Your Story

Text: Raymon de Lange

My new Hobby

Five and a half years ago, as of me writing this, I went to my very first pop culture convention. I went there together with a good friend of mine, with both of us having effectively no idea what we really expected to find there. The convention at that time was AnimeCon, a convention specifically centered around Japanese pop culture, something me and my friend were both very interested in at the time. Although we had little idea of what to expect, we were heading there mostly hoping to meet some fun new people sharing our interests and maybe learning a new thing or two about something we enjoyed engaging with. Something I certainly did not expect to find there, was a jaw-dropping amount of people walking around in fantastical costumes, each one more meticulously pieced together than the last.

Those people had gone to the convention hall in Cosplay, short for “costume play”, dressing up as characters from some of their favourite franchises, TV shows, or videogames. I still remember being awestruck at that time by seeing near-perfect imitations of characters I had been a fan of for many years casually roaming the convention hall, and even more so by the scale and quality of all the costumes, which went far beyond anything I had expected possible. The entire convention experience had given me far more than I was expecting to get out of it, and needless to say I went to the convention again the next year… and the year after that.

Naturally, these conventions were no exception to the great number of events that had to be delayed or outright cancelled due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, and it was not until June of this year that I was finally able to go to a convention again.

Whilst my interest in Japanese pop culture had declined somewhat over the past five years, I could not help but still look forward with great excitement to the convention experience as a whole, especially since the intermission by Covid had come with a fortunate silver lining.

Some of the newer faces at Abacus might not know, but before the pandemic, I used to have significantly shorter hair, and I had been growing it out during the intermission. It was then to a most welcome surprise that during this time one of my all-time favourite shows had got a new season, one that introduced a character with hair very similar in colour and length to mine. Not long after, I had decided for myself that this character would be my first serious attempt at a cosplay of my own, and I would no longer be simply a spectator at the conventions.

With a lot of help from others, I was able to bring this character to life, and pay homage to a show I had been a fan of since I was 13 years old. This itself was a great experience on its own, and at the time I mostly intended for the cosplay to be a one-time thing. However, this changed drastically after I had walked the convention floors in my cosplay, where I was greeted by person after person who recognized my costume and wanted to take a picture with me. Seeing that many other people as excited as I was to see this character brought to life, and bonding with them over it was an experience that I will always cherish dearly.

Since then I have found other conventions which also attract cosplayers, and what started out as a casual side-event throughout my years has now grown into something that might very well be a long term hobby of mine. I will soon start working on my second cosplay, and while I am still very much an amateur, I simply cannot wait to see the end result and share it with others.

Thank you very much for reading, I hope I was able to share some of the joys of my experiences with you through this story.

Kind regards, Raymon de Lange