Heart of Dorkness: Day One

After a few hours of this, we had nabbed a few brief video interactions, as well as lots of walk about footage. We even had a chance to gush over some of our favorite industry folks a little. We looked at our convention event schedules, and lined up a couple of panels to go to. The first was a panel about scientific advancements in relation to pop culture issues. The second was a tournament style geek debate smackdown. I took notes on both, and all my panels through the weekend will eventually be written about for their own posts.

As we ended our time in the hall and moved into the rest of of the con, I started feeling weird. I remember thinking that for all the stuff inside the hall, very little for sale was actual comic books. Or even collectibles, really. My unease grew more and more as we proceeded to go around the convention center, cosplay was the king of the day. Even when we went to the panels, most of the people who were there for cool features weren’t in costume. The cosplay people would just hang out in the lobbies and just kind of exist there. I have nothing wrong with cosplay as a rule, but when you start to see it on this massive of a people watching scale I started to realize some of my problems with it.

Firstly, it’s become it’s own form of nerddom. Very few of the cosplayers seemed to be there to actually go to panels or visit the tables (unless they were costume related), they just kind of looped around talking to each other and looking for people to take their photos. This seems very odd to me. Spending so much money to go to something like this and not even expressing interest in the thing you love. I dont know. I can’t judge these people’s devotion to something, it just seems foreign to me. Like the only reason they came here is because it’s a socially acceptable place to dress like they are.

Secondly, modern cosplay is incredibly topical, and very repetitive and unimaginative. You start seeing hundreds of people dressing from the same thing that’s popular right this second, and it starts to lose it’s uniqueness. Which I always thought was an important part of the appeal of dressing outlandishly in the first place. If I were to cosplay again, I’d like to think I’d come up with something awesome that I knew I wouldn’t see seven hundred other versions of, or something that’s so timeless it wouldn’t matter how many there are. You see see two hundred stormtroopers and that’s kind of the point of them, the more the merrier.

Thirdly my problem is when originality swings the opposite way. When you start mixing ideas together, to me you just look like a weird frankenmess. You want to be Princess Leia? More power to you. You wanna go as the Joker? Right on man. But I saw a girl dressed as both at once. Leia with Heath Ledger Joker scar makeup. Again, people are free to express, I just don’t get at all what they’re trying to express. I think so many modern cosplayers are just using it as an excuse to be weird in public. If that’s your bag, go for it. But when I’ve cosplayed in the past I’ve never felt the need to have people look at me and say “I don’t get it.”