What Were They Thinking?

In the past, I famously relegated the fans of Dr. Who to the bottom of the nerd food chain. In my mind, they were below SCAdians, D&D players, and even Trekkies; I saw them as the plecostomus in the aquarium of fandom. More recently, I determined that the new Dr. Who show is soooo cool that it has upset this scheme. The Whovian can now leave his parents' basement with pride, as I declared the bottom rungs to be occupied by "Highlander LARPers and those who believe in the Force as a religion."

All that changed again last week. As I was surfing I came across this:

Do not enlarge - her labia are practically hanging out.

Disturbing as this was I knew there had to be more. I entered the words "bad cosplay" into Google and prepared myself for the worst. This was one of the first things to pop up:


Behold - the new bottom feeders of pop culture. (It only gets worse from here.) This is, of course, nothing new to con-goers - Trekkies have been doing cosplay for decades - but the anime crowd has really taken this to a new level in the last few years.

Bad cosplay seems to fall into a few loose categories; a lot of these pics could fit in several of them. The first and most common is the person who is entirely too round for the costume they have chosen:

Please bear in mind that I am taking it easy on you here. I purposely didn't choose to put up the literally hundreds of pictures that I found in which large people were sqeezed into tiny costumes with various parts hanging out. Say thank you.

Another category is the gender bender. Sometimes this can be kind of cool - I've seen some female versions of Vash that were appealing in an odd way - but usually it results in this:

("GoGo HeBari" is disturbing, but "Sailor Drew Carey" is my favorite...)

The next category is crappy costumes. This is common to any costume game; the SCA certainly had lots of people who showed up in terrible garb every week (we used to snarkily refer to the period of those costumes as "early fairy princess"). In the cosplay world, there are many of these:

(What the hell is the one on the right supposed to be?)

There are also those cosplayers who are just plain scary:

I assure you, there were many more for this category, but I am merciful...

To reward you for wading in this far, there are some very, um, "outgoing" young women in the cosplay world as well. I refer to this as the "too much skin" category:

While I like naked girls as much as the next guy, I just can't imagine how this works at a convention. If you look at cosplay con pics, there are a lot of little kids running around in the backgrounds...

If you haven't had enough, go to Fuckin' Otaku, but remember, I was filtering this for you; far greater horrors await you there.