/cgl/ - Cosplay & EGL

>>10223743
My best guess is participants just got tired. As a former AX masq participant, the main reasons my group stopped going is because of how we were treated backstage and also how judging goes down. We weren't treated to many of the bare essentials like food or water or even comfortable seating you should have ready for people putting on a performance and stuck in one room for several hours. We've performed at smaller conventions, and even they could give us snacks and shit.

Their judging system (for skits at least, and during the year we finally said "enough") is based off audience reaction. If a skit gets the crowd more fired up, that gives it more points. While that might make sense out of context, in context, it's really poor. It doesn't take into account a lot of components for a good performance and favors ones that are either based on comedy or crowd-pleasing topics like DBZ references and AoT jokes.

There were also the few times we got judged on the quality of our costumes or props. The first year we performed and bothered with good costumes, they did all judging backstage, took a quick look at our cosplays, then moved on to the next group where they did the same thing. We had a large prop that was a key feature to our skit that they never even bothered to look at. Because staff told us to stuff it in a back room somewhere.

Sorry for the blogpost but AX is the worst experience I've had with any masquerade as a participant and I feel sorry for anyone who has to go through that. If they've improved since then, good. If not, well, you can probably blame that as one reason for the low number of entries.