At no other convention are the participants also the attraction.
Thousands of people attended Northern FanCon last weekend, and many of them arrived in costumes - many of them elaborate costumes.
These attendees are there to see and to be seen, to stand alone as a living work of pop-art and to convene with those who share their rare passion for wearing their favourite characters.
It wasn't as rare as first believed, Northern FanCon revealed. Those who play with costume - cosplayers, for short - got to come out of the closet and basement and garage and workshop for the very first time in Prince George history and shocked each other with their own population. Hundreds donned creative garb to wander about the extravaganza, and dozens of them entered the official Northern FanCon cosplay events, like a demonic and dashing debutante ball.
There were three categories. One was for kids, one for novice cosplayers and one for those in the upper echelons who have competed and won at other fan conventions and cosplay exhibitions. Some of the best, according to the judges, included Kaylee Abriel, who attended from Kitimat decked out as Demon Hunter from the Diablo III video game, Lyman Doolittle and his perfect facsimile of My Bloody Valentine's masked miner, and Ben Gibson's take on the Mordekaiser character from League Of Legends.
The top prize in the A-class went to Meg Leppington, in her female rendition of the Borderlands game character Krieg.
"I've cross-played many, many characters. It's awesome. I personally find the male characters to be more interesting, really. I like big armour, big props, big guns," said Clearwater's Leppington, who now lives in Prince George with her cosplayer boyfriend Adrian Dones.
The two actually met at a cosplay event.
"When I was probably about 16 is when I first went to Anime Revolution," she said of her first cosplay experience. "A friend and I took a Greyhound to Vancouver and, oh, it was a blast. Teenaged giggling from start to end. We have it on video. I also saw a guy there dressed as a ninja, I liked that, and we started hanging out. We're still together. It's a cosplay romance story."
Leppington said she caught the costume urge while still a child. It was a Sailor Moon outfit at about 10 years old that set her off. Most kids like to role-play and dress up but "I didn't have a tickle trunk, I had a tickle room," she said.
Her parents considered the diversion to be a positive creative outlet. She took it as seriously as many kids take music lessons or drawing for hours, so her mother especially pitched in to help.
On the novice stage, there were many who were still in their formative stages or just getting their confidence up. That still meant, though, that the judge's favourites were astonishing.
The three invigilators picked an up-and-coming Darth Maul as an honorable mention due to his pre-teen costume and makeup skills as well as light-saber twirls that made even his own sister gasp: "I didn't know he could do that" as she waited in the wings for her turn, dressed as Merida from the film Brave.
Third place went to Nadine Arnott dressed as Pyro from the Team Fortress video game franchise.
Second went to Morgan Tasa and his giant sword, portraying Cloud Strife from the Final Fantasy games.
First place was a surprise to some, but not veteran cosplayers. Samantha Ramsay, formerly of Prince George now living in Terrace where she works as a seamstress, swept onstage like a cartoon bride come to life. She was portraying Princess Peach, the damsel in distress in a plethora of Mario Brothers projects. No armor, no leather, no swords or laser blasters. Yet she won because the judges ascertained the immense level of detailed work that went into her creation.
"The hardest part wasn't putting it together, it was tracking down materials that would make the costume look as authentic as possible," she said. For those specialty fabrics like wedding satin she had to travel to Vancouver. The detail materials, she said, she could find at local craft stores.
"Assemblage of materials took about a month," she said. "I started research back in November, looking at all the different ways Princess Peach had been done by other cosplayers. I got going right away when I first heard about Northern FanCon. February was my testing month when I put together a facsimile out of bed sheet material just to see if the patterns would work."
Once that was tweaked, she averaged about three hours per day of sewing and altering from March "right up until the last day before FanCon."
"I was sewing the beejeebers out of it on the train on the way down."
She estimated the financial outlay at about $900 for the dressmaking, wig, and other materials involved in the costume. She plans to sell it one day, when she is finished enjoying the wearing of it at costume parties and cosplay events, and its value will likely increase now that it has been deemed a winner, but she doesn't expect to make back all she invested.
There are professional cosplayers, however, who make the bulk of their living making costumes for later sale, winning competitions, and especially selling online products like autographed photos wearing the original costumes of familiar characters.
She hasn't gone that far, yet, but she does have a YouTube channel devoted to teaching how she made her cosplay outfits, and the prize doesn't hurt her marketability as a seamstress either.
"Every time I took apart a dress for alterations, I'd learn more about how to assemble a dress. I would like to try doing a thermal plastic armour. This has definitely proven to me that my skills are mostly in fabric," she said.
"Now it's trying to figure out what I'm going to wear next year, when I can't compete in the novice anymore. I have to step up," said Ramsay.
Thankfully, she said, her husband "is definitely an enabler. He really encourages me. It's great because you have to call in other sets of eyes, sometimes, to look at what you're doing, because your own start doing laps inside your skull."
Both Ramsay and Leppington were thrilled that Prince George had such a creative outlet for their cosplay habit.
"There's nothing else closer," said Ramsay, and even Prince George is a day-long trek on Via Rail.
"We try to go to at least one fan convention a year," said Leppington. "To get one in P.G.- Finally! Yes! I can just get ready at home! - and that means I can invest a bit more time and money in the costume because I don't have to put that into a hotel and transportation."
FanCon took care of another layer of that issue as well. The grand prize for Leppington was a trip for two to any cosplay congregation she wants to attend. Coincidentally, she and Dones had booked a dream trip to the iconic convention Dragon Con in Atlanta but it fell through at the last minute. They lost money and felt big disappointment. But Leppington got to take home their prize and surprise her partner in cosplay crime.
"He got quite emotional, actually, it was something that meant a lot to us, even more than usual, because we'd lost that chance and got a second shot," she said.
Ramsay won a free golden ticket to next year's Northern FanCon event, so she will be back to raise her own costume bar along with all the others making sophomoric efforts in 2016.
With all the plastic, foam, metal, leather and fabric skills out in the local world, plus those expected to travel to Prince George as visiting cosplayers in the years to come, she knows she doesn't have this sewn up just yet.
