Vote Now For The Winner Of The Mary Sue and Calgary Expo’s Ultimate Cosplay Contest!

Bronson (Williams Lake, BC)
as Gipsy Danger from Pacific Rim

I chose this costume for a multitude of reasons, the most important being that every single small child in the world dreams of being a giant robot, kicking aliens’ asses using tanker ships like baseball bats. The secondary reason was that I wanted to make a costume that I hadn’t seen much of before, and to challenge myself. My previous costume was a Commander Shepard cosplay, and after that, I felt I had the necessary skills to tackle Gipsy.

Building Gipsy Danger was definitely… an experience. Looking online, I couldn’t find much reference material for Gipsy builds. There were two other people who built Gipsy before me and, thankfully, cataloged their building experience. The problem was that, even with their extensive build threads at TheRPF, there still were many gaps where I had no idea what I was doing. However, I am no quitter, or rather, not a quitter when it comes to showing up everyone at the staff Halloween party, so I improvised. The center reactor is a vegetable steamer (stole that idea from one of the reference builds,) the lense was from an old paintball  helmet I had, the assorted tubes and bits were from previous costumes I cannibalized. Building this took from the middle of July to right before Halloween. When I heard about this contest, I asked my photographer friend to take some pictures of me goofing around in my costume. I quickly realized I needed something extra to stand out, and so, in my quickest build yet, made a tanker ship to carry around to hopefully give a sense of scale. I dont know if you can see it in any of the pictures, but I named the ship the AKE Del Toro, after the director of the movie. Inside nerd joke cred. :)

This will sound like a cop out, but what I love about cosplay is everything. I love the imagination. I love the contemplation phase. I love making schematics. I love buying powertools from the cute girl at Home Depot, who asks if I’m trying my hand at household improvements, then looks at me like I’m crazy when I tell her the third dremel I bought this year is for costume making. I LOVE  building, seeing it come to life. I love the glue burns. I love it when something doesnt work out quite right and you stay up til three in the morning coming up with a solution. I love the looks I get. I love seeing first time cosplayers at conventions, nervous until they step out the door and see the sea of costumes, and realize this is where they fit in.

I think what I love most about cosplay is the idea that we take something impractical or downright impossible, usually limited to fantasy universes, where the hero can wield a 6 foot sword, or hair so spiky and intricate you could poke someones eye out, and then pulling them from fiction, and into real life.