Manifest(ing) Mid-2000s Anime Convention Energy

I've been going through my old photos while backing up all my files; it's important to keep track of what exactly it is I've been moving from one hard drive to another for a decade. Do I still need my high school project .swf files when Flash Player is no longer supported? Better keep them for another 15 years just in case.

Then I realised I didn't have photos I thought I did. Through the magic of Facebook, Flickr, and eventually giving up and asking my best friend if she had them, I found what I was looking for: evidence of my first cosplay.

For the more contently normal, here's a keyword breakdown of that scene:

• L and Light: from the Death Note manga/anime. Not the four Japanese live-action films, and definitely not the American live-action film.
• yaoi: manga or anime with male same-sex relationships, particularly fanmade media or character shipping. "Yuri" is the female equivalent. See also "yaoi hands", an artistic quirk where yaoi artists would often draw men with extremely large hands
• yaoi paddle: a 'novelty' oar that people would (at best) pose for photos with or (at worst) hit people on the arse without consent. These were absolutely everywhere until cons banned them
• caramelldansen: an animation-based dance meme, or a dance-based animation meme, depending on your perspective

For the sake of completeness, I'd also add:

• glomping: when a complete stranger runs, then jumps on another person in some sort of aggressive and invasive hug
• animegao/kigurumi face: a full-body suit and enclosed mask

Even at the time this was pretty out-there, though the main reason I'm including this pic because no-one can be identified. If you search "Manifest 2008" online there are some fantastic cosplays; Rozen Maiden, Juste from Castlevania, Kingdom Hearts back when it was fresh. (Also, if you have Facebook or Flickr accounts, go through and check your photo album privacy settings. I doubt everyone whose photos I found knew a complete stranger could see them.)

I'm not so removed from this time that I've got rose-coloured glasses on. The "wood décor" section at Savers is a fitting resting place for these weapons against decency, though some have found other uses:

Repurposed garden implement or not, yaoi paddles are best left to the woodchippers of history, along with a lot of old weeb culture. People would type and speak like this unironically:

2007 onwards was a period of upheaval for online fandom and nerd spaces: the mass exodus of users from LiveJournal when it was sold to a Russian company coincided with the launch of Tumblr. Twitter launched a year earlier, and YouTube the year before that. It was the beginning of the end as niche interest forums, Myspace and oekaki online drawing spaces died off, with online social interaction slowly moving to Facebook.

Between YouTube and torrented fansubbed anime, viral videos and dances were also commonplace. If The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya came out in 2021, would TikTok kids be doing the Hare Hare Yukai?

I suppose technically I lied about not having rose-coloured glasses for this time period. My first cosplay was thirteen years ago at Manifest 2008, Ema Skye from the Ace Attorney series:

Almost everything here is from an op shop: the glass lenses are pink cellophane, the lab coat borrowed from my friend's sister. This is the only photo I have, because I was extremely socially anxious and couldn't speak or make eye contact with people I didn't already know. Sad!

Having said that, I was really happy with it, and I think that day was the most confident I was before or after for a long time. I've since acquired social competency, as well as a sewing machine and a hot glue gun for my latest cosplays, Edelgard and Monica from Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

Edel clearly wasn't finished, but it didn't matter. When I wore her to PAX 2019 the game had been out for less than three months and people were excited to see her. I've never had so many people approach me to take a photo or just have a chat. And because I was dressed as everyone's favourite dragon-hunting, war-waging girlboss, I didn't have any problems getting along with dozens of strangers.

PAX Aus is more expensive to attend, has an 18+ age limit for the video game trade floor and attracts a slightly older crowd than anime/pop culture cons. Supanova, Madman Anime Fest, SMASH and Animaga are 'family-friendly' events aimed at teens, and feature stalls of independent artists and small businesses.

When a racist, fascist stall wasn't immediately removed from Sydney Supanova this year despite multiple complaints to staff, it culminated in the eventual resignation of its founder and director Daniel Zachariou—only after sponsors and businesses publicly cut ties, of course. Previously Zachariou had openly shared homophobic and transphobic material on his Facebook page. The chasm between Supanova's founder's idiocy and the supportive culture of congoers is now too wide, and if Supanova is no longer regarded as a LGBTQI+ supportive space its artist and attendee numbers will plummet.

Still, it was frustrating to see comments from local media professionals about how "cooked" it is that anyone attends Supanova or conventions in general. Despite the dominance of Disney/Star Wars/MCU in pop culture, going to a con is still (correctly) incredibly uncool but ultimately harmless. It's a place for local writers, performers and artists to directly meet their audiences, and for fans to dress up and take photos. Perhaps most importantly, it's a place for insufferable and socially inept teens to get offline, go outside and have a good time with other nerds. For me, I cosplay as a normal person 362 days of the year, and then at PAX I am myself.

(Though, I worked at Savers for two years and when my store manager noticed that I nabbed every costume which fitted me, she thought it was a sex thing (?????) so maybe it shouldn't have been a shock that even people in related industries don't understand.)

Times change, I suppose. Manifest and its yaoi paddles are long gone. Virtually every major event last year was obviously cancelled—except, somehow, Melbourne Supanova, which dodged lockdowns in both 2020 and 2021 by mere days. It was hard enough to find motivation to work on anything artistic last year as it was, but a lack of public event deadlines didn't help.

PAX Aus is still scheduled for October, but actually planning for it feels like tempting fate. I could approach 2021 like 2008 and just cobble something together out of clothes I already have, but I don't think it would be the same. Like those disconnected websites, broken links and forgotten digital photo albums, we can't ever really go back.