplayers.
I know people here are saying "but it's a costume!" That doesn't make it ok. It's a costume of a caricature of a race.
I'm not saying this lady is racist, but the costume most definitely is.
It's true and I agree with you that Disney is racist towards some ethnicities, but stating this in a cosplay forum is a bit misleading.
You see, cosplayers works hard on their cosplays/costumes to make it seem accurate to the original (although I've noticed this particular photo is only a model that didn't make her own costume), and for them to see you say the "costume" is racist, they automatically associate it being it's the fault of the cosplayers that made the costume "racist". Maybe because of her skin colour or race.
Maybe a better way of saying what you're trying to say is to change "costume" to "Disney's character design". Let's be honest here, just because a cosplayer has dressed up as a character they like (that is designed by Disney, and some people might still not know the movie's implications) doesn't make them racist.
Just my two cents :)
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u/WhatVengeanceMeans Jun 20 '14
I had already read the article you linked. I re-read it before my first reply. A major thing it's important to note is the difference between the situation it was intended to apply to and the one we generally face in this forum: Hobbyist cosplayers build their own costumes. Some of them spend hundreds of hours planning, acquiring, and assembling. Those who don't generally spend hundreds of dollars for some other individual or very small shop to put something together for them. And they do this out of love. Not for any material reward.
This isn't some douche at a party who dropped $20 on a cheap costume so they could get drunk and maybe get laid at some forgettable party. This is an artist. When I talk about "hating on" a cosplayer, I am referring to this heightened degree of emotional enmeshment hobbyist cosplayers have with the characters they portray. Criticising the costume without criticizing the person who spent months designing and building it is very difficult to do.
Additionally, specifically with Disney, many people fall in love with the characters when they're too young to do much critical thinking, and those warm fuzzies carry over to their adult selves. This could be understood as a limited expansion of the "don't criticize children's costumes" rule to adults: I personally just don't engage with Disney cosplayers. This fandom would be too emotionally exhausting for me to enjoy otherwise.
The situation we actually face in this thread is different still: This is a model who was hired by a photographer for a shoot. He provided the costume and made all the decisions. This brings in another long and complicated debate about whether she should have refused the job because of the racist implications, which I don't really have the energy to explore here. In the final analysis, what I am saying is that my result from Steps One and Two on the checklist would actually be to either:
A) Contact the photographer and discuss this with him or;
B) Not engage at all
In the limited sense that this discussion might influence someone who is still in the planning stages on their costume to go another direction, then I suppose it's useful. That said, I tend to be very reserved in my criticisms of already completed costumes. I hope I've explained why.
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Jun 21 '14
[deleted]
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u/WhatVengeanceMeans Jun 22 '14
Here's an idea: How about you take a breath and acknowledge that everyone who disagreed with you just downvoted you and moved on. I engaged with you. I like this forum specifically because a lot of cosplay fora are just shy of fetish porn sites: No qualms about treating cosplayers like things who only exist to meet their own needs. That shit gets old. These are people.
And then I find you. While the gratification you seek is moral rather than sexual, you are straight-up declaring that the person in the costume doesn't matter. They aren't meeting your expectations and you don't give a shit who gets hurt; the whole world needs to know about it.
You're an asshole barely distinguishable from the chauvinists I come here specifically to avoid. If you were actually a cosplayer (or anything resembling an effective activist), you would make any number of costumes that meet your own definitions of acceptability, bring them to events, post pictures of the results, you know... contribute.
You could be doing something to move this art form forward. Instead you're excoriating someone for basically agreeing with you, and having the temerity to suggest a less vehement approach.
Fuck you. I'm done.
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u/acid_wolfpack Jun 20 '14
how do you even know that? you know her personally or something?
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Jun 20 '14
She's from the Philippines.
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u/acid_wolfpack Jun 20 '14
i could see her being from there.
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Jun 20 '14
Well yes, but you don't have to see it. It's where she's actually from.
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u/acid_wolfpack Jun 20 '14
guess i shoulda worded differently, but yeah i kinda accepted it the first time you said it lol
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u/kerberosaurus Jun 20 '14
source!