Anime NYC 2025 Saturday Gallery And Writeup

Per my usual style, in this, my second and final article on Anime NYC 2025, I’ll be doing an editorial style piece. Before I get started, I’d like to mention a couple of things for full disclosure.

First, I only attended two of the four days of the convention — Friday and Saturday. This wasn’t due to any sort of lack of interest, as I’d have loved to have been at the convention for another day, but alas, my body wasn’t ready. I have over a two hour commute each way, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to get home and get a good night’s sleep to recover fully from my activities each day.

Also, I should mention that I spent the lion’s share of my days in the “Destination Cosplay” area in the River Pavilion. I never really got my ear to the ground during or after the convention to hear how things went in other areas of the venue, so my feedback outside of the River Pavilion may be a bit limited.

I’d like to start off by saying that I love the idea of “Destination Cosplay” and appreciate that the organizers feel that it’s worth dedicating a significant space specifically for cosplay related activities. I, and many others would be very disappointed if this area was ever removed or scaled back significantly.

With that said, there is certainly some room for improvement. The first thing that comes to my mind pertains to the cosplay photoshoot/meetups held in the area. Last year, I suggested that more space be dedicated to these meetups. That did end up happening, but however, the number of meetups being held during the convention was increased from around 50 last year, to about 75 this year. This was sort of one step forward, but one step back. That being the case, the area became quite crowded once again this year. I briefly stopped by a few meetups throughout the two days I was in attendance, but on at least a couple of occasions I ‘noped’ right out of there when I saw the sheer number of bodies in the area.

There are a couple of potential solutions to this. One would be to start utilizing the one segment of the floor that was used for seating for premium ticket holders (or something to that effect). That area feels out of place up in the River Pavilion anyways, but I can’t say I have any ideas regarding where to move it to, and I doubt they’ll remove it from the convention entirely.

The other solution would be simply to scale back the number of meetups closer to the amount that was held last year. I love these fandom photoshoot/meetups, but the organizers may have been overextending a bit when they scheduled so many.

Some photographers, possibly professionals, that set up in the North and South Concourse areas of the convention center apparently drew the ire of some attendees, which you can read about in a Reddit thread here. I’m not going to get too in depth talking about this, but it seems that it is something that needs to be addressed by convention management. I should stress that sending photographers upstairs to the already crowded River Pavilion is just about the worst possible idea.

As I mentioned in my first article, Anime NYC is rapidly growing. The convention has more than doubled its attendance within the past two years, and overcrowding in areas of the venue is definitely an issue that the organizers should endeavor to remedy. The convention is not currently utilizing the recent addition made to the North building, and I think it would be very wise for them to consider doing so within the next couple of years.

Among the cosplayers in this gallery are manaknight, xj9nny, _mikall, kellilaurenxoxo, banhmibryan, Sakuraharunogirl, kawaii.leigh, salliannwood, olivialabosky, mushroom_cosplay, mythwishcosplay, nekomunchkin, Yuki Crissy, thatonen3rddcosplay, arelivale, mostlyghostlycosplay, vivbeauty.nyc, irlplushies, greg_kenji, pinkspookyghost, mizubimayhem, and many more.

We now use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and will post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This will allow 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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