I am a nerd.
This is something I have actually and actively worked at; from marathoning Star Trek to purposely filling my home with Batman PEZ dispensers, Jurassic Park cookie cutters and cramming my brain with thoroughly useless Sci-fi Trivia. So I suppose it was inevitable the conventions and cosplay would be one of those things that I would take to like an Otaku to Pocky.
However I suppose the weird part about the whole thing is that I really don’t actually engage in Anime that much. I don’t watch it often. I find reading subtitles overly single-minded. So why do I spend most of my time and all of my cash planning a single three day weekend every single year?
Because I love it.
I once responded to a forum on this topic with the response “I love the atmosphere of Con. It's like entering a whole other universe. Or like...a hundred different plays all accidentally walked onto each other's stage. I love the three-dimensional, theatre aspect of the whole thing.
And I love being around people who get just as bubbly and nerdy as I do about the things that I do. Just being anywhere where I can say “OMG! I LOVE castle Heterodyne! I'M THE PRETTIEST FROG IN THIS WHOLE POND!” And not be carted off by those nice men in their white lab coats; is pretty cool.”
That’s always how I’ve looked at it. I’ve been a part of theater since I was a small child, despite (and saving me from) being a small neurotic, phobic, pathologically shy little kid. I did D.I. , and I made roman centurion uniforms out of duct-tape and I watched the special features of movies that I never actually saw. Despite all this I never really realized that I actually would enjoy costuming. I remember getting a sewing machine for my fourteenth birthday and kind of shrugging it off as another amenity that I might never use. Luckily for my sewing machine my friends invited me to my first con only a few weeks later.
My first anime experience consisted of my friends falling asleep as I sat glued and horrified to the TV watching one of the weirdest (or, so I thought) shows that I had ever encountered. I sat in the dark, clutching a pillow, unable to make it stop or go away. So, I guess it’s ironic that I enjoy anime conventions as much as I do, considering the amount of psychological scarring anime itself has inflicted on me. But con never the less sounded amazing, especially since I am a webcomic, videogame, RvB, etc etc nerd. So we went to the local Sakura-con the next year.
I was a little overzealous. Being a theater kid and a crafty person, I get overambitious with costumes reaaaallly easily and not understanding cosplay, as I had never seen it, I did really amazing Halloween costumes. Which make only half-a**ed cosplays. I did a Soot Sprite for Spirited away which nobody understood and ended up looking saggy and weird. Skull Kid from Legend of Zelda, which had an amazing mask...that was too heavy to stay on my face and had to be carried around, and the costume was otherwise crappy and suspiciously racist looking.
The only good cosplay I did was an original character (and ironically the only one I was complimented on several times) that had a straight jacket I made myself and was self locking (a feature some guy wanted to know more about, which made me more than a little suspicious) and a toaster strapped to my back on a cord bandoleer. Oddly enough, as crappy as our first costumes were. I really loved it. More than the Anime and the merchandise, which is what some people seem to be only interested it, it was the environment and the costuming that really brings me back to con. I'll probably be finding ways to cosplay even after I'm old and it's creepy.
The truth is, I just love everything about it. To the extent that it’s totally change my very concept of my future. I’m going to college for technical and theatrical costume design as we speak. Cosplay did that for me!
Since that first rocky start I’ve had a few failures, and more than a few successes, and I look forward to a lot more of this adventure. So, basically, hopefully, this blog will inspire, teach, or at the very least be worth a few giggles. If nothing else, it will at least keep me on track to finish all my many projects XD.
So, there’s the horrible first post out of the way. Time to get down to business!
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