The Tribes of C2E2 assembled at McCormick Place last weekend for their 16th meeting since 2010, the many constituencies of the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, 100,000 strong. Raggedy Ann-like pigtails streaming from anime fans. A handmade Silver Surfer posing atop a gravity-defying longboard cleverly hiding the skateboard beneath. A Doctor Octopus wrestling with the push bar on a door, his tentacles made from HVAC duct tape and EVA foam quivering in frustration.
“Jesus Christ,” he said to himself.
“Please,” came the soft reply of a “Resident Evil” zombie, “it’s Lent.”
“Oh, sorry,” came the even softer apology.
A Mandalorian passed, his plastic armor clack-clack-clacking, filling the silence.
We hear that Americans can’t talk nowadays, that offense and disagreement devolve into shouting, that perhaps the American experiment was fated to derail in a nation of so many cultures and languages. The people who say that should visit C2E2, which, year after year, invariably comes together into a South Loop city-state for three days. If Chicago is the city that works, C2E2 is the congress that talks, and listens, and remains civil. For a weekend, a gazillion distinctive fan communities blur into a linguistic utopia.
The Tribes have spoken.
No one person always understood what everyone else was saying, but they said it.
On Saturday, I stood beside Aaramis Hill of Indiana, a self-described entrepreneur and aspiring cybersecurity professional from Gary. He wore the black and white samurai-like robes of a character from the Japanese show “Bleach.” We watched a dozen doppelgangers with orange hair, “Bleach” fans, mingling. “What am I looking at?” I asked.
“The ones dressed like me are CAPTAINS,” he said. The ones in jumpsuits, he went on, “are HOLLOWS, who used to be people — they also should have holes in their chests.”
I strolled away into a LARP-ing arena, a kind of playground for Live-Action Role-Playing, which is a polite way of saying: Two sets of warriors of divergent properties (“Game of Thrones,” “Star Wars,” “Blue’s Clues,” “My Pretty Pony”) face each other across an imaginary field, “Lord of the Rings”-like. Everyone cradles a foam bat, until they are released, run at each other and swing.
Imagine a group slap fight.
It’s tough to witness this for more than 15 seconds, so I walked into the autographing arena, which is a genuine battlefield of anxiety, exhaustion and perseverance. Tim Smith of Springfield stood in a long line waiting to meet Martin Sheen (who himself gave us the WALK AND TALK). Smith had waited in a longer line that day to meet Elizabeth Olsen; a few fans said that they waited for four hours. But how else do you guarantee you’re not getting a SECRETARIAL, an autograph signed by an assistant? The big fear, he said, is a real RACKFEST, or too many fans holding too much memorabilia to sign.
I said, there should be a word for the celebrity who waits at a folding table, looking forlorn, even as lines for celebrities in booths beside them stretch far away and loop.
He smiled and nodded at Wayne Knight, of “Seinfeld,” whose autograph line appeared oddly slight, whereas the line for B.D. Wong, Knight’s costar from “Jurassic Park,” curled and stretched.
A few days of this, huddled in endless lines, standing for hours, shouldering bags of MYSTERY BOXES and HORSE GIRL art, discussing the latest SHIPS in Harry Potter FANFIC (meaning the latest imagined romances between characters, created by self-published online fan fiction), it’s not unusual to come down with CON CRUD, or nerd flu.
Definitely GLOMPING, being tackle-hugged by COSPLAYERS, doesn’t help.
“Oh my frickin’ god, you look so frickin’ cute!” said a woman wearing “Stranger Things” Scoops Ahoy COSPLAY to Katie Godfrey, 27, a motion-graphics designer for a Chicago production agency. She certainly looked KAWAII, Japanese for “cute.” She wore long turquoise hair and a candy-colored dress bustling outward like a happy mushroom.
“I’m dressed as Miku,” she told me, meaning she’s cosplaying as the performing corporate mascot of Vocaloid, the synthesizer software developed by Yamaha — but then you knew that.
“I’ve met so many other WEEBs through AMVs,” she said, “which are just anime music videos, which is actually how a lot of people who work in motion graphics started out. But really, being here, it’s a kind of CON OSMOSIS, meaning I might not play that game or watch that show, but after staying a while at C2E2, you pick up everything anyway.”
A WEEB is an anime fan.
Which, basically, is a GEEK, or NERD, or BLERD (a Black nerd), or FANBOY, or FANGIRL, none of which are used here in any derogatory way, and are generally interchangeable. Myself, a fanboy of a certain age, I am known among the YOUNGLINGS (a child in the “Star Wars” universe) as a FANOSAUR. But that doesn’t mean I’m an overly obsessive STAN. And certainly, if I were a fan of K-pop, I wouldn’t have a BIAS, which is K-pop for a favorite performer. More likely, I’d have way too many BIAS WRECKERS, or K-pop for the almost-favorite threatening to unseat your favorite. I’m too casual in my tastes. I cringe at clear FAN SERVICE, or corporate pandering from T.P.T.B. (the powers that be). I’m certainly no member of any MANAGER ARMY, the derisive term for fans who get way too opinionated about the real careers of their BIAS.
But then, it’s hard being offended when the woman beside you is dressed like a yellow barrel from “Jaws.”
That wasn’t even my favorite C2E2 cosplay this year. That honor goes to Gabrielle Amey and husband Michael, who were dressed as a CHICAGO HANDSHAKE. Meaning, she played Lady Old Style, he played Lord Malort, original characters they created for one day. He had a bottle of Malort at the end of his emerald cane; she wore a Marie Antoinette-esque wig constructed from Old Style cans she cut and piled into a tower of tin curls. The stitching on his long coat and ruffled sleeves — all created by Gabrielle — paid homage to Malort. But way too subtle for some people. She said that competitive cosplayers joke that the casual cosplay observer, who doesn’t necessarily know the work that goes into some of these costumes, would assume it’s all BOOBS AND BALLGOWNS.
That said, if there’s a common language at C2E2, it’s cosplay.
“This is where all the different groups of C2E2 converge,” said Rita Christianson, a student in the theater department at DePaul University, which keeps a booth at C2E2 every year and provides free help with wig and costume malfunctions throughout the weekend. “You end up fixing so many different kinds of fans that you start to pick up a baseline language of what they’re into. I mean, I know way more about ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ than I would normally know. I learned more about obscure superheroes just doing this. A lot of anime people tell me the backgrounds of their characters and I have no idea what they mean.”
Christianson herself told me this while wearing fake blood caked on her face and an aggressively ordinary work shirt. She explained that she was “Robert” in the video game Dispatch, and I nodded but had no idea what she meant.
Erin Kennedy, who runs the school’s wig and makeup department, pulled aside another student, McMillian Spicer, who was playing Jon Snow from “Game of Thrones.”
“What is some cosplaying language?” she asked.
“Oh,” McMillian said, “well, I was CON CRUNCHING to get my cosplay ready, so there’s always a need to have a CON PLAN,” or a schedule of your costumes for the weekend.
Behind them, a Regency-era queen was undergoing WIG PREP, which is the work that’s done beneath the actual wig, while WIG STYLING is the assembling of the wig itself. Many cosplayers brought their BUILD BOOKS, or scrapbooks that show the steps and skills they employed to create the look you see; they need one to enter any competition. “We also hear a lot about making sure a costume is SUPERHERO-LANDING READY,” Kennedy said. Meaning, in general, the costume should look perfect when they pose.
The kind of perfect that’s illustrated on a CLASSIC COVER, the term used for a vintage comic-book cover so distinctive or iconic that the cover itself renders the book valuable, explained Travis Landry, owner of Landry Pop Auctions and an “Antiques Roadshow” regular. He pointed to a 1946 cover showing a heroine being injected by a hypodermic needle. “And, oh, this one — that’s not-so-thinly-veiled bondage imagery.”
So not quite WEDNESDAY SUPERHEROES, or the traditional ubiquitous heroes everyone knows, named for the weekday when new Marvel and DC comics arrive.
After hours of hearing about GARBAGE BAG TESTS from local monster maker Tristian Johnson (i.e., when creators build a monster out of cheap material, before committing to the real deal) and the ways that players of collectible card games use CHAINS (the order of how a card is played against another card, and then another, and so), I feared coming down with con crud.
I left the convention floor for a quiet hallway and passed an open ballroom.
Inside, Dennis Kardys was preparing a game of Dungeons & Dragons. He was the DUNGEON MASTER. At a convention like this, where time is not unlimited, some favor a DUNGEON CLASSIC CRAWL, he said. Except then there’s the chance of being FUNNELED, placed on the rails and headed for a very specific destination, instead of the OPEN-WORLD anything-goes of traditional D&D. He was laying out detailed sheets.
“One of the hardest things about this world,” he said, “is how coded it can be to outsiders. Like if I ask you what your AC is, would you understand what I meant?”
No, I said.
“See? Your ARMOR CLASS,” he said. “It’s intimidating to someone just getting started. But it’s just like anything else. Once you learn the language, you’re a part of something.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
