On one hand, it feels like the organisers listened to some of the feedback from previous events that were very underwhelming. For example, they avoided the miserable failing of the Valentine's Day event by actually hosting the event in a well themed venue that very much had a Halloween feel to it. Similarly, they made sure that there were plenty of photo opportunities for guests to pose and make some memories for themselves to keep.
On the other hand, the layout of the venue made it almost impossible to find anyone, even if you knew they were in attendance. By going for a long but narrow layout, it really congested everyone into a very tight space. The cynic in me says that was a deliberate ploy to make the crowd as dense as possible in an attempt to make it look as impressive as possible. All it ended up doing was, like I already mentioned, make it super hard to find anyone in the crowd and, when you did eventually spot them from across the room, make it an absolute pain in the butt to actually make your way across to rendezvous with them.
Possibly that comes some way towards explaining why I found the first hour and a half that I was at the event to be a pretty miserable time. Because it literally took that long for a single person to even acknowledge my presence there. Not until Jess finally turned up, did I get so much as a greeting! Despite deliberately choosing to sit away from the dancefloor in a slightly more visible location.
Or maybe people saw me there but none of them had any interest in talking to me. I mean, who am I kidding? Feeling sorry for myself for being all on my lonesome in a room with over 400 people in, is so totally typical of me. In which case, I'm just unfairly projected my own frustrations on to the event. And things did pick up for me as a few of my favourite girls started to trickle in as the crowd grew to over 500 peeps. But, if we are being brutally truthful, that probably speaks volumes about the current state of the community more than anything.
With all of that being said, let me refocus back to the organisation of the event and there is definitely one area in which previous feedback was completely ignored. And that meant they wildly missed the mark, not for the first time. And that's the music. Once again, we got random, generic dance music for a themed event where it should have been a no-brainer to select spooky and sinister tunes. Based on my conversation with other people, I know that I'm far from alone in thinking that too. It really shouldn't be difficult to get something as fundamental to a party as the music right but they consistently seem to prioritise the names of the selected DJs over what they will actually contribute to the event in terms of settings the atmosphere.
The next event has already been announced for in a month's time and will be the annual anniversary event. No themed music required for that one so I guess I'll be able to skip repeating myself for that one but the Christmas Party will be up after that, and if they cannot get the music right for that one, there is literally no hope that they ever will...
Anyway, thinking beyond my own personal experience, which started out pretty negatively but then improved to being a decent night out, the general response from the community seems to have been pretty positive. Like I said at the out said, the organisers certainly addressed some of the past complaints and I think a lot of the guests recognised and were grateful for that.
I should probably also touch on the main thing that everyone surely associates most closely with Halloween and that's the dressing up. Now, I think I'm a bit old-fashioned in that I feel like Halloween costumes should ideally reflect the spooky them of the day. Monsters, creatures of the night, supernatural beings and any other sort of scary characters are what I instinctively think of. I seem to increasingly be an outlier in that regard though as, these days, it is becoming ever more about just simply dressing up as someone or something.
It would be foolish of me to grumble about that as it obviously massively opens up the various options to pick from. Especially if, like me, you're not great at creating your own costumes so need as many options to pick from as possible. To my credit, I actually managed to come up with 4 or 5 costumes to pick from.
Of course, I left the final choice to the last minute. Mostly because I was a little torn. One of my outfits was, in my humble opinion, absolutely spot on and a great reproduction of the original. However, it was a little too niche and I didn't want to force people to keep asking me who it was. So I went for probably my most basic but also recognisable option. And, funnily enough, it kind of ticked the box for being scary themed because it was my favourite zombie-killing badass babe; the wonderful Ms Jill Valentine from Resident Evil.
But you probably already figured that out from the pics above, right? Right....?!
For the record, the other choices I produced were Yumeko Jabami from the anime Kakegurui (which was the one I was actually quite proud of), 2B from the video game Nier: Automata, Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop and, finally, Kim Possible, which was the first idea I had and one that I was quite keen on but the outfit really didn't turn out to be up to the standard that I had hoped for. I did spot one other person that did go as 2B and her effort was almost identical to the one that I prepared, so I'm glad I didn't pick that one. Perhaps next year though...
And, contrary to my prediction at the Juice Halloween Party, this year didn't become the year that everyone goes as Wednesday Adams. Perrie reprised her role as Wednesday from Juice, albeit in a slightly different version of her costume, and they only other one that I actually remember spotting was Emmy. Then comically, we all ended hanging out in a little group together.
To be fair, there probably other Wednesday's there. In fact, I would wager there were. They were simply lost in the crowd that was crammed into a space that was much too small for that many people. Along with all the other great costumes that I undoubtedly didn't get to see. Actually, as I write this, I remember seeing another pair of Wednesday there. Strange how they seemed to keep coming in twos!
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