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OK now that i'm not hungover any more i have to say something about the masquerade.  WTF is going on??? This year was such a freaking joke it is not even funny. So it looks like the judges were giving awards to everyone who did anything but a skit, like it's some kind of talent show. Oh, girls were dancing with their butts hanging out. Clearly that's good enough for Best in Show!!!! Oh, a Doomfist (WTF is Overwatch doing in the contest anyway??) did a flip. That's good enough for an award!! And the Space Marine got nothing and it looked amazing!! If non anime things got awards why didn't he?? This thing has become such a joke with terrible costumes winning the biggest awards. No wonder the good cosplayers stay outside and just take photos.

[Rehearsals made no sense]

There were so many issues with this year's Cosplay Spectacular it's not even funny. Now, for the record all of the staff I talked with were nice and tried to be as helpful as possible. Unfortunately I don't know where the blame for all this lays and I don't really care - what happened, happened, and this is the gist of it:

• Rehearsals made no sense. Why not have a sign up list in advance assigning blocks of time to people? And why were some groups allowed 15 practice attempts and others only 1? And barring that, why was there not a signup sheet onsite? A lot of people were lucky to just practice once, some didn't even get to practice at all. Partly this was due to:

• No laptop?! We couldn't even find out if our audio was okay because CS head had no laptop. We know other groups got cheated because they had video which of course a netbook with no cd/dvd drive couldn't handle- and don't know what was up with favoritism where some groups eventually did have video playing during their performance and others did not. We asked multiple times over the course of ~4 hours and just kept hearing "the laptop is coming!"

• No sound check? Cosplayers were rudely cleared off the stage so people could setup the band equipment. This happened before 3pm and we never did see the band perform a sound check. Was there seriously a reason that the band had to have their equipment setup over 3 hours before their performance? And the band suffered from poor audio levels - and it was really hard to hear the singer, too. And on a side rant- why was the band even there? How did that relate to cosplay? At the very least they could have performed while the judges deliberated.

• Why did it begin so late? According to the online schedule, as well as the CS head, seating was to start at 4:30 and the show to start at 5:00. Seating didn't even start until around 5:40.

• And then dragged on...The show ended around 10. That's WAY TOO LONG. Almost all the audience was gone by that point. Probably because of--

• SO MANY technical problems. This is totally inexcusable. Why did so many people have their audio mess up? Seriously, what is the reason for this?
  

• Inappropriate content. Something like the cosplay burlesque was a little risque but totally appropriate (and awesome dancers!). The male Link "performance" was totally inappropriate and should never have been allowed. Lights and audio should have been cut the second they started gyrating on each other, if not earlier- things started going downhill pretty fast. Family friendly? Heck no.
  

• Ordering problems. Not only were all the performance numbers changed at the last possible second but some groups were rushed on stage before they should have been. This was really not conducive to having good performances. Especially when people have large props and set pieces, this is just not acceptable.

• Last minute emcee. The emcee seemed to be heckled quite a lot for things that weren't his fault - apparently he was thrown into it at the last minute and was trying to make the best of a really bad situation. It is also inexcusable that things were so disorganized that he didn't even have a list of the performance names until like an hour in - thank goodness that wild laptop finally appeared -_-.

• Favoritism? Not only with the aforementioned video thing (some groups got to use their video, others didn't) - how come the Madoka Magica performance got a redo and the Hetalia performance didn't? Their audio cut off early and they weren't given the same opportunity- why was that?

• Complete waste of a day. Due to all the disorganization a bunch of us were basically held hostage at the Civic Center the entire day- waiting to rehearse, waiting to see if audio/video were functional, waiting to find out 100% sure what time the show was supposed to start, etc etc. I wonder how much the band got paid to perform when the rest of us got nothing but are a big part of Fanime- to be clear, I'm not asking for anything but complete organization so we could get in and get out so we could maybe, you know, actually enjoy the convention. And maybe some kind of snacks available- who else was practically dropping over from hunger since we thought the show would be done 8 at the latest and it dragged til 10?

Myself, my group and a bunch of other people we talked to are seriously considering not attending Fanime nor participating in the Cosplay Spectacular again. It wasn't fun, it wasn't organized, it was a huge mess and I think everyone should be aware of this for the future.

Sakaki