Dress Up Time!

The Team Fortress 2 characters are among the most common seen at gaming or comic conventions, unless you happen to live in Cyprus, where they’re practically non-existent. Scouts run rampant and Spies have been seen infiltrating any dressing up convention they can find, particularly furry ones. Unfortunately for me, opportunities to dress up are few and far between, so I end up dressing up to bake cakes and things. That being said, I’ve got a couple of TF2 costumes at my disposal.

But why are TF2 characters so common? Well the obvious reason is because they’re all, to a one, really, really great characters. They all have their own unique shapes, sizes and silhouettes. Each character is well defined and nothing like any other class, while also playing on silly stereotypes. Their personalities are also great, even if they’re not always realistic and have changed a lot over the years. There’s passion behind every little thing, something that other video game characters, particularly in FPS games, often lack.

That same passion carries on into people who dress up as TF2 characters. You have no idea how long I have spent making my own TF2 weaponry. For a while, half my bedroom was filled with unfinished weapons of various types. I’ll have a go at anything. I even created a tutorial on how to create your own shotgun, that’s how dedicated I can be when I’m not permanently exhausted.

Seriously though, a lot of the people who cosplay as TF2 characters really put passion into it.

There is another reason though. Our beloved mercenaries have a certain style to them that kinda actually works in real life, without having to do tons of bulky things. A real life Big Daddy costume for example would be impossible to move in. I’ve seen really nice Iron Man costumes and heavily armoured suits and all sorts, but they are huge and heavy and impractical to move around in. Even when in air conditioning or something. What the mercenaries wear is home-made. They made all their stuff themselves, their costumes, their original weapons, everything. That carries really nicely into reality, where we have people doing the exact same thing.

Of course, there’s always the “It doesn’t work in real life!” issue, like with how Soldier’s coat works or how big proportions are supposed to be, but it all somehow works out. Proportions are a problem though, which does make cosplaying as Heavy incredibly difficult. I’ve always found it difficult to make my weapons in proportion to the rest of me or to  how big the actual characters would be.

But on top of everything else, dressing up as a TF2 character is easy, memorable and, most of all, fun.

Let’s go back to looking at cardboard weapons. Because fuck me I have a lot of them. This is an OLD picture.