The Dedication That Shames Me

Cosplay is a culture I’ve never fully inhabited—there’s something about the enterprise, the months of fabrication and the public commitment to a character, that sits just outside my particular zone. But I can’t pretend it doesn’t impress me. What happens at a Comic Con is not dressing up. It’s a craft. People pour six months of evenings into a single piece of armor, and the results are often better than what the actual production designers managed with a proper budget and a full team.

At New York Comic Con this year, a group Game of Thrones entry apparently stopped traffic in the hall. The kind of thing you’d see once and then spend time second-guessing your memory of, wondering if it was really as good as you thought. The bar for "just wearing a costume" is officially gone. What’s left is closer to fan art you can walk around in.