A Short-ish Breakdown of What Is Wrong With Heroes of Cosplay

• Syfy’s reality show centered around a past time of geeks around the world caused a stir right from the beginning. The season finale featured a group cosplay contest that quickly went South for many reasons. 
• First, some fans were upset that the Alice: Madness Returns group featured an inaccurate Cheshire Cat and a fight between Alice and Yaya Han’s Red Queen that never ocurrs in the game. This is not a central part of the discussion of the finale at the moment, but some people have brought it it up. 
• To the point: While the judges were deliberating, apparently a group of Doctor Who cosplayers, who did all eleven doctors, started shouting some rude things.
• These rude things may or may not have been spliced together by Syfy.
• Then, later on backstage, apparently some nasty comments were thrown about and, while most people blame the Doctor Who group, made both the HTTYD and DWho’s look pretty rude.
• Not even an hour after the episode premiered (The Who group winning something, The Alice group winning something, and the HTTYD group walking away (I think) empty handed) one of the ladies from the Who group posted something like the following:
• The Who group was frustrated for a myriad of reasons that day. One being that not only them, but everybody else, had only found out that the contest required a skit the day before the contest. They rushed to put something together.
• This of course gives Yaya and the Crabcat girls unfair advantage as they had pre-planned sets, dialog, music, lighting, and special effects.
• Which leads to the fact that Syfy is probably rigging all of the contests.
• The Dwho group says that while they did make some impolite remarks, Syfy cut together some other remarks that they did not actually make to pump the drama, and that the Crabcat girls came after them with the cameras in tow to cause drama.
• The Crabcat girls asked for fans to cut Dwho a break as they were just having a bad day.
• However, probably the biggest issue is not even one of opinion here. 
• It all comes back to Syfy for trying to manufacture drama and using coventions, usually a peaceful place for geeks to hang out and enjoy things together, as their own personal reality TV playground.
• Not to mention the incredibly illegal point of telling everyone they’re shooting a documentary, meaning that nothing will be tampered with or edited to make it seem different, and shooting a reality tv show, where words are rearranged, drama is manufactured, etc.
• Hopefuls for the cosplay contest were told that if they didn’t agree to be on the show, they couldn’t compete. To be told that unless you’re okay with going on a doctored TV show after working hard on elaborate costumes seems like a no-brainer.
• However, Syfy telling everyone it’s a documentary than shooting a reality show is not only creatively a betrayal, but also illegal because there is the business of signing a waiver, which gives over all creative rights to Syfy and whatnot. 
• Nobody in the history of Heroes of Cosplay has said that they have had to sign a waiver.
• That’s actually really illegal.
• So I think that if we’re going to blame anyone, it should be 51 Minds, the production company, and Syfy, for putting words in mouths and taking over conventions they had no legal right to mess with.
• -Randi