It seemed inevitable, considering the large number of people joining up and the hobby that has become widely popular.
Some say it was the recent SM Megamall Martilyo Gang jewel heist that provoked it. Some twitters even proposed having an Anti-Cosplay Bill due to the incident (as news reported that the robbers wore costumes, but later on retracted as CCTV cameras saw them wearing plain clothes). Some later on claimed it was a sarcastic joke that went overboard thanks to irresponsible posting and liking of screenshots of the matter in Facebook.
Thinking about it, it really shouldn't have garner this much stigma against cosplayers but apparently the move is justified due to the robbery scare and cosplayers who like to bring realistic gun props to events. As much as I like cosplaying, some people simply has this need to be kick-ass, so they bring realistic guns to an event saying its for cosplay, disregarding the orange tip rule and the common sense of not playing around carelessly and pointing the gun props at anyone. Its election year and I've already talked about how to go about it during the gun ban during the election year of 2009. Guess people forget.
But personally, I feel that Robinsons admin was simply looking for a way to justify enforcing cosplayers because of an incident that happened just last December, in an event which had cosplay activities. A fight occurred between two cosplayers (or costume makers?) that ended up rather badly. But the bad part was it was done inside the event premises and security needed to separate them along with their friends. Already it resulted with rumors that cosplay events will be banned from the mall. With PCC (Philippine Cosplay Convention) being the next in line, the organizers Cosplay.ph waited for the eventual storm.
Needless to say, this has been the result of unfortunate circumstances and self-centered stupidity. Now that the eventual "zero tolerance" atmosphere has taken effect (similar to Anime Expo in Los Angeles), I wonder if cosplayers in general would finally learn something from this. After all, it takes just one person to bring down the whole, the minority bringing down the majority which of course, includes the public posting of mismanaged sarcasm versus the angry herd mentality phenomenon witnessed in Twitter and FB.
Oh well, this will all come to pass I guess. Sooner or later people will realize this is just a kneejerk reaction until somebody robs a bank. I bet someone in the internet will say the robbers looked like Superman and Batman. Oh wait, they already did.
