JP sums it up. But I think there are a few things that need to be couched in the right contexts.

Let’s do the refrain:

[#1] interaction with pros,

[#2] procuring goods,

[#3] gaining new information, and

[#4] interacting with fellow fans.

JP explains further how anime cons don’t quite meet his needs for #1-3, and I can see that to a degree. Again, the context is kind of off.

First of all, “anime cons in general” are not Otakon or Anime Boston or even PMX or The Chase Wang Spam Con (aka AM2) (It’s a dumb joke by the way). It’s your garden variety vendor show. It’s the cons in Florida that you hear people tweet about but nobody ever goes to unless you are already local. You go those cons to meet up with other locals and buy crap (#2 and #4) because it’s easier to buy IRL than over a URL. There are like, almost a con a week in North America alone. But maybe this is kind of a hit and miss thing.

Second, let’s look at the actual criticisms of anime cons in JP’s post.

#1. I basically go to cons largely for access. My raison d’etre, as they say, when it comes to cons. The fact that I actually go to cons makes the criticism not particularly poignant. Even at NYAF (well ok NYCC) I was able to score this. Access! You get the idea. I can crack jokes about “splash” or “Ask [insert person] to draw Anaru” because of my chances at interacting with pros. Interacting with Takaaki Suzuki was great at this past AX. Listening to Shinkai talk at Otakon was insightful. Seeing IwakamiP being true to his word gives me hope for the future. [As an aside I think everything he said about Madoka and Fate Zero during his Otakon panel came true, right?]

But JP is right in that if you didn’t care for anything like “the industry” or “character designers” or “mechamusume” or “yaoi” or “weeaboo merchandising” any of the sub-section of anime fandom represented at the con, you probably wouldn’t care. There’s something also to be said that I don’t go to many cons, like this year’s AnimeNext, which is like minutes away from where I live. And AnimeNext is a top-ten anime con this year I think, in terms of population.

Interaction with pros is something that anime cons bring at various levels. But it’s good to take a bigger perspective and realize that compared to Japan, US fans are context-poor and starved of interaction. Not everyone is a Halko Momoi. Not everyone cares for dub actors (but I guess a lot of people do). Anime cons bring us a little bit of that interaction, but it’s like what you can get if you just buy this month’s Newtype or Seigura or something, for example. Heck, US-based dub actors have no commercial press out there to publish their dealies! No exposure besides what ANN picks up, really. That’s not all there is to interacting with pros at cons, but even with the internet helping out, there’s a sizable gap between what hardcore fans over in Japan knows versus what fans in the US knows.

With that said, the main thrust behind JP’s argument on this point is perhaps the realization of how even for the top-attended anime cons in the US, most people don’t care too much about creator access in this sense. Just go to Otakon forums and talk about Japanese GOH panels and their attendance. It’s kind of sad coming from a certain perspective to see a fan panel getting more attendance than some creator’s GOH panel, when that creator makes the anime that fan panel is about in the first place.

I can probably write a post or three on just point #1, so let me just wrap it up now and say that at AX this year, there were a lot of Japanese otaku doing the same things I was doing. Because they were able to interact with some of these pro guests in ways impossible in Japan.

#2. Likewise, most people at any con don’t blow their wads at the charity auction. In 2011, no thanks to the tragedy in Tohoku, that was the #1 place where you could have spend and bought some seriously awesome stuff. That was just an observation but let me get that out of the way.

Anime Expo’s dealer room was also a solid place to pick up stuff. Vendors like MangaGamer had some really cool stuff that it would take a ton of effort (and additional costs) to buy if you wanted to proxy them. Specialty Japanese vendors occasionally appear at the bigger cons. I’ve spotted Cospa at least a couple times over here on the East coast, for example, and just by bringing over a fraction of their wares you’ll likely see something you want to buy that you didn’t know even exists.

And then there’s the more R1-centric type swag that’s worth less. I have a Madoka charity poster that you can’t get anywhere, for example. Funimation offers a whole lines of trinkets and t-shirts that you can only get at a con (I still want that Eden of the East t-shirt they were giving out last year). It’s a very different mode of buy-and-sell, very different than the horde of neckbeard dudes flipping their comic books on eBay or whatever that you can see at NYCC, but I’m at a place in my collector’s life where I’m seeing a lot of stuff in my collection that you can’t just walk in a store (online or otherwise) and buy. At least not easily. The biggest anime cons in the US offers at least something to check out in their vendor halls, imported or domestic. The examples are numerous, but I think the truth here is that most of that money is out of marketing, not because there is a secondary economy healthy enough to support it (well the RULERS OF TIME may have something to say about it). This is drastically different than what goes on in Japan.

As to buying crap, while the internet basically renders a lot of this a moot point, there’s still something to be said of having the physical shopping experience. On top of that certain goods are just better purchased in person (posters, figures, etc). I think we can safely say that buying stuff hasn’t changed that much in terms of mode, for any con versus what you can get online. That’s why there’s still shows and cons packed with small vendors, for video games, comics, TCGs, anime things, books, whatever. People still go to them to shop. As fans in a first world nation, ultimately that is a core competency.

#3. God bless bayoab. This kind of blurs into the point about access, but that’s kind of true–you get better news from people reporting at the con than being at the con. I suppose that is also why now I play with a press badge. Anyways, all of that just points to the fact that cons have new info. I’ve had a dig or two, but that’s more something unique to the circumstances and not because the general attendee had access to that information.

To sum it up: cons are big marketing pushes even for anime companies. But it is only the larger cons where that is true. NYCC is one of them. Perhaps the anime con circuit is too centralized (or not amorphous enough?) and it will miss a large parts of the megacon audience.

#4. Contrary to JP I think this point kind of is the least relevant to anime cons. As oppose to most people who do cons as a social event, I don’t, at least not primarily. The internet is a great way to talk to and socialize with other people, don’t you agree? But just like #2 and #3 I don’t think the internet replaces existing types of human interaction. It just supplements that.

Of course, it’s much more fun to do a con with a group of friends, and a con is always a great excuse to party, so those things happen. But in the proper “learn to offkai” mentality, I socialize to socialize. If it happens at a con, great, but that’s not why I’m there in the first place.

To wrap this up, I think I agree with JP here:

You can’t apply the megacon style to an anime con, and anime cons are too amorphous and unfocused for the megacon attendees.

But that has more to do with the people going to anime cons than how anime cons are run. Considering attendance, Otakon and AX are proper megacons. It’s just that unless you are a weeaboo, you wouldn’t get much out of the programming at those cons. I would even go further to say that AX and Otakon’s attendees are too amorphous already. To give an example, looking at the guest requests threads at those two con’s forums, you’ll get requests of things that are just “geek” and not even anime related. And that is more and better representation than even some of the most popular anime-related people in Japan. [Every con should request Yamakan btw.]

So there you have it. I mean just think about it a little–no anime con has proper 4chan programming (other than Otakon for a few years) but every major anime con is a internet meme con, why is this? It’s because the people who go to anime cons are largely internet … people. I think Intel and MLG might get better reception if they target those events than mainstream cons! I mean, LOL.

I admit, slutty cosplay tumblrs sometimes brighten my mornings. More often, they’re just a chore. In any event, they can be informative.

I think this article speaks the truth, from a certain point of view. Unfortunately as someone who just look at pictures of cosplay and occasionally visit conventions where cosplay is prominent, I realize that both the viewing of said images and the act of creating and donning a costume and then putting that, pic or in the flesh, in the public, it is a personal thing. In other words, they operate in different contextual spaces.

As an anime fan outside of Japan, one thing that is probably becoming an eternal chip on my shoulder is the issue of context. And well, if we can forgive the silly tagline right off the bat:

Too often in cosplay photography, the subject becomes an object. Cosplayers are fairly bad at doing anything other than looking sexy (?) and photographers focus too strongly on simply making cosplayers look good. I think we can do better than that.

and forget for a moment that this is utmost hypocritical–the objectification of the subject matter and then whining about how they’re not objectifying it the way he likes them–there’s probably some stuff to learn here.

The rest of the post goes on and talk about cosplay photography in the “in-character” school of thought. That in itself is harmless except it’s couched in this douchy context that I can’t really touch without ripping it to shreds. Or maybe it’s just from my point of view, it can be a pretty hilarious troll post that is made of fail. But hey, here I am writing about it.

And by “in-character” I simply mean the ongoing school of thought where when you cosplay, it is an important goal to become, to liken to the character you are cosplaying as. And by school of thought I mean there’s always a rival, but not always contrary, camp who think of cosplay as a matter of fashion and identity. I believe they generally co-exist, and sometimes they are one and the same, but on some issues that is just not the case.

The context is simple. Cosplay (let’s take your average semi-porn adult-ish cosplay on DVD at Comiket as example) is often tied to costume play in the context of erotic acts. Play your typical and modern nukige and you get what I’m saying. That is by far not the context of what cosplay is commonly known as today. It just used not to be the case. For cultural ambassadors and exporters of cool, cosplay as the more semi-pro, Japanese-content-oriented context (think of those World Cosplay Summit things), is what they would like it to be. In America, cosplay is more like, “hey let’s go to this party where people dresses up,” which is probably a step above “trick or treat” but usually not pro nor even semi-pro. Or even semi-semi-pro.

None of that is a problem. It’s like someone whose notion of basketball is from the NBA and then he goes and criticize youtube videos of kids playing on the street. I mean, com’on; you can do it, but it’s mean and unsportsmanlike. But at the same time, the difference between NBA level of play and some kids on the playground is much larger than your average, veteran hall cosplayer versus even a semi-pro that has won in a con masquerade of a reasonably size contestant pool. I mean, you can win a trip to Hawaii for two at even this second-rate US con. If you are dedicated, the gap between a pro cosplayer and Joe Schmoe is not an insurmountable gap, a gap that can be overcome in a few years. Not a gap that required you to be playing ball since you were 6 years old because your body peaks and become non-competitive by age 30, or something nuts like that.

Instead of basically telling people to tell a story with their cosplay photography, which is what Akira is doing, I’m just going to talk about what I learned from those dreadful “photo sets” and Asian-style semi-pro cosplay photography: the nature of zettai ryouiki and fashion. In other words, I’m telling you how to objectify people from photographs (and people in general) in a preferred way. Just like him, I’m going to skip the nitty gritty on how to actually do it; this isn’t really a how-to post. It’s more about the theory behind a working slit on your legs. Right. [You can follow the links below for the how-to.]

Just so we’re on the same page; by zettai ryouiki I mean the way of fashion in which you stress the segment of your outfit by showing thigh while hiding the area below, usually via a combination of socks or boots plus a short skirt. Is this more interesting? I think so. There’s been some amount of ink spilled over the years about how to do zettai ryouiki right. I’m not talking about that precisely; I want to talk about how to do zettai ryouiki right in 3D—how to apply it as a fashion item.

Truth is, anime characters are rarely identified by the length of their legs. It is typically across-the-board artistic choice for stylistic reasons or as a signature for a particular artist. But for typical human beings that is a major point of differentiation. Shape, length, size, contour, color, texture, and much more, all play a role in crafting a suitable wear to apply zettai ryouiki in the way that is best for what you’re gunning for. For example, it even comes down to the type of heel (or not) that you wear, it will impact the way your leg muscles are pulled and give your zettai ryouiki a different look. I don’t think I’ve seen an anime that illustrated this little detail yet.

On top of that, for everyday dress, zettai ryouiki is a practicality problem typically due to the additional wares involved: sock glue, garter belts, uncomfortable bands on your socks, matching the length of your skirt with your socks, what have you. Plus it is not exactly a conservative look (although it can be downplayed and be reasonably conservative). So don’t push it unless you can pull it off, as I would recommend generally.

But one of the big reason behind why I want to talk about zettai ryouiki is how flexible and robust it is. The nature of the beast is that you’re seeing more “outfit” than “flesh.” The hardest cosplay to do right is characters like Yoko Ritona, because she’s more skin than clothes. Have you seen any good Japanese Yoko cosplays? Nowhere near as many as westerners, simply because skin-y cosplay require the body type and shape to already be very close to what your image of the character to be. And plastic surgery is typically not an option, nor is it desirable in these situation. Now comes zettai ryouiki: because the act of zettai ryouiki gives you the option to cloth yourself while still injecting that ounce of excitement, that inch of your thigh, pretty much anyone can do it as long as their thighs are remotely presentable as everything else can be covered up. So, it’s great to be a zettai ryouiki fan–even the most shapeless or fattest cosplayer can pull it off with some thought, and it wouldn’t look super terrible (unless that’s what they were gunning for).

In terms of the logic behind zettai ryouiki and personalizing it for wear, I think of it as a form of addition by subtraction. Imagine someone who wears pants. Now if you can cut away a piece of that person’s pant legs, where would you cut it? It’s like the running FF11 joke about brass subligars, or hot pants. But much more modest and subtle.

Operationally, because human beings are not like computer-painted animation, you’re allowed a pretty big range for operable zettai ryouiki. In the cosplay context, typically the cosplayer is gunning for the iconographic affect, and not as much as how it looks on the person. By this I mean if you are cosplaying a character with zettai ryouiki, you will want to have zettai ryouiki in your costume. The precise ratio of skin to sock to skirt and where that line is drawn on the cosplayer’s legs will vary and compromise on the basis that human proportions vary from anime character proportions. Some people will try to make the outfit look like the character, others will make the outfit suit the cosplayer. Sometimes you can do both. And again, I want to talk about zettai ryouiki because rarely will you be unable to do either.

Another key point about setting up a good zettai ryouiki is to understand how the sock/stocking/boots part work to accentuate your legs. I think a common mistake is when the coverage exceeds the knees, but just enough. Because human legs bend at the knee, it causes this double-break in the line of the legs, and it kind of neutralizes the impact. It’s like the difference of drawing two lines right next to each other versus far apart; it looks kind of like a double line instead of two distinct lines. You are no longer highlighting that absolute zone between the knee and the hemline.

That’s really all I have to say about it. A few months ago I was going to go all out and write a more practical guide about zettai ryouiki, since it’s the summer con season. The plan fell through and now I’m stuck thinking about zettai ryouiki all summer long (and getting my fair share of “samples” at cons to verify my hypotheses) and nowhere to write it down. Consider this blog post precisely the outcome of that.

Last thing: while I was going through my old con pictures, I noticed one thing: Sera Victoria cosplayers have got it right. Out of all characters, her cosplayers have consistently pulled off the zettai ryouiki more successfully on average than any other cosplays, and as far as I have pictures, that’s as back as it had dated (like, 2002 or 2001). Is she the first? Maybe, maybe not, but she is definitely not the last.