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Cosplayers don't like the Reader writer coming in costume
So, I'm a cosplayer and that might make me a little biased in regards to this article, but I think I'm being pretty sensible when I say that you're making unfair generalizations about a much bigger group/community than with the few people you encountered in order to write this article. And if you were wondering why it was that they were so hesitant to allow you to come with them, then this is why. Because this entire article is written in a very negative way, portraying cosplayers in a very negative light. As if we don't already have awful stigma's attached to our hobby, now it's being added to and judged in a public forum. I'll admit, the people you encountered are probably not the best example of sane, friendly cosplayers, in fact by the sounds of it, I'd even go so far as to believe they are "weeaboo's", everything cosplayers don't like about their own community. But I am a cosplayer, my closest friends are cosplayers, and I've met a lot of very incredible people through cosplay. Many of them are incredibly smart, funny and overall lovely people, bu of course, you couldn't know that, not from the small amount of exposure you had to this community of people. There are reasons for what we do, reasons that might not make much sense to anyone who isn't already a cosplayer, but really, isn't that the way with most hobbies? Unless you yourself do it and enjoy it, you probably won't understand what makes it so special to us. We do it because these characters mean something to us, the series they come from are important to us, because we want to show how much we enjoyed something, because we like making works of art just like any other artist would. We do it because it makes us happy, which is pretty much the base rule for why anyone does anything. So to you, I say congratulations. You have successfully judged a very wide and varying community based on the actions of a few people who clearly were very cagey about their hobbies. Perhaps if you went into this sort of thing with a more open mind, you might have found answers a lot more satisfying than the ones you did through this experience.— March 23, 2013 11:59 p.m.