A Tribute to Nobody

It's throwback thursday again and this week I'm showing off my only Kingdom Hearts cosplay to date: Roxas. It'll be a short entry as I really don't have very many photos, since I wore him a total of... twice, maybe? Also I'm not super into KH in the first place, I really just wanted to make some keyblades, and I liked his design more than Sora's.

As you'll probably notice... I don't have a wig. Why, you ask? Because I'm lazy. It's as simple as that. I put all of my effort into my keyblades that I didn;t really care about anything else so I said "to hell with the wig."
Ironically enough, I did eventually get a wig with the intention of "doing this cosplay properly" but I never actually wore it all together. This was pretty early in my cosplay career when I was still so gung-ho about making new costumes that I didn't often wear any of them more than  a couple of times because I was pumping out new ones so fast. Fortunately, the wig didn't go to waste, because I ended up using it for my Spark cosplay.

The spikes might be a bit long, but it still works.

Colossal was one of the two cons I wore Roxas to (the other being Tekko), and I met a pretty fantastic Axel so we decided to take a couple of photos together, particularly given my choice of keyblades.

As I stated before, the biggest reason I wanted to do a KH cosplay was to have an excuse to make some keyblades, which is why more work went into these than any other part of the cosplay. They're not very clean & polished, but considering how early this was in my cosplay career, they actually turned out pretty well. These are made from cardboard, paper mache, and some craft foam (primarily for details).

The specific keyblades i chose to make were very intentional. Roxas is most often seen wielding a black and white duo of keyblades known as "Oathkeeper" and "Oblivion." The designs are super cool, but because this is the standard pair of keyblades associated with Roxas, almost every Roxas cosplayer out there uses them for props. So, in my usual fashion, I decided I wanted to do something different, whicle still being relevant.

The first blade I went with was "Two Become One." This keyblade is styled after Roxas himself, with lots of nods to his design. The four-pointed ninja star-looking keychain mirrors the metal piece on his jacket, the checkerboard pattern mimics his wristband, and the nobody symbol can be seen on the hilt. To me, this combines some facets of both Oathkeeper and Oblivion into a single keyblade, which had a lot of appeal to me.

The second keyblade is the "Bond of Flame," a keyblade which represents Roxas' best friend, Axel. You actually recieve this keyblade in KH2 after Axel sacrifices himself to save Sora. Given their strong bond (yeah, I ship it) I thought it was a fitting second choice for a keyblade.

And that's all there is for this week, since I'm out of photos, and out of anecdotes.

May All Your Bacon Burn

Welcome back to another throwback thursday! I feel like I've almost been too consistent with these because I am quickly running out of costumes! But no matter, we're going to chug right along and show off the pretty boy wizard: Howl.

Now of course when you cosplay Howl, you can't just have Howl... what fun would that be? At the very least you need a Calcifer, but I thought Heen would make a nice companion as well.

I initially made this costume in part because I had a friend who made Markl, and that's essentially what propted me to make a Heen plush as well. This was a while ago and I had no real clue what I was doing when it came to making plushies so he ended up rather loaf-shaped... but then again Heen is supposed to be kinda loaf-shaped so it worked out alright.

Take Me to Paradise

After showing off my first wolfish cosplay last week, I thought i'd stick with the theme and go with my other canine character: Tsume from Wolf's Rain.

I remember watching Wolf's Rain when I was a kid. I honestly don't even remember how I found it, I think it was one of the random assortment of things my local library had in their tiny anime section. Regardless, I really enjoyed it and it stuck with me. So naturally, when some of my closest con friends started planning a WR group, I jumped at the opportunity.

Making Tsume was interesting, as I've never really made a jacket quite like that before. Fortunately I found something that was about the right shape in my forays to the thrift store so I had a pretty easy time coming up with the pattern for it. The vinyl I used was... kinda cheap to be quite honest XD But it worked well for the project so whatever.

Obviously the best thing about wearing the costume was the fact that I we had a full group of wolves, and it was all of y favorite people to hang out with at cons already anyway! But even more exciting was that we met a Blue (the only canine main character we didn't have) at the con, and made a new friend!

It wassuper fun just hanging out, and we got a good bit of attention for being a big group, and cosplaying something you hardly ever see. We also took advantage of a vacant spot outside the convention center to get some nice photos.

And of course whenever we get together, goofiness ensues...

Hige, you can eat all the gross hot dogs you want, some of us have actual taste.

I'm hoping to wear this again some time soon, cause it's a fun cosplay. Maybe we can get the whole pack together again!