Home from New Orleans Comic Con! Also, I'm Alive

So yeah, New Orleans Comic-Con. I went this year (was Riza Hawkeye on Saturday) and had a pretty awesome time. It's a different feel from MechaCon, and I think I sorta liked the small setting of MechaCon more... but it was really awesome to actually run into people I had met at MechaCon and talked to a few times... and this time I actually got some of their names, including the guy who was a really awesome Maes Hughes. >>

The one downside to it (other than the lots of walking that sorta wore my poor mom out >>; ) was the Cosplay Competition. Why, you ask? Three words:

Heroes. Of. Cosplay.

They were filming the season finale of the second season there at NOCC... and they wanted to film two episodes, so the singles and group competitions were divided up. So, not only did the singles competition start late because the camera crew needed to record the stars' drama backstage, but judging took forever because they needed to film back there, then film the judges "deliberating" (which was basically paper shuffling and looking at each other and murmuring, much to all our annoyance).

So, they announce the singles winners... then announce a break before the group competition because YaYa Han and the judges needed to change outfits. Which was weird... and then it stretched into thirty minutes with a Wizard World employee resorting to asking the vastly dwindled crowd for jokes. After several bad blonde jokes and half an hour, they finally all came out again in their different costumes for the groups.

Groups went by super fast, except for the "stars" of the show, which were a Soul Calibur team who claimed their armor and stuff was made within a week, and a "Peter Pan's Labyrinth" team who had large elaborate props and stuff for it. It was kinda clear who were the professionals and who were the locals in the whole competition, which made things VERY one-sided.

When the group events had mostly finished off, some of the other local cosplayers came to sit in the row behind my Mom and I. A Silent Hill trio, Thor and Loki as Bunnies, and a four-man squad of Halo Marines (two males and two females). All of them looked exhausted, worn out... and beyond frustrated and annoyed. As they talked to us, we came to find out just how one-sided and rigged the whole entire competition was.

For four hours, the group cosplayers were told to stand in line, not even backstage, and were told nothing else. They were given one beignet to eat each, and apparently at about three and a half hours, the HoC "stars" showed up all freshly costumed up and clearly not having just stood in line like all of them did. The groups finally went backstage, only to be told they had to wait for half an hour for the costume change for the judges. Not only that, but the crew working the con helped carry in these massive props (a bed and tombstone-headboard sorta thing). At this point the groups realized how rigged it was, and a lot of their skits couldn't be done because of how loud the music was. So, a bunch decided to purposefully bomb their own skits and do some terribad dancing instead (which was sorta hilarious when you realized they had coordinated it, much to the judges' ire).

The Loki Bunny was nearly in tears as she told me that, in her four years of going to this con since it was started, she had never been treated with such disrespect as she was now. Her ride was supposed to pick her up at 9:15, but it was past 11:30 by the time the contest finished and the two had to find their way home. The Halo group all lived not too far from me and had to take a street car late at night to get to their vehicle. SO MANY people had cleared out of the theatre after the singles that the Wizard World people made us try to fill in the middle rows to make the illusion of a massive audience still watching. It was an all around mess, and a good cosplay competition was ruined by those vultures with Heroes of Cosplay.

As you can imagine, the HoC stars were the ones to win awards (including an "honorable mention" category being made just for the Soul Calibur group), and if I'm not mistaken, ALL HoC stars got something there. There was a clear, massive chasm between the local cosplayers and the professional ones from out of town with HoC.

I know I dedicated most of this journal to ranting about HoC, but their terrible practices simply NEED to be made known to everybody. Make your voices heard to SyFy that the portrayal of the cosplay community they do is completely wrong, and they ruin costume contests for everyone else when they show up. I plan on going to MechaCon again this year, and I'm proud of the owners of that con who outright told SyFy no when it came to filming HoC there. At least that competition is still untarnished by this blasted reality show.

For a blog post of one of the groups cosplaying there who can tell you about what happened in line, go read chevpala's post.