I hereby convene the 1st SakeYakinikuCon!

It’s Friday night at Little Tokyo, and I’m hanging out with friends, some old, some new, all involved one way or another with the otaku scene. Cosplayers, anime and manga fans, gamers and GMs.

I’m downing my fifth shot of cold sake and I’m thinking about several things all at once. Someone complained about the state of a certain cosplay forum they used to haunt. Another brought up the Animax-sponsored K-On! event everyone and their distant cousins were invited to. Another ranted about the new Cosplay Critique Center on Facebook that popped up recently.

I turned over the karubi I was barbecuing with a pair of metal tongs and I wondered why I didn’t care.

I mean, I cared mildly, in the way one distantly cares about something a friend is concerned about but doesn’t affect one personally. But I didn’t CARE. Me. I get on my soapbox for semantic hairsplitting like ‘cosplay’ vs. ‘costrip’ but I didn’t care enough about any of these new things to rant about them.

Or was it because my opinions have somehow gotten ‘safer’? I miss the days when I didn’t know ANYTHING about the scene so I didn’t mind offending anybody. Now like many of my contemporaries my ‘items’ just keep getting blinder and blinder. Is it true? Am I losing my edge? How depressing.

Another shot of sake and another slice of yakiniku please.

Let’s be honest here. I actually have a lot to say about all of those things and more. I mean, take the K-On! cosplay. Put aside the fact that it’s corporate-sponsored. That doesn’t concern me. What does concern me is this:

Un...tan?

Look at this. I mean frankly, the entire idea of K-On! is that these four girls are moe precisely because they’re completely unselfconscious of their own moeness. That’s not happening for me in this picture, even though the outfits are spot-on. Ashley comes close in appearance, but we all know she’s the confrontational one, as opposed to Mio who would wither onstage before picking a fight. As for Yui, one needs to have a certain innate level of naivete to do the “Un-tan” routine with the castanets properly. Observe:

As for the so-called Cosplay Critique Circle — well, dissing others for what they look like has been around since we developed sight organs. This is nothing new. Anyone who has gone to a club or been to a high school with girls in it knows what this is like. The only thing new that this has brought to the scene is the sheer public nature of Facebook, which is a step up from simply putting up a troll blog which only a select group of bitter jilted cosplay lovers read. So people puffed up behind the safety of the Internet are giving harsh critiques about people they’ve never met in order to feel better about themselves. WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

There’s another thing I don’t understand. Of COURSE looks matter when it comes to cosplay. Cosplay is inherently visual. Looks aren’t everything, clearly, but it’s just like dating, or attending job interviews. Your appearance is the first thing people notice. Some people will dismiss you at first glance. Others will take the time to get to know you. You are cosplayers. By the very nature of the hobby you are exposing yourself to public scrutiny. GET OVER IT.

How DARE you tell me I can't cosplay who I want!

Here’s what I don’t understand. Here we are, me and my friends, some from way back, some I just met that night, and we’re all united by our love for the hobby. (And by sake and yakiniku.) Why can’t it be like this on a larger scale? Hasn’t this been what I’ve been trying to say all this time? Well, hasn’t it? Even the forums are either dominated by some strange agendas of people who were clearly bullied as kids and want their belated turn as the big kids on the otaku playground, or by people who intend to simply capitalize on the scene, either for cash, fame, or their pick of naive ingenues who like to dress up. Why don’t I just put up my own community of people who actually LOVE the hobby, LOVE the scene enough to make fools of themselves from time to time in the name of FUN?

…

Yeah, why don’t I?

More sake and yakiniku, please!

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