First, I'll just say that unlike last year, there were no COVID restrictions and basically no one wore masks unless it was a part of their cosplay.
Momocon started on Thursday, and holy fuck, sometimes I tend to lose track of how popular certain games/shows are, but the first thing I see once I get out of the parking garage and go towards registration is a sea of Genshin Impact cosplayers, whether they be Venti, Beidou, Zhongli, the Raiden Shogun, Tartaglia/Childe, Shenhe, Lisa, Ningguang, I basically saw Genshin cosplayers the most throughout the whole weekend. What made that even more interesting is for a lot of the male characters, I saw more girls cosplaying them than guys. Venti, Tartaglia/Childe, Diluc, Kaeya, Xiao, for all of them, I saw more girls cosplaying them than guys, and for Zhongli, the split was about 50/50. I even saw people dressed up as Primogems which was pretty funny. (Primogems are the premium currency used to summon for weapons and characters in Genshin Impact, for those who are unaware.
Outside of Genshin, League of Legends was the post cosplayed game that I saw, but about like 40% of those cosplayers were either Jinx, Vi or Caitlin, I'm assuming because Arcane came out semi-recently and was a lot of normies/non-gamers' first exposure to anything from League of Legends and was honestly pretty good at least in my opinion. Most of the others were varying Ahri skins, the other members of K/DA, or a few Qiyanas that I saw, but I did see some of the guys like Ezreal, etc, although not nearly as much as the girls.
Anime wise, the singular most popular character that I saw cosplayed was Yor from SPY X Family, and specifically her spy outfit. I think I saw exactly one person cosplaying with the red sweater the entire weekend, but everyone else used her spy outfit. Didn't matter if they were hot, fat, whatever, I saw that spy outfit everywhere. Her and Rumi/Mirko were everywhere.
The last thing I'll say about the cosplaying stuff is that the one thing I did regret not doing all weekend is cosplaying. Some of the stuff I saw is honestly pretty damn easy to do/get, even if you don't wanna try too hard. Power and Makima from Chainsaw Man are extremely easy to do because they wear white button-down shirts, black pants and ties, and all you need to get that's specific to them are the wigs, plus horns in the case of Power. Or you could even just buy an Akatsuki cloak if you're a Naruto fan, or if you like My Hero Academia, either the UA uniform or the PE uniform for UA and not even bother being a character as you can say you're just a support student.
The exhibit hall was amazing, with an arcade full of dance/rhythm games, fighting game cabinets, stuff like Pac-Man, and more, hundreds of vendors selling figures, shirts, hats, "suspect merchandise", cosplay weapons, advertising their games, you name it, you could find basically everything there if you so wanted to. I bought a bunch of shirts, Chrom/Lucina's Falchion from one of the cosplay weapon sellers, a Kamen Rider driver, and some more stuff. It was also a FGC tournament, I entered Smash where I underperformed but I'm not too upset at how it went because I learned how to play some specific matchups that I've been needing to learn for a while.
I didn't do that many panels, but for the panels I did do, or tried to before I saw the massive lines, they were great. A bunch of Vtubers were there doing panels, which I honestly don't know how the con does the OPSEC needed to prevent fans from finding out who those Vtubers are IRL, but Ironmouse, Zentreya, a few Hololive Vtubers I forgot the name of and 3 of the Holostars, male vtuber idols were all at the convention and from what I heard, the people loved it. I missed the one thing I planned on doing, because the karaoke line was like 300 people deep and they had to call it after 250 most of the days, but I'm fine with that because I went to 2 parties this weekend which were both fun as hell.
They were both featured on Momocon's website, but ran by outside places. The one from Friday was in a kinda rough part of Atlanta, but it was fun, I got the VIP tickets to skip the massive line, and there was a sushi bar, gaming truck, a DJ who did fusions with rap and anime openings, and a lot of girls in stuff I'm like "holy fuck I didn't know they made clothes that small that weren't cosplay" for both days. The one on Saturday, like damn, some things you just don't believe until you see them, like skirts that don't even go below the ass, it's kinda wild.
Sunday was uneventful, as I just watched Smash top 8 then left as it took 5 hours due to one set taking like 40 minutes to finish because of the characters chosen by those players, but I had a very fun time this past weekend, and I want to go to more conventions if only so I can start cosplaying myself.
I'm glad you had fun and appreciate hearing about good times happening out there. Thank's for sharing!
By comparison, and similar to last year when you mentioned this, the ComboBreaker fighting game tournament was this weekend and they are all still in masks. Their rules demanded it, and also included numerous mentions that there were plain-clothes and undercover cops on premises to enforce it.
I couldn't watch it, again. Masks are the least cool and most distracting thing possible to see during a fighting game tournament.
I saw they had an exception in their rules to allow the broadcasters to take theirs off when they were on mic. So reasonable, yet still so far from an acceptable norm.
The FGC is completely and utterly cucked to progressivism. Combo Breaker is run by Rick 'The Hadou' who is one of the biggest faggot feminist ally ideologue types. The mask policy is 100% ideological spite towards anyone who didn't bend the knee enough during the scamdemic. Wouldn't be surprised if the place was crawling with trannies in pride gear too.
Chicago is the city that Mayor Beetlejuice is in, so that's to be expected. I'm 99% sure the only reason we had masks at Momocon last year was more for fear, because they didn't even really enforce them last year, people carried around so much food you couldn't even tell half the time.
Beetlejuice is out; she's been replaced by somebody who ran to the left of her.
I forgot about that, damn.
Check on who runs it. There are massive companies that own some of the big names. E3 and PAX are owned by the same company. It's actually the same company that owns the term ComicCon.
It's been my experience that women will do cosplay more than guys. Also, it doesn't matter what the character is, there is a sexy cosplay version of it.
I used to run the arcades at all the conventions in the PNW. It's a lot of fun.
The cooler part is the stuff happening outside of the convention. Mini conventions and press screenings happen at the hotels nearby.
Momocon LLC's CEO is Christopher Stuckey, and here's his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherstuckey
I'm assuming Momocon LLC is its own independent firm, as I can't find information own who owns it, other than Stuckey. Interestingly, Momocon started off through Georgia Tech's anime club, Anime O-Tekku.
I feel like I remember you posting about this last year. Glad you had fun and glad the Covid BS was essentially nonexistent.
Considering dropping into a medium sized con happening near me next weekend. Time flies, cause it's been over 4 years since I've been to one....feels like just yesterday...
One thing that everyone says, including you, is that Genshin cosplays are everywhere. Would like to see those and roam around a good dealers room and artist's alley for the first time in a while.
I did post about this last year, and yeah, Genshin Impact is probably one of if not the most played game in the world right now, and it's a fucking Chinese made gacha game.
The character designs, story, and overall gameplay loop (plus the fact that if you don't care about doing Spiral Abyss 9-12 every month, you only have to summon on the things you wanna summon for as there's no powercreep within the mandatory stuff to progress through the story. The only thing really is that if you don't summon, you're basically going to have Lumine/Aether carry you through a lot of the quests because the free characters are good, but not much else. Nothing special, but they're fine enough.
Yeah I haven't played much lately but I do like Genshin. I can totally understand people having issues with the gacha system, but you can easily get through everything without paying for anything if you're good at the game and smart.
The overall production values are just too good to pass up. Great voice acting, huge world, cute characters, etc. Even the story which was probably the weak point had a pretty big boost in Sumeru in my opinion. The main story arch there was pretty damn hype.
I’ll admit that I’ve spent way too much on Genshin, but that was all in one shot last year, I got Yelan to C6 on release, because her character bow is only BiS if you have her at C1 or above because of the fact that her E is every 12 seconds instead of every 24 seconds once you have her on C1, and Yelan really, really needs her E as much as she can.
Oh I don't bemoan people for spending on it. I've spent a fair amount too if you sum it up over 2+ years. In my opinion it's fine so long as you have self control and only spend what you can. If you become some gambling addict its kinda your own fault in my opinion.
I feel like it's pretty evident they have been reinvesting a good amount of money into increasing the quality of the game as it's gone on, so as far as I'm concerned the money making scheme is a necessary evil that lets us get games that are effectively completely free while still being extremely high quality.
All that aside, yeah I got Yelan when she had a rerun earlier this year but I haven't played much since then so I never got to take her for a run. She looks really fun though so I'll definitely build her up once I start playing a bit again.
Actually feel that I'm not even a weeb anymore or shit just got way too mainstream. The most popular anime I'm often not even interested in and genshin I've been boycotting since day one because fuck gacha trash.
At least no drag show cosplay event for all ages. I believe an anime convention in canada has that.
When it comes to OPSEC, the more popular Vtubers that you mentioned were former twitch streamers so most of their audience had already seen their face.
Seen you are well versed in the geekdom, could you explain why Asian costume designers have this obsession with the face mask/half gas mask thing?
I for one appreciate the field report. I've been on the fence about whether or not to try attending my local convention this year since they've been pants on head retarded about Covid for a while now. Here's hoping the whole thing is finally breaking and a return to normalcy is imminent, at least in the convention circuit.
Well, Ironmouse OPSEC is easy enough because she can't go in person.
Oh?
The only thing anyone really knows about Ironmouse is what she's openly talked about: She's very sick and has been for a very long time.
Idk if you’ve seen/played the Gen 4 Pokémon stuff, but you know how Dawn’s skirt is really short? That’s basically the bare minimum a skirt has to be for it to be considered a skirt and somehow I saw shorter skirts on a ton of girls this weekend, like damn, I know thirst is one thing but wow.
They were all out of my league and I don’t know how to apply all that TRP mental stuff just yet, but maybe next year.
There were actual hot girls at this con?
Yep. Some of it might be "cosplay goggles", but considering a lot of female characters wear barely anything, and a lot of girls cosplayed as said characters, and they were actually hot, I’d say so.
How bad was the smell
I believe most Vtubers just stream to the conventions. Although I recall reading some were doing signings at a con last year so I don't know how that works. Remote control pen?
Glad to hear the mask stuff is dying out. The masks really ruined all the cosplays
Oh word. I was at Momo as well and while I was crossplaying I ran into some cool and even Based people there which was a total shock
It’s Atlanta, so that’s to be expected, although there were a ton of leftist panelists; like I went to the panel about crossplaying, because I wanna do a male version of Kujou Sara at some point, and the according stuff you think you’d hear, you did hear, although the panel itself was pretty damn informational about how I’d have to craft things and whatnot.
The one mistake I made this year was not cosplaying at all, I really need to do that for all of the cons I go to from now on tbh, it’s basically free interaction with people (and honestly it’s partly because I wanna get some time with certain cosplayers, but that’s besides the point)
Huh I missed that one, but yeah I’m not surprised. I’m still a dude sometimes I wana dress up and rep beat girl