It is crazy to me that you just give out your resources. You give out your patterns and links and mail people your cosplays and I know that I would be horrified if anyone had my stuff. Don't you worry that someone might cosplay what you cosplay better than you?
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.
And that means making sure there are always more cosplayers to do that. So please be better than me. So you can show me what those characters being real looks like. And I’ll let you in on a secret, its so, so, so not hard to be better than me. I don’t press my seams, I don’t measure anything, I use almost all pre-made clothes, I never line anything, and I don’t make anything last more than one convention. I’m in no way, shape, or form, any skilled craftsmen. I just want to show everybody how easy this shit is, so everyone will try it.
I can only hope that when you get there, and you will, when you get to being better than me, you help others too. Maybe I can instill that.
Love all of this.
