My First Ever Anime Convention

Yes, I went to an anime convention. I am now probably caught up with my undergrad in nerdiness. (My lab has a running joke that Chad and I are in a competition to see who is nerdier. Mostly he wins, but only barely.) My friend from undergrad Iva was going to be at one on campus, so I went to it to hang out with her. It was an interesting experience.

When I first walked in, there were a zillion people wondering around in, umm, interesting costumes. I found Iva pretty quickly and met some of her friends, all of whom were also in interesting costumes. For the record, I was wearing just normal clothes. At some point in time someone said “cosplay.”

I leaned over and whispered to Iva, “What is cosplay?”

She said, “What we’re doing right now,” as if it was totally obvious.

“Standing around talking?” I guessed.

“But in costumes.”

Oh, so cosplay is wearing costumes and then being in your costume at the event. Okay, this part kind of confuses me. Lots of people have brightly colored wigs and interesting clothes. I only recognized a couple of costumes, like Link from the Zelda games, and oh yeah, that’s pretty much the only one I recognized.

It was kind of an interesting place. There were rooms devoted to various things: panel discussions on stuff (who knows what), music, booths selling everything from anime drawings and Pikachu hats to C-3PO masks for those who forgot their costumes. There were rooms for video games and card games and people talking about a million things that I didn’t really understand.

I gather from the event that some part of cosplay is actually acting like you are your character, though people take it to lower and higher degrees of seriousness. And then lots of people take pictures or videos of different people in different costumes. There was this really hyper group of middle school girls that were mobbing Iva the whole time. She was dressed like Riku or Repliku, or something like that. These girls kept following her around yelling, “Repliku” repeatedly and mobbing her. They kind of drove me insane after a while, but Iva is too shy or passive to tell them to go away. After a while I was trying to protect her from them, but they were really crazy.

There was judging of the craftsmanship of the costumes, because lots of people make their own costumes themselves. And then there is a sort of masquerade of all the cosplayers. (I don’t know if cosplayers is a word, but it is now.) Some people just sort of posed on stage in different ways, Iva and her friend performed a skit (as did some others), one of the little annoying fangirls sang a bizarre song in Japanese, a girl in a very strange green lantern costume recited a very dark and depressing poem that she wrote, and this awesome kickboxer guy scared the crap out of all of us by kickboxing all over the stage crazily.

Some of the costumes were really cool, especially the crazy hair and crazy wigs. And this girl in my program won the award for craftsmanship for her costume, which was crazy awesome. Iva won an award for her sword that she made herself. It is really cool and made of wood and clay and painted really well, so I was happy for her.

While we were at dinner, one of Iva’s friends told me that she was surprised that Iva had friends “outside of cosplay.” I thought that was a bit harsh, but Iva is very shy and it is hard to get to know her. But she is incredibly sweet and smart, and I love her a lot.

Right before Iva and all of her friends left, one of them told me that I was really cool. And then they all agreed that I was cool. It was very strange, because cool is not exactly a word that I get called a lot. And what does it mean, when a bunch of people in freaky costumes call you “cool.” Still, they were really sweet, and I did have a very excellent time. I really didn’t get any of the jokes, costumes, events, or pretty much anything else. But I was glad to see Iva and meet all of her friends.

Advertisement