(Actually, it was a cosplay winner who just brought up how calling any of the skits "sub-par" seemed uncool.)
Mainly, the thing I have to say here would be that if you were back there in the Green Room with all of the cosplay participants, you would have seen more up close how much effort and anxiety ALL the ones who did participate put into their cosplays.
Blackjack, I'm kinda surprised at your reaction; you ought to know what it's like. I know you've done cosplay skits before. Would you like to hear something that put down a Cosplay Contest that you worked hard to do your part for, just because the show as a whole may have felt like it didn't live up to the (fairly high, I might add) standards that somehow ALL the participants in previous years seemed to set for this event at our con? I'm sure you wouldn't.
But Rushifa had a point in that there was a lack of participation. Based on how other things were going this year at con and the volume of cosplayers, the Cosplay director was expecting to fill every skit slot, and we only got 9/16ths instead.
I think if we want to get more cosplay participants we need to be even more embracing of what people offer. Heckling = bad, even post-fact, and that's what MistressLegato was trying to get us to be sensitive about. For some people, even a walk-on is difficult, but they want to share their costume with you and participate so yay to them for going through that effort. We can still clap for them and appreciate.
On the other end of the spectrum, and to respond to the fact that a lot of people in awesome costumes didn't enter cosplay, for some who have great costumes maybe the time involved in having to go through judging, wait for the event, etc, just is not worth it to them. That's totally fine, because the main thing that congoers -should- do is make sure they're having fun.
Now, what follows is a similar comment to what a fellow staffer said about the job of staffing and how we've gotten the people involved that we have over the past couple of years to expand our staff. To paraphrase, the only way to draw more people to the event is to participate in it yourself and to have fun doing it.
When others notice that you had fun with your cosplay, that you had a great time, they'll really want to do it themselves next time. So, that's my idea on how to encourage it more.
I, for one, did it totally for fun this year and not anything else; it was my first time in a cosplay event, and I just said: "this is the year, I don't care, I have to do it. I want to show that anybody can, and I want to represent my niche fandom."
Despite the fact that I didn't get to simply hang out a lot with the other cosplayers which is usually part of the fun (I was busy doing a lot of other needed things for a large part of the time surrounding my actual stagetime, like helping with seating), I still had a BLAST.
If I can take a half hour or so out to do it even with everything else, anybody can. They just have to want to. I hope next year everybody comes and signs up!
And if the same person is the coordinator, she's very committed to making sure contestants don't have to be stuck in a small loading room for hours upon hours as has happened to her at other cons. You can still do other things on the same day as Cosplay, so that's good and I think it is one of our strengths. Yeah, there will always be some wait-time, and mandatory meetings, but its nothing compared to some other conventions.
