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In September 2013, the Montreal Comiccon greeted more than 40 000 people.
This kind of event encourages participants to dress up as a fictional character as accurately as possible.
This practise is called cosplay. But despite the growing number of cosplayers, the hobby remains to this day misunderstood.
But cosplay is more than just a disguise.
So what is it? Is it just a childish pastime, or is it a passion and even a way of life?
Cosplay is a portmanteau for costume and play. It's a mix of costuming and performance.
However, this definition neglects the social side of the activity.
If you play or don't play video games, if you listen or don't listen animes, read or
not mangas, follow tv series or movies, people are interested in cosplay for the social activity
in convention, to dress up with lots of people and have fun.
Some of these groups become professionals like the 501st legion for example, and push their group activities further.
The 501st legion is a group of Star Wars fans.
It's a worldwide group that started in North Carolina and further developed itself in Florida.
Canada was one of the first countries to join the phenomenon.
It's composed of Star Wars fans, but it's also people who do charity. We mostly encourage Make a Wish,
which is Faites un vœux in Quebec, it's about the same thing as Rêve d'enfant.
So always for the good cause, we participate in parades,
conventions, film premieres and things like that.
But apart form a community, cosplay develops social skills of its practitioners.
In my case, I'm generally not a shy person.
I can talk easily and I'm used to drive teams, so it's not really a problem for me.
But I think it's nice for other people who are more reserved, to hop in a role and rediscover themselves.
When you see them again one or two years later and even without their costumes,
they developed better social skills and they are not as shy as before.
Cosplay also has a strong artistic value, where cosplayers work very hard to make their costumes.
I have a passion for mecanical challenges,
so the VI gloves were interesting to build because of the articulated hands that were
really really really fun to build. It implies months of work, hundreds of dollars and a
lot of patience!
It is through this manual and artistic aspect, that cosplay is also a competitive environment.
You want to be the best, you want to be the first to do it, you want to be the one everyone loves,
it surely is very competitive.
In every convention there is a contest called the masquerade,
where they'll judge two things: the workmanship, which is the costume's quality and they will
win in Canada will count in my career. So it's really really interesting to do, the
shaken a bit and hit on the helmet... People don't understand the value of the costumes.
They don't realize that it's months, sometimes a year of work and they don't do the difference
between a Star Wars costume, or any other cosplay, that took months to build and a costume
bought at the store for 30 bucks. The line is very thin between doing cosplay and look
like a mascot. So that's what we try to demystify sometimes and educate the public a little
bit in the details on our costumes and see the differences. You'll try to explain it
to someone what it is, he won't get it. At work or things like that ... you do costumes?
Oh, that's weird ... But show two or three pictures and oh, they already change their
mind. I'll give an example.. My father in law came to the last Comiccon, the Sunday,
to visit and the Star Wars booth was crowded. Yes, maybe there was a Star Wars celebrity,
but people couldn't even move. So then they see the size of doing cosplay and then they
speak of it again and want to come back and become interested in what you do, want pictures
and ask whats your next costume? Slowly, people are getting used to what you do and understand
that it isn't that marginal and that it opens doors to many things.
We can no longer ignore the presence of cosplay. Despite the reducing echoes towards it, it
has no intend to disappear. It's an incredible art form that helps million
of people in their personal life and their professional life. It's wonderful pastime
where you make a lot of friends, you meet people that are as geek as you are, it's really
fun. How I see it in the future? Well, recently last summer there was the show Heroes of Cosplay.
It's starting to be on tv, so I think in the future it will be a good art form.