If computers reasoned this way, they would break.

The funny thing is that the writer of the forum post didn’t really seem to have anything against me aside from the fact that I got along a little too well with someone he dislikes. Rival courtier, apparently, for the favor of the lady. Funny considering where the post was. Playing both sides, cheers mate.

Thanks again to ksolaris for the great chibi art! Love the lightsaber

See the gaps in this Saturday crowd? They're gone on Sunday.

Read Part 1 here! Part 2 here!

Sunday at Ozine made Saturday look like a lazy day at the park. The con was packed with hundreds of cosplayers — so many that registration was still ongoing as the first cosplayers started strutting their stuff on the catwalk.

As expected, the “first ever cosplay photo studio in a con in the whole world EVAR” (or so Mike Abundo claimed repeatedly, but I distinctly remember having my picture taken as Lelouch at a Brother-sponsored cosplay photo studio setup at Cosplay Mania 2009) had a long queue. I was wondering if I would ever get to have that coffee with Richie dela Merced, who was busy clicking away and gently guiding the cosplayers’ poses.

Richie, one of the Cosplay Photographers’ Guild’s head honchos, spotted me, flashed a big smile and shook my hand. “I’ll be with you in a second, let’s go have that coffee!” The man’s personal charm was much stronger in person. I found myself predisposed to liking this jolly giant, at least compared to me. Why do I always feel so short at these things?

Another well-known photographer at the studio, Gian Bacuyag (who was rumored to have been sucker-punched sometime during the convention, although he seemed fine at that moment, rumors being funny ephemeral things) leaned in to whisper something to Richie. “Anong nangyayari (what’s happening)?” he said, flashing a suspicious glance at me.

“Wala. Si Otaking. Okay lang, (Nothing. It’s Otaking. It’s okay.)” Richie replied.

What was that about?

Pikarchie surveys his koi, tankobon and CD kingdom.

“I like your blog. I read it all the time. The last thing I wanted to do was pick a fight with you on your own blog,” Richie was telling me over green tea frappuccinos. “The difficult thing about having a discussion on a comments thread is that I have to wait a day for a response, and by then I’d have forgotten what we were talking about.”

“You know, we’re probably just disagreeing over terminology, and about a side issue at that,” I said. “My whole point with the dominance post is that any Us vs. Them thing, Pros vs. Amateurs or whatever, is bogus, is pointless. My whole point is that it’s a dominance strategy, and dominance ruins any scene.”

“That’s what I don’t get about the post,” Richie said. “What is dominance?”

“Dominance is a survival strategy. It’s not the only survival strategy but it’s the one most of mankind has favored since we started clubbing our enemies with femurs. Basically, to ensure that your tribe survives within your ecosystem, you aim to completely dominate it, to eliminate your competition.”

“But this is human nature,” Richie replied. “If you have a field with a hundred cows and one T-Rex, at the end only the T-Rex will be left. I guarantee it. Dominance works. Mankind will always use it, and it’s worked so far.”

“And now we’re killing the planet,” I replied.

“Ah. Well, that’s another issue,” he said.

“But that’s the whole point of my post. The natural consequence of the dominance strategy is the death of the whole. If the T-Rex’s strategy is to eliminate all the cows instead of coexist with them, when all the cows are dead, what would the T-Rex eat?”

“You’re right, I don’t think we’re disagreeing. Professionals and Amateurs will always have a place together in the scene,” Richie said.

“But I keep saying this isn’t about Pros vs. Ams,” I repeated. “This is about the dangers of wanting to dominate the scene.”

“The fittest will always survive, professional or amateur, especially when corporate sponsorship money comes pouring into the scene. Amateurs will always be free to cosplay, as long as they only do it for fun, but the best will always rise to the top. This is the future. Dominance is human nature,” he reiterated. Finally as we returned to his photo studio he flashed me another smile and said, “It was great talking to you and sorting things out.” He clapped me on the back and told Mike, “I told you Mike, we’re not really disagreeing!”

I stood there, sipping my green tea frap.

Palm-top Tiger. Table-top Machine Gun.

I was waiting for my friend Joey (aka bumbayker) to arrive at the con. It was 9PM. He said he was coming at eight. I rang him up.

“Hey Cliff,” Joey said on the other end of the line. “I’ve been here a while now but the guards won’t let me in to get my figures.”

“They won’t let exhibitors in?”

“Not until the con is over,” he whined.

“Wait there.” I made my way to the entrance and began using my lawyer-trained Negotiation skill. “My friend here has figures at the exhibit and needs to collect them,” I said to two security guards.

“Sorry sir, we can’t let anyone in until the event is over,” was the rote reply.

“The event IS over. It’s 9PM. Everyone is cleaning up. The remaining cosplayers are dancing in a conga line over there.” Sure enough there was a conga line of cosplayers holding up Free Hugs signs. Mike decided to take advantage of this, hugging everyone in the line one at a time. Some of the cosplayers ran away from him in fear. I nodded toward them in sympathy.

“Sorry sir. Take it up with the man in white over there,” they said, motioning toward Dennis Uy.

I walked up to Dennis. “Hi Dennis, my friend over there is an OtaKai exhibitor, and he–”

Another look of irritation crossed his face, the look of a man who had been dealing with this sort of thing for three days. I understood. He wasn’t irritated at me or at Joey. He was just… tired. Without letting me finish, he went up to the guards and said, “Let him in.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He grunted at me, probably the best thing he could muster. People don’t realize how tired someone in charge of an event of this scale can be. I silently hoped he would get three full days of sleep after this was all done.

Yoko waits for Daddy Joey to take her home.

“So if you don’t want the Pros or the Ams to dominate, what do you want?” Mike asked over a rum coke at Big Sky Mind.

“I don’t want anyone to dominate,” I said. “Hail Eris!”

“All Hail Discordia!” Joey said, raising a glass.

“So just… chaos, then?” Mike asked, unconvinced. “You want rival groups to fight amongst themselves without anyone emerging as the dominant faction?”

“You know, for someone who sings the virtues of the free market, you’re taking your time getting the point of all of this,” I said. “This isn’t about Pros vs. Ams at all. Here’s an analogy. When different TV channels have to fight over market share instead of one channel dominating the airwaves, who wins?”

“Nobody wins,” Mike said. “All this time and effort is wasted trying to best the competition.”

I shook my head. “No, of course the competing factions don’t win. The audience wins. They get more interesting stuff to watch on TV that way.”

Mike paused. “Ah.”

I grinned. “Popcorn, anyone?”

Yes, I know my ponytail makes me look like a girl.

While Vigilant is my main comic writing project, I’ve always wanted to do a 4koma-style comic like Azumanga Daioh or Wa!

Thanks for Ksolaris for the always-adorable chibi art!

The stage at Ozine Fest 2010, during a rare empty moment.

[This is Day 2 of my Ozine Fest 2010 report! Read day 1 here! All pictures are by my friend Ksolaris, as you can tell from the watermark -- not that it's stopped some very high profile scrapers from swiping her pics and posting them on their Multiply without attribution before. And what's with those uniformly crappy captions?]

“Two day passes please?” I asked the ticket lady.

She shook her head. “Two tickets?”

I sighed. “Three please.” For me, my wife and her niece Marielle. My wife was attending primarily because she wanted to have Utena and Liara T’Soni t-shirts done by the Doujin Shirts people. Marielle, totally oblivious to the cosplay scene politics, was attending for the simplest reasons again — her friends were going, and she wanted to score some loot.

The con was much more crowded today; even before arriving at the con itself we ran into a large crowd waiting outside — posing for pictures, taking pictures with SLRs, taking surreptitious pictures of cosplayers in short skirts from low angles with more compact digicams. Your typical con-going crowd.

In this photo: Girls in ideal costumes for 'low-angle' photography.

“Oh, I didn’t know you’d be here!” Kia said as we greeted each other. The last two times I saw her in costume, I easily recognized who she was — Chun-Li and Phoenix. Today, I was at a loss.

“Who are you dressed up as?” I asked.

“Oh, nobody really, this is just something I threw together,” she said. Red hair, black-and-white striped outfit. She wasn’t cosplaying, she was just dressed up. Same as me: with my old-school Grado headphones, The World Ends With You Player Pin, and Cobra t-shirt, I wasn’t in costume (although I did seem like a dark side version of Neku), but I was dressed for the occasion.

Suddenly Mike Abundo passes by, herding a small crowd of very young-looking cosplayer girls toward the highly-touted cosplay photo studio set up just for the con. Kia and I watch this spectacle unfold, speechless for a long moment.

“So,” Kia finally said, “how do you know Mike?”

“We were in the same ROTC unit in UP together. Yeah, I know, he’s weird,” I said, to vigorous nodding from Marielle, “but I’m used to it.”

“GamerTotoy wrote about us, you know,” Kia said. “Said I was his girlfriend.”

“Oh, you mean the way they used to say ____________ was his girl before,” I said.

“Yeah. I’m not, but I’m not going to stop hanging out with him just because some jerk spreads rumors about us. That would be letting people know that I’m affected by that sort of thing,” she said.

And there it was — the simplest reply to the vicious mudslinging the cosplay scene has become famous for. Why should I change the way I act or the people I hang out with just because some maladjusted perverts or some jealous harpies can find a way to paint what I do in a malicious light? Who am I in this for, anyway? Them or me? What was wrong with being a weirdo?

I looked back at where Mike had gone. He was regaling the slightly-frightened girls with grand gestures and a really, really loud voice.

“…He is pretty weird though,” I admitted.

Kia pursed her lips.

Marielle kept nodding.

Sebastian looks on disinterestedly as Itoshiki-sensei is in despair over this reputation-conscious cosplay world.

There seemed to be equal proportions of cosplayers and non-cosplayers at this con, with the non-cosplayers thinning out as the day wore on. How exactly did that happen? Not that I minded, but it did make me regret not being in costume. It’s easy for non-cosplayers to point and laugh at the weirdos in costume because non-cosplayers risk nothing. Being ‘normal’ is a social defense against ridicule. Conforming is just another way of seeking safety in numbers.

My dream cosplay event involves everyone, without exception, being in costume, just partying, hamming it up, and having a blast away from the judging eyes of outsiders. Has this happened yet? There is a general rule in LARP (Live Action Role-Playing) that LARPing should be done away from non-LARPers. Aside from the fact that people pretending to be vampires or werewolves or mages would freak out unsuspecting passersby, we tend to be self-conscious about our performances if outsiders are present.

There’s a thought: how do cosplayers act when they’re alone?

Especially cosplayers who can drink everyone under the table!

As we headed to the parking lot we ran into our friends Romeo, Sese, and Kune, who were out of costume and resting after a hard day’s work. (Don’t think cosplaying the whole day is hard work? Try it.)

“Hakushaku~!” Romeo greeted me. Romeo is an endangered species, a cosplayer who does it purely for fun, making up for the lack of technical polish with sheer pluck. This Ozine Fest he topped himself by wearing three different costumes, one per day: Zero from Code Geass, a Scholar from Ragnarok Online, and Jagi-sama from Detroit Metal City. He was already out of costume at this point, and was leaning against the metal service door.

“Hakushaku~!” I greeted back. “Are you going to catwalk?”

“Nope,” he replied.

“What?” I cried in mock-alarm. “You’re not going to compete? You’re not a real cosplayer! You’re just… a COSTRIPPER!”

“Oh noes!” he gasped.

Then we burst out laughing, while everyone else looked at us funny. Weirdos.

Hakushakuuuuuuu~

(To be continued in Part 3! Check out other Ozine 2010 reports from Sese and Romeo!)

We're out of three day passes, but you can buy three of these for forty pesos more!

I attended an Ozine event (O-zeen? O-zayn? No one I’ve talked to seems to agree…) the year before, but only during the final day. I wanted to get a sense of the entire con this year, so this year I decided to attend all three days of Ozine Fest 2010.

Day 1:

“It’s 100 per ticket, 260 for a three-day pass,” the ticket lady said.

“A three day pass, please.”

“We’re out of three-day passes. Would you like three tickets?”

This was off to a great start, I thought. Immediately through no fault of my own I was down forty pesos more than I should have spent. Oh well, no big deal. “Just the one, please.”

Ozine on a Friday was… spacious. The organizers rented out Megatrade Halls 1 and 2 and with so few people (compared to the crazy contest days where you have to stand toe-to-toe with someone who considers hygiene lower on the hierarchy of needs than having watched every single anime Minorin has ever contributed a song for) I could have actually brought my lightsaber and did some saber spinning tricks without hitting anyone.

Bloody thing’s too heavy to lug around though.

I see your schwarz is as big as mine.

Another thing: if you aren’t in some sort of costume, you are immediately considered a lower caste. This is not to say that you get intentionally treated like second-class citizens. But the difference between walking around in costume and being a regularly-dressed gawker is clear as night and day. I found myself wishing I had a new costume, or at least a vastly-improved version of my previous one. Cosplayers are the center of attention, getting away with anything they pull.

Well, almost anything. There were some cosplayers who went largely unnoticed because either their costumes were too simple, too shoddy, or because the cosplayer himself seemed too creepy to approach. Yes, I said ‘himself’. Female cosplayers always, always had someone approaching them.

Unless they were patently unattractive. In which case elaborate costumes usually compensated. Usually. When they didn’t, I was greeted with a spectacle that was almost too painful to behold: A cosplayer who desperately wanted to call attention to himself/herself but couldn’t break character to do so, surrounded by a crowd busy ooh-ing and aah-ing over someone right next to them. The saddest thing in the world is a cosplayer holding a ‘Free Hug’ sign surrounded by empty space.

Many (but not all) of the shops were in this corner of the con separated from the main flow of traffic. This was an interesting choice that was probably made to ease crowding, since would-be purchasers stand around and gawk when everyone else needs to pass through to get somewhere.

This opinion was not shared by the people running the stalls.

“I keep getting lost,” said Raymond Sison of CSCentral. “They should open up the corner.”

“Hey Raymond,” Mike Abundo said, motioning toward me, “have you met Cliff from Project Otaking yet?”

Raymond looked at me disinterestedly, simply emitted a grunt, turned his back to me, and returned to what he was saying.

Nice to meet you too. Simon says “Have a nice day.”

I'm going to sink a lot of money into kitschy Japanese junk from now on, I just know it.

I walked off to the Waku Waku stall and purchased a yellow PEN’Z GEAR (PROTIP: If the PEN’Z GEAR is yellow, it means the ink is yellow, too. Much confusion under incandescent lights.) and a Peri Peri keychain for my wife, which replicates the sweet sensation of tearing open a mail parcel or a box of Tongari Corn.

My wife spent the next morning ripping imaginary packages open over and over again.

Just look at the sheer joy on their faces!

I also bought a pair of aviator goggles from a shop that specializes in all sorts of geeky eyewear, like steampunk goggle’s and Willy Wonka’s shades.

I paid a visit to OtaKai’s figurine exhibit as well, to check out my friend Joey’s glorious Yoko Littner Bounty Hunter PVC figure.

Look at those wondrous... details.

I ran into Kunebitt who was hanging out at her friends’ contacts and wigs stall. Mike was once again applying ‘social lubrication’ as he charmingly puts it.

“Kunebitt is going to be on a live web chat this Tuesday,” Mike informed me.

“Live web chat, ha?” I gave her a sly look and grinned, rubbing my chin.

“Gago ka Cliff,” she shot back. Then she grinned too. “Anong sinabi mo, Kuya Dennis?”

God I hate that guy.

Highly moddable, perfectly balanced ballpoint pen designed specifically for pen twirling. Oh, Japan.

“This is Cliff. He writes Project Otaking,” Mike said, introducing me to Dennis Uy, of the Ozine Uy brothers.

Dennis regarded me as he shook my hand. Once again I couldn’t help notice how much taller everyone else seems compared to me. “Oh. So that’s you,” placing particular emphasis on the last word. My reputation, whatever it is, keeps preceding me.

“Yep, that’s me,” I replied. “Say, I’m having trouble getting a three day pass.”

“Is there any chance we could get Cliff a press pass?” Mike asked.

“We’re having trouble with the IDs. We keep running out of them. Apparently people keep lending them out to friends who never come back,” Dennis said. “You can get a three day pass at the ticket booth.”

“No I can’t,” I said. “They said they were all out.”

“What? How is that possible?” A look of irritation, not the first one all day considering that he was the boss of this huge party, crossed Dennis’ face. “Anyway, we’ll be selling two day passes tomorrow. Will you be coming back?”

“Yeah, with my wife and her niece. I’m supposed to have coffee with Richie dela Merced at some point.”

He shook my hand again before leaving to take care of another minor crisis. “Great. See you then.”

[EDIT: It has been brought to my attention that there are two Dennises in my narrative. No, the Dennis I hate with a vengeance isn't Dennis Uy. Move along. If you want to know who it is, ask someone who knows the inside joke. ]

(to be continued in Day 2 and Day 3)

Taguro, Eugene, Vincent, and Master Jeremiah battle it out for the right to represent the Philippines in the "Official" Asian Yuu Yuu Hakusho Cosplay Meet.

Someone recently pointed out to me a Malaysian website for the Asia Cosplay Meet (ACM), the Malaysian and Singaporean Final Rounds apparently taking place in July.

The home page on this website states that the countries involved in the Asia Cosplay Meet are Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

Let’s skip over the fact that this is the first I’ve heard of this, and I had to hear about it from a foreign website (which begs the questions: Who is in charge of the Philippine leg of this competition, and how was that decided?) The organizers of this event are the Singapore Cosplay Club, infamous for their attempts to copyright the word “cosplay” a few years back.

This is the scummiest domination move in the cosplay world so far that I can think of. As the forums point out, this is akin to copyrighting ‘origami’ or ‘swimming’. Now they’re stating that they’re the ‘Official’ Asia Cosplay Meet.

We Filipinos are no strangers to the deep-seated urge to be ‘recognized’ as the ‘official’ representatives of cosplay of the entire country. But an Official Asia Cosplay Meet that doesn’t include oh I don’t know, maybe Japan or China?

Then again, I’m an Erisian Pope. For those of you unfamiliar with the subject, one of the tenets of Discordianism is that anyone who declares himself an Erisian Pope is a Erisian Pope, because every man, woman, and child on the planet is an Erisian Pope.

Maybe that’s how this entire ‘official’ business works. All you have to do to be ‘official’ is call yourself ‘official’ and you are. Neat trick, that.

So who exactly IS the Official Philippine representative to the Official Asian Cosplay Meet? What does it matter?

My dad can beat up your dad because he makes his costumes by himself!

So a friend and I were shooting the shit the other night and he was going on about the ‘Amateurism vs. Professionalism’ clash he observed in the local cosplay community. This particular friend allied himself firmly with the ‘Professionalism’ camp, saying that people who work long hours for low pay in costume are just as deserving as the ‘Amateurs’ of the term ‘cosplayer’.

“What the hell is the difference between both camps, anyway?” I asked.

“Amateurism,” he said, “is basically the whole ‘Do it for the love of the hobby for no money’ camp. This is great but it goes nowhere. It’s stagnant. For the scene to progress it has to embrace the fact that some people will want to do this for a living, not just as a hobby.”

“I don’t get it. The conflict, I mean,” I said. “Take Trekkies. Trekkers. Whatever. Most of the content is produced by Paramount, who are the actual IP owners, or Paramount’s licensees. But the vast majority of people engaged in the Trek subculture are complete amateurs. Pale, thin-blooded bastards who show up in a sour-smelling Starfleet uniform that hasn’t been washed since last con. Anyway clearly Paramount couldn’t sell any Star Trek-themed merchandise without relying on the amateur fanbase, and the fanbase would have nothing to consume if it weren’t for the suits who decide what to do with the franchise.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m saying that there is no Us vs. Them dynamic inherent between amateurs and professionals unless one or both factions start one. The professionals clearly shouldn’t be alienating their fans. The amateurs clearly need to be valuing the content and exposure created by professionals. This Amateurism vs. Professionalism clash is a complete crock of shite.” I had rewatched Trainspotting and Grant Morrison’s Disinfocon talk and kept lapsing into a Scottish accent every now and then.

“When you put it that way…”

“The only reason why both factions are warring with each other — and by the way, the Amateurs simply call themselves ‘cosplayers’ and the Professionals ‘mascots’ or ‘models’ or ‘actresses’, once again proving my point that the power to name is the power of definition — is because of the dominance motivation.”

“What?”

“Dominance is an adaptive strategy. One way to make sure you survive in a particular environment is to dominate it. It’s not the only strategy, mind you, but it is the one favored by humanity since we learned how to bash each other over the head with clubs. You can still see it in playgrounds. Heck the cosplay scene is one huge playground and all the kids who got bullied back in preschool are taking it out on everyone else now. Have you noticed how childish the politics of the scene are? Basic big-kid-in-the-sandbox primate politics. The problem is, as the entire human race has demonstrated, dominance is such an effective strategy that everyone does it. And the thing about dominance strategies is that there always has to be a loser. Someone has to submit. And the dominated have no rights except the ones the dominators give them.”

“So how does this relate to cosplay?”

“Well, think of your standard factional tactic in the cosplay community. First they try to convince you to choose sides. They usually do this by dissing the opposing side. That group is a bunch of insular harpies. This group is a bunch of attention-seeking wannabe celebrities. That group is full of social misfits that everyone who’s anyone shuns. This group is cultishly led by a megalomaniacal leader. That group is a bunch of jilted wannabe Yagami Lights who are BAWWWing about their crushes being seduced by dirty old men. It’s like high school, but with costumes. Fortunately no single group currently holds complete dominance, which is, hey, fun for me.”

“And then?”

“And then if you don’t choose, they attempt to apply the ‘If You’re Not With Us You’re Against Us’ tactic. Since you’re not a dedicated hobbyist you must be in this just for the money (or the hits on your blog). Since you’re not putting yourself out there in public in actual costume you must not be a real cosplayer. Since you haven’t been around since the beginning then you have no authority to speak about the subject. It’s all very transparent, and all attributable to a failure to express these territorial urges when you’re supposed to — when you’re a toddler.”

“So how do you get them to leave you alone? Never pick a side?”

“That’s the hardest thing to do. Dominance-minded social robots have an inherent distrust of anyone who won’t pick sides. But if you value your independence, you have to resort to the tried-and-tested tactic of the little kid in the playground no one will mess with.”

“The what?”

“In every playground, you have your big kids who pick on everyone and all the other kids that they pick on. But there is usually at least one small kid the big kids never mess with.”

“Because?”

“Because whenever this kid — who usually doesn’t bother anyone if left to his devices — gets into a fight, he will fight back like a caged wolverine instead of simply submitting. Kicking, biting, clawing, eye-gouging. So the big kids learn that even if they win a fight against him (and they usually will), no one comes out from fighting the runt without getting hurt in the process. So they leave him alone.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying, BE THAT KID.”

A pause. “You mean, be the ‘Voice of the Minority’, O Fearless One?”

“Shut it you wanker.”