Cosplay meet ChuCK... ChuCK, meet Cosplay. Ok WTF was that?!?!

Evening all, well it is for me anyways and I'm wore the hell out. So there is a special someone in my life that has been talking about San-Japan for a while now. For the uneducated like myself, San Japan is a non-profit group that holds yearly Japanese Culture and Anime Convention. So let me break this down for you, having just experiencing a whole day of it, it had more to do with dressing up in costume and buying a ton of Japanese Anime stuff. They definitely are holding a bit of creative liberty with the whole Japanese culture thing. There was only two booths that were, what I would call Japanese culture in nature. The rest were all figurines, books, and costumes.... So, anyways, we started our adventure driving to Downtown San Antonio. That in it's own rights is an entertaining experience. I hadn't been there in years, but my foggy memory got us to the right spot. The good thing is, once we parked it was pretty easy to find where we were going... because it looked like we had been dropped in the middle of a power hour on Cartoon Network. There were more colors of hair than there are colors in a Crayola box. Needless to say, my golf polo and visor I was wearing was a dead give away of the n00b in town. I stood in line for a bit for the registration and looked around wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into... There were people walking around with over sized 5 foot swords, a guy wearing a school girls skirt outfit (nasty ass hairy legs included), and several people that needed a bit more of their bodies covered up. For the better of 4 hours there was a burning of a rave beat drilled into my head from the blasting music while I was wandering around looking at everyone. Then off in the distance across the room there was a crowd looking at a group of people fighting... with cardboard. Sad thing is, one of the guys was about in tears because his sword that he had worked on for 5 hours bent and was constantly floppy. This is where I learned what Cosplay was first hand. Sure I had seen pictures on the net, seen videos on YouTube, hell even been told all about it by a good friend of mine... but it's something all together different when you see it first hand. They were absolutely sold that they were the actual characters they were dressed up as. Even to the tune of butchering the Japanese language... which felt odd when I corrected them. Kids to adults were all dressed up moving around the rooms like they were in a movie, some of them even crawling on the ground to stay "in character". As the day went on, the people showing up were almost in a battle of "one upmanship" to better the person next to them with their tricked out costumes. There was even a repair shop booth... that's right, a place to walk on up and get your gear and costume repaired on the spot! I'm in the wrong business because those guys were raking in the money. All in all it was an interesting day and we plan on making this an annual trip. I don't think that I will be dressing up anytime soon, but it was a lot of fun to watch people just enjoy themselves with no reservation. Outside of the freaky old guy with the camera taking pictures of skimpy dressed girls that were old enough to be his grand daughters, everyone was cool. I didn't like that guy much... and had no problem speaking my mind about it... I think this might be the start of a new game in life for me... called ChuCK_AmuCK was here! Notice the name on the badge? Damn right I did and no one even came close to trying to stop me...