Well, I’m in the middle of packing my life away in boxes as I’m preparing to move, so cosplay was out of the question for this event. In a way, this worked out well as this is my first time attending “Ottawa Comiccon: Holiday Edition”. Typically – because I seem to enjoy having my whole head covered when I’m in cosplay – I like to check out conventions/events in somewhat “normal” attire/cosplays before subjecting myself to to difficulties associated with a full yarn face. Now, I’ve been to the EY Centre plenty of times before, so I was not worried about the layout of the space, but as I have not yet been to one of these Holiday Edition events (I believe this is only the second one…?) I want to get a feel for the atmosphere so that in future I will know what is/is not an appropriate/safe cosplay for me to wear.
From what I heard about last year’s holiday event, this one took up much more space in the EY Centre but overall it was small by Ottawa Comiccon standards. Basically, the Holiday Edition is a large vendors exhibition area. Although an event like this is great for a little geeky shopping just in time for the holidays, it’s not the kind of event that draws a lot of cosplayers. So I could safely wear something like my Nightcrawler or Jar Jar cosplays here, but they wouldn’t really be worth the effort for a low key event like this. Something like Scarecrow – where I’m wearing normal clothes with a yarn face – would probably be a better fit. Although there were a handful of cosplayers wandering around – some of them were even decked out in very creative holiday versions of their cosplays – the main focus was clearly the shopping.
Based on what I have seen on Facebook these past couple of weeks, I was excited to visit the vendors area. On Facebook I follow quite a lot of the usual suspects as far as vendors go – people I’ve seen/met/purchased from at other Comiccon events or at other local events like the Ottawa Geek Market – so I knew that a lot of my favourites would be in attendance this weekend. My boyfriend and I wandered the aisles of the event saying hi to friends and vendors, doing some personal shopping and some Christmas shopping.
Now normally I would give a detailed product description of our purchases from the vendors, but there was Christmas shopping involved! I can say that my top purchases of the day were some Funko Pops for my collection from a couple of vendors, some beautiful Christmas stockings from Two Emu Creations, and some delicious flavoured coffee from JenEric Designs. I would like to acknowledge the following vendors we made purchases from this weekend: Toys on Fire, Rebecca Menard, Comic Cage, It Came From The Basement, Isabelle Angell, Pats Watches and Fashion, Angelyques Trinkets.
So as an extension of Ottawa Comiccon, this was definitely a much more simplified event. This was still a lot of fun though, and it was a great chance to see fellow members of the geek community. And this was absolutely a great way to get some geeky shopping done.
