PAX East 2026 Thursday Gallery Part 2
When I finally did get my slightly late start Thursday morning, we had a rush of cosplayers waiting to get their photos taken, and Castro and his team got an early rush of people already needing cosplay repair. Then it slowed down quite a bit. Slow enough that when my table assistant for the day, Clever of Adventures of Clever, arrived I sent him and his companions off to have fun, with instructions to check back in around 90 minutes later.
Before we opened the doors to Room 207 at noon, Nerd Caliber founder Manny and videographer and editor Victoria came by to set up a base camp and prepare to get on the show floor and do both game developer interviews and get social media clips of Victoria’s awesome idea “Give Us a Spin” action video of cosplayers. When they came back hours later, it turned out that many of the devs they were looking to interview weren’t planning to arrive until Friday, so Victoria volunteered to be a third table assistant for much of the weekend, when she wasn’t out doing video or back in her hotel room editing video.
New to the team this year was Nana of nanaakaonasis, who filled a completely new role for us — hype man. I printed up all new business cards with information on the back about the studio and Room 207, and Nana’s job was to go out in the Thomas M. Menino Convention and Exhibition Center and ask cosplayers if they have had their free photos taken at the PAX East official photo studio. If they said “no” he would hand them a card and explain further what we were doing and how to find us.
Nana started on Thursday, and while he is the perfect choice for that role given his endless positivity and energy, as the day wore on and it seemed to me that I wasn’t taking very many photos, I wondered if the whole idea of a hype man was wrong. Then a cosplayer came by for photos and, when I told him to take a card, he said that he already got one from the guy on the show floor. I did a quick count of images in the camera and realized I was already well over the number I shot on Thursday of 2025. At the end of the day, we doubled last year’s numbers, and Nana was definitely a big part of that.
Cosplayers in the second Thursday gallery include aralylangomas, CJ Baker, Carl Baker, elsiethewitch, safern93, force_majeure_cos, jammthejedi, eggland_art, viridiancosplay, shericosplays, rosen.queen, terrorus_cosplay, floris_lilium, _olivia_kelley_, magicalwarriorscosplay, jinx.jaded, blackprincesspeach, tamz_sez, and many more.
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