10. Robbing the cradle

I was cosplaying as Red X from Teen Titans and I had this 16 year old girl dressed as Raven follow me around and try and get me to kiss her all day long. I was 20 at the time.

11. Glomping

I was dressed as Edward Elric, friend was dressed as Envy from FMA. The show was still super popular back then and ‘glomping’ was a thing. Some girl ran up behind me at top speed and jumped on my back (and I’m tall, not short like Ed), and bashed me into a table and brought me to my knees. It was horribly embarrassing, and painful.

12. Karaoke fail

Some girl asks me to sing a duet in the karaoke room which I agree to. 30 seconds in and I realize that it’s some anime song that is sung in Japanese, and it’s 8 minutes long.

Longest and most cringiest 8 minutes of my life while butchering the Japanese language in front of an audience.

13. Explicit fan art

At Anime Matsuri last month, I was crossplaying as Prompto with my friend as Noctis. A much younger Noctis cosplayer (they looked to be about 13-14, whereas we’re in our mid-twenties) came up to us and said their Prompto really wanted to meet us. We followed this Noctis cosplayer over to their group of friends, introduced ourselves to the other Prompto, took some selfies, had some laughs.

Apparently, the kids felt super comfortable around us, because they then proceeded to pull out their sketchbooks and show us the explicit fan art they’d drawn while loudly describing each pornographic scene in detail. Needless to say, my friend and I exchanged a look of abject horror and hightailed it out of there, torn between feeling utterly skeevy and biting down the urge to call their mothers.

Obviously, there are kids who wander into the NSFW side of fandom. (I’m sure we all had our instances of saying we were 18+ when prompted to on AFF.net, LJ, etc. back in the day). But to have literal children showing me the porn they drew in real life was positively jarring.