Colossalcon East 2025 Marvel Rivals Swim Shoot

IT’S MAHVEL BAYBEE!

Continuing my coverage of Colossalcon East 2025, I have the Marvel Rivals Swim Shoot I hosted at the Kalahari water park on Saturday afternoon of the convention.

The free-to-play 6v6 third-person hero shooter, featuring characters from the Marvel Universe, gained huge popularity after its release toward the end of last year. Likewise, cosplay of characters from the game has become extremely popular, as many Marvel Rivals cosplayers are likely to be seen on the show floor of any given comic, anime, or video game convention.

For full disclosure, I must confess that I do not play Marvel Rivals. Call me a fake gamer boy if you must. Why host a Marvel Rivals meetup then? First and foremost, I love Marvel characters, and I love video games, so that’s probably reason enough right there. Also, considering the popularity of the game, and cosplay based on it, there wasn’t much doubt that there would be enough cosplayers in attendance to have a decent sized meetup/photoshoot. Also, sue me or send me to horny jail if you must, but the waifus from the game, and those who cosplay said characters, certainly didn’t make me second guess my decision.

I’ve hosted my share of meetups at Colossalcon East, but this one was one of the more challenging experiences for me. We ended up having around 30-35 total cosplayers in attendance at the meetup. I would consider this a fairly large turnout, and it was one of, if not the largest group I’ve ever hosted a meetup for.

I was the lone host/coordinator for the meetup, as well as the lead photographer. Personally, I would say that one person can probably assume all of those roles for a meetup of maybe around 20-25 people or less, which I have done in the past, but once that number rises to around 30 or more, it definitely helps a lot to at least have one co-host for the meetup to help keep things in order and moving along smoothly.

Although the meetup was certainly far from a disaster, I must admit that I began to lose control of the meetup at times. I started off by gathering the social media info for as many people as I could as people began to file in. This seemed like a better idea than trying to get this information after the meetup as I had in the past, since some people will immediately leave the area after a meetup. That went pretty well, and although it was time-consuming, I’ll probably continue to do so in that manner in the future.

Unfortunately a lot of people show up late to meetups, and well, everything else, at Colossalcon East. It’s just sort of the nature or culture of the convention that I’ve grown to accept. However, it does sometimes present a tough decision to be made; when do you make the call to start the meetup? At what point does stalling for the latecomers become annoying to the attendees that actually showed up on time?

When the time came that I decided it was time to begin the meetup, I rushed over to a group of people that I personally knew to be sure they didn’t miss the start. They were taking photos with another photographer, so I decided to wait a few final minutes for them. As I turned my head back to the group, I noticed something interesting. The meetup — you know, the one I’m the host of — WAS STARTING WITHOUT ME!

After I hurried back over there, I discovered that apparently there was some confusion as to who the host was. I thought maybe the fact that I had gone around getting everyone’s social media info earlier would have implied that I was the host, but perhaps that was a bit presumptuous of me. Either way, I didn’t consider this to be some sort of hostile takeover. Rather, I took this a needed kick in the ass telling me that it was time to get this show on the road!

As I mentioned before, a co-host/coordinator would have been helpful. I had other cosplayers and another photographer’s lens creeping into my shot on a number of occasions. I also had a tough time getting everyone packed together enough in the large group shots to fit into the frame. I found myself climbing on one of the chairs set up by the wave pool to try to get a better angle to compensate for some of this stuff, which let to camera shake as I tried to balance myself on a not so steady surface. Due to all these things, I ended up having to delete a fair chunk of my photos due to poor quality.

By no means am I mentioning all this to vent or complain. I thought perhaps it might be interesting to hear things from the perspective of a host, as only a very small percentage of the thousands in attendance have, or ever will host a meetup. As the sole host of this meetup, I ultimately take responsibility for any disappointment that anyone at the meetup may have had. This was an absolutely fantastic group of cosplayers, and under ideal circumstances, my photo gallery from this photoshoot could have easily been double or triple the size it was.

I’ve already talked to a couple of people about collaborating on a meetup next year and hope to continue to improve as a host in order to make everyone’s experience as positive as possible, while maximizing the amount of quality photos I get during these meetups.

Thank you again to everyone that came out to the first ever Marvel Rivals Swim Shoot at Colossalcon East!

Cosplayer in this gallery include zadrabug, xavacynx, ladykayleen, ry_anyone, greg_kenji, blackacecosplays, pixxiestarr, gooisa.cos, cosplayrocket, joseph.connery, hey.hey.dj, sayamaycry, aranea_venenum, krisc_cubed, cos_meme_, ftcow, darthcross, mango.shark, stevehatpirates, piexv, serenityblairrcosplay, jme_cosplays, just_.j0j0, oreosandheroes, 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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