Animarketplace 2022

Los Angeles has so many events happening every weekend. From sports, concerts, fairs and conventions that have been in circulation for year and years, to new events such as the Animarketplace.

With 2 years strong, it’s gotten its fair share of growth every year. It’s still being held in Little Tokyo, but in a year or 2, it’ll have to be moved to a bigger area. As it was now, it was pretty full of booths.

I met up with Alyza a little late into the convention. We were just in time as they started getting ready for the Costume competition. We had enough time walk around and look at the booths first. We saw a lot of people who dressed up. We were trying to see how many Genshin Impact costumes we saw. We ended up seeing 8 which were really well made. Sadly, none of them participated in the competition.

The competition was supposed to last 30 minutes but they had some technical difficulties with the microphone so they ended up taking closer to an hour. You could tell they are barely getting the hang of holding this event.

The people wearing costumes were excited and extremely happy to participate. The 3 judges are well known in the cosplay world so it was nice hearing their take on the costumes. About half of the people made their costumes by hand so that was really cool.

The girl that one made the black dress all herself. She did a lot of research about the material, color and trim from the era of the character she was cosplaying as. It was for sure the best of the group.

After the competition was over, we had a quick meal in the local restaurant. The food is always good in this are. We beat the rush of people from the expo.

Once we finished eating we got Somi Somi like we always do. The line for this was exceptionally long. There was a few of the cosplayers that were in the competition so it was really nice to see their costumes up front.

We explored the booths one last time and bought a comic book from one of the artists. It was pretty cool. By now it was getting dark and it was time to go.

I’m going to keep an eye out on this event for next year. I think it’s going to be getting bigger and bigger.