It’s easy to assume that cosplayers are maladjusted social retards. Easy, inasmuch that most people can't quite fathom how a person can be motivated to don a Sailor Moon costume – tiara, gloves and all – hop on a bus to the city centre, and spend the day buying shit they don't need at a convention full of other geeks dressed as Sailors and M. Bison. 

Waiting in line for one of said conventions, I stood out like a sensibly-dressed sore thumb. Under normal circumstances my clothes wouldn’t warrant a second glance, but here they were conspicuous in their conventionality. What the fuck was I doing here, surrounded by these scrawny Asian Marios and white Narutos?  More importantly, what were these people thinking? “Ugh,” I thought. “Retards”.

Whatever. I had gone out of my way to get a media pass for the event, so it would have been a waste not to mingle. So I waited, and the line got longer and longer as more and more people (mostly in their late teens and early twenties) turned up in elaborate costumes and waited patiently, sizing each other up. And this was just a teaser event – a precursor to a much larger con to be held a few months later. To me it seemed like a waste to dress so extravagantly for what turned out to be a handful of stalls and a Coke machine, but they didn’t seem to mind.

“This is our first time cosplaying, actually” said Craig Davies, a 14-year-old dressed in the white mask and black robe of the Menos Grande (Gillin class) from Bleach. “It’s fun to dress up, especially if you’re with a group of friends.”

“This only took a couple of days to make,” chimed in 17 year old Nick Davies. He was wearing a pair of Japanese clogs, a special part of his Bleach Shinigami costume. “I did most of the work during [design and technology] at school, so it wasn’t too hard. My sister made my robe.”

How disappointing. I didn’t want to hear about some dude's sister – I wanted craziness! I wanted personality disorders and barely-concealed sexual dysfunction. I wanted someone to tell me how dressing up as Solid Snake made them feel like a real man. But this was so ... so normal.

Well, almost normal.