Cosplay is Hard

An obvious title, but as I nurse a small, burnt finger from a hot glue gun and wait patiently for a bad paint job to dry, it’s something I can rant about. Seriously, cosplay is hard. Well, anything complicated is hard. There’s a lot of piss easy costumes you can do, with just some generic stuff from around the house. It’s a weird, backwards scenario where the more effort you put into a costume, the more quickly things go wrong and you end up wondering if a simple costume made from odds and ends would have been better.

For me, the only real time I get to wear my costumes is for Cyprus Comic Con (nicely abbreviated to CCC). It’s the only place that other people are wearing stupid costumes that aren’t generic things bought from Jumbo – the local cheap generic tat from China store. There’s people I can relate to and I’m not standing around like a twat with no one recognizing me.

When I first went in 2015, I went as a ‘female sexy Malzahar’ because everyone insisted I go as something sexy and feminine because apparently that suits a round, chunky, tomboyish person like me. Luckily, no one was looking at my bloated body because sister went as Nidalee and was walking around in a fur-laced bikini and was willing to pose for pictures with people – the other Nidalee in attendance never did anything but stand around.

In 2016, I went as Pyro and plenty of people recognized me. Weirdly though, I got the most attention from little kids. It’s as if they knew that both Pyro and I are massive, mentally ill children at heart. Although that costume was boiling hot and I could hardly see, I enjoyed being Pyro because it was a character I could relate to. That and I wasn’t being out-staged by my sister in a bikini. She was busy being a custom-styled Harley Quinn, surrounded by a billion fucking Suicide Squad Harley Quinns. Despite an original costume though, it was obvious who we all were.

But the problem is, I’m a weird sort of lazy, cheap perfectionist. I worry over the tiniest details but at the same time I’m unwilling to spend vast amounts of money and time on a costume I’m only going to wear once. Case in point, my Pyro costume, I wear the trousers around the house as lounge wear, but I’ll probably never wear the whole thing out again. Mostly because the gas canister backpack kinda fell apart.

There’s always a point where you look at what you’ve made and you think “this is good.” With my Pyro costume, I never really reached that point, aside from the flamethrower. That flamethrower was amazing and it makes me sad I can’t really do anything else with it.

This brings me back nicely to this year’s costume. Because of course I’m going to Cyprus Comic Con again this year. Even when I’m wearing an astoundingly hot costume, I always enjoy being around other people in silly costumes that they’ve worked on, pretending to be characters that they love. This year’s costume, I’ve already reached that “this is good” point. Despite the low quality materials I’ve used (because I don’t have much money right now), it actually all looks pretty decent. Less so when I wear it. Because I’m fat and horrible and have annoying breasts that get in the way all the fucking time.

But this costume has been really hard to make. Awkward shapes and the like. What makes it harder is that I don’t have access to things like Worbler, what all the pro people use. I mean, a light-weight card material that glues to itself and bends into any shape and stays in place just when you heat it? That’s amazing. And expensive. I fuck things up a lot, so I’d probably run out of it super fast. All I really have is cardboard and some shitty foam that’s still kinda expensive.

Either way, it’s still going pretty well. My costume this year is going to be almost as stupid and bulky as my Pyro costume. Almost. Because this year, I’ll actually be able to see through my mask.

I mean, really, it should be obvious what I’m going as, considering my latest obsession.

But it’s a ton of hard work, and even if you want your costume to look vaguely good, you need a ton of effort and time to throw into these things.