SNA (Taipei) — A heroine from the classic anime TV show Neon Genesis Evangelion was spotted several times in the flesh during Taiwan’s recent election campaign asking people to vote for her.

Asuka Langley Soryu’s outreach worked, as her earthly form, political activist Lai Pin-yu, became the youngest legislator in Taiwan’s parliament at age 27. Lai, who has been dressing up as Japanese manga and anime characters since high school, is now a representative of President Tsai Ing-wen’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Lai’s campaign shows the popularity of the cosplay subculture in Taiwan, which first emerged in 1970s Japan among young people who had grown up on anime and manga. High-school or college students channel a different side of their personalities by interacting with each other as characters, mostly from Japanese comic books, anime, and video games, as well as, in Lai’s case, Elsa from Disney’s Frozen.

During the recent election campaign, President Tsai and her party capitalized on Lai’s attention-grabbing appearances as they successfully appealed to Taiwan’s young people to give them a second term. One of the most memorable images of the whole season was a rally poster with an unlikely band of three: Lai dressed as Asuka in a red latex bodysuit and long red wig, death metal band frontman Freddy Lim as the Marvel Comics character Deadpool, and President Tsai wearing pink cat ears.

The embrace of cosplay shows that some Taiwanese politicians are beginning to accept that younger people want representatives that are more like them. The DPP even turned President Tsai and her two cats into anime-style characters to boost her appeal.

New legislator Lai first gained public attention as a cosplaying social activist protesting the demolition of a housing community in Taipei in 2013. A year later, she was a member of a protest group that occupied Taiwan’s legislature to oppose a trade deal with China in what became known as the Sunflower Movement. In 2016, she started working as a legislative assistant for the death metal band singer Lim, who had just won election for the New Power Party (NPP), an outfit appealing to the youth vote.

In January’s elections, Lai stood as the DPP’s candidate in a district of New Taipei City. She attended political rallies as Asuka, at times sharing a stage with President Tsai. Lai’s Facebook and Instagram are filled with images of anime, video games, and herself in cosplay action, including as another 1990s Neon Genesis Evangelion character, Rei Ayanami.

“I’m trying out something new, that if someone like me can get elected, this really means that the times have changed,” Lai told New Bloom, SNA’s partner news agency, in December. “I believe that this will also be encouraging for many young people, telling everyone that if they want to enter politics, they don’t have to force themselves to appear a certain way.”

Despite her political inexperience, Lai narrowly beat a former Taipei deputy mayor, the Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate, by 84,393 to 81,613 votes. She announced her win on Facebook alongside a photo of herself dressed as supernatural fighter Sailor Mars from the Sailor Moon manga series, and three cat emojis.

Many of the young Taiwanese and cosplay fans who make up her 100,000+ followers on Facebook and 38,000 on Instagram weren’t able to vote for her because they don’t live in her district or were under the voting age of twenty. However, her high-profile campaign and ongoing popularity signals the unsubtle start of a new generation of Taiwanese activist-politicians who understand young people. These voters, unlike their parents and grandparents, have grown up in a democratically stable Taiwan, rather than under dictatorship and martial law. They care about social issues like gender rights and same-sex marriage.

Lai’s election “is emblematic of the bigger phenomenon of people wanting more younger politicians,” said Lev Nachman, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Irvine.

“Young voters in Taiwan want to see themselves empowered, meaning that they want young people to be in office,” he said. “They don’t want Taiwanese politics to be dictated by second- or third-generation politicians, or to be dictated by people who have been in power since the 1970s or the 1980s.”

Of the two main parties, young voters tend to identify with Taiwan’s independence-leaning President Tsai and the DPP over the KMT, a political party that traditionally favors closer relations with China.

Nevertheless, “someone like Lai Pin-yu joining the DPP is a good sign that the DPP is realizing that they need to bring more new blood into their fold, otherwise they are just going to be a party of old people,” said Nachman.

Other young politicians elected last month who endorsed the DPP include Lim, lead singer of heavy metal band Chthonic and a founding leader of the NPP, which grew out of the Sunflower Movement. He was elected in January for a second time, this time for Tsai’s DPP. Chen Bo-Wei, who previously worked in the film industry, used YouTube and comic appearances on TV shows to win an unexpected first seat for the Taiwan Statebuilding Party, which openly advocates Taiwanese independence.

Cosplay enthusiasts in blonde, purple, and blue wigs, short skirts, and long socks regularly gather at weekends and act out stories as comic book, TV show, or movie characters. What was a fringe hobby has grown into a large subculture among teenagers and others in Taiwan, at times straddling the mainstream. Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-Je once dressed up as League of Legends’ Surgeon Shen, a doctor who wields oversized scalpels, to support two Taiwanese teams in an international video game competition.

No public figure has become as associated with cosplay as Lai, however.

In the interview with New Bloom, she said she wanted to let voters know “that politicians aren’t different from everybody else. Outside of our focus on politics, our daily lives are the same as everyone else’s.”

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