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!

Ohayocon 2016 - Rise of the Mad King

Ohayocon was absolutely amazing! I barely know where to start. First off, one of my oldest con buddies joined me again for the first time in a very long time. And of course she makes the most badass Imperator I know, which helps :-)

Our first set of serendipitous events of the weekend include meeting an awesome Max cosplayer on our way back to the room Friday evening, which delays our journey to our comfy beds by an hour or so but he was so awesome that we didn't mind :-D
Now we have a new awesome cosplay friend who fortunately we managed to find again on Saturday night (again on our way back to the room, but this time to extract the Mad King from me rather than head to bed). Sadly I didn't get a photo of him on Saturday because he was a badass biker version of Rainbow Dash. I did get him along with my Imperator on Friday though.

Second on our awesome new cosplay friends list is another wonderful MMFR pair we found on Saturday. A lovely Capable and an absolutely spot-on Nux. This badass cosplayer made me want to WAAAY up my game next time I cosplay our adorable warboy. Which I have now decreed will always come with me any time I go conventioning with my Imperator so I don't get left out of wonderful photos like this ;-)

The next lovely portion of my weekend was spending all day Friday with my wolf pack, which naturally we didn't get a new photo of, but here we are at Matsuri last year; we haven't changed much.

The word wolf pack seems all too appropriate for us, besides just being an actual pack of Wolf's Rain cosplayers, these people are truly my con family. I can't express how much I enjoy spending time with these nerds. And I'm even more humbled by the fact that they gave me presents. It's too freaking adorable to handle. Among them are my first two Pop! figures ever, including Old Man Solo, and a tiny Tenth Doctor, along with the only Star Wars hat I'll ever need.

I really don't know what else to say, other than to repeat my sentiments of loving the shit out of these fellow nerds.

Further wonders unfold on Saturday when I meet a badass New Monarchy Titan while dressed as the Speaker. Thank god people still like this game.

And perhaps the most miraculous series of events occurred in conjunction with my newest cosplay, the infamous [SECRET COSPLAY] that I've been ranting about for the last... many many months. Which, if you haven't been on facebook yet, it is none other than the Mad King, Ashnard.

The tale begins on Friday night, when our pack was dawdling in the lower floor near registration, and I see a very tall man with long black hair and a white robe go through the registration door. After a moment I start wailing to one of my pack mates that I think I just saw a Sephiran cosplayer, but that can't be right. Who would cosplay Sephiran, that's even more random that Ashnard. So I creep by the exit to the registration area only to ask, and discover that he is in fact a Sephiran cosplayer.

Apologies to anyone with delicate sensibilities. On that note, I now have a twitter which will be full of more swearing, random cosplay photos, and livetweeting of me being a derp and playing video games. Fair warning, spoilers will likely be abundant.

After flipping my shit more than just a little, I find out that he actually is supposed to have a Micaiah and an ASHERA (WTF?!?!?) and they're going to do a little shoot later. *LOUD WAILING NOISES* My intentions were not to be putting Ashnard on until Saturday because I already had a Soren and Lethe there and I sure as hell wasn't about to change at this point in the evening because that would be the biggest pain in the ass ever. We do, however, intend to get photos of these other lovely Tellius cosplayers when we can find them.
Praise Yune, goddess of Chaos, their Ashera was having some issues, and I don't think Micaiah ever even showed up , so Sephiran found us again and told us they were going to try again the following day. SCORE. We were already intending to do FE shenanigans on Saturday to it would work out perfectly, and since they weren't planning on doing their little shoot until the evening, our Lethe could actually finish working on her cosplay.
So everything is going great until the derp brigade marches through my brain and I realize I know neither WHEN nor WHERE they're meeting up for their shoot. *MORE LOUD WAILING NOISES* So we now have a Soren, Ashnard, and Lethe (and a few non-FE folks) wandering around for a good hour trying to find a very tall man in long white robes (we at least thought we remembered him saying something about 5pm). We finally decide we should just take some photos because we're in a good spot with some nice lighting and a blank background because Ashera knows if we're ever going to actually find these people. 

We got some photos with just the three of us (and those first two photos of Ashnard up above are from our little impromptu shoot as well), and were satisfied enough, if annoyed that we were unsuccessful in our search. Well, providence would have it that my dear friend Trickssi was going to be around for a little while yet and we should come meet her in another area of the convention center. I was super excited cause it's been forever since I've spent any actual time with her so we hustled over that direction and who should we meet along the way? CHANCELLOR GODDAMN SEPHIRAN. There are still no Ashera or Micaiah in sight, but he tells us they're on their way. So after a lovely time hanging out with Trickssi and the rest of the Trimeriad, we finally manage to assemble the ranks and successfully do a Tellius shoot. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! As we gather up for our shoot, an Ike wanders past (who just so happens to be a friend of a friend, no less) and we manage to wrangle him into our shoot as well. I'm not entirely sure he's a Fire Emblem person or just a Smash Bros person, as he didn't seem super familiar with the rest of our characters, but at this point I couldn't have cared less because the sheer awesomeness of our accomplishment in assembling the team was successful. Here are the fruits of our labor. I'm sure there will be more photos floating around as others start posting stuff, but bless Trickssi for sticking around and taking some shots with my phone (especially as she isn't remotely a Fire Emblem fan). 

Having an Ike around was clearly useful in giving us some actual poses and things, including the lovely awkward prom photos XD
So as you can see, it was a hella good con weekend. I found a bunch of awesome cosplayers, hung out with cosfamily, including some family members I haven't seen in forever, and made some new friends! If you want to see the full gambit of photos I took this weekend, you can find them on facebook in my Ohayocon 2016 album.
You can expect a post in the near future with the trials and tribulations of making the Mad King to be coming around shortly. In the meantime, feel free to enjoy all of the photos (and checking out some new additions to the Cosplay Plans Album (which is growing faster than I can control), and observing the spiral of inane livetweeting on my new Twitter account. The flavor of the month is Mikey Plays Tales of Xillia. Be warned there is no spoiler filter, and also no language filter.
Later, lovelies!

Arooooooooo

Well Matsuricon was this weekend, along with a Steampunk Soiree up at the Massillon Museum so needless to say I've been running/driving around Ohio like a madman for the past two days. It was totally worth it though, because I won't be able to satisfy my con fix again until Ohayo next year D-:

The definitely highlight of the weekend was spending most of Friday with my pack from Wolf's Rain. We even had one more that we were anticipating with was amazing! I wish that happened more often cause now we have new con friend! 

Obligatory pack selfie

Thanks to me being the tallest/having the longest arms in the group, I have the selfie we took, but sadly don't have too many other photos on my phone as Kiba has the better camera and consequently has most of the photos. Thankfully a few are already on facebook so I'll share those ones, and I'm sure you'll be seeing more in the next few days.

Those last 3 photos were all courtesy of WOLF Cosplay. We also have some goofy ones that I can't wait to see, and possibly a video that caused a passerby to do a double take as we were filming it so I'm excited to see some more of her stuff from this photoshoot!

Saturday I took Oliver from Ni No Kuni, since he's a pretty easy cosplay to get into & out of and I love all of the props I made for it and so of course I wanted to show them off! Which of course the only photos I have are of the props, cause of courseI didn't get any of myself when I was wearing Oliver since I'm a goofball who forgot to ask anyone to get a picture of me with my phone... *facepalm* But anyway, you can check out the cool props at least XD

I will admit, I did some of my best personal prop work on my Ni No Kuni stuff.

And that's pretty much it for my cosplay this weekend. My phone was constantly dying so I didn't take a ton of photos in an attempt to conserve battery life, but here are the few that I did.

This awesome Borderlands cosplayer is the beautiful and talented Drop Dead Meg