Gina DeBenedictis (21) is from Bellevue, and this is her ninth Sakura-Con. She’s cosplaying as 00 Gundam Girl. She said it took about 10 months to do the costume, “It was pretty much waking up, working on it, taking a break for eating, working on it, then going to sleep.” Her mecha costume is made of craft foam, foam core, paper-maché. This is her first time wearing it to Sakura-Con.
My “Best in Show” pick is Steven (27) from Everett, cosplaying as Ryuk from Death Note. This is his second Sakura-Con. He loves the Death Note series and thought no one was pulling off the character well, in his opinion, at the last Con. Costume took about a week. He purchased the iconic black spiky hair. Everything else, the feathers, the rest of the costume, he put together himself. The apple makes it.
Abby (17), Lauren (17) and Jennifer (18) from Portland were cosplaying as Ulquiorra Cifer, Orihime Inoue, and Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez (respectively) from the Bleach series. They are here cosplaying as these characters because, as Lauren puts it, “These are really fun costumes to do.” She’s the seamstress of the group and sewed all the costumes herself, and even made the shoes. Lauren says that the hardest part of sewing these costumes is that there isn’t a pattern available; it’s more trial and error. This is something I heard quite a bit from others who make their own costumes.
Abi (27) from Lynnwood was cosplaying as Sylvanas Windrunner from the World of Warcraft game. This is her fourth Sakura-Con. When I asked why she chose this costume, she said she used to play WoW and “wanted a challenge.” Asked how she got into anime, she said her brothers were all anime fans, and she got pulled in. She leans more towards games than anime, and she thinks that the increase in cosplaying girls and women at Sakura-Con is related to the fact that game companies are starting to cater games more to girls. “Now,” she says, “there are games where the girls are leads instead of just pretty.” This was a common theme when I asked how women and girls found their passion for cosplay: many of them discover it through gaming.
Abby pulls anime, cosplay, and gaming together in her involvement with a group called the D20 Girls (where she is the editor of the group’s magazine). It’s a business that combines social networking, talent management, event services, and independent publications to promote the positive image of female gamers in the gaming industry.
Robert (25) and Kim (24) from Seattle had two of the most elaborate costumes at the Con, cosplaying as Dark Paladin and Magician’s Valkyria from the Yu-Gi-Oh! series. Why did they choose these characters? Robert sums it up with: “I thought they looked awesome.” It took about four months to make these costumes, with ¼-in. foam and craft foam. Robert works as a software engineer, and spent his time after work crafting this remarkably detailed costume. He even cast the green jewels on his gloves out of epoxy resin, finishing them off with nail polish.
Denzel (19) is Sazh Katzroy from Final Fantasy 13. He is one of the few African American cosplayers I saw at the Con. “Sometimes it’s hard with people of…darker skin…to cosplay,” he said. Then he saw FF13, with “this guy who had these two guns and this big afro and this bird in his hair, and it’s just like ‘I’m gonna do that.’” What is notable about cosplay, though, is how the race--or even gender--of the cosplayers relative to the character just really isn’t an issue. There were more girl Luffys than boy Luffys running around, girl Grimmjows, it doesn’t seem to matter.
Sometimes you also get random non-anime or game-based characters that show up. Like Jesus. Or bacon. Or even Tom Servo and Crow from MST3K. Totally worth spending a sunny Saturday indoors.
Weather-wise, it was the nicest Saturday in a while, and while the rest of you were walking Green Lake or mowing your yards, I was hanging with the Otaku in the caverns of the Convention Center at Sakura-Con 2012. The annual anime and manga gathering brought fans together from all over the Northwest, North America, Japan, and even Norway to cosplay, watch anime, attend panels, and buy lots and lots of anime- and manga-related stuff.
There is no way I can compete with the comprehensiveness and sheer awesomeness of Andrew Boscardin’s review of Emerald City Comicon. That was a hard act to follow. So instead, let’s peek into the lives of cosplayers we met along the way to find out why they chose the character they play…and what went into making their costumes.
While the sun was shining this past weekend, thousands of costumed Otaku avoided the sunlight at the Washington State Convention Center for the annual Sakura-Con anime and manga convention. So let’s start with the obvious…it’s a convention for guys who live in their parents’ basements who dress like ninjas and who have an unhealthy fondness for Sailor Moon, right? Well, no. At least not entirely. Or even mostly.
What was shocking about this Con was how many women and girls were there–easily half of the attendees if not more were female, even when you account for the ones where it was hard to tell.
Karin from Portland drove up with daughter Emma (15) and her friends Amy (14) and Kira (16). This is Emma’s second anime convention. At last year’s smaller Kumoricon convention in Portland, she came costumed (known as “cosplay”) as Lan Fan from the Full Metal Alchemist series. She went to Sakura-Con as a civilian this time, and explaining the difference she said, “When you’re in the costume, you can socialize more because you immediately have something in common with other attendees. Especially if you’re a ‘peripheral’ character like Lan Fan. They run up and hug you even though they don’t know you.” She and her mother even traveled to Tokyo to soak up the Otaku culture from the source. “There,” she says, “cosplay is a rebellious thing. Here in the States, it’s more a form of self-expression.”
16-year-old Katie Gandy and her parents traveled from Grant’s Pass Oregon to attend her second Sakura-Con. She’s identifies as a “Furry,” one of the a sub-genres of Otaku-dom. As she talks, the mouth in her fox costume cleverly moves along with her words. The head alone on her costume took 25 hours to make. Like many of the attendees, she connects with other furry cosplayers online and meets them once a year at Sakura-Con. Her parents had that patient “Well, she loves it” look on their faces.
Being an Otaku can also be a family thing. Jim and Leslie, both 23, came costumed as Ikkaku and Nanao from the Bleach series. They came to the Con with the ultimate accessory: their 9-month old daughter Ria. Jim is active duty Coast Guard, stationed at Port Orchard, and says he often finds Otaku in the military.
As you walk through the Convention center, you constantly see attendees complimenting each other on costumes. And the detail that goes into the costumes can sometimes be astonishing. 21-year-old Suresh, a restaurant cook from Vancouver, BC, is shirtless and painted red, which stains the inside of his sneakers as he takes them off for the official, iconic pose of his character (all cosplayers have them). He gets together with other cosplayers in BC and carpools down for Sakura-Con. “Costume maintenance is pretty important,” he says. He and his friends will even bring a sewing machine with to them to fix wardrobe malfunctions on the spot. “We procrastinate quite a bit–there is always something to finish up, so we’ll finish up on the day we arrive.”
It’s too easy to look at the stream of ninjas, gothic lolitas, sword-wielding school girls, and nine-tailed foxes, and dismiss them as misfit geeks. In reality, this group is essentially no different than a Convention Center full of gardeners, scrapbookers, classic car enthusiasts–or any group of people who share the love of something niche. These folks enjoy being in the company of others who know that Grimmjow Jaegerjaques is a prominent member in the Aizen-affiliated army of Arrancar, and the sexta (6th) Espada in the same way that another group craves to connect with others who know that Engine Code T for a 1966 Mustang meant a 200-cubic-inch I-6 engine at 120hp with 9.2:1 compression and a one-barrel carburetor. We’re all freaks about something. These folks just wear their freak flags on the outside.
