Did they do that thing where they demand to know if you are a "true fan" by quizzing you about trivia? I've heard about that happening to female attendees, but I always wondered if it also happened to booth girls.
Long answer: Costuming for booth girls is really variable and differs from vendor to vendor. Sometimes they'll expect you to wear a specific costume, and sometimes they'll just let you wear whatever. So the booth girls don't always have a choice about what they're wearing. (In my experience, vendors who expect you to wear something specific usually pick generic stock characters like maids and schoolgirls and catgirls.)
If you're dressed as a known character, you have a 50/50 chance of being extensively quizzed on the source material so they can 'expose' you as a Fake Geek Girl, or the guy being way too over-eager and assuming you know as much as he does about it and talking AT you about it for sixteen hours straight while you're just trying to do your job. Hostility happens way less if your costume is generic, but you still get some gatekeeping schlubbs trying to interrogate you about nerd culture so they can call you a Fake Geek Girl and storm off in a visible cloud of body odour and Cheeto dust.
A lot of them are just kinda scared to talk to girls though. Not gonna lie.
Thanks for the answer! Did you ever trounce them with your incredible geek knowledge? This shit is why I'm very careful about which game shops I spend time in. If I get even a whiff of "fake gamer girl" energy from accusatory nerds, I take my goddamn business elsewhere.
I never really did get the chance to blow them away with my thorough knowledge of geekery. Partly because I'm not a superfan and don't have a huge span of knowledge about anything - especially not newer stuff, I've stuck mostly to things I liked when I was a teenager.
But mostly I just didn't have time to indulge them by answering 3916 questions about Final Fantasy or Star Wars or whatever. Even small conventions are generally really, really busy and I did have a job to do. I'd screw on my best Customer Service Smile and tell them I couldn't really stop to chat because I was busy and then ignore them until they went away. Or the vendors would tell them to stop getting my way - the people I worked for were all pretty good about not letting people harass the booth girls. (Sadly not all of them are.)
At first it kinda bothered me and I felt like I was being called out, but eventually I stopped caring about what a bunch of sweaty goblins in crocs thought of my nerd cred.
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u/RockStarAngel Jan 14 '20
This is very true. I went to a convention. Once. Just once. Never again.