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.