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Topic: Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame  (Read 34454 times)

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #15
I ever tell you guys about how Homestuck fans' idiocy made the Toronto Comic Arts Festival put a ban on cosplaying?
KingKalamari, February 12, 2014, 05:30:25 pm

No, but please do! Homestucks can be pretty terrible.

VVV I read it, I just try to avoid the fandom.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2014, 05:48:14 pm by kal-elk »

Ansemaru

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #16
I know that story from my years on the front lines of reading Homestuck, but you should still share it with the class, KingKalamari. It's beautiful.

EYE OF ZA

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #17
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?

I get being a big fan of things and how you're willing to do things that make other people feel a bit weird.  Part of being a fan is putting a higher importance on something that doesn't really warrant it.  Why do I care that I have a developer diary signed by all the staff at Larian Studios?  Why do I have Elder Scrolls maps framed in my room?  Neither of those things are important at all, and they're weird to other people,  but they're expressions of stuff I really enjoy, so I'm fine with doing something people without a specific interest in something dorky would think is weird.

Like Ansemaru said, there's a difference between between being unashamed to like a dorky thing, and actively trying to make people think you're weird, and that difference boils down to needing validation.  If you're weird and you're just weird to yourself and you acknowledge that and you're fine with it, that's far more sane and rational than trying to be weird, but wanting everyone else to know that you're weird so that you feel like you're properly weird and justifiably ostracized or whatever validation you're looking for.

I say this as someone who did, for about two years back in high school, actively try to be weird.  I don't really know why, probably for attention, or because I was bored, or because I was uncomfortable in a new school where I didn't know anyone and the social groups had already crystallized long before I came along.  But I remember thinking to myself 'I want people to think I'm weird', and I acted like that my freshman and sophomore year.

I didn't have any friends freshman and sophomore year.

I don't know what it was that made me cut that out, either.  Maybe growing up, maybe getting lonely, maybe finally making some friends that I felt more comfortable around.  But it turns out, actively trying to be weird makes you a terrible person to be around and no one likes it.

What I'm getting at is, okay, if you want to do a dorky thing, that's fine.  Conventions are honestly a great place to do dorky things.  But don't try to make it a status thing or a validation thing where you try to baffle the normies who are just too plebian to understand why you're all spitting on a barber pole or why you're dressed up as a salt shaker with tiger ears.  You can just be into Barberstuck or Tora no Shiro wo Chōmiryō Shukugakai and be happy with that.

tl;dr: one time I went to a convention and someone complimented me on my cosplay but I wasn't wearing a costume :(

Ansemaru

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #18
The worst part about "Barberstuck" is that is exactly in line with terrible, inane, inexplicably popular Homestuck AUs/fandom trends and how they tend to be named. There's about as much material buried in Tumblr for that as there is on the Terrible MLP Stuff general thread right now.

In fact, I kind of suspect that if I searched the tumblr tag for "Barberstuck" I'd actually fucking find something.*

*http://www.tumblr.com/search/barberstuck**
**There are two things on the tag. That's two things too many.

Runic

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #19
It kind of reminds me of those nerds who are really, really invested in the idea that video games are art. It's not just that they think video games are art, that isn't a bad opinion, I'm talking the kind of guys who cursed Roger Ebert when he died because he said that he thought video games weren't are. Those kinds of nerds. Are they interested in the subject because they have strongly held and well formed opinions on what art is or how an interactive medium makes players an active part of creating the art that they are viewing? No, they just want society to validate their terrible life choices. They want people to validate that the fifty hours they spend playing WoW each week are every bit as enriching and respectable as if they spent that time reading Chaucer or admiring Monets at the local museum.

The problem is that those things aren't comparable. Even if video games can be art, most of them aren't. And they don't need to be. It's okay to have a nerdy hobby that is kind of odd and that most people won't understand. That's fine. The problem is when you get really weirdly defensive about it. Because if you identify so strongly with your nerdy hobby that you view any criticism of that hobby or the way you indulge in it as a personal attack then you will reflexively reject any criticism of it, even if that criticism is well founded and constructive and before you know it you're selling your eggs for fabric because you are no longer willing to listen to your friends and family when they tell you that that is insane.

KingKalamari

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #20
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.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2014, 06:23:32 pm by KingKalamari »

Runic

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #21
Yeah, but there's a good chance an eight year old would dress up as Finn from Adventure Time on a normal day so she's okay. Also that sounds adorable. And the TCAF sounds pretty cool

EYE OF ZA

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #22
That quote from the girl who wanted to cosplay is pretty aggravating.  She seems to miss the idea that this is taking place in an open library, and the idea that some people might not find it 'fun' to see people dressed up like that.  It's kinda weird to see people dressed up, especially if we're talking about something taking place in a fully public venue.

Plus, I completely disagree with her on the idea that someone cosplaying isn't going to be any more disruptive than someone not doing it.  For certain things, I could see her point (like if you've got a very delicate costume on), but the fact is, when people dress up, they feel like they aren't themselves, and they act out more because they've got this layer between their actual selves and what they're doing.  Cosplayers are exactly the people who are going to be more rowdy.

Also if I'm still in the northeast come May I'd totally like to go, it sounds like a cool place without people dressing up like gray assholes.

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #23
a) Why is cosplaying there necessarily such a bad thing?

Because it's a public library and you'll be around people who aren't there to be amused by your attention-seeking catchphrases and in-jokes. It's like going into a yoga class and then breakdancing. If I tried to start a pickup hockey game in a roller rink I don't get to ask "Why is playing hockey there necessarily such a bad thing" just because it's the sort of environment in which hockey could be played.

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #24
I think the question of whether or not wearing a costume is inherently disruptive is irrelevant, anyway. The spirit of the rule is obvious: It's not a con, and they don't want Homestucks or other weirdos harshing the vibe. It's that simple. All this person is doing is being whiny and pedantic.

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #25
I live in a country that has pretty much one nerd convention a year and that's it, so when it's time for it, you get all the types of nerds in one go. So I'm acutally curious about how actual subject-specific cons look since what I have is a strange mishmash of everything, I remember there being LARP, MtG tournaments, drawing workshops, lectures about all sorts of things, people selling merch and used books, screenings of movies and some panels about stuff. Barely any anime though.

Have an embarassing note about me!: This year I went to that aforementioned con, and I complimented a group of teenagers on their group cosplay thing (they were the whole cast of Dangan Ronpa 1), and awkwardly confronted them about the fact that some of them were in costumes that were spoilers, and that it's kind of unfair to people who haven't played the game (or read the Something Awful Let's Play of it), since it hasn't come out in English yet. They replied that it's their right to do so and having spoilers is the whole point. My poor friends had no idea what any of this shit was and called me out about being awkward afterwards.

I did see some really great costumes and I really admire people who have the skill and can set apart time to make these things and wear them without shame.

EYE OF ZA

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #26
I don't know a lot about Diamond Rhombus but I know it makes Tumblr mad when the SA paywall goes up and one time someone dressed up as Lowtax (or Slowbeef?) and posed with shades and a whole bunch of ten dollar bills and that was pretty funny.

Ansemaru

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #27
It's a neat murder mystery game in the vein of Phoenix Wright and Battle Royale, of all things. It was actually just released in English on the PS Vita like... this past week.* If for some reason you have a Vita and like murder mystery/courtroom drama games, check it out. If not, there's an excellent Let's Play on SA.

*(The reason for this is almost entirely due to the fan-translated LP on Something Awful, which got insanely popular across the assorted internets. Including with the Tumblr crowd, who A) don't understand how SA works and B) have a remarkable tendency to be complete idiots about the game itself. They have done nothing but make it harder to like the game.)

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #28
Yeah, Dangit Ron Paul is a fun murder mystery game that has a phenomenal Let's Play on Something Awful, it also caused some amusing drama on the LP sub-forum whenever the paywall went up and people couldn't read DR and bitched about it on tumblr instead of paying the 10$ to register a SA account. Some did register an SA account, but didn't actually read the rules before posting in the LP thread, which got them banned quickly enough.

But back to the topic of cosplay:


One of many videos best described as "a bunch of people in cosplay dancing in the woods to the sound of J-pop/Touhou remixes"
edit: sometimes they aren't in the woods but in a field or something
« Last Edit: February 13, 2014, 11:59:10 am by A Meat »

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Episode 127: Cosplay To Win The Cosgame #29
A bunch of Tumblrites also shared account passwords so they didn't have to pay. It would've been a bigger problem but a lot of them were dumb enough to post the account names and passwords on their public accounts to share.