Hello y’all. It certainly has been a long while since I last posted here. I had really, really wanted to post in this blog regularly last year, but…lol we all know how 2020 went. 2020 totally sucked away my drive and made me very unmotivated to do anything remotely creative, even though I really, really wanted to do something with all the free time I have now. Within the last several months though, my creative juices have been slowly coming back to me and I’m starting to get back into the groove of things. I haven’t really sewn anything new yet, but I hope to get back to it soon. I’ve started to pick up on drawing again. I’m also ready to start posting here again.
Things are still not great yet, but we are in a new year. With this new year, I’m happy to introduce a new series to my blog here—Java’s Cosplay Timeline. It will be a series of blog entries in which I will be dedicating an entry for EVERY. SINGLE. COSPLAY I’ve ever done thus far since I started. I started cosplaying all the way back in 2003, which basically means that I have been cosplaying for literally a little over half of my lifetime. Also lol hi guys. I’m hella old. This series of blog entries are an effort for me to post art more frequently, practice drawing full bodies, just draw in general, and to get better at drawing and coloring digitally. It’ll also be a motivator for me to post here more frequently as well. This blog series was actually an idea I had back in maybe 2018/2019 or so??? I had originally wanted to debut this series in 2020 to signify a new decade, but..lol 2020. I’d been sitting on the few first drawings of this series for a while now, but it wasn’t until very recently (i.e. this year) that I had finally been able to render the very first one in a way that I liked.
Anyway, intro aside, let’s get this blog series started with my very first cosplay.
Character: Rem Savarem, Trigun
Age: 14, going on 15
-Summer before sophomore year of high schoolFirst Worn To: Big Apple Anime Fest 2003
-Bby’s 1st con. No longer exists.
Also Worn To: None
Why Them?: My friends and I wanted to go to our first anime con and thought it would be fun to dress up as a group. Trigun was a show that we were all into and thought we could realistically get the costumes done in a really short amount of time (i.e. literal days I think), as opposed to outfits from InuYasha or Rurouni Kenshin or Sailor Moon or whatever else we were into during that time. I was actually originally supposed to be Meryl Strife. My sister was going to be Kuroneko-sama, the little black cat that shows up in every episode of the anime. I don’t exactly remember what happened, but somehow, my sister suddenly didn’t want to be the cat anymore and chose to be Meryl instead, which left me having to switch characters at the last minute (literally like, the day before). Rem was the easiest choice since her outfit was completely attainable at such short notice.
Thoughts: Bby’s 1st Con and Bby’s 1st Cosplay. I had only heard of cons and seen pictures of people in cosplay online. I remember thinking that it was SO COOL to dress up as anime characters and I really, really wanted to try it out too. I especially loved seeing when groups of friends would all cosplay from the same series together as a group. I was so caught up in the excitement of my first cosplay and my first convention. I was just so happy to be doing it. This was in ye olde times, back when I didn’t care so much about accuracy or looking particularly great/presentable for photos. I didn’t care that I was pretty much in just normal, everyday clothes. I didn’t care that I would be recognized as also cosplaying only because I was standing with my friends who were more recognizable as the characters of Trigun. I rarely got asked for photos, but that was okay because I was just happy to be there.
Status: Retired
Would I Cosplay Again?: Most likely no, to be honest. If I were to cosplay Trigun again, maybe I’d actually cosplay Meryl like I had originally wanted to lol.
As soon as I found out there would be a con in NYC in the summer of 2003, I jumped at the chance and told my friends about it. We were all really excited to go. We were all quite young, so we did have to have a chaperone for this trip. It was a little awkward, not gonna lie, but we all just really wanted to go, so we dealt with it. This chaperone was also our mode of transportation to the con since none of us really knew how to take the train into the city back then. Thinking back on it now, I honestly don’t know what we would have done with ourselves had we gone alone lmao. We were all definitely in over our heads a little bit I think. We didn’t even know what panels were. We didn’t know there were screenings. We didn’t know that guests were a thing. We didn’t even know that a con schedule existed, for that matter. We were just very happy to be there. I think we were all just so starstruck by the mere existence of this type of event; where everyone else was an anime and manga fan just like you. Where people wanted to dress up as their favorite characters. I can’t recall if there was an artist alley at this con, let alone the fact that we most likely had no idea what the hell an artist alley even was at the time, but we were amaaaazed at the dealer room. You mean we could just BUY anime stuff????? Anime/manga wasn’t so mainstream at the time and therefore the merch and VHS (yes, VHS.) or DVDs were not so easily accessible as they all are now. So seeing all this product available blew our minds back then. I was given an allowance of $60….FOR THE DAY. Lmaoooo. I think we all know that that amount DOES NOT LAST. I blew a big chunk of it on ONE (1) item in the dealer room—an InuYasha plush drawstring purse. The rest of the money I had was then spent on lunch at Sbarro’s, which we went to after spending a mere few hours at the con. Lol again, we had no idea that there were panels or events at conventions, so we had no plan for the day. I think we knew that the con was a whole weekend event, but we were only able to afford/make it for one (half) day. I don’t remember much of what we did. We spent the majority of it wandering around perhaps. ALTHOUGH, as I’m writing out this entry, I am slowly remembering a particular moment early on in the day, where we came across a Kenshin Himura cosplayer WHO HAD NO X-SHAPED SCAR ON HIS FACE. We dutifully pointed it out to him, for him to reply with “…...DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY LIPSTICK OR SOMETHING?”
Love and Peace~!
D’aaaw look how cute we are~
THESE ARE SCANS/PHOTOS OF PHYSICAL PHOTOS, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? Many thanks to my friend, KabukiRoad (our group’s Wolfwood), for texting these to me out of the blue last year. She had come across them while doing some pandemic spring cleaning lmao. …Huh. My hair’s actually shorter than I remember it being then. Also, I guess I was wearing sneakers that day. I figured as much, since we were doing lots of walking. And I guess I didn’t tuck the shirt in after all. Lol as I said earlier, the lineart for the drawing above had actually been done back in 2019 I think. I didn’t see these photos until last year lol.
For a Trigun group though, we sure DID lack a Vash the Stampede of all characters. Way to have everyone except the literal MAIN CHARACTER. We even brought a box of donuts with us to the con to fucking give to a Vash cosplayer if we ever saw one. Fortunately, we actually came across a single Vash cosplayer (with a Wolfwood) during our few hours at the con. They loved the donuts. We had our Meryl and Millie give the box to them a la Insurance Girls style. I think I remember the Vash cosplayer pretending to tear up when they saw me as Rem lol. We were utterly ECSTATIC over this interaction. It definitely made our day. Afterwards, we parted ways to go enjoy the con. We did see them again in passing some time later on in the day; they and their Wolfwood still eating the box of donuts lol.
BAAF 2003 Con badge
This con was unique in that it offered “half day” tickets??? Like…you could only go for half the day? Idk how you would even track how long someone had been there. There must’ve been a sticker or something to indicate what time the person bought the badge.
The aforementioned InuYasha plush pouch. Lol I had to google search for this image, as I have no idea where the hell mine is now (I actually also managed to find an eBay listing for one). I definitely still have it somewhere in my house. I used mine to carry around my cell phone (lol back when cell phones weren’t so fucking big). I’d tie the strings onto a belt loop on my school uniform skirt or my pants, so I’d always have my phone on me at my waist.
Big Apple Anime Fest no longer exists. After our first experience with a convention, I had really wanted to go to another one. I was super hoping to make it to BAAF again the next summer. But in 2004, I was bummed when I heard that it would not be returning to that venue. Instead, the venue would be hosting the Republican National Convention or something that year. I remember being particularly salty about it; not because of them being Republican, but because they canceled my anime convention lmaoooo. BAAF never happened again after that. Not totally sure what happened there. Maybe it fell on hard times and was just never able to recover. I’ll always remember it though.
And that’s it~! If you’ve read through this whole thing, thank you! Thank you for taking this trip down memory lane with me. I think it’s gonna be really fun to revisit old memories and fun times. I think it’ll also be interesting to look back on the convention and cosplay world throughout the years. It’s definitely grown and changed a lot. I don’t know when my next entry will be, but I hope to post at least one a month. Ideally, I’d like to post once a week, since I’ve got A TON of costumes to go through. Maybe this will inspire me to learn how to draw faster too lol.