Convention Survival Tips

Tip #7: Forget the cosplay haters

Cosplayers get a lot of criticism from non-cosplayers.

There's groups of people.

There's the creepy pervy ones. Veteran con goers can easily spot them a mile away. Quickly alert the con staff immediately if they do anything inappropriate you and your friends/relatives.

A group of people, who are made up of overprotective (pushing to soccer mom levels) guardians that are there with their kids. They may think that cosplayers over the age of 18 or 20 are "man/woman children" and are afraid that their kids would turn out like that.

One group will think that cosplayers are a bunch of fetishists, freaks or weirdos. Probably the same group that think most or all furries are into bestiality.

One group of idiots would say/shout, "Are you a little early/late for Halloween?!" or "Are you a bit old to dress up?" This group tends to be hypocritical. Like they haven't dressed up as their favourite character at a costume party, Halloween or did it as some sort of role play with someone. You may run into them when you're going to or from the con.

An another hypocritical group would be the ones who thinks watching anime, cartoons, reading comic book or anything like that is childish, yet watching a Disney/Pixar movie isn't childish. There's a old saying that a number of you heard that probably goes "You're potting the kettle black." They should probably take a good long look at a mirror.

There's a certain group of people that's infamous in the geek world and that they're called the neckbeards and the legbeards (or female neckbeards). If you don't know what they are, go to Walter Fate or Fun With Failure on YouTube or search around Reddit. There's so many stories on them.

And the another group would go on a huge tangent saying that cosplayers aren't true fans just because they're dressed up as character from a fandom that they're probably not a fan of that said fandom or say that the cosplay is way too different to the outfit (with very mild differences) that the character wears or bitch that the person who's cosplaying is the different skin color, gender, body shape or nationality.

I know that people who have different skin color or body type and cosplays in the US, Canada, Great Britain or anywhere in the world got complaints as well. Like if they dressed up as Naruto, The Scarlet Witch or Frisk, some people will go: "Oh, you can't cosplay her/him because they're white or this said gender and you're not that."

Hell, I've even heard that western people shouldn't cosplay as anime characters because the characters are Asian. Many of them forget that the anime characters can have different nationalities or skin color like being european. Like 85 - 95% of the characters from Attack On Titan or anything like that.

When Legend Of Korra came out, I heard people complained that some white/slightly tanned people who were cosplaying as Korra were racist just because they slightly tanned their skin with tan lotion or used body paint to make their skin and mildly darker than their own skin color. Even saying that they're white-washing to the Korra cosplayers who don't use fake tan or etc.

Heck, I heard a similar thing with Steven Universe and includes body shape as well (Watch AlphaOmegaSin's video on the Steven Universe controversy). I really don't want to get into that. You'll probably find stories floating around on YouTube or somewhere else.

Don't get me started with the time that a number of people freaked the eff out when a woman from Korea/Japan/China (I forgot where she's from, I am very sorry) cosplayed as Sombra from Overwatch, just because her skin was lighter than the character that she was cosplaying as.

If you see the haters on websites like DeviantArt or Facebook, block their sorry backsides or just ignore them.

Before I forget, when you post your own cosplay pictures or videos, PLEASE, for the love of God, know the difference between constructive criticism and trolling in the comment section. A good number of people commonly confuse constructive criticism with trolling or vice versa. Just don't feed the trolls. They just want a reaction from you and start drama. Also please don't be an asshole to the person is cosplaying.