Virtual CosMeet or VCM is a virtual event hosted by Cosplay.PH on YouTube yesterday. The streaming event was hosted on YouTube.com and it started at 7:55 PM Manila time.
Kenkoy and Lora were the hosts for tonight and they sure do miss the cosplay convention and so do we. But I just attended KuroCon, you ask, this is different.
The festivities start with Ken and Lora calling the cosers according to their colors. Basing on what I’ve heard about the rules, each cosplayer will have an assigned number of colors and each color and so do the audience.
Not sure why, but we’ll find out why later on and they also plug in their Patreon and their sponsor CosplayMania.com (isn’t that part of CPN?).
They end the introductions with thanking their media sponsors and they asked the YouTube audience their fave Cosmania memories and experiences with Kenkoy’s best memory with everyone laughing because they found a Sadako cosplayer. A Sadako cosplayer, imagine doing that in the late 2000s-early 2010s.
One YouTube commenter mentioned that one cosplayer who cosplayed as the SMX Convention Center. Only in the Philippines.
So we now move to Cosplay ½. What’s that you ask? Imagine having a 2×2 shot of yourself in cosplay form, then make it half-body, and make it a video instead of a photo. That’s that. It’s the same as what we had on FanFes but this time, no TikTok involved.
Judges are introduced as follows: Leandro “MuiMui” Peleno (a champion from Cebu), Rica Gabriel Ortiz (JPOP Singing contest winner and Kenkoy’s crush) and Win Evangelista (co-leader of Z Warriors and a G Cup champion. What’s that, I don’t know).
Too bad though because the judges can’t or won’t show their faces. It could be because for privacy purposes or something but if it’s the former, I understand. Internet security nowadays is spotty at best and no, this article isn’t sponsored by NordVPN or ExpressVPN.
YouTube viewers are asked to go to menti.com and were given a code to vote until 9:30 PM. Due to technical difficulties, we get more Cosplay Mania memories. One cosplayer (Nekomi Kasai) shared that Cosplay Mania always fall on her birth month so this is something as a gift for herself.
After that, they used the coloring system to separate the cosers by groups and so they implemented that to get the cosplayers in a specific group to share their Cosmania memories. The 2B cosplayer had mic troubles because it took some time before we can hear her.
Now it’s time for Shadow Play and no, this isn’t something trademarked by NVIDIA but what it is is that the emcees will have to choose from a bunch of people in the audience to be “shadow players”.
From said bunch of people, they would pick the players by using a question. Think of it as a filter, it’s just like FanFes’ games where from out of all the Zoom people, they pick two or three people to be the contestants.
What do these shadow players do? The players pick a letter, a silhouette appears and they have to answer what or who is the person behind said silhouette. The mechanics on how they will guess who or what’s on the silhouette were kind of borrowed from “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” as you’re given options on how you will answer the question.
The first qualifiers were grueling as hell but the second round was a massacre because Nekomi Kasai just dunked all over the competition as she scored 5-0 against the competition.
There were also ad breaks in between rounds and it’s for Cosplay.PH’s Patreon account. Here are the tiers and the Cosplay.PH Patreon link:
The final round begins. We now have five letters instead of ten, thus the options from getting the answers are limited as well making this a sudden death round but that grinds to a halt as the other contestant went AWOL.
So now begins the YouTuber’s Choice ™ for the Cosplay ½ contest, and then the finalist from Round 2 showed up so the games continue.
We finally have a winner for Shadow Play. Fortunately for the loser, she doesn’t get sent to the Shadow Realm because the final round is as grueling as the first qualifier. Believe you me, Tito Jay the tech booth guy even threw some tricky ones.
It’s time to announce the winners for Cosplay ½.
For the YouTuber awards, the 2B cosplayer won by a whopping 34 points.
It looks like people really like Nier Automata huh? As for the grand winner, Nekomi Kasai won the judges’ hearts so that saved her from being banished to the shadow realm after losing on the grand finals of Shadow Play.
The event ends with a group shot of all the cosplayers on the live stage voice chat and they close out with the music video for the frontliners, just like Fanfes.
In retrospect, VCM is what I can consider a mini-event. It’s not as big as FanFes wherein the event has it’s own Discord server and not much to do if you’re not part of the voice chat but for what it’s worth, and for being a mini-event, the fun factor wasn’t cut in half. In fact, you still got the Cosplay.PH event experience in just a matter of almost three hours.
Unlike FanFes though, the technical difficulties became more evident as time went on. Not sure why but I don’t blame CPH or the cosplayers for it, I put the blame on the telcos still haven’t fixed the kinks that were supposed to be fixed last week.
All in all, this can be a thing as long as this timeline hasn’t been fixed yet. I don’t care about convention overload, give me more of these.
Rayas-WEB 