Was that related to bucket-spitting or someone bathing in alcohol with gray paint mixed in to try to dye their skin grey? Or is it some other ridiculously dumb fan stuff?
EYE OF ZA, February 12, 2014, 05:50:33 pm
It is, thankfully, less terrible than that. Though the bucket spitting video was reportedly shot during a convention somewhere in Canada.
So, Toronto, as the biggest city in Canada, is home to a number of conventions of varying levels of geekery. One of them is the
Toronto Comic Arts Festival (Or TCAF). Now unlike a lot of comics conventions TCAF isn't really about selling comics/merchandise so much as it's more a celebration of the comics medium with a particular focus on independently published and small press stuff. Headlining guests from past years have included people like Dan Clowes, Art Spiegelman and Los Bros Hernandez: People who are sort of known for doing alternative comics outside your usual action or superhero titles.
It's traditionally held at the Toronto Reference Library during normal business hours and has a lot of panels about things like the business end of self publishing, workshops for educators and stuff like that mixed in with the usual book signings and creator panels. If you're familiar with the Small Press Expo it's sort of along the same lines.
Now, another big part of TCAF is the webcomics crowd: With its focus on Small Press stuff it's kind of the perfect venue for moderately successful webcomic artists to exhibit their work and connect with fans. Now, back in 2010-11, right when Homestuck was getting to be A Thing, Andrew Hussie was announced as one of the exhibitors that year. NOw, come the weekend of the festival it was very easy to spot the Homestuck fans because they were pretty much the only ones who were dressed up*
Now keep in mind this was happening in the middle of a library while said library was still open and you can get an idea as to how weird and out of place this entire spectacle was. TCAF had never really had a policy on cosplay or anything prior to this because, well, no one had really been out of touch enough to think TCAF was an appropriate venue for it.
So fast forward to next year and the TCAF website has added another item to its FAQ page:
So can I still do convention-type stuff at it? Like cosplay, skits, walking around ‘in-character’, etc.?
We recommend against it.
Conventions are held in dedicated spaces, and these become ‘safe’ spaces for attendees to express themselves creatively. TCAF takes place in a public building, and TCAF exhibitors and attendees mix with members of the general public and library customers and that’s what makes it special, but it also makes for a very different vibe than a convention, and one that might not welcome your particular brand of creativity.
We put it like this: You probably wouldn’t wear your Captain America or Karakat Vantas costume to the library on the weekend before TCAF, so you probably shouldn’t wear your costume to the library on the weekend of TCAF. All of us that run the show support personal creative expression through costuming and performance, but TCAF just isn’t an appropriate venue for that.
We have the utmost respect for all of our attending publishers, authors, and their fans, and we want everyone to enjoy themselves. We’re not singling any one or any fandom out. This is about TCAF and the way we do things, and we decided from the get go that this was going to be a literary festival and not a con, and that means that some attendees are going to need to find a more appropriate venue for their cosplay, their performances, and/or their meetups.
Emphasis mine.
Andrew Hussie actually had to specifically discourage people from dressing up at the festival that year on his site...And we still had a bunch of weirdos running around the convention in grey pancake makeup.
My favorite thing to come out of this debacle was the whining in this thread:
Awwww, Liza... :( You were one of the people I was looking forward to meeting most, too!
I am actually not sure how I feel about TCAF's Official Stance on cosplaying. I will be abiding by that rule(? guideline? caution?), to be sure, since I would like to act in accordance with their requests, whatever I think of them.
However - it does not seem particularly well reasoned to me.
Their and others' arguments seem to be able to be summed up as follows - a) TCAF "isn't the place to cosplay"; b) "it takes place in a library"; c) "it's a comics festival, not an anime convention"; d) "it would disturb the public".
a) Why is cosplaying there necessarily such a bad thing? This has never been explained in any of the discussions that I have seen or been part of concerning the issue. Most Homestuck costumes are not much more than a tee shirt and basic bottom (shorts, skirt, jeans, etc.). I will likely have black hair by the time TCAF rolls around, I sometimes wear glasses, and am bucktoothed; if I wore a Green Slime Ghost tee shirt there, I could easily be mistaken for a John cosplayer. If they were worried about troll make-up getting on artists' wares, or props getting in festival-goers' way - which are both more than understandable concerns, certainly - they could forbid those things rather than frowning upon cosplaying in itself.
When I bring this up, I tend to receive a reply along the lines of that "there were Homestuck cosplayers misbehaving last year".
But again - why conflate cosplaying and "misbehaviour", or assume that anybody who cosplays there will definitely cause a scene? If someone is prone to acting ridiculous at events like these, they are going to do so whether or not they are wearing candy corn coloured horns and a zodiac symbol shirt. This is not to mention that I was right there most of the time last TCAF, and absolutely nothing happened besides maybe two or three slightly embarrassing incidents that I am sure Mr. Hussie, other exhibitors, and other festival-goers were able to brush off... and I may be wrong, but I do not recall the cosplayers there having been the ones orchestrating said embarrassing stunts, or at least not having been the principal perpetrators.
I am not desperate to cosplay, and I would honestly be a little worried about someone if they felt that they NEEDED to cosplay there. Like I said, I will be showing up in casual clothing after all. But there are some great things to be said in favour of cosplaying to events like TCAF: It's fun. It's a fun, if silly, way to show fan appreciation, and I'm sure that most artists are happy and flattered to see people dressed as their characters. It's convenient shorthand for MSPA fans to quickly identify other fans. It adds a little colour, metaphorical and literal, to the proceedings. It causes absolutely no harm in and of itself.
b) Lots of conventions, cosplay meet-ups, and the like take place in libraries (and are very crowded, and yes, sometimes Normal People come through it or even have unrelated events at the same time, and so forth).
c) I don't believe I've been successful in identifying a precise semantic difference between a "festival" versus a "convention", but more to the point, I don't think anyone is trying to insist that TCAF is an anime convention, as an attempt to justify cosplay or for any other reason.
d) This is the biggest sticking point to me. I find that this argument - which is not something that I think TCAF is necessarily saying, but that I have seen time and time again from other fans - carries something of an aroma of paranoid nerd-terror at the thought of ostracism from a vicious, judgmental Public whose members will panic and clutch their pearls and shout abuse at the sight of something or someone that is slightly (more) out of the ordinary. It seems to assume either great stupidity, great delicacy of constitution, great preoccupation with the affairs of random strangers, or two or all of those things on the part of the Normal Folks - that a student (for instance) will be getting on just fine alongside the sea of black tee shirts and comic books and other quite obviously nerdy things at a quite obviously nerdy event, and then suddenly, holy shit, there's a person with a black wig and a knock-off Slimer on his shirt, and their psyche and sense of personal safety shatter like an egg at the hands of a dame who is stoked as BALLS to get them off that horse before their metaphorical kitchen gets massacred.
...Or perhaps it isn't quite that so much as the fear that cosplayers will make comic nerds "look bad" somehow, which... ...which... I'm not even sure how to approach that, honestly, if only because I can't quite decide what to say first.
EDIT: I should clarify that I do not think that it wouldn't be disrespectful to cosplay at TCAF. It would be - but because they are now "officially" asking people not to, and those are their wishes, however I feel about them. Cosplaying there anyway WOULD be blatantly disregarding those wishes. I completely acknowledge that it's a small concession to make and that there are other ways to make oneself known to other MSPA fans. I'm really just saying that I think it's a little silly.
*-There were only two exceptions I saw to this: A woman dressed as Marceline and an 8 year old girl dressed up as Finn from Adventure Time (Pendleton Ward was also a guest that year)
Oh, and if you're in Toronto for the weekend of May 10-11, are into comics and do not have a burning need to wear a silly costume wherever you go I'd totally recommend going to TCAF: It's free to attend and has some awesome guests lined up this year.