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!)

3 people like this post.

Unlike