More than a year ago, Korean cosplayer Yasal suddenly appeared at the Brown Dust 2 booth at BW, gaining 1 million followers in just three days. Besides letting domestic players feel the "dimensional strike" of professional booth cosplayers, Yasal's rise gradually made everyone realize an indisputable fact: there is a high demand for "Korean reinforcements" in various offline exhibition activities in China.
But to this day, I must emphasize one point: in the field of booth cosplayers, the history of our domestic region being held back is over. Now, we have a heavyweight contender who can match Yasal—Rabbit Girl.
The main reason Yasal became popular last year was her good image and active interaction with the audience while working as a booth cosplayer, achieving success in both stats and mechanics.
As for Rabbit Girl, the reason she can be compared is her extreme professionalism as a booth cosplayer. For instance, once a fan gave Rabbit Girl a box of hand cream during a signing. At that moment, Rabbit Girl decisively chose the strategy with the most bullet screen comments.
She unpacked it, tried it out on the spot, and then used the excuse of "accidentally squeezing out too much" to directly hold the fan's hand.
For example, with fans who are shy and haven't brought convenient props like hand cream, she will proactively say, "I see you just don't want to touch my soft, fragrant little hands," guiding them to interact with her.
Also, when faced with fans making "heart" gestures, unlike other cosplayers who went trending for ignoring them with cold faces, Rabbit Girl not only accepted them gladly but even helped fans position their hands for the most photogenic look...
It can be said that, setting aside the numbers, when it comes to professionalism as a booth cosplayer, Rabbit Girl is in no way inferior to the formidable "Korean reinforcements." In fact, thanks to her language advantage, she has even surpassed them in terms of the diversity and fun of her interactions.
During live streams, when viewers send pun-filled risqué jokes, Rabbit Girl instantly comes up with counter-quips, resolving any crisis in the stream faster than the viewers' innuendos.
Even when going live with the car blogger "Adaxi Doesn't Understand Cars," who is known for caring only about cars and not beauty, Rabbit Girl finds ways through trickery to include this "Sigma male" among those "teased by Xiao Chunan."
Offline, the difference between a "Sigma male unmoved by beauty" and a "flustered Xiao Chunan easily handled by Rabbit Girl" is just a thought away. The challenge projects, where losing means being "publicly executed," are undoubtedly thrilling for fans attending offline events. Therefore, booths with Rabbit Girl often have some of the longest queues, sometimes even extending outside the venue.
You ask how I know? It's definitely not because I've queued up myself...
Over time, Rabbit Girl's popularity has continued to rise. Besides long queues for offline signings, her follower count on Douyin has exceeded 10 million. Additionally, she has earned a very impressive nickname—"The People's Rabbit Girl."
Of course, there is a reason behind this seemingly outrageous nickname. After reviewing some relevant cases, you should be able to feel the weight behind this title.
For example, a few days ago, Rabbit Girl canceled a comic convention originally scheduled during the National Day holiday. The reason behind this is actually related to the queuing issues mentioned earlier.
For some more enthusiastic fans, in order to secure priority entry, they often choose to stay up all night the day before, queuing at the venue entrance in advance, known as "overnight queuing." Since this behavior is neither safe nor healthy, offline event organizers often take measures to prevent such incidents.
But for the upcoming comic convention, regarding the "overnight queuing" issue, the organizers gave a very outrageous answer: buying a new phone from a certain brand, currently priced at least at 4000 yuan, would grant an extra chance for Rabbit Girl's signing session.
Even more outrageously, before deciding on this unappealing bundled sales model, the organizers didn't even contact or discuss it with Rabbit Girl. When questioned, the organizers offered the sophistry that "since phones are a necessity, this is better than overnight queuing..."
Let's set aside the fact that the organizers didn't confirm this sales model with the guest beforehand. Even if "phones are a necessity," it doesn't mean the specific phone they're bundling is a necessity. Even if overnight queuing is bad, is it really acceptable for the official organizers to hype up a signing session that should only require queuing into a bundle costing several thousand yuan?
Finally, upon learning the truth, Rabbit Girl decisively "exploded" at the comic convention organizers to prevent fans from actually falling into their trap, quickly refunding deposits and canceling the trip.
Of course, doing so may inevitably lead to legal disputes such as lawsuits for breach of contract by the organizers. But first, it is said that Rabbit Girl and the organizers haven't signed a formal contract, and the organizers engaged in deceptive practices, so their chances of winning the lawsuit are slim. Secondly, judging by Rabbit Girl's performance, it's clear that avoiding scamming fans is more important to her.
In fact, the first time Rabbit Girl was called "The People's Rabbit Girl" was also related to her attentive treatment of fans. At a comic convention last year, Rabbit Girl was also a signing guest and encountered poor arrangements by the organizers. Specifically, many fans who bought VIP tickets queued all day but didn't get a signing slot.
Although Rabbit Girl wasn't responsible for this incident, she still chose to pay out of her own pocket, buying hundreds of McDonald's meals to distribute to the fans present.
Besides this, in many other aspects, Rabbit Girl's performance can be described as exemplary—it is said that at previous offline events, she would squat down to lower the microphone for fans in wheelchairs and give candy to fans with low blood sugar.
An even more substantiated piece of news is that she donated desks, school supplies, and sports equipment to rural elementary schools, personally participating in the moving and assembly.
So, returning to the aforementioned nickname "The People's Rabbit Girl," it's not hard to see that while the title might sound a bit exaggerated and grand, it genuinely reflects everyone's support for Rabbit Girl with simple, heartfelt emotion.
On one hand, the nickname "The People's Rabbit Girl" succinctly summarizes the public welfare activities Rabbit Girl has done as a public figure; on the other hand, when mentioning this title, people often associate it with her performance in her本职 work as a booth cosplayer, adapting the famous quote possibly misattributed to Che Guevara.
If viewed from the original perspective of the cosplay circle, or rather the "famous cosplayer circle," Rabbit Girl's actions could be considered a form of involution. But we already know the attitude of most people—they believe Rabbit Girl's approach is the right one.
In other words, the performance of the cosplayer circle has likely been below average all along. As a major influencer in the circle, Rabbit Girl simply did what a normal person should do, yet she tore off the "Emperor's New Clothes" of the entire community.
When discussing Yasal's explosion in popularity last year, I stated that Yasal didn't actually do anything extraordinary; she simply did her job as a booth cosplayer, giving fans the respect and service they deserved. Looking at it now, this logic applies to Rabbit Girl as well.
For instance, video clips of Rabbit Girl interacting intimately with fans have generated significant discussion on "away game" platforms. Of course, as expected, negative attitudes make up a larger proportion.
However, if we carefully analyze comments about Rabbit Girl such as "she deserves this money," "occupational hazard," or "go back and wash your hands with disinfectant ten times," we discover an intriguing phenomenon—the basis of these comments is largely that the commenters feel the male fans interacting with Rabbit Girl have poor images, and that intimate interactions with these people are tough and require endurance.
But the issue is that there's an old saying in the cosplay community: "Don't criticize looks in the C-circle." This means that for amateur cosplayers, showing passion and doing their best to recreate a character is enough; there's no need to be overly critical of their appearance.
The values behind this statement are correct. But strangely, it doesn't apply to the booth fans who also prioritize passion over looks or styling as their primary evaluation criteria. Rabbit Girl stands out today simply because, in the face of "how things have always been," she didn't bring evaluations of looks and styling into areas where they don't belong, instead insisting on an attitude of equality above all else based on passion.
She even became popular overseas
From a macro perspective, it's somewhat tragic that the theoretical baseline has become the ceiling in practice. But on the other hand, being able to stick to basic principles in such an environment is the fundamental reason for Rabbit Girl's standout success. Her current high popularity is the reward for this.
So, if you ask me if Rabbit Girl will have a scandal in the future, I can only say it's possible, but the probability is low.
After all, such persistence is hard to maintain through pretense alone.
