Well, I live in Ohio with my husband. I recently received my Master of Arts in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University. I am still a student at BGSU, just in the American Culture Studies Ph.D. program. And I am a great big geek!
I first found out about cosplay during spring quarter of my sophomore year of college. I had an awesome roommate who explained to me what conventions were and what cosplay was all about. The following fall (2003) I went up to Goodwill and cobbled together my first cosplay, Milly Thompson, for Halloween. The next year I decided to go for my first attempt at crossplay, even though I had no idea that's what I was doing at the time, with Wolfwood. Then I graduated from college. I kept working on making my Halloween costumes the best I could. I was never satisfied with just buying something off the rack. Then our friends invited us to come to DragonCon. Since then I've jumped in with both feet and never looked back!
As you can probably see, I'm not much of an anime/manga cosplayer. I prefer to think of myself as a western costumer. While I love my anime and manga, the characters I love there either have too complex of costumes or are really simple and would be really hard to recognize. I have been a sci-fi fan for as long as I can remember. Bookworm, too. So it's no surprise that most of my costumes fall into those two categories. DragonCon helps to encourage that too. ;)
I first found out about cosplay during spring quarter of my sophomore year of college. I had an awesome roommate who explained to me what conventions were and what cosplay was all about. The following fall (2003) I went up to Goodwill and cobbled together my first cosplay, Milly Thompson, for Halloween. The next year I decided to go for my first attempt at crossplay, even though I had no idea that's what I was doing at the time, with Wolfwood. Then I graduated from college. I kept working on making my Halloween costumes the best I could. I was never satisfied with just buying something off the rack. Then our friends invited us to come to DragonCon. Since then I've jumped in with both feet and never looked back!
As you can probably see, I'm not much of an anime/manga cosplayer. I prefer to think of myself as a western costumer. While I love my anime and manga, the characters I love there either have too complex of costumes or are really simple and would be really hard to recognize. I have been a sci-fi fan for as long as I can remember. Bookworm, too. So it's no surprise that most of my costumes fall into those two categories. DragonCon helps to encourage that too. ;)