Arisia 2019 Friday Cosplay Gallery And Event Roundup

Arisia 2019 is going on as I type this on Sunday of the four-day event. Bad weather is keeping me away for the last two days of the con, but that bad weather is just the latest in a storm of problems that the con has been facing over the last few months.

It all started with top management being called out for lack of response to sexual assault and harassment allegations and included serious consequences from that along with astonishingly bad luck. Before we get to the link to the short cosplay photo gallery from Friday, let me give a brief rundown of what happened.

Back in October, a former attendee and volunteer staffer of Arisia wrote a blog post accusing Arisia of not only doing nothing about the person they says raped them, but making him president of the not-for-profit corporation that runs the event. The blog was reposted to the Facebook group Fans of Arisia, which is not officially associated with the convention. There it gained huge amounts of attention, spawning other people to come forward with their own complaints about how the Executive Board of the con handled their complaints about harassment, assault and consent violation issues — despite Arisia supposedly having a well-developed structure to handle just such things.

Ultimately this led to the resignation of the then-president and his ban from the convention completely. New board elections saw the replacement of nearly all board members. And more people accused of violations were either banned from holding any staff positions or banned from the convention completely.

While this was going on, the home hotel of Arisia, the Westin Boston Waterfront in South Boston, was the target of protests from striking workers, as were all Marriott International chain hotels, including among others the Sheraton Boston, home of Anime Boston. Between people not wanting to cross a picket line, and people furious with Arisia’s handling of the assault and other violations, numerous former attendees and vendors announced they would not be attending in 2019. So the con decided to move back to the hotel it was at years ago, the Park Plaza next to the theater district in downtown Boston. 

Less than 24 hours after announcing the move in mid-November, the Westin strike was settled and the protest was over. But, having signed an agreement with the Park Plaza, Arisia had to go forward with plans to hold the con there in 2019.

Planning went forward for both the setup at the new location and the further correcting of the problems with violations handling. Fast forward to this past Thursday night, and staffers were at the storage facility where much of the gear and goods that get reused each year are stored. That day, both elevators in the facility failed, and the room was on the third floor. After removing everything they needed from storage via a bucket brigade along three stories of stairway, two trucks were on the way to the Park Plaza.

One broke down before it got there.

When I got to the Park Plaza about 10:30 Friday morning, setup was almost as far along as it would be on any previous Friday morning at the Westin, despite all of these problems. To be clear, I heard plenty of grousing about ongoing issues with the location, the pre-planning and the general tension and stress among the staff and volunteers. But nobody lost their religion (at least not in my earshot and not that I was told or overheard tales of), and everybody did their jobs. 

Then the weather hit.

It remains to be seen how well Arisia will recover from the devastating reveal of its callous disregard and terrible mishandling of violations reports. Or how it will recover from a year in which both attendance and vendor numbers are down — possibly significantly, although we won’t know that until after the 2019 convention ends. But I do know that management, staff and volunteers need kudos for pulling off any convention this year given all the problems chance put in their way and they handed themselves — to say nothing of a convention that ran as smoothly (mostly) as this one did.

Now on to the gallery. You will notice that this year we have started a new way to present cosplay photo galleries. We have a Smugmug account and will post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This will allow us to save money on hosting storage, and give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.

Cosplayers in this short Friday gallery include featured image moriah_miracle, blissfulanime, PaperToadette, Greengrasspony Cosplay, Colonial Armory, femmeqween, nekomanci, and others.

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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