If you are anything like me, you know a little bit about Otakon. Maybe you drive by it each year and are baffled by all the costumes—some odd and outlandish (an infinite variety of costumes inspired by Japanese manga and anime), others very familiar (Captain Jack Sparrow, anyone?) Perhaps you have even managed to walk in and wander amongst all the otaku and be dazzled by it all. Either way, you probably don't really -know- much about it. This year, I had the chance to go to the con for several hours over the weekend, take photos, absorb it all and try to make some sense of it.

The most important, or most obvious, element of it is the cosplay (costume play). People dress up as their favorite characters. Then other people take their picture. Repeated ad infinitum. One young man, dressed head to toe in a features-obscuring leotard told me he had been photographed more than 7,000 times over the weekend, and I believed him. I was taking his picture at the time.

While you might think that it's strange for a person to spend months designing these costumes—the majority are homemade—the cosplayers themselves seemed somewhat normal, and their desire to show off the end result of all their hard work, natural. I question some of their choices, though. Over the course of the weekend I ran into half a dozen people dressed as "Pedobear" a . . . pedophile bear. Pedobear was originated by the users of the web site 4chan as a graphic designed to mock posters who were perceived as having to great an interest in photos of young people. Somehow along the way, he became a full-fledged phenomenon of his own.

The idea of spending a weekend with strangers dressed as your favorite pop culture character seems a lot less weird once you are there, surrounded by tens of thousands of them. Sure, the outfits are out of the ordinary, but is it really that different than being at a craft fair or art show, once you get past the pedophile bears and the like?

Well, it is somewhat different. The entire affair has a really strange, voyeuristic, exhibitionistic element. The strangest part of this—to an outsider at least—is the photo collectors. A large subset of attendees—not media people—seem to be there just take photos of other attendees. They art direct cosplayers and make them sit this way or that. They gather people from the same source material and have them pose together. They are so persistent that the cosplayers themselves—who seem to be in good humor about it, but only up to a point—seem to have developed a code of etiquette to deal with the photographers... they pose for awhile but once it goes too long, they start counting down and once they hit zero, they break pose with a loud clap or yell.

You would imagine that the photographer would generally reserve this for the people with the best ot most outlandish costumes, but I saw many people whose costume seemed to consist only of a wig get their picture taken over and over again. Of course, women seem to get their picture taken more—much, much more—as most of these picture collectors seemed to be middle-aged dudes. The fact that I was also there to take pictures probably colored my impression of it all, but it just seemed very awkward/borderline to me.

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