This year the small local anime/cosplay/etc convention Kraken Con held a second event in the Fall, and in a rather brilliant move it took place on the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier museum parked off the coast of Alameda, Ca, with a view of San Francisco across the bay.
If you look at the cosplay photos from a typical convention, you tend to see people with very elaborate, exotic outfits posing in godawful beige hotel lobbies and the like. Using the USS Hornet as a locale immediately fixed that problem, and as it turns out improved a number of other things as well-- modern architecture is so bad that WWII military surplus easily beats it.
What follows is some miscellaneous musings on the occasion of, and tangentially related to, this event...
We've spent a lot on this military-industrial complex over the years, we might as well get something out of it.
The troubles with a typical hotel setting are many and various-- lots of flourescent lighting, poor ventilation handled by a one-size-fits-all central system, and oddly sized rooms that never seem to quite fit what you need to do with them. A first for me at Kraken Con: this time I was willing to attend the Costume Contest finale and I stayed through the whole thing. Usually it seems too crowded to want to bother with it, but it's hard to fill up the deck of an aircraft carrier.
Quite a few costumes showed a lot of craftsmanship, and there was a high percentage of people participating.
I wasn't one of them however, except in that I always look vaugely like an anime character. (Sometimes I toy with the idea of doing a manga featuring someone who looks and dresses like me, then I could always pass as a "cosplayer".)
Much as enjoy seeing other people doing cosplay, I actually have a few problems with the general concept-- in fact, I have a problem with "concepts" in general, at least where costumes are concerned. I have a similar problem with Halloween, where I often get people looking at me strangely and commenting "What are you?"
In the sub-cultures that I come out of (punk, goth, ...), you might try to dress to match the
style of the scene, but without trying to look exactly like one of the leading figures. You try to put your own spin on it; you're supposed to be revealing (or creating?) your own character not just imitating a look. Goths always liked to accuse each other of being mere inauthentic "poseurs".
A friend of mine frequently comments disdainfully about how these days it's fairly easy to just buy a complete costume off of the net, whereas in the old days you had to make stuff yourself.
Kraken Con has always placed a lot of emphasis on creativity, however -- the panels, for example, tend to feature creators talking about how to do stuff, and the dealers room has a lot of artists and craftsmen showing off their own work.
I noticed a few people had done some good work with cardboard-- one young woman had a small silver "ship" she carried around her waist, a sailor girl complete with boat, another young blonde woman had made her own Thor armor out of cardboard. One woman appeared in the costume contest as "The Great Will of the Macrocosm" from the Excel Saga, using cardboard to appear as an amorphous cosmic (but cheap-looking) blob. Cardboard: The People's Medium.
And really, all of the top-of-the line costumes featured in the costume contest involved a lot of very detailed work with sewing, hot glue, and even fiberglass casting.
Some even showed quite a bit of conceptual creativity, such as this woman doing a steampunk Rosie the Riveter, who deserved a "most site-specific" award:
And then there's this woman who invented her own "Anime West" character...
Anime West liked playing with the flight simulator, which was a real, electromechanical shake-rattle-and-roll deal, not just some cheesy computer game. But she commented that she could see how things like that could just turn killing into a kind of game, distancing you from what's really going on.
By the way, one of the things I personally find interesting about Japanese pop culture is the way the very real, but somewhat loose connection between our two cultures turns them into distorting mirrors of each other. The influences get traded back-and-forth and turned into something else entirely on the turn-around...
I'll have more to say about that some other day, I expect.
The elements from past and future and from east and west all get transformed... into something rich and strange?
The crunchyroll.com panel on new anime that they're putting up reminds that there's some
really silly stuff out there these days, e.g. idol singers with superpowers and extended cheescake transformation sequences. The "cyberpunk" days, when there was some attempt at covering serious ground with anime seem long gone, and now we wallow in endless waves of moe. However, Owarimonogatari, a new addition to the Monogatari series, has some possibilities.... if we must have low-grade sexual perversion everywhere, we might as well be stylish about it.
Giles Poitras gave a talk about doing "Tokyo on the Cheap", essentialy providing a lot of advice on saving money on room and board so you can spend more on doujinshi and the like.
I also saw a talk on "World of Warships-- Bringing History to Life", by a fellow with an obsessively detailed knowledge of the details of historical naval craft, motivated almost entirely by a desire to do insanely accurate war games where, for example, you always have the right number of anti-aircraft guns on deck for the year the battle is supposed to be taking place.
I always want to support the efforts of the dealers, but myself I often have trouble finding things I'd want to buy in the dealers room-- I'm just not interested in collecting plastic figurines, no matter how detailed (if only American cons had more doujinshi...). This time I found some gift items (a fox motif purse, and some black cat earrings), and I was somewhat surprised to find a publisher with some real books available for half cover price.