Arisia 2023 Saturday Cosplay Gallery
The long-running sci-fi and fantasy focused Boston convention Arisia took off the last two years because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s first year back, again at the Westin Waterfront hotel in South Boston, was a fraction of its pre-pandemic self. This was a bit of a surprise, since those cons that I was able to attend in 2022 seemed to be running at about 75 percent of normal attendance.
One way I can judge attendance numbers without actually having them from the con itself is the number of cosplay photos I take. This year I took 95 photos of cosplayers on Saturday. In 2020, the last year the convention was held, I took more than 180 photos on Saturday of that convention. All other indications our team of Gregg of Wonderllama Photography and I saw this weekend indicated that attendance was at best 50 percent of pre-pandemic normal.
Most people we talked to put as the main reason Arisia’s Covid compliance policy, which had a requirement for proof of vaccination that included the latest bivalent booster shot. I was among those that had not had the latest booster shot and had to rush to get the shot in time to make the two-week clearance period. Just minutes before posting this on social media, Arisia announced on Instagram that one of its Information Desk volunteers had tested positive for Covid-19. So maybe the vaccine policy was a very good idea.
Still, I had a good time seeing and catching up with con friends and seeing the kind of cosplay you really only get to experience at Arisia in New England. With the con’s strong focus on sci-fi and fantasy as well as steampunk, the cosplayers often create costumes you rarely see at a comic con or anime con, including original characters from various fandoms. A perfect example is the image used for the gallery link below. Wash Washburne from Firefly is not a very common cosplay.
Among the cosplayers in this gallery are Redfield design, lostsanitycosplays, michelleclight, Adventures of Clever, bad_phoenix_wolf, pdemakes, deerprincesscosplay, Colonial Armory, Inevitable Betrayal Cosplay, Carley Winn Cosplay, matrixvampyr, chaoscosplays, makeupmermaidcosplay, makermage, papaya.blossom.cosplay, cosplay_buttercup, estellerodgers, realmatchesmalone, and many more.
We use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This allows us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.
To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.
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