By the fans, for the fans.
FanimeCon celebrated its 25th anniversary with style this year, introducing a jam-packed weekend of cosplay, panels, and special guests. We’re always impressed by the cosplay we encounter while navigating the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, and decided to once again compile a gallery of our favorites.
First held in 1994, FanimeCon is an anime and gaming convention that was first put together by several college anime clubs. Today, it’s one of northern California’s more well-known anime conventions, attracting various anime fans from across the state. FanimeCon 2019 saw several special guests in attendance this year, including Funimation ADR director and voice actor Jād Saxton and Studio Bones co-founder and director Toshihiro Kawamoto. Saxton has had a rather cat-filled career, voicing the likes of Carla in Fairy Tail, Koneko in High School DxD, and Haru in My Roommate is a Cat, but her voice has been heard in dozens of series dating back to Masako Hara in 2008’s Ghost Hunt. Meanwhile, Kawamoto has worked on anime such as Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and Space Dandy.
FanimeCon is most well-known for its massive cosplay turnout, as cosplayers flood the quad right outside the convention hall. Despite the blazing sun, you typically run into hundreds of cosplayers jam-packed into the space. We saw numerous anime and video game characters throughout the weekend. There were far too many for us to snap a picture of everyone, so we grabbed photos of some of our favorites.
My Hero Academia and My Hero Academia: Vigilantes cosplayers were out in full force. Little surprise there considering how popular the anime is for the former and manga for the latter. Seeing Game of Thrones cosplayers at FanimeCon was a little surprising though. Despite the popularity of the show, public opinion for it seems to have shifted slightly in the past few weeks with the final season. We saw all the Spider-folk from Into the Spider-Verse too, several characters from God of War, and the occasional deranged monster from BioShock, Bloodborne, or other spooky video games. All that and more can be found in the gallery below.