Fanfest was awesome!!! But…
I wanna preface this, this post is going to be a grievance I had towards other guest. The team members, and the cast at Universal were outstanding and fantastic.
So I was in LA this past weekend for a graduation and had some free time and I figured I would check out Fanfest because I LOVE One Piece. Like I’ve been a fan since I was 9 years old (I’m 31), and I loved the show and enjoyed some of the food & bev and it was great!
I knew going in that I would have to get a photo with the Straw Hats. I knew going in it would be a long wait and it might be something I would miss out on all together, but I saw an opportunity toward the end of the night when the line opened again. So I got in and waited my turn.
I’m no stranger to long waits being some one who lives on the east coast I’m used to wait times being a lot longer at all the Orlando parks on a regular basis, especially at Disney and especially for unique meet and greets.
So that lengthy wait didn’t bother me, but it was more so why the wait was so long and that was because of some of the cosplayers. I had two separate ones ahead of me in line and they both just treated the Straw Hat photo op as a private photoshoot. They were requesting specific shots of the actors, giving them gifts, posing with a their own props, and one even gave them booster packs of the one piece tcg to open and record what they got. And just in general taking longer than any guests before or after them for the interaction, which in return ate up most of the set time the characters had before they had to leave. So if it ask me it was just super inconsiderate and rude to the people behind you. You can have a meaningful interaction with the characters and not take forever and a day. Mine was less than 2 minutes and I have the recording to prove it. You could see the frustration from the other guest in line and when the cosplayers finally left people cheered and clapped. Usually at Disney, cast is encouraged to “love and shove” in order to keep the wait time to a minimum, that didn’t seem to be a thing here. That would be the only thing I would change about it, other than that I had a wonderful time and would love to go again! I was just curious to see if anyone else had the same issues with cosplayers or anyone just taking a bit too long with their photo ops.