Meeting Your Imagined Community on the Show Floor

There’s something really magical about watching a Sephiroth cosplayer glide down an escalator, sword ready to impale an Aerith cosplayer, once they meet on the ground floor, while a Prompto cosplayer snaps a pic of the scene – a sight only available over the PAX East 2025 weekend.

My friends and I have made PAX East our annual vacation now for the last three years, and as we’ve grown older and our cosplay skills even bolder, I’ve started to realize the importance of imagined communities not only coming together in the digital world, but the real world as well, and how this coming together of people with similar identities can help to strengthen your own.

The term “imagined community” was coined by political scientist Benedict Anderson, and refers to the idea of a group of individuals who identify with being a part of a specific group or community (such as the Final Fantasy fandom/community) despite the fact that they do not know others within this community personally. As a massive Final Fantasy fan myself, I can attest to this definition of imagined communities, as the only Final Fantasy fans I know personally are two of my friends and my brothers, and I’m pretty certain there are more than five Final Fantasy fans out there in the world. However, walking onto the PAX East convention floor and seeing a myriad of Final Fantasy cosplayers mingling and enjoying the company of each other created a sense of belonging and lessened my feelings of alienation that I often feel when outside of this imagined community.

One of the major themes of imagined communities is the feeling of belonging and, you guessed it, community. PAX East itself is a large videogame community, with smaller communities based around specific videogame titles within it. No matter who you run into at the convention, they are definitely at least a fan of videogames in general. Sticking with Final Fantasy as our basis for imagined communities, my friends and I cosplayed as characters from Final Fantasy VII. As attendees of PAX, we were automatically associated with the imagined community of people who identify as gamers. Since we were also cosplaying as Final Fantasy characters, our outward appearance associated us with our other imagined community. By appearance alone, other members of the Final Fantasy community were able to identify us as one of their own.

For example, a man approached my friends and I and complimented me on my Aerith cosplay. He told us about how he named his daughter Aerith, as Final Fantasy VII was an extremely important and impactful game for him, and was happy to see that I was cosplaying as the character he named his daughter after. Another member of our imagined community approached my friend, who was cosplaying as Zack Fair, and handed him a card of Zack from the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game, simply because Zack was one of his favorite characters. We don’t know any of these people, where they’re from, what they do for a living, or even their names, but we were nevertheless able to engage in meaningful conversation because of our shared imagined community.

Photos courtesy floris_lilium: https://www.facebook.com/people/floris_lilium/61550844826669/

Not only were we able to meet and have meaningful conversations with others within our imagined community, but we were, in a way, also looking out for each other during our time at the convention, which didn’t happen with other people I met who did not identify with the Final Fantasy imagined community.

For example, my friends and I were waiting in line to meet Ben Starr, the voice of Clive Rosfield from Final Fantasy XVI. At the same time that we were waiting to meet him, an unofficial Final Fantasy VII meetup and photoshoot (spread by word of mouth from one Final Fantasy fan to another) was happening just across from us. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the meetup, we had missed the photoshoot, and the professional photographer had already left. One of the Final Fantasy fans from the meetup had noticed this and actually ran across the convention floor to bring the photographer back, just so my friends could get some pictures with other Final Fantasy VII cosplayers. This fan had no reason to call the photographer back, but he did so anyway because he knew my friends would appreciate it, have fun taking the photos, and feel even more included within our community.

There were a few more instances where other members of this imagined community had either told my friends and I about something that made us enjoy our time at PAX more, or instances where my friends and I were the ones to give advice or help other Final Fantasy fans out. Either way, this give and take of looking out for those within the Final Fantasy imagined community helped make me feel like I was an important member of this community. I felt as if my presence at PAX East helped others enjoy their time at the convention, seeing as the presence of other Final Fantasy fans certainly made my time at the convention more memorable.

Interacting with other Final Fantasy fans outside of my close circle of friends and family really helped to solidify my sense of belonging on the convention floor, as well as foster a sense of community among people that I otherwise would never have had the chance to meet and associate with. I met some truly incredible people during my time at PAX East this year, and meeting them would not have been possible without our shared imagined community.

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Gianna Mulvey is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and American Studies while juggling her ever-growing game backlog. She enjoys playing videogames and writing about them from a narrative and literary perspective. You can find more of her writing on her Medium page.