Cosplay
by Luke Plunkett
There’s always been a bit of a stigma attached to hentai, a highly sexualised form of Japanese anime and manga. Ditto for any associated cosplay, which can often be explicitly pornographic. Despite this, a German couple is finding some surprising mainstream (for the cosplay world, at least) success combining the two.
Because I run our cosplay website, I browse DeviantArt (one of the world’s most popular sources for cosplay images) a lot while looking for cool photos, and started noticing an influx of a certain type of photo maybe 6-9 months ago. Every time I’d go and check the site out, I’d see that near the very top of the “most viewed” section of images, right alongside the Harley Quinns and Disney Princesses, would be these photos of a girl, usually dressed as anime character (though video games featured as well), bound and gagged. Sometimes there would be a man alongside her doing the binding, sometimes there’d be a man being bound as well.
At first I thought the images were coming out of a scene I’d never encountered before, some fetish BDSM or shibari community that was finding its feet on the site, but eventually I noticed that it was always the same girl. And there were never any shots of other cosplayers doing the same thing to indicate it was a community. It was just her.
That girl’s name is Kitty, and along with her husband Jester they’re now caught in the midst of a surprising (and accidental) rise to cosplay fame.
The couple, who have been together since 2009 (and married since 2015), met each other through cosplay; Kitty began in 2006 and Jester in 2007, and the pair remain committed to the craft, building their own costumes and attending cons in their native Germany every year. They operate together under the name Natsuko Hiragi.
To set this straight, they began as, and remain outside certain photos, “traditional” cosplayers. They don’t attend cons tied up, nor do they do their bondage stuff with other folks, and every outfit they make is done with regular cosplay in mind. Despite this, bondage is what they’re fast becoming known for, with increasing levels of both support and notoriety.
“It began as a silly bet”, Jester tells me. “I told my wife about my love for bondage-related stuff and showed her my Deviantart Page”. After some discussion about the possible intersection of two of his interests, Kitty made a bet with him that they would upload a gallery of her in cosplay, bound and gagged, and see how well it did.
If they got less than 200 views in 24 hours, she’d never do it again. If they got more, then she’d do more.
“By the end of the day, the image had been viewed over 2000 times”, Jester remembers, laughing. …