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..｡*ﾟ+ HEY I won Zenkaikon’s T-shirt design contest!! .Which is. very cool..｡*ﾟ+
If you’re going to the con, make sure to pick up a shirt! I’m very happy with how this came out, and I can’t wait to see it printed! ..｡*ﾟ+
[click for better image]
when i have to be following more than one person for a blog rate
that's when i realize this is not worth it
Why I don't like 'Audience Vote' Run Cosplay Contests Online
As many of you may, or may not know- I distinctly have come to dislike contests that use 'likes' or 'votes' from public audiences in order to judge a winner. Recently I had to explain to someone my distaste for them and why I wont enter things like 'Otaku House', and why I run Limelight Masquerade the way I do.
Like contests are created not for the cosplayers, but for the company/page
Short and simple- a cosplay contest that is run off of votes (including applications) can be used as a tool not to help promote cosplayers, but instead use our natural competitive nature to gain an audience back to the page.
How is this done? You like the page to enter, you share your entry an enormous amount of times to garter more likes, which in turns get more viewership to the page. Several pages require applications, which has you not only like the page but also sign up for the application (which in itself is a trick) in order to vote. All of this sharing, liking, commenting, ect promotes a higher score of the page for viewership outside of their normal audience,
Some pages do not even run these contests in order to promote cosplayers. It is simply the knowledge that our competitive natures will boost their social ranking.
(Ironically, running 'like only' contests is against the TOS of Facebook and they can shut you down for that.)
Like/Vote contests cater to pulling the followers off of internet popular cosplayers
Like the above, tapping into a popular cosplayer is one of the biggest advantages a contest like these have in our community. The more popular the cosplayer, the bigger the advantage that they'll not only pull the cosplay followers- but also the regular nerds and the normal people who follow these people as well. You give an award to very popular cosplayer? You now have a following of their fans wanting to help support the company that boosted someone they enjoy.
Like/Vote contests is a lazy way to judge
When we do judging for our LLM cosplay contest we stop all our activities for the page for a full month in order to dedicate time to judging. We go through three rounds of judging with several different criteria- including a craftsmanship portion on the side. For me, to do 30 entries can take up to an hour or more to do them effectively. Then to avoid through the 'they're all merging together' mode I batch them 10 or 15 at a time over the span of a few days to make sure each batch is fresh.
What's easier? Letting the people do the judging. Keep your page active and posting while other people do the numbers for you. Like/Vote contests in the end become a lot easier because it adds no time to the administrators of the page and instead get to eat up the social score boost.
Like/Vote contests can cause anxiety and distress in cosplayers
Ever enter a cosplay contest online? And go scrolling through the entries to see where you are placed? And the moment you see you are several hundred (maybe thousand) likes beneath the popular cosplayer? That's a pretty terrible thing to see.
This is a main reason why competitions do not show judging, -especially- during the competition. Because it distresses the competitors and eventually causes them to overall give up because they feel like they have no chance.
When we live in a community that has a serious amount of self-image issues, heavy anxiety problems and enough self-hate generated from the real world that this could potentially be damaging to a persons view on cosplay, and especially other cosplayers. For many this is their first experience with competition in cosplay, which cause them to turn away from future real life competitions such as craftsmanship or performance judging because they feel that the same rules will apply: The popular or 'best' win and they do not have a chance in hell. They will instead grow into this ideal that there will always be a bigger fish, so why even bother.
***
Now of course, this is simply my outward opinion onto the like/popularity run cosplay contests. It does not cater to all contests online but it certainly could be applied to a bunch I've seen. And it's also sad because eventually it becomes the way we categorize cosplayers as 'great' or 'best'. That we instead take the views of our peers- many of them who aren't even cosplayers themselves- and use this as a way to rank each other in a hobby.
But I would really love some follow up opinion (like I do with all my rants.) What do you feel about Like/Vote contests?
