“I haven’t cried this much since Optimus Prime died in Transformers the Movie.”

Note the sheer professionalism of the ideal subject.

It must be real tough to be an average cosplay photographer (or ‘Freelance Phographer’ as this profile indicates) in this country. It’s not enough that everyone accuses you of groping tweeners and taking surreptitious upskirt photos. Now you can’t even have a good laugh at other people’s expense, like this guy who just wanted Ondoy rains and Milenyo winds because it’s pretty outside his window. I mean, who wouldn’t want to go back to killing hundreds and displacing thousands of people, destroying property and livelihood, especially if you have the luxury of watching the whole thing from the distance of a TV screen?

OH MAN I LAUGHED MY ASS OFF AT THIS

All right, seriously now. If this is the sort of antics you need to resort to get love and attention, you may want to put the camera down for a little while and reconnect with your humanity. Just a thought.

EDIT: I have been graciously provided with a screenie of the wonderful ‘karma trap’ in case the link goes down. (This would make no sense because then how would he trap karma? Then again he admits freely that his plurk karma is frozen, so… he’s dumb.) Enjoy.

EDIT 2: The link has gone down! So much for ‘the experiment being a success‘

EDIT 3: I liek pho.

Ride Jagi ride!

As I was laughing my head off watching Jagi-sama get thrown off by an mechanical bull, I wondered: Why do people need an excuse to cosplay, anyway? This convention-centric view of cosplay doesn’t seem to be shared by Akiba itself. Every Sunday the main road that cuts through Akiba, Chuo-dori, is closed to vehicular traffic and becomes a stage for cosplayers. No entrance fees, no cramped venues with poor ventilation, just miles of concrete serving as the ballroom for a weekly fancy dress party.

Monique, as it turns out, would be instrumental in organizing another non-official event — visiting Magnetic Rose at the hospital while she was recovering from her recent operation.

ImpromptuCon was also the venue for NoGeishaCon.

I’ve been blogging (despite strange hosting problems recently) about the local otaku scene for about a year now. It has slowly dawned on me that the term SNAFU applies to the scene. “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.”

And that’s a good thing. Because a scene like that is organic, alive, and emergent. It’ll come up with new ways to surprise people.

I see your Schwartz is as big as mine.

So a bunch of us eventually went to visit Magnetic Rose (minus Monique, who suddenly contracted an eye infection that she was afraid to give the post-op patient). We managed to prevent K from eating the cookies we brought as a get-well-soon present and just chatted with MagRose about random stuff like Kuroshitsuji doujinshi and tennis.

We simply hung out. Which struck me as in stark contrast with a couple of other events I was invited to, which turned out to be corporate press conferences. I never really know what to do at those things anyway. Am I supposed to give a glowing writeup because I got free food and swag? And what is the deal with this Ani-mates stuff anyway? Combined with ‘costripping’, I think the terms we choose to signify ourselves are giving the general public a really skewed impression of what it is we do when we gather, exactly.

Here’s the thing funny about the otaku community: when push comes to shove we’re all really just people. Sure, opinion may be sharply divided on one issue or another (in this case, the value of a publication like Otacool2 in the grand scheme of things) and there’s a lot of name-calling that passes for open debate, but we’re all just human beings, and we look out for each other. Some things are just more important than what really constitutes a true cosplayer.

Rotch, I hope you liked the cookies. We saved them from extinction.

(As usual, all photo credits go to Ksolaris, whom we pacified with a nibbler pack )

You want political discourse?! Here's my political discourse!

Now, I like to think that cosplayers aren’t dense or stupid. (If you disagree, bear with me, I like my rose-tinted glasses.) So how can people who are deeply immersed in the backbiting and name-calling that pervades local cosplay claim that everyone is one big happy cosplaying family?

I only realized what the reason was after I participated in my brother’s election campaign back in our hometown and discovered that party unity is a pleasant facade, loyalty is a handicap, and everyone covers up selfish, short-sighted agendas with high-minded ideals. Often the people who are the most vocal critics of politics are the people most interested in obtaining power through its use.

This isn't chess. We're just having a bit of fun!

It was that point that I realized that every time you seek to gain something through your interaction with society, be it companionship, affirmation, power, information, or financial gain, you are engaged in politics. That’s every single time you go out to meet people. Even otaku.

Politics is like masturbation. Everybody does it. Nobody likes to admit doing it.

Which is too bad. Politics is a dirty word in our country because our politicians are dirty. Politicians can be statesmen, they can be paragons, they can be revolutionaries, too, but they’re so rare these days that they’re shining exceptions to the unspoken rule. Society can be changed for the better with enlightened leaders. It’s just much, much easier to maintain and take advantage of the status quo. All you have to do is look after yourself.

Genghis Khan said, “It is not sufficient that I succeed; all others must fail.” Well, he would know, right? I mean he conquered an empire three times the size of Alexander the Great’s, and could dance a mean troika while singing in gibberish.

So how does this relate to me, you might ask? Well, do you want to be liked? Do you like snickering to your friends about the exaggerated facial features of other people? Are you trying to get your beloved’s friends to put in a good word for you? Are you trying to guilt-trip your friend into treating you out to dinner? Are you convinced that your little clique of a subculture is better than everyone else’s and therefore gives you the right to publicly humiliate them? Have you ever tried to pass off responsibility for your own mistakes on someone else to avoid reproach?

Congratulations. No matter how you gussy it up, the precise word for the activity that you are engaged in is POLITICS.

Wankers.

BL = Boys' Love, also known as Yaoi. No climax, no point, no meaning.

I had a great time at Komikon 2010, held at UP Diliman! Got a lot of loot, hounded Gerry Alanguilan again I’ll scan in excerpts from my stack of loot soon!

Many thanks to Forsaken Ground for not laughing at two completely oblivious, very straight male comic fans who ended up buying a BL compilation! Meru-chan, your lovely cover art totally blinded us to the contents of your comic

If computers reasoned this way, they would break.

The funny thing is that the writer of the forum post didn’t really seem to have anything against me aside from the fact that I got along a little too well with someone he dislikes. Rival courtier, apparently, for the favor of the lady. Funny considering where the post was. Playing both sides, cheers mate.

Thanks again to ksolaris for the great chibi art! Love the lightsaber

See the gaps in this Saturday crowd? They're gone on Sunday.

Read Part 1 here! Part 2 here!

Sunday at Ozine made Saturday look like a lazy day at the park. The con was packed with hundreds of cosplayers — so many that registration was still ongoing as the first cosplayers started strutting their stuff on the catwalk.

As expected, the “first ever cosplay photo studio in a con in the whole world EVAR” (or so Mike Abundo claimed repeatedly, but I distinctly remember having my picture taken as Lelouch at a Brother-sponsored cosplay photo studio setup at Cosplay Mania 2009) had a long queue. I was wondering if I would ever get to have that coffee with Richie dela Merced, who was busy clicking away and gently guiding the cosplayers’ poses.

Richie, one of the Cosplay Photographers’ Guild’s head honchos, spotted me, flashed a big smile and shook my hand. “I’ll be with you in a second, let’s go have that coffee!” The man’s personal charm was much stronger in person. I found myself predisposed to liking this jolly giant, at least compared to me. Why do I always feel so short at these things?

Another well-known photographer at the studio, Gian Bacuyag (who was rumored to have been sucker-punched sometime during the convention, although he seemed fine at that moment, rumors being funny ephemeral things) leaned in to whisper something to Richie. “Anong nangyayari (what’s happening)?” he said, flashing a suspicious glance at me.

“Wala. Si Otaking. Okay lang, (Nothing. It’s Otaking. It’s okay.)” Richie replied.

What was that about?

Pikarchie surveys his koi, tankobon and CD kingdom.

“I like your blog. I read it all the time. The last thing I wanted to do was pick a fight with you on your own blog,” Richie was telling me over green tea frappuccinos. “The difficult thing about having a discussion on a comments thread is that I have to wait a day for a response, and by then I’d have forgotten what we were talking about.”

“You know, we’re probably just disagreeing over terminology, and about a side issue at that,” I said. “My whole point with the dominance post is that any Us vs. Them thing, Pros vs. Amateurs or whatever, is bogus, is pointless. My whole point is that it’s a dominance strategy, and dominance ruins any scene.”

“That’s what I don’t get about the post,” Richie said. “What is dominance?”

“Dominance is a survival strategy. It’s not the only survival strategy but it’s the one most of mankind has favored since we started clubbing our enemies with femurs. Basically, to ensure that your tribe survives within your ecosystem, you aim to completely dominate it, to eliminate your competition.”

“But this is human nature,” Richie replied. “If you have a field with a hundred cows and one T-Rex, at the end only the T-Rex will be left. I guarantee it. Dominance works. Mankind will always use it, and it’s worked so far.”

“And now we’re killing the planet,” I replied.

“Ah. Well, that’s another issue,” he said.

“But that’s the whole point of my post. The natural consequence of the dominance strategy is the death of the whole. If the T-Rex’s strategy is to eliminate all the cows instead of coexist with them, when all the cows are dead, what would the T-Rex eat?”

“You’re right, I don’t think we’re disagreeing. Professionals and Amateurs will always have a place together in the scene,” Richie said.

“But I keep saying this isn’t about Pros vs. Ams,” I repeated. “This is about the dangers of wanting to dominate the scene.”

“The fittest will always survive, professional or amateur, especially when corporate sponsorship money comes pouring into the scene. Amateurs will always be free to cosplay, as long as they only do it for fun, but the best will always rise to the top. This is the future. Dominance is human nature,” he reiterated. Finally as we returned to his photo studio he flashed me another smile and said, “It was great talking to you and sorting things out.” He clapped me on the back and told Mike, “I told you Mike, we’re not really disagreeing!”

I stood there, sipping my green tea frap.

Palm-top Tiger. Table-top Machine Gun.

I was waiting for my friend Joey (aka bumbayker) to arrive at the con. It was 9PM. He said he was coming at eight. I rang him up.

“Hey Cliff,” Joey said on the other end of the line. “I’ve been here a while now but the guards won’t let me in to get my figures.”

“They won’t let exhibitors in?”

“Not until the con is over,” he whined.

“Wait there.” I made my way to the entrance and began using my lawyer-trained Negotiation skill. “My friend here has figures at the exhibit and needs to collect them,” I said to two security guards.

“Sorry sir, we can’t let anyone in until the event is over,” was the rote reply.

“The event IS over. It’s 9PM. Everyone is cleaning up. The remaining cosplayers are dancing in a conga line over there.” Sure enough there was a conga line of cosplayers holding up Free Hugs signs. Mike decided to take advantage of this, hugging everyone in the line one at a time. Some of the cosplayers ran away from him in fear. I nodded toward them in sympathy.

“Sorry sir. Take it up with the man in white over there,” they said, motioning toward Dennis Uy.

I walked up to Dennis. “Hi Dennis, my friend over there is an OtaKai exhibitor, and he–”

Another look of irritation crossed his face, the look of a man who had been dealing with this sort of thing for three days. I understood. He wasn’t irritated at me or at Joey. He was just… tired. Without letting me finish, he went up to the guards and said, “Let him in.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He grunted at me, probably the best thing he could muster. People don’t realize how tired someone in charge of an event of this scale can be. I silently hoped he would get three full days of sleep after this was all done.

Yoko waits for Daddy Joey to take her home.

“So if you don’t want the Pros or the Ams to dominate, what do you want?” Mike asked over a rum coke at Big Sky Mind.

“I don’t want anyone to dominate,” I said. “Hail Eris!”

“All Hail Discordia!” Joey said, raising a glass.

“So just… chaos, then?” Mike asked, unconvinced. “You want rival groups to fight amongst themselves without anyone emerging as the dominant faction?”

“You know, for someone who sings the virtues of the free market, you’re taking your time getting the point of all of this,” I said. “This isn’t about Pros vs. Ams at all. Here’s an analogy. When different TV channels have to fight over market share instead of one channel dominating the airwaves, who wins?”

“Nobody wins,” Mike said. “All this time and effort is wasted trying to best the competition.”

I shook my head. “No, of course the competing factions don’t win. The audience wins. They get more interesting stuff to watch on TV that way.”

Mike paused. “Ah.”

I grinned. “Popcorn, anyone?”

Yes, I know my ponytail makes me look like a girl.

While Vigilant is my main comic writing project, I’ve always wanted to do a 4koma-style comic like Azumanga Daioh or Wa!

Thanks for Ksolaris for the always-adorable chibi art!

The stage at Ozine Fest 2010, during a rare empty moment.

[This is Day 2 of my Ozine Fest 2010 report! Read day 1 here! All pictures are by my friend Ksolaris, as you can tell from the watermark -- not that it's stopped some very high profile scrapers from swiping her pics and posting them on their Multiply without attribution before. And what's with those uniformly crappy captions?]

“Two day passes please?” I asked the ticket lady.

She shook her head. “Two tickets?”

I sighed. “Three please.” For me, my wife and her niece Marielle. My wife was attending primarily because she wanted to have Utena and Liara T’Soni t-shirts done by the Doujin Shirts people. Marielle, totally oblivious to the cosplay scene politics, was attending for the simplest reasons again — her friends were going, and she wanted to score some loot.

The con was much more crowded today; even before arriving at the con itself we ran into a large crowd waiting outside — posing for pictures, taking pictures with SLRs, taking surreptitious pictures of cosplayers in short skirts from low angles with more compact digicams. Your typical con-going crowd.

In this photo: Girls in ideal costumes for 'low-angle' photography.

“Oh, I didn’t know you’d be here!” Kia said as we greeted each other. The last two times I saw her in costume, I easily recognized who she was — Chun-Li and Phoenix. Today, I was at a loss.

“Who are you dressed up as?” I asked.

“Oh, nobody really, this is just something I threw together,” she said. Red hair, black-and-white striped outfit. She wasn’t cosplaying, she was just dressed up. Same as me: with my old-school Grado headphones, The World Ends With You Player Pin, and Cobra t-shirt, I wasn’t in costume (although I did seem like a dark side version of Neku), but I was dressed for the occasion.

Suddenly Mike Abundo passes by, herding a small crowd of very young-looking cosplayer girls toward the highly-touted cosplay photo studio set up just for the con. Kia and I watch this spectacle unfold, speechless for a long moment.

“So,” Kia finally said, “how do you know Mike?”

“We were in the same ROTC unit in UP together. Yeah, I know, he’s weird,” I said, to vigorous nodding from Marielle, “but I’m used to it.”

“GamerTotoy wrote about us, you know,” Kia said. “Said I was his girlfriend.”

“Oh, you mean the way they used to say ____________ was his girl before,” I said.

“Yeah. I’m not, but I’m not going to stop hanging out with him just because some jerk spreads rumors about us. That would be letting people know that I’m affected by that sort of thing,” she said.

And there it was — the simplest reply to the vicious mudslinging the cosplay scene has become famous for. Why should I change the way I act or the people I hang out with just because some maladjusted perverts or some jealous harpies can find a way to paint what I do in a malicious light? Who am I in this for, anyway? Them or me? What was wrong with being a weirdo?

I looked back at where Mike had gone. He was regaling the slightly-frightened girls with grand gestures and a really, really loud voice.

“…He is pretty weird though,” I admitted.

Kia pursed her lips.

Marielle kept nodding.

Sebastian looks on disinterestedly as Itoshiki-sensei is in despair over this reputation-conscious cosplay world.

There seemed to be equal proportions of cosplayers and non-cosplayers at this con, with the non-cosplayers thinning out as the day wore on. How exactly did that happen? Not that I minded, but it did make me regret not being in costume. It’s easy for non-cosplayers to point and laugh at the weirdos in costume because non-cosplayers risk nothing. Being ‘normal’ is a social defense against ridicule. Conforming is just another way of seeking safety in numbers.

My dream cosplay event involves everyone, without exception, being in costume, just partying, hamming it up, and having a blast away from the judging eyes of outsiders. Has this happened yet? There is a general rule in LARP (Live Action Role-Playing) that LARPing should be done away from non-LARPers. Aside from the fact that people pretending to be vampires or werewolves or mages would freak out unsuspecting passersby, we tend to be self-conscious about our performances if outsiders are present.

There’s a thought: how do cosplayers act when they’re alone?

Especially cosplayers who can drink everyone under the table!

As we headed to the parking lot we ran into our friends Romeo, Sese, and Kune, who were out of costume and resting after a hard day’s work. (Don’t think cosplaying the whole day is hard work? Try it.)

“Hakushaku~!” Romeo greeted me. Romeo is an endangered species, a cosplayer who does it purely for fun, making up for the lack of technical polish with sheer pluck. This Ozine Fest he topped himself by wearing three different costumes, one per day: Zero from Code Geass, a Scholar from Ragnarok Online, and Jagi-sama from Detroit Metal City. He was already out of costume at this point, and was leaning against the metal service door.

“Hakushaku~!” I greeted back. “Are you going to catwalk?”

“Nope,” he replied.

“What?” I cried in mock-alarm. “You’re not going to compete? You’re not a real cosplayer! You’re just… a COSTRIPPER!”

“Oh noes!” he gasped.

Then we burst out laughing, while everyone else looked at us funny. Weirdos.

Hakushakuuuuuuu~

(To be continued in Part 3! Check out other Ozine 2010 reports from Sese and Romeo!)

We're out of three day passes, but you can buy three of these for forty pesos more!

I attended an Ozine event (O-zeen? O-zayn? No one I’ve talked to seems to agree…) the year before, but only during the final day. I wanted to get a sense of the entire con this year, so this year I decided to attend all three days of Ozine Fest 2010.

Day 1:

“It’s 100 per ticket, 260 for a three-day pass,” the ticket lady said.

“A three day pass, please.”

“We’re out of three-day passes. Would you like three tickets?”

This was off to a great start, I thought. Immediately through no fault of my own I was down forty pesos more than I should have spent. Oh well, no big deal. “Just the one, please.”

Ozine on a Friday was… spacious. The organizers rented out Megatrade Halls 1 and 2 and with so few people (compared to the crazy contest days where you have to stand toe-to-toe with someone who considers hygiene lower on the hierarchy of needs than having watched every single anime Minorin has ever contributed a song for) I could have actually brought my lightsaber and did some saber spinning tricks without hitting anyone.

Bloody thing’s too heavy to lug around though.

I see your schwarz is as big as mine.

Another thing: if you aren’t in some sort of costume, you are immediately considered a lower caste. This is not to say that you get intentionally treated like second-class citizens. But the difference between walking around in costume and being a regularly-dressed gawker is clear as night and day. I found myself wishing I had a new costume, or at least a vastly-improved version of my previous one. Cosplayers are the center of attention, getting away with anything they pull.

Well, almost anything. There were some cosplayers who went largely unnoticed because either their costumes were too simple, too shoddy, or because the cosplayer himself seemed too creepy to approach. Yes, I said ‘himself’. Female cosplayers always, always had someone approaching them.

Unless they were patently unattractive. In which case elaborate costumes usually compensated. Usually. When they didn’t, I was greeted with a spectacle that was almost too painful to behold: A cosplayer who desperately wanted to call attention to himself/herself but couldn’t break character to do so, surrounded by a crowd busy ooh-ing and aah-ing over someone right next to them. The saddest thing in the world is a cosplayer holding a ‘Free Hug’ sign surrounded by empty space.

Many (but not all) of the shops were in this corner of the con separated from the main flow of traffic. This was an interesting choice that was probably made to ease crowding, since would-be purchasers stand around and gawk when everyone else needs to pass through to get somewhere.

This opinion was not shared by the people running the stalls.

“I keep getting lost,” said Raymond Sison of CSCentral. “They should open up the corner.”

“Hey Raymond,” Mike Abundo said, motioning toward me, “have you met Cliff from Project Otaking yet?”

Raymond looked at me disinterestedly, simply emitted a grunt, turned his back to me, and returned to what he was saying.

Nice to meet you too. Simon says “Have a nice day.”

I'm going to sink a lot of money into kitschy Japanese junk from now on, I just know it.

I walked off to the Waku Waku stall and purchased a yellow PEN’Z GEAR (PROTIP: If the PEN’Z GEAR is yellow, it means the ink is yellow, too. Much confusion under incandescent lights.) and a Peri Peri keychain for my wife, which replicates the sweet sensation of tearing open a mail parcel or a box of Tongari Corn.

My wife spent the next morning ripping imaginary packages open over and over again.

Just look at the sheer joy on their faces!

I also bought a pair of aviator goggles from a shop that specializes in all sorts of geeky eyewear, like steampunk goggle’s and Willy Wonka’s shades.

I paid a visit to OtaKai’s figurine exhibit as well, to check out my friend Joey’s glorious Yoko Littner Bounty Hunter PVC figure.

Look at those wondrous... details.

I ran into Kunebitt who was hanging out at her friends’ contacts and wigs stall. Mike was once again applying ‘social lubrication’ as he charmingly puts it.

“Kunebitt is going to be on a live web chat this Tuesday,” Mike informed me.

“Live web chat, ha?” I gave her a sly look and grinned, rubbing my chin.

“Gago ka Cliff,” she shot back. Then she grinned too. “Anong sinabi mo, Kuya Dennis?”

God I hate that guy.

Highly moddable, perfectly balanced ballpoint pen designed specifically for pen twirling. Oh, Japan.

“This is Cliff. He writes Project Otaking,” Mike said, introducing me to Dennis Uy, of the Ozine Uy brothers.

Dennis regarded me as he shook my hand. Once again I couldn’t help notice how much taller everyone else seems compared to me. “Oh. So that’s you,” placing particular emphasis on the last word. My reputation, whatever it is, keeps preceding me.

“Yep, that’s me,” I replied. “Say, I’m having trouble getting a three day pass.”

“Is there any chance we could get Cliff a press pass?” Mike asked.

“We’re having trouble with the IDs. We keep running out of them. Apparently people keep lending them out to friends who never come back,” Dennis said. “You can get a three day pass at the ticket booth.”

“No I can’t,” I said. “They said they were all out.”

“What? How is that possible?” A look of irritation, not the first one all day considering that he was the boss of this huge party, crossed Dennis’ face. “Anyway, we’ll be selling two day passes tomorrow. Will you be coming back?”

“Yeah, with my wife and her niece. I’m supposed to have coffee with Richie dela Merced at some point.”

He shook my hand again before leaving to take care of another minor crisis. “Great. See you then.”

[EDIT: It has been brought to my attention that there are two Dennises in my narrative. No, the Dennis I hate with a vengeance isn't Dennis Uy. Move along. If you want to know who it is, ask someone who knows the inside joke. ]

(to be continued in Day 2 and Day 3)