#i'm intrigued by merch and was thinking of designing one without actually making them and this came to mind

[s2pdoktopus]

You know those fanfics where Zidian evolves into a magic snake? That's the idea but it's the fuzzy worm thing.

[kohki3325]

SwampCon 2022

Paying respects to the GOAT of Genshin.

I always like making my blog posts unique by presenting thoughts that I think are unique to myself (or least things I researched myself), so this time I'll just tell the story of my weekend!

I was absolutely dreading having to go to SwampCon the night before, mainly because I didn't want to go alone and, if you know me at all, I almost never hit people up. Going alone to an event might be a top 5 fear of all time for me, especially because I'm not too good at talking to strangers.

But I guess the energy of SwampCon got to me before I even got there. Saturday morning, I broke out of character and decided to ask my friend from Japanese Club if he wanted to go with me. And so, all of my fears were gone. Well, almost. There was no way I was gonna receive an IRL 「お帰りなさい、ご主人様！」 as a native Japanese speaker without cringing immensely. Needless to say, I skipped the maid café. Reading everyone else's blog posts though, I'm now a little curious... maybe I'll go next year.

Walking around the Reitz Union, I noticed a lot of Genshin cosplayers, which I should've expected due to its sheer popularity. But I would also attribute this to just how passionate the fans of the game are. In fact, many of the cosplayers, merch, and panels I saw are based on works that I know have very passionate communities like Five Nights at Freddy's, Genshin, and Danganronpa. If I'm gonna be fully honest, I find these communities to be insufferable on the internet, but here at SwampCon, I couldn't help but be completely enthralled by the culture that these communities have formed. Let's put it this way: if I weren't at a convention, I never would've asked for that picture with the Kazuha cosplayer.

I think another reason why there were so many Genshin cosplayers, and perhaps even why these select communities are so passionate about their respective works, is one I talked about in my post about Azuma’s “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals”. As a result of the trend of database consumption, it's become arguably more important to create memorable characters than to write a good story, which I personally believe the three aforementioned games follow perfectly. For Genshin specifically, as a gacha game, I wouldn't be surprised if each character is fully designed before their stories are written. But to get to the point, it is important for fans to cosplay as memorable characters because cosplay is a performance, one that shows your devotion to a fandom. Cosplay is you becoming a symbol of your passion. As much of a joke as this may sound, I think in this sense, furries are an especially intriguing community to observe. Rather than devoting themselves to a certain work, they devote themselves to their own self-made characters. But this commonality between all furries conversely creates a sense of community.

Anyway, moving on. The Idol Fest came as a surprise to me because I expected the concert to be more like a Tokyo live show where amateur idols would sing and dance on stage and then interact with fans, but it was more like a celebration of the Japanese idol culture that apparently is pretty popular here in the US as well. A good portion of the groups were lip syncing, as if they were going beyond just cosplaying their character and getting closer to actually becoming them.

This probably won't make a lot of sense unless you're a Love Live! fan, but something I found interesting was that the Love Live! performances at SwampCon dressed up as the characters from the anime, while the actual voice actors always perform as themselves rather than their characters in live shows. The voice actors are as much idols as the characters they voice. Perhaps this is a reflection of anime idols being so much more popular than real Japanese idols here in the US, but I think a more reasonable explanation is that the goal of most of these groups is to "claim" the character by acting as them, and not to actually become idols like the voice actors are.

A final thing I noticed was the complete lack of VTuber merch and cosplay (I was sort of disappointed not gonna lie). Maybe kind of a silly thing to notice, but I know popularity is not an issue with VTubers, so I wonder why.

I had a lot of fun this weekend. I've said this in a previous post, but I genuinely feel so lucky to be able to share my love for Japanese pop culture here in America. I'll definitely be coming back to SwampCon next year and probably every year I'm here at UF (as long as I have someone to go with, of course). Who knows, maybe I'll even be in a costume next time?