As revealed, there’ll be the I love Anisong concept concert, I’m guessing similar to the lines of Animelo. I’ll only really miss out Fukuyama. Those who were not lucky enough to catch May’n live, or worst still, unable to catch Aniki live last year, here’s your second chance! Shoko-tan would do great for her silly live panels, but I wouldn’t really stay long for her songs. XD

Danny Choo will also be over, and hopefully together with his stormtrooper antics.

That said, anyone from Kuching who’s interested to go, but are afraid to go alone, I do have some contacts going over who won’t mind to have some people tag along; lower cost, extra fun. Leave a comment (with your e-mail) here if you want to find out more. But from my side, I’ll be missing this round’s AFA. No pity for the working people.

Special thanks to Minorin and her management team for kindly allowing photography during the interview session, thanks to Daicon staff for bringing Minorin down here Malaysia, thanks to all the fans for making the Minorin sessions so awsm, and finally thanks to swatwolf for the camera resources.

Let me first speak about the defining sense of cosplay. Cosplay is an act of performance by costume role-playing as a certain character or an idea. Read that again until you get a picture that cosplay has a limitless scope. There is no definite definition of cosplay terminology since there is no such international cosplay standard written yet or any prominent authority to come up with one. It would be beneficial to have defined cosplay, but that would certainly take away the dynamics, and thus diminishing the uniqueness and fun of cosplaying, and even from professional (paid) cosplay. We’re not going to come up with a lengthy specification just to quell the terminology Nazis. I would like to point out that currently, there is only one international event that has a prominent role in  promoting cosplay competition. And even then, organizing committee does not have an extended influence over the global cosplay community give out licenses to cosplay.

Cosplay does not just involve the cosplayer, it also involves those who interact with the cosplayer. Should we now offer licenses to witness, photograph, judge and create cosplay costumes?

I shall discuss more on cosplay during Boulevard’s event as I was more involved then. During the Boulevard cosplay competition, the organizers divided the competition into individual and group categories. I’ll talk about the individual cosplay category first.

I’m certainly aware that as a judge for the first day individual competition, there’s just too many factors to consider in evaluating an individual’s cosplayer’s quality. I personally define the quality of the performance and faithfulness to the role-played character as top criteria to fulfill. I have no qualms about allocating the best marks (scaled to local standards) to the top cosplayers when I judged, as they did satisfy the my expectations. However, I felt that the variety of cosplay was better on the second day, but I did not get to judge that round. I would like to also mention that all the cosplayers are very brave people to put up with the crowd’s expectations; congratulations on that!

The winners of Kuching Open Cosplay Competition 2009 – do I need to mention the characters?

I must point out that individual quality cosplay in Kuching cannot be judged subjectively through the crowd’s point of view. It’s hard to take the crowd’s judgment into consideration because the Kuching crowd is always familiar with mainstream characters and will root and connect better with them. Who will empathize or support the one cosplayer that only a handful of enthusiasts in Kuching know, but is exceptionally popular among the global visual culture community?

Now, the group competition is a totally different facade of competition. I personally feel that its a battle that comes down to the quality of the execution of the performance; to put it simply: may the best performer win. Faithful representation comes secondary to a brilliantly creative and artistic performance. I will justify that the champion deserved their win due to that the fact that they were the most coherent in presenting their story to me. In fact, when I think over it, their performance really brought out the mood and atmosphere of the story of the anime they were trying to portray, albeit with understandably imperfect execution of their elements, which every other group is guilty of as well.

The competency of judges is certainly debatable. I for one, am comfortable with the choices of judges present during the Boulevard competition. My colleagues for the first day and last day of competition were fairly competent and knowledgeable about cosplay and characters from various types of media, as well as the competition’s rules and regulations. Let me name them Miss Onee-sama and Miss Ojou-sama. Miss Onee-sama is part of the Boulevard events team and has a slight interest in Japanese anime. Miss Ojou-sama is a fashion-journalist with tonnes of fashion experience under her belt. No question about the experience they have in their own domains. Thus, my effort in lugging my 4KG laptop over to assist us  in doing comparisons between the role-playing contestant and their beloved character. (ie. character and clothing sketches, general information about character characteristics) for the first day of the competition.

Honestly, there is no truly qualified candidate (and where do you get any official international certification for that I wonder) to judge any cosplay competition in Kuching, or even in Malaysia for that matter. There are a number of experienced and knowledgeable enthusiasts that have the ability to judge professionally and without any bias, and in Kuching these are the people who should be invited to judge due to their familiarity to the cosplay concept.

There’s still quite a lot of issues, more towards the side of personal problems; the clique inter-bashing and raging thing does not good for the community, my friends. I like how some cosplayers are taking the effort to understand and settle differences, that’s what I call beneficial clique characteristics. Kuching is just too small to have a fight over for.

And finally, to those that still think that I and Carol are under-qualified to judge, I suggest that you leave a comment and we can have a little rage fight right here.

Expect to see some familiar faces from the Boulevard competition as well!

Hey guys, late post, but I’m gonna pimp something for the SAMS committee before I head down to Boulevard for the art workshop.

Besides that, the cosplay group skit competition will be on Sunday (2/8/2009) @ 7:30p.m. Here’s a pic of last Sunday’s cosplay competition participants.

And for those who have been asking about Mio’s Nendoroid release, to let you know, pre-ordering is now open. Those interested to pre-order through me can leave a comment here, or you can find me at the booth on Sunday evening.

Pic stolen from Hobbysearch.

There’ll be a lot more cosplayers today, guaranteed. (it’s Sunday) Come and join us! A reminder that the cosplay competition starts at 7:30p.m.! Don’t be late!

Easter egg photo with Loli-san

And another easter egg, there’s gonna be a Mio next round

The next event I’ll attending will be Cosvention ‘09, a local cosplay & anime event in Kuching, organized by one great guy in Boulevard. I’ve Anime! will be there to do the usual stuff, but don’t expect a shitstorm from us . Those heading there, do drop by our booth and chill out with us.

This Kyou vector will be complete some day.

Minorin’s Parade Dream up on Wednesday.

Today’s haul:

They don’t belong to me though.

A few random cosplay pics after this point.

That done, I’ll be around again later at around noontime. Sleep comes first of course.