Lessons from the Cosplay Festival 4 (CF4) Incident
Source: Amin Husni @ Facebook
What are you looking at here are some of the front page headlines from a couple of Malay-written Malaysian newspaper company dated on the 25th of March, 2019. Notice a photo of cosplayers on the header.
> Hang on a minute, what actually had happened?
On the 23rd of March 2019, a cosplay event being held at Sunway Putra Hotel Grand Ballroom called Cosplay Festival 4 (CF4) had been raided by the Immigration Department of Malaysia under their Ops Kutip operation. The officers had detained eleven (11) foreign cosplayer and one local man, who believed to be the Event Director. Because of this incident, Day 2 of CF4 was cancelled.
> OKAY, HANG ON! How this is even possible?!
Apparently, it was rumoured that this incident caused by someone who have some kind of revenge with the Director. Whether the incident considered to be a deliberate attempt for the revenged to sabotage the Director’s event remained unclear to this day.
> How the world reacted to this incident?
Sure enough, this incident had send multiple shockwaves to Animation, Comics and Games (ACG) fans throughout the world, particularly in Malaysia. If you think the local newspaper coverage was enough to ignite the heat among the circle, sites like Anime News Network, tv Asahi, Kotaku and SoraNews24 also covered the story. And if that wasn’t enough, Singaporean news publishing sites such as TNP.SG, Alvinology, Yahoo! SG and The Straits Times have been keeping tabs about their citizens who were detained by the Malaysian Immigration Department.
> Are there any legal actions taken for the detained foreigners?
To cut the story short, all detained foreign cosplayers had been released as of 29th of March, 2019. Meanwhile, guest cosplayer Mon had given her statement that she and stayxxx were not detained at all and had flew back safely to Taiwan on Monday.
Originally published at https://otakupetrolheadslife.blogspot.com on March 30, 2019.
