So EoY came and went. Yay? Actually to me it was entirely about the cosplay, I mean, how the hell am I supposed to cover a freaking small stage event that had nothing of interest to me? No offense to the Shiro Tsubasa Anime Club, the event, like any other (such as was the case with AFA ‘08), means something different to everyone. Thanks to them for sending me a media pass invitation and I took advantage of their offer at least. The problem? Freaking camera. Read on to find out more about the day’s happenings.

I reached there late, because I figured from past events’ experience that “Hey, the good cosplayers always arrive late.” Largely, it is because of preparations. What was even better, I had never been to this place in SG before, supposedly the largest exhibition and convention center here. Anyway, I arrived to find myself out of parking space for bikes. I swear to God, people who plan parking lots should realize there are more than just a small percentage of what your freaking brain can register also ride freaking bikes, bitches.

So after parking my bike in a spot that would least disturb others, I left to look for the halls in which the event would take place. It was quite a walk, and I found myself alongside Buddhist monks soon enough. Turns out a large exhibition hall was rented by a Buddhist organization or something, for talks and speeches, and my gawd, they absolutely outnumbered the number of people at EoY by like 10 times. Luckily most of them were inside the hall at the time, and I only had difficulty looking for a toilet because they decided to give more toilets to females, near the Buddhist talks. Maybe there were more nuns than monks, I have no idea.
 

I found the place, but upon deciding to first go outside on the first floor (the event’s halls were on the second floor), and taking out my camera, I found out it had a huge error and could not work. Ain’t that hoesome? I met Malzias at this time, apparently the group of cosplayers I was trying to take a picture of were his friends or something. It was of the Vocaloid series, which in the end, I only managed to get a picture of one of them, later on with help. I will leave who for when her post comes up, and no it is not Miku. The hint is “spinoff”.

So, with a dead camera, I had to obviously look for help, and up I went to look for the rest. I first looked outside the hall, there was more space (and more cosplayers initially). I chanced upon a group of sexy, lovely old Chinese-style cosplayers that I had absolutely no idea who, but at the time I did note one of them looked rather familiar. Still without a camera I did not linger long.

I went to get the media pass almost immediately, and wow, the pass was freaking cheap! I mean yeah, at least give me a pass that says “MEDIA” at the back, folks. My pass was blank – anyone could have just bought the same looking pass and gone in with it probably. Meh. I gave no two hoots about it and went about looking for people.
 

Gwendolyn and Velvet, from Odin Sphere, thanks to ron~ for the ID. Gwen was very well-done to me, but then again I never really played the game.

Outside the hall there were Hirito and Amano (who knew us through a previous karaoke session and now talks regularly in our channel), and I also found Squee, Yumeno (who was part of the STAC helpers committee, basically doing shitty miscellaneous help jobs around the area), a Stormtrooper, Feidamu, NanoPulp, and YuKi-To. I also found CI a little later, who was using Squee’s camera and thus I availed myself of the opportunity, as he also had a media pass, to ask him to help me take pictures of the interior of what I needed to cover the event. I also met the late Fariz, AK, Blurmage (who came up to me and said “Hi” and later said on IRC I was too bloody recognizable), Sentinel011 from Bonkurasu Brigade and Xak from NKDS. I failed to see TJ Han however. That was unfortunate. :\

There were a lot of people milling around. Akabane had been there early, and later Zero and Tom arrived too. Kit-Fox said hi to me like, real late. I also met Hexlord a little late, his photos are used in this post, courtesy of him obviously, thanks for letting me use yours and for future posts too, Hex. I hope I missed out no one.
 

Much of the day passed as random scattering of people moved around, taking shots, and stuff. So I will now just talk about the highlights of the event.

Yumeno decided to draw his mascot on the graffitti wall section, and left his blog URL there. Double spotted it and Yumeno said, “Shameless advertising.” The latter quickly looked for a marker and wrote the exact words with an arrow pointing to the URL. I have no picture of it.

There were over 9000 fricking Narutards Naruto cosplayers. I swear, there was such a big team of them, they freaking could have taken on all the monks and nuns by themselves.

There were also way too many Vampire Knight cosplayers. What is VK now, the new in-thing? Dgaysemen D.Gray-man had a smaller showing comparative to the earlier events I were at this year. There were also many, many gothic lolitas.
 

The booths and the stage events were, to me, unappealing. So they will not be covered.

I met up with kurohoshi, the Ilya cosplayer mentioned in the AFA Cosplay Part 2 post. She is supposed to be my imouto in IRC (lol), but when I found her quite late she had just lost her handbag and was seriously peeved about it. :(

There was an awesome Viletta Nu cosplayer (from Code Geass) that I talked to at some length. In fact I talked to quite a few cosplayers at some length, for the first time. It was good to at least get to know and appreciate, if only to a small extent possible, the amount of effort they had put in and what the cosplayers themselves felt about their cosplay. However my eyes throughout the day were largely on auto-filter, thanks in part to earlier mentioned cosplays, and the last highlight of the day that actually was early on that made my entire day.
 

What I felt to be a better C.C. cosplayer than the other present. She also looks cuter than this in real life, and was pretty obliging. Not in a warped way you asses.

Remember the Chinese-style cosplayers? Turns out they were from Dynasty Warriors 6. I never liked that series, or hack-and-slash games for that matter, but anyway, Hirito was my assistant (thanks dude) for the external shots outside of the event, and early on since they were outside, I asked Hirito to help me get pictures of them. When he had finished with the three pretty girls, the one I thought was familiar and incidentally also felt was the best of the three (in blue too <3) looked at me and asked, “You’re Panther, right?”

First thing that went through my mind, “WTF?”

I replied, “Yeah.” I think I did anyway, my memory is getting a little hazy, her radiance went through me.

“I’m that FF13 VS cosplayer from Cosfest.” (see this post)

That was when I went “Holy shit that was why she looked familiar!” in my head.
 

I also took a picture with her but since I am ugly as all hell obviously it will be a waste to her brilliance and her cosplay. Of the cosplayers at the event, the ones I considered good, aside from hers and her friends’, were few and far between. Thanks by the way, Shizuka, sorry when I asked about your real name it was because the first thing that went through my head was “You’re Japanese?” and that was my intention, because I was like “Holy crap Japanese girl?”. I did not mean to offend you by letting you think I wanted to know your real name lol. Messed up. :(

By the way yeah, once I receive the pictures I will pass you the hi-res ones, my email for your convenience is pantherrh -at- gmail -dot- com, also available on MSN through it.

I left the event late, Shizuka and her friend, who cosplayed as Diao Chan, also received awards for being the best females I believe, right before I left. Several of us had dinner nearby, and I went home at like 8. It had been fully a cosplay event, and of course, the radiance of blue and lovely girl made my day. Sorry female readers, I must be irritating you here lol.
 

As for the rest of the cosplay coverage posts, I have to wait for the people with the pictures to send me them, before I look through what I can use and how to split them up. YuKi-To, who cosplayed as Hei from Darker than Black (the first picture in this post is him), will be doing most of them. I will likely be doing just one more post, the final one. Nothing is known for sure yet though, but if you follow me on Twitter I might update there or something. Cheers.

A huge thanks as well to all the cosplayers today who allowed me to take photos with them and chatted with at length. Should, for the following posts, any cosplayer like me to take down their pictures, please, just leave a comment and I will remove them ASAP. As for hi-res pictures, I would hope that my friends took pictures well, and I will definitely be post-processing them. If you want them, I will be keeping all of theirs for a week after the post is up, unless you requested for them beforehand (as did Shizuka and Sephora).
 

PS: Yes Impz. I lost. Fug.

PPS: Incidentally Shizuka also happens to be the real name of one of my favorite seiyuu, Itou Shizuka-sama! <3 She also falls under the same zodiac sign as I do.

Related posts:

1. EoY ‘08 Cosplay – The Best of My Best
2. EoY ‘08 Cosplay Part 3
3. AFA Cosplay Part 1
4. Cosfest Day 1 Part 1 – Internal Shots
5. AFA ‘08 Report Preview