As I have never been to cosfest before, I felt that it is quite interesting and different from the other anime events like AFA etc. As expected, there were numerous cosplayers but the venue had ample space for the large number of cosplayers, as compared to say Comifest 1. The amount of fanmade merchandise stalls surprised me, as other events like AFA have much less fan merchandise and more official ones .
Overall it was a very exciting and enjoyable event. Just looking at all the cosplayers was fun too :) As for the dance, although it was a pity that we could not do it, I think it is just as well that we didn’t. We were quite uncoordinated and not exactly in costume, which probably caused us to feel a lot more self-conscious, especially in a such a large group of cosplayers.
I cosplayed as a bird. I made a pair of earmuffs with wings, using pincushions, felt, cardboard and a thin hairband that I had. Unfortunately, it kind of fell apart after being jostled in my bag on the way home )): It wasn’t very well done, since I discovered that felt is very very difficult to cut nicely with a blunt pair of scissors *sigh* In addition, it kinda kept slipping off during the dance due to the weight of the pincushions and it blocked my hearing somewhat too! Overall, I think our cosplay was quite fun for a mini cosplay.
(Sorry for the smallish and quite unclear pic!)
One cosplayer that caught my attention was this person cosplaying Black!Japan (Hetalia Axis Powers) It caught my attention because I wasn’t expecting anyone to be cosplaying from the black!Asia series. I felt that the gold embellishments were very well made and that the hat was a nice touch to the outfit. In addition, since I plan to cosplay black!Hong Kong, this cosplay of another character with the similar theme would be helpful.
Hong Kong is generally an expressionless, emotionless character for most parts, except when he’s setting off firecrackers. His character is also quite complicated, especially in terms of relationships okay I’m going into fanfiction territory now, sorry! In this picture, his black!outfit is quite simple in terms of design but some designs are really complicated. I think I would be going with this easier design since … it’s easier and more suitable for my woefully pitiable skills with cloth materials. One thing that I have yet to determine is if I should use a prop, since it would be easy to pose but Hong Kong doesn’t exactly have a set item to use.
There were a lot more booths than I were expecting and (much to my horror, I would say), so many booths that were selling hetalia merchandise! This was a far cry from other events I had been to which usually had booths selling from one or two animes/mangas only. I bought badges and badges, being a notorious badge collector.
(some of my hoard hohoho)
I think I bought the most in the group heh, except perhaps for Charmaine? I felt the prices were quite reasonable since badges of the size in the picture usually goes for around 3 dollars, with the medium sized ones around 4 dollars and finally larger ones at 4 dollars and above. Besides, many shops had a buy ____ get 1 free or buy 3 at ____ price offer that was good for marketing I suppose. One area of strength was that many booths sold items from a wide range of animes, which catered to a large audience. However I feel that this would be difficult for us to replicate since we do not have the funds to produce such a wide variety of goods. Also, I noticed that there were few shoujo merchandise (for some reason, it’s always like that?) and that most of the merchandise were for main characters. For example, although there were a range of vocaloid goods, there was an exorbitant number of Miku goods! What about Len and Rin? Or Gakupo, Meiko, Kaito, Neru, Teto, Ted, Neru haha okay sorry I’ll stop now . I also felt that more creative items rather than the standard badges, prints, keychains etc could be done and that the items could also have a practical use.
Also, perhaps prose could be incorporated more into the merchandise :))) *sorry, this is what happens to me from writing too much*
But overall, I had and I think we all had fun at cosfest together :D
Labels: Cosfest
