![\"Dressed](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/CTC-L-C2E2-0329-04.jpg\")
Dressed as the character Waluigi, Ginny Differding looks through comics during C2E2 at McCormick Place, March 29, 2026, in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez\/Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\nThe Tribes of C2E2 assembled at McCormick Place last weekend for their 16th meeting since 2010, the many constituencies of the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, 100,000 strong. Raggedy Ann-like pigtails streaming from anime fans. A handmade Silver Surfer posing atop a gravity-defying longboard cleverly hiding the skateboard beneath. A Doctor Octopus wrestling with the push bar on a door, his tentacles made from HVAC duct tape and EVA foam quivering in frustration.<\/p>\n
\u201cJesus Christ,\u201d he said to himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlease,\u201d came the soft reply of a \u201cResident Evil\u201d zombie, \u201cit\u2019s Lent.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, sorry,\u201d came the even softer apology.<\/p>\n
A Mandalorian passed, his plastic armor clack-clack-clacking, filling the silence.<\/p>\n
We hear that Americans can\u2019t talk nowadays, that offense and disagreement devolve into shouting, that perhaps the American experiment was fated to derail in a nation of so many cultures and languages. The people who say that should visit C2E2, which, year after year, invariably comes together into a South Loop city-state for three days. If Chicago is the city that works, C2E2 is the congress that talks, and listens, and remains civil. For a weekend, a gazillion distinctive fan communities blur into a linguistic utopia.<\/p>\n
The Tribes have spoken.<\/p>\n
No one person always understood what everyone else was saying, but they said it.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, I stood beside Aaramis Hill of Indiana, a self-described entrepreneur and aspiring cybersecurity professional from Gary. He wore the black and white samurai-like robes of a character from the Japanese show \u201cBleach.\u201d We watched a dozen doppelgangers with orange hair, \u201cBleach\u201d fans, mingling. \u201cWhat am I looking at?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ones dressed like me are CAPTAINS,\u201d he said. The ones in jumpsuits, he went on, \u201care HOLLOWS, who used to be people \u2014 they also should have holes in their chests.\u201d<\/p>\n
I strolled away into a LARP-ing arena, a kind of playground for Live-Action Role-Playing, which is a polite way of saying: Two sets of warriors of divergent properties (\u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d \u201cStar Wars,\u201d \u201cBlue\u2019s Clues,\u201d \u201cMy Pretty Pony\u201d) face each other across an imaginary field, \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d-like. Everyone cradles a foam bat, until they are released, run at each other and swing.<\/p>\n
Imagine a group slap fight.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s tough to witness this for more than 15 seconds, so I walked into the autographing arena, which is a genuine battlefield of anxiety, exhaustion and perseverance. Tim Smith of Springfield stood in a long line waiting to meet Martin Sheen (who himself gave us the WALK AND TALK). Smith had waited in a longer line that day to meet Elizabeth Olsen; a few fans said that they waited for four hours. But how else do you guarantee you\u2019re not getting a SECRETARIAL, an autograph signed by an assistant? The big fear, he said, is a real RACKFEST, or too many fans holding too much memorabilia to sign.<\/p>\n
I said, there should be a word for the celebrity who waits at a folding table, looking forlorn, even as lines for celebrities in booths beside them stretch far away and loop.<\/p>\n
He smiled and nodded at Wayne Knight, of \u201cSeinfeld,\u201d whose autograph line appeared oddly slight, whereas the line for B.D. Wong, Knight\u2019s costar from \u201cJurassic Park,\u201d curled and stretched.<\/p>\n
A few days of this, huddled in endless lines, standing for hours, shouldering bags of MYSTERY BOXES and HORSE GIRL art, discussing the latest SHIPS in Harry Potter FANFIC (meaning the latest imagined romances between characters, created by self-published online fan fiction), it\u2019s not unusual to come down with CON CRUD, or nerd flu.<\/p>\n
Definitely GLOMPING, being tackle-hugged by COSPLAYERS, doesn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh my frickin\u2019 god, you look so frickin\u2019 cute!\u201d said a woman wearing \u201cStranger Things\u201d Scoops Ahoy COSPLAY to Katie Godfrey, 27, a motion-graphics designer for a Chicago production agency. She certainly looked KAWAII, Japanese for \u201ccute.\u201d She wore long turquoise hair and a candy-colored dress bustling outward like a happy mushroom.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m dressed as Miku,\u201d she told me, meaning she\u2019s cosplaying as the performing corporate mascot of Vocaloid, the synthesizer software developed by Yamaha \u2014 but then you knew that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve met so many other WEEBs through AMVs,\u201d she said, \u201cwhich are just anime music videos, which is actually how a lot of people who work in motion graphics started out. But really, being here, it\u2019s a kind of CON OSMOSIS, meaning I might not play that game or watch that show, but after staying a while at C2E2, you pick up everything anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n
A WEEB is an anime fan.<\/p>\n
Which, basically, is a GEEK, or NERD, or BLERD (a Black nerd), or FANBOY, or FANGIRL, none of which are used here in any derogatory way, and are generally interchangeable. Myself, a fanboy of a certain age, I am known among the YOUNGLINGS (a child in the \u201cStar Wars\u201d universe) as a FANOSAUR. But that doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m an overly obsessive STAN. And certainly, if I were a fan of K-pop, I wouldn\u2019t have a BIAS, which is K-pop for a favorite performer. More likely, I\u2019d have way too many BIAS WRECKERS, or K-pop for the almost-favorite threatening to unseat your favorite. I\u2019m too casual in my tastes. I cringe at clear FAN SERVICE, or corporate pandering from T.P.T.B. (the powers that be). I\u2019m certainly no member of any MANAGER ARMY, the derisive term for fans who get way too opinionated about the real careers of their BIAS.<\/p>\n
But then, it\u2019s hard being offended when the woman beside you is dressed like a yellow barrel from \u201cJaws.\u201d<\/p>\n
That wasn\u2019t even my favorite C2E2 cosplay this year. That honor goes to Gabrielle Amey and husband Michael, who were dressed as a CHICAGO HANDSHAKE. Meaning, she played Lady Old Style, he played Lord Malort, original characters they created for one day. He had a bottle of Malort at the end of his emerald cane; she wore a Marie Antoinette-esque wig constructed from Old Style cans she cut and piled into a tower of tin curls. The stitching on his long coat and ruffled sleeves \u2014 all created by Gabrielle \u2014 paid homage to Malort. Way too subtle for cosplay judges, they feared.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not pandering like any of the BOOBS AND BALLGOWNS cosplays,\u201d she said, \u201cwhich actually is the shorthand a lot of cosplayers complain about, that convention judges often miss little details when an audience is so excited by boobs and ballgowns.\u201d<\/p>\n
That said, if there\u2019s a common language at C2E2, it\u2019s cosplay.<\/p>\n
Dressed as the character Waluigi, Ginny Differding looks through comics during C2E2 at McCormick Place, March 29, 2026, in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez\/Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is where all the different groups of C2E2 converge,\u201d said Rita Christianson, a student in the theater department at DePaul University, which keeps a booth at C2E2 every year and provides free help with wig and costume malfunctions throughout the weekend. \u201cYou end up fixing so many different kinds of fans that you start to pick up a baseline language of what they\u2019re into. I mean, I know way more about \u2018Five Nights at Freddy\u2019s\u2019 than I would normally know. I learned more about obscure superheroes just doing this. A lot of anime people tell me the backgrounds of their characters and I have no idea what they mean.\u201d<\/p>\n
Christianson herself told me this while wearing fake blood caked on her face and an aggressively ordinary work shirt. She explained that she was \u201cRobert\u201d in the video game Dispatch, and I nodded but had no idea what she meant.<\/p>\n
Erin Kennedy, who runs the school\u2019s wig and makeup department, pulled aside another student, McMillian Spicer, who was playing Jon Snow from \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is some cosplaying language?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh,\u201d McMillian said, \u201cwell, I was CON CRUNCHING to get my cosplay ready, so there\u2019s always a need to have a CON PLAN,\u201d or a schedule of your costumes for the weekend.<\/p>\n
Behind them, a Regency-era queen was undergoing WIG PREP, which is the work that\u2019s done beneath the actual wig, while WIG STYLING is the assembling of the wig itself. Many cosplayers brought their BUILD BOOKS, or scrapbooks that show the steps and skills they employed to create the look you see; they need one to enter any competition. \u201cWe also hear a lot about making sure a costume is SUPERHERO-LANDING READY,\u201d Kennedy said. Meaning, in general, the costume should look perfect when they pose.<\/p>\n
The kind of perfect that\u2019s illustrated on a CLASSIC COVER, the term used for a vintage comic-book cover so distinctive or iconic that the cover itself renders the book valuable, explained Travis Landry, owner of Landry Pop Auctions and an \u201cAntiques Roadshow\u201d regular. He pointed to a 1946 cover showing a heroine being injected by a hypodermic needle. \u201cAnd, oh, this one \u2014 that\u2019s not-so-thinly-veiled bondage imagery.\u201d<\/p>\n
So not quite WEDNESDAY SUPERHEROES, or the traditional ubiquitous heroes everyone knows, named for the weekday when new Marvel and DC comics arrive.<\/p>\n
After hours of hearing about GARBAGE BAG TESTS from local monster maker Tristian Johnson (i.e., when creators build a monster out of cheap material, before committing to the real deal) and the ways that players of collectible card games use CHAINS (the order of how a card is played against another card, and then another, and so), I feared coming down with con crud.<\/p>\n
I left the convention floor for a quiet hallway and passed an open ballroom.<\/p>\n
Inside, Dennis Kardys was preparing a game of Dungeons & Dragons. He was the DUNGEON MASTER. At a convention like this, where time is not unlimited, some favor a DUNGEON CLASSIC CRAWL, he said. Except then there\u2019s the chance of being FUNNELED, placed on the rails and headed for a very specific destination, instead of the OPEN-WORLD anything-goes of traditional D&D. He was laying out detailed sheets.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the hardest things about this world,\u201d he said, \u201cis how coded it can be to outsiders. Like if I ask you what your AC is, would you understand what I meant?\u201d<\/p>\n
No, I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSee? Your ARMOR CLASS,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s intimidating to someone just getting started. But it\u2019s just like anything else. Once you learn the language, you\u2019re a part of something.\u201d<\/p>\n
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Tribes of C2E2 assembled at McCormick Place last weekend for their 16th meeting since 2010, the many…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":694191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5124],"tags":[648,960,171,20596,5386,1818,2765,1370,53,1072,7156],"class_list":["post-694190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago","tag-arts","tag-chicago","tag-entertainment","tag-fun-and-games","tag-il","tag-illinois","tag-keywee","tag-latest-headlines","tag-movies","tag-things-to-do","tag-tv-and-streaming"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116322353091211322","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/694191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}