天美传媒

About

I am a second-year PhD student in Creative Industries, with interests in popular culture markets, youth culture and social media. I have contributed as an amateur journalist covering youth popular culture. I completed my master鈥檚 degree at the Central University of Finance and Economics in China, where my interests also included media investment and financing.

Research interests

My PhD research explores how para-social intimacy with fictional characters is transformed into purchasable experiences through cosplay commissions. Located at the intersection of popular culture, intimacy and labour, the project examines how attachments developed through games and other media become the basis for personalized encounters with another person. It asks how fictional relationships acquire significance in everyday life and how people work together to make these relationships tangible within a commercial service.

The central question guiding my research is: how is para-social intimacy with fictional characters transformed into a purchasable experience? To explore this, I ask how clients鈥� understandings of a character and their imagined relationship with that character inform what they seek from a commission. I also examine how cosplayers interpret and embody these expectations through appearance, conversation, gestures and emotional expression. My research pay particular attention to how clients and cosplayers negotiate the experience together, including its boundaries and the moments when their expectations differ.

The project centres on cosplay commissions in East Asia, particularly those involving characters from otome games(romance-oriented games primarily marketed towards women). In these commissions, clients pay a cosplayer to portray a chosen fictional character during a personalized interaction(e.g. a date). This provides a revealing context for exploring the relationship between media consumption and commercial intimacy: the experience draws on an existing attachment to a fictional figure, while depending on the skills and participation of the people involved.

A further concern is the labour required to create and sustain these encounters. Beyond costume and visual resemblance, I am interested in the emotional management and ongoing affective motivation through which a cosplayer responds to the client. By examining this work alongside clients鈥� expectations and participation, the research aims to contribute to our understanding of how popular culture generates opportunities for intimate services, and how the value of those 鈥渢ransformed labour鈥� is negotiated. More broadly, it considers what cosplay commissions reveal about the connections between fictional attachments and creative work.

My research is supervised by Dr Heidi Ashton and Dr Carolina Bandinelli