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"I've managed to find a group with an extremely high ratio of virgins."

The year is 2018, the place is New York Comic Con, and I'm seated in a packed auditorium for the world premiere of the What We Do in the Shadows pilot. The now-beloved Guillermo de la Cruz (played by the perhaps even more beloved Harvey Guillén) just delivered the above line, and a kind of history is about to be made. Because when the camera smash-cuts to a group of LARPers, the What We Do in the Shadows fandom is spontaneously born, screamed to life in the peeling laughter of the attendees. I walked out of the screening certain I'd just seen something that would be monumental.

Two presidents, one pandemic, and an entire brat summer later, I was right. Last weekend, I was again in the audience for a What We Do in the Shadows panel at New York Comic Con, and the even larger room was once again packed. This time, cosplaying Laszlos, Nadjas, and Colin Robinsons were in attendance with a bittersweet mission - to watch the first episodes of the final season, marking the latest (and last) appearance their favorite vampires would premiere new episodes at NYCC. But still, there couldn't have been a better place to send them off.

Why? Well first of all, there's the obvious New York-iness of the show. Even beyond its Staten Island and occasionally Manhattan setting, What We Do in the Shadows captures the true meaning of living in New York City, which is a lot more "How To with John Wilson" than it is "Sex and the City" (both streaming on Max, ayyy). Living in NYC means trying to get by as the absolute weirdest things happen around you, alongside people that are as different from you as the average nosferatu is to a Van Helsing. In fact, "hilarious and sometimes scary roommate situations" are as much a tenet of the series as they are core to the average New Yorker's experience.

They can also get just as bloody. Don't ask.

Then there's the inherent Comic Con-iness (Con-ishness? Con-someness? Con-sciousness?) of FX's vampire comedy. As I mentioned above, the show's got cosplay opportunities galore - from the simple Guillermo or Colin Robinson to the slightly harder Nadja or Nandor to the as-yet-untouched Sire cosplay (though I am begging someone with prosthetics experience to pull that off). I have been to comic conventions across the country - Emerald City, C2E2, Baltimore Comic Con, and counting - and have not found a single one that lacks at least one What We Do in the Shadows vampire, and cosplay isn't even the most comic con-dom (wait) thing about the show.

What I haven't seen at a comic con are people cosplaying the Workaholics, or Friends, the Cheers cast, or any of a thousand other sitcoms that have aired on network TV. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd be willing to bet that's because the DNA of What We Do in the Shadows is a lot more similar to a genre show than it is to your average comedy. Unlike most sitcoms, the comedy of What We Do in the Shadows is built on the fact that it cannot happen in our world. Yes, there's usually world-building in modern sitcoms (look at, say, the history of Pawnee from Parks and Rec), but the sweeping majority of them could conceptually happen in our own reality. In that way, What We Do in the Shadows is closer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer than it is The Office, making it more friendly to con-victs (dammit).

Tie all these qualities together and you get a particular show for a particular cultural moment best suited in, I would argue, a particular place. And that's not at all to say that the measure of a true What We Do in the Shadows fan is their proximity to the Javits Center; just last month, stars Harvey Guillén and Kristen Schaal hosted a packed panel of fans at LA Comic Con, fans just as obsessed with the show as their East Coast counterparts. Your vampiric origin doesn't have to come out of New York. I'm just saying that the show's do.

So why is that important? Well, the show is ending, for one thing; now is the time to piece its history together, from lights up to curtain call. There's also a great creative lesson to be learned here about knowing your audience and keeping your vision on track. Or maybe it's to mark the idea that, even in an age where global connectivity is as cheap as a monthly internet service, there are still experiences unique to and to be cherished by a lucky group of people. And for one shining moment, we were that special group.

A group with an extremely high ratio of virgins.

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