Kestrelle Cosplay

Dude literally FUCK being better than anybody else. 

What about, creating more cosplayers?

I’ve been doing this 2007. Which, isn’t even a lot of time compared to others, really, but I’ve been in this community long enough to realize that Cosplay being this small, secretive, thing, is no FUCKING fun. Its just not. All of us cosplayers, all of us, have come from a generation before super hero movies where being a nerd was not cool. Almost all interviews with cosplayers start off like, “I used to be bullied.” We all were. And we found a place we we weren’t. Where we excelled and found a like minded community. 

Why the hell in the world would I turn it into a war ground? We were all bullied. We were all judged. To turn around and do it to each other is becoming exactly what we hated in the first place. I WANT everyone who follows me to be better then me. PLEASE BE BETTER THAN ME. PLEASE. Because why else would I help you? I want to see progress, improvment, I want you all to be amazing! I want more people cosplaying, I want cosplay to be something you can say at work and people all smile and go “Wow thats so cool.” Not, “Okay weird, I guess.” Because I know that feeling and it sucks ass.

Its almost as bad as asking a big time cosplayer, someone you look up to, that you feel you relate to because they are in this niche with you, its like asking them a question and getting back a, “Figure it out yourself.” 

I’ve been there, it’s soul crushing. 

So please be better than me. Because why else am I here, but to be someone you can learn off of and then excel past? So that way you can inspire other cosplayers who then inspire more and then inspire more. 

Like yeah, I cosplay, cause its fun and my passion, but if I’m gonna do anything with what I learn from my process its gonna be to give it back to the community that gave it to me. I want someone else to be me when I was 16, spotting a beautiful cosplayer as my favorite character, and feeling like they were real. That  my passion was validated. And then realizing they have the power to do that themselves.  To this day nothing gets me more beside myself with hype then seeing a perfect cosplay. And I don’t want that to ever stop.

rest stops on highways

trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic

schools during breaks

those little beaches right next to ferry docks

your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep

the lighting section of home depot

A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.

The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease. 

-The days between Christmas and the New Year

-The time between getting tested for a terminal illness and getting the results. When the coin I’d tossed into the air and you are both dying and not dying while you wait for it to land.

I sewed really powerful magnets into a friend's Dr. Strange costume a couple weeks ago so he can flip it around and have the cape land perectly on his shoulders.

At one point one magnet pulled the other out of my hand and they tore skin off my leg when they snapped together. I didn't notice I had an open would until the next morning though because my migraine was already making my legs hurt.

It also took about a half hour to get the magnets apart after that. After I gave the cape back, I started to notice things at my work space falling a lot. I figured out why when I picked up my scissors and a bunch of pins stuck to it. The magnets turned most of the metal at my desk magnetic too!