Cosplay Bingo Makes Me Smile

I went on a road trip with a friend over the Memorial day weekend.  She sets up events, so she was headed off to FanimeCon in San Jose, California, and I was along for the ride.  Fanime is a convention dedicated to Anime, Japanese Pop Culture, and general nerd stuff.  Now, I'm what is called a "convention virgin" and not really an anime nerd, so I would like to tell you that I was out of my element. . . but that's not really true.  I was surrounded by loads of freakishly skinny Asians wearing glasses, so I pretty much blended in.

Something that was definitely eye catching was the vast amounts of cosplayers--convention goers wearing costumes.  Why?  I have no idea.  I knew there would be at least a few of them, but I was blown away by the sheer number of them.  Strangely, there didn't seem to be any etiquette on what is an appropriate costume to wear.  I almost immediately found a guy dressed as Lucius Malfoy, and then later found the Bananas in Pajamas.  I asked my friend if it was possible to wear an inappropriate costume here.  She said no.

You get super-nerd points if you can name more than three of the characters here.

Not one to miss the opportunity for a bit of fun, we decided to play some 'cosplayer bingo.'  I made some bingo cards and a we went through the convention hunting for various costumes.

It was a fun distraction.  Here is my artistic interpretation of some of the cosplayers we found while playing bingo.  All of these were real costumes.

Crappy costume with a cardboard sign.

Hipster Link's sign actually read "I was saving princesses before saving princesses was cool."

 Guy in a skirt who hasn't shaved his legs.

It was pretty disturbing how easy it was to find this one.

Set of five themed characters.

Other themed sets found included the cast of Avatar: the Last Airbender and Kill Bill

Costume requiring a handler.

It would have been really funny to push him down the stairs.

Guy with too many buttons.

He had dozens more in his pockets.

Person with giant key/sword.

I believe such a weapon would be inefficient in combat.

I ended up tying my friend for the first bingo.  I think I made the card too easy--we were able to find almost everyone on both our cards within an hour.

Also, I should note one of the bigger reasons I blended in with the crowd:

I unwittingly dressed up for it.

I wore a shirt that said "HATERS GONNA LOVE THIS" thinking that it was about as far away from the Asian cosplay swag as I could get (after all, Kanye references 'haters' in his songs).  But then people started approaching me and saying "Dude, I love your shirt," or "Where did you get your shirt?"  One vender with a bullhorn yelled at me from across the hall "I'm a hater, and I'm lovin' it!"  I asked my friend what the deal was, and she said that the saying comes from an internet meme (Epic Meal Time?).

So it turns out that in spite of my best efforts, I ended up being a spot on my own bingo card.  What. the. freak.