PAX East 2026 Cosplay Meetups – Choose Your Fighter & Star Wars
In 2025 at PAX East all Cosplay Meetup events were held on Friday and Saturday of the four-day convention. This year, a couple of them were held on Thursday because the number of meetups — both cosplay and fandom — had grown significantly over the previous year.
That meant that both of those meetups, Choose Your Fighter and Star Wars, were lightly attended compared to those of the next two days. Thursday is by far the day with the smallest crowds, and that made it a challenge for the organizers and hosts of the meetups to draw a sizeable group of attendees.
Once again, as we did last year, we brought in Jibrii to take the photos from this year’s Cosplay Meetups. This year the meetups were held even closer than they were last year, being in Room 206, literally next door. Well, most of them. For what I assume is again scheduling reasons, some of them were held in Room 109, the room used last year. Room 206 is large enough that only about half the space was used for the meetups, and the other half had tables and chairs to provide a place for cosplayers to hang out and relax, and an area that was used for the overflow crowds from our cosplay photo studio in Room 207.
For this year’s Cosplay Meetup galleries, I brought to the convention my backup Sigma 17-50 f/2.8 lens for Jibrii to use instead of his own kit zoom lens. Having a brighter lens allowed him to shoot at a consistently higher shutter speed, resulting in more good shots per meetup compared to last year. We did ask to rent some LED light panels for the room, but it was determined that the safety and security concerns were too great, so having the better lens was a big help. Jibrii was so enamored of it after just the first meetup that he decided he had to get one himself. Unfortunately, Sigma no longer makes that model, and its replacement is in the Sigma ART line, and way more expensive.
Cosplayers in this combined gallery of the two Thursday meetups include craftycontraptions, triforcedelgeezy_cosplay, pikachuinapikachu, nanaakaonasis, faith.fit.blerd, matchamind, floris_lilium, cattableabby, and many more.
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