Choosing characters- Casualty Cosplay edition

Many people wonder which character they should choose and why. I've been planning on writing from this subject in general, but first I'd like to reveal how we have ended up with the characters we have cosplayed. I will go trought our pair cosplays original ones not included.

When we did our first cosplay pair, I was the one who chose the character first. I had just been introduced to Bleach and after a marathon of manga and anime published to the date, I took a liking on Matsumoto Rangiku, because of her feminity and outgoing personality. And perhaps the fact that she enjoyed alcohol had something to do with it too. The con we were going to attend was Ropecon, which I had participated two or three times before in random costumes. It was first time for Yoki and she had hard time choosing the character. She wanted to cosplay character from Bleach as I did. In the end she just picked up Hitsugaya Toushiro. She didn't particularly like him, but it would be natural to see these characters together. The uniforms was easy to make with the skills we had back then and we just couldn't resist the fact that we would have swords. When I look at the costumes now, there are many things I would like to redo, but then again, everybody have their first costumes which sometimes are just things to set aside.

The second pair we did was Sasori and Deidara from Naruto. God... I can't remember what was the reason why we chose them, but then again they jus fitted us really well. I think Yoki has a opinion on this one. I have some idea though... I think this was the first cosplay we chose as a team. Usually one of us come up with an idea and then the other one just goes with the flow. But in the case of Sasori and Deidara we ended up with our favorite characters in the series and they just matched. The height was so and so, personalities varied like ours do and we liked them. What else do we need? The funny thing with this cosplay was, that we had thought of doing one other pair cosplay, but then chose to drop it, because it seemed a lot of time consuming work. May I laught now? Making complex pieces of Sasori's body and Mayuri's head gear at the same time isn't a lot of work? Hohhohho... We had to use our imagination with Sasori, because his puppet form hadn’t been shown in the anime at that time. As colour reference we used one manga cover and if I remember correctly, one original art. I recall that Sasori debuted in the anime week before Animecon 2007.

At the time we were really ambitious and decided to do two cosplays. Yoki wanted to do Kurotsuchi Mayuri from Bleach. I had no clue that I would end up doing Akon. It was just a natural solution to our ”we need to do connected characters”-thinking. I think I also chosed Akon, because I hadn’t seen more than one person portraying him. The costume was easy and it would not take too much attention off from Mayuri's costume. I could concentrate on doing Mayuri, when my own part was quite humble. For Mayuri, his Yoki’s ultimately favorite character from Bleach. In fact, everyone of her favorite characters have some sort of mental issue. Mad scientist syndrome in this case. And Mayuri was the highlight of this pair cosplay. I was more like an add-on, which was fine really. I was satisfied with my work on the costumes and Yoki is like a hanger for my creations. And the more photogenic one.

Jasdero and Debitto was purely my idea. I had read D.Gray-man for some time and when I saw these twins the first time I just couldn’t pass them. I introduced grey-skinned Noahs to Yoki, and she approved them. Of course I had already thought that Yoki would portray Jasdero and apparently he was enough of a nuthead to fit Yoki's taste. The height difference between us, which is something like 10 cm at most, didn't matter, because Jasdero hardly ever stands straight. If I were to portray Jasdero, I would have serious problems with showing off my waist and stomack and also grinning the way Jasdero does. Yoki did not have any issues with these. Only thing she wasn't too happy about was the long blond wig. Without the grey make-up she looked really bizarre.

Our current project, which I can not reveal, fits the neutral-evil personality zone we have been accidentally been following. And if we ever finish this huge project we have another one already selected. The characters are more in the nuthead zone, I think.

When we choose characters we try to take in concideration our height, porpotion and on some level the personalities. We hardly ever cosplay characters we don't like, but can pick up the other persons interests. The restrictions we have are usually costs and a level of skills in costume making combined. I'm personally not going to start a project I know will include expencive fabrics and stuctures sewing-wise that I am not too familiar with. But as I always say... Imagination.