Excellent topic.
I have always maintained, and even said so multiple times on cosplay.com (typing until my fingers cramped, so to speak), that people will have this viewpoint UNTIL someone shows them a different way of doing things. Whenever anyone has asked, and been open to all advice, I always say “just try it once, and you might realize you like the way it feels when you get that surprise factor in!” A lot of people default to what everyone else is doing, and don’t really think about it one way or the other, or if asked why they don’t save the surprise for the stage, parrot what everyone else is saying (“I want to wear it as much as I can”).
As the director for SF&F for 34, I want SO BADLY to put in a rule that you can’t wear your competition costume in the hall prior to Saturday. I want to. I haven’t yet because I don’t know what our members will want. What I’m unsure about is whether it’s enough to simply encourage people to save the surprise for the stage, to be genial and optimistic and phrase it was “well we’re really like to see…but in the end it’s your choice,” or if the only way to get people into the habit is to make it an explicit rule.
Because really, it is a habit. It’s something that, once you give it a try, you realize is actually a really good idea. Especially once your builds start getting so big that wearing it in the hall becomes almost impossible, and while some people learn from their mistakes, not all do. Some people will still wear their heavy, hot armor or their 10-foot-wide wings or their 20-foot long trains in the hall due to habit and inertia, rather than wising up and not getting their costumes dirty, damaged, or start to hate the mere thought of wearing it another five minutes.
CC32 was a good example of exactly why it’s a good idea to save your competition piece for the competition. The masquerade was way over-booked. It went on way too long. But what really made it a chore to sit through was the fact that we had seen 80% of these costumes in the halls all day – if not for two days! And when they came to stage, they didn’t bring us anything new to see – they didn’t do more than a circle-walk-on. We rolled our eyes at the glut of Frozen costumes, but I will at least give the genderswap guy kudos for putting on an actual performance. Sure, I had already been touching the beading on his costume a few hours before, so seeing the outfit was boring, but he took it up a notch. If you’re going to wear the costume all day and only walk across the stage? It’s pointless to even enter.
One of the bad habits the younger generation is picking up is the idea that if you’re wearing a costume, no matter how simple, you should enter it in competition. On the one hand, we do like to encourage novices to take a brave step onto stage, but on the other hand, when you have 50 slots for your masquerade and 40 of them are taken up by novices who are entering solo with a character they can’t even think up a performance for, merely because they have a costume, it weighs down the quality of the masquerade. It’s a catch-22 – you don’t want to discourage novices, but at the same time, a director has to consider the quality of the show and the value for the audience. If you’re going to get a hundred feedback forms post-con and most of them tell you the masquerade sucked because all the entries were boring and lame…well, as a director, you can’t improve the show with that kind of feedback. You’re at the mercy of who enters with what. So it really falls to the community as a whole to develop different habits, so that you can be both encouraging AND put on a great show.
What bugs me most is that wearing competition costumes in the hall actually does prejudice or fatigue the judges, and people don’t even think about this. They’re more focused on their own gratification rather than the whole concept of why the contest exists and what they’re doing in it. They don’t realize that the judges are not nuns sequestered away for the weekend, they’re congoers too and they’re in the halls enjoying themselves while subconsciously evaluating costumes. So by the time that same costume appears before the judging table, the judge may have already made up their mind. Or they’re so plain tired of seeing the costume that they don’t care. It’s unfortunate, but it’s human nature, and it’s something you can’t steel your mind against. If you can’t prevent the judges from THINKING about the costumes, you can at least prevent them from SEEING the costumes by forbidding the wearing.
Maybe it also comes down to encouraging people with “yes, I know you worked hard and want to wear it a lot. Wear it AFTER the show. Wear it Sunday and Monday. Wear it at the NEXT con you’re going to, when it’s no longer in competition and you can enjoy it.” But mostly it’s about developing the habit. I don’t think the days of the surprise on stage are over, and I personally want to see this particular habit stay relevant. I just don’t know, outside of long-windedly blathering on cosplay forums/facebook to try to get it through thick heads (like I do) HOW to cultivate the habit. HOW to get people to give the surprise a try.
At least people who are working so hard on a build that it isn’t finished until the day of the competition automatically save their costume for the stage. It’s probably not a preferable method but it works. 😉
Stace
—In runacc@yahoogroups.com, <casamai@…> wrote :
I recognize that we must reach out to these costumers for the sake of getting new blood, but is there a risk of making too much of an accommodation? I remember one person on Cosplay.com (a forum that, at least USED to be, a place CC concoms should be paying attention to) said “I spent a lot of time on my one costume and I want to wear it as much as I can”. So, they wore it pretty much everywhere. They were not the only ones. Now, in some ways, I can’t blame them for thinking that way. But, stay with me here.
Any “wow” factor has been lost by the time they get on stage. Chances are, the judges will have seen them at some point, beforehand. This makes the costume less “fresh”. It’s also not as much fun for the judges because they’ve seen it already – part of the fun for them is the surprise factor.
Are the days of saving one’s competition costume for the stage fading?
Should there be more of an effort to encourage people not to wear their competition costume in the halls before the masquerade?
In my opinion, you have a better masquerade without a “preview”.