Fan eXpo 2011 Costume

Fan eXpo is a huge geek convention that happens in downtown Toronto at the end of August. It’s a combination convention which mashes together Comics, Sci-Fi, Horror, Anime, and Gaming into one large crazy event. I’m intending to attend this year for a few reasons:

• There’s a cool board game tournament of which I am defending champion.
• Awesome celebrity guests. (Uhura, Hercules, Faith from Buffy, Starbuck, Deanna Troi, C-3P0... Ok, not nearly as awesome as last year but it's really hard to top Kirk and Spike.)
• An excuse to dress up like an idiot and maybe not look like an idiot!

It’s the last part that’s of concern here today. Last year I solicited costume ideas via Facebook and asked for feedback in a post very similar to this one. I ended up going as Waluigi and thought the costume worked out pretty well. Some people had no idea who I was but they were all people who didn't know Waluigi at all. Last year I had a handlebar moustache which I decided had to be the focus of my costume. 



As a great man once said, "restriction breeds creativity". I had a pretty narrow window to look through last year and was able to come up with a few decent ideas and make a decision from there. This year I have no such restriction and have found myself at a bit of a loss. There are so many things I could do, how could I possibly pick between them all? Without a focal piece like the moustache the idea will need to stand on it's own in order to be awesome and that's hard to find.

Here's what I look like today:

To start with, what am I looking for? Well…

• I don’t even have a stapler let alone a sewing machine, so the costume would either have to be readily available for rent/sale at a costume place or be relatively trivial to put together. (Especially since there’s only a month or so to go and I’m spending over a week of that at WBC!)
• If I’m going to look silly, I want to look good silly. This means it should be something many people would recognize (this is many people AT Fan eXpo, not the general population. I don’t care if people on the subway have no clue what I am) and be a reasonable attempt at a portrayal. Three years ago I wore a Star Trek uniform but didn’t have any Spock ears so I wasn’t really much of anything. That’s not cool and not the goal here.
• It would be nice if it was a character I actually like. 

First up, we have rehashes from previous years. The King of All Cosmos was suggested, though without a moustache it has fewer pros than last year and still has the huge con of the big tube being really annoying to other people around me. As Sthenno commented last year it would be one thing if I was 6'6" and most people could walk under the tube. Even Byung couldn't walk under the tube if I wore one. Waluigi is still an option. I'd need a fake moustache but otherwise I have everything else already. I had the best of several Waluigi costumes last year, I'd like to think, so I could go back to that well. But that's boring. I could also rehash my Spock uniform now that I have ears. But I'd add a twist, if I could find a tommy gun... Spocko!



Moving along, I also had the suggestion that I dress up as an imp from Dungeon Lords. I'm going to spending most of my time in the board game room, playing in a board game tournament. So dressing up as something from a board game makes sense and I like where the idea is coming from, but the specifics aren't appealing. I don't think anyone outside the board game room would know what I was, and I have serious doubts that anyone else would really get it even in the room. But I thought I should look for board game characters that would better fit, and couldn't come up with anything from things I play now. Unless I want to dress up as a block of wood I just don't play games with any actual characters that aren't based on something else. Darth Maul is from Star Wars, not from the Queen's Gambit board game. But then I thought about games I used to play as a kid and two ideas hit me like a truck... Rich Uncle Pennybags and Colonel Mustard! I'd probably need to carry around a candlestick for the second one but I bet most people would recognize either one. (And I'm now kicking myself for not thinking of Mr Monopoly for last year when I had a handlebar moustache!)


I had one last suggestion from my Facebook post. This was the first suggestion I got and was actually what I was thinking of in the first place as a starting point so it gets to start this search as the front runner. It's especially fitting given my Final Fantasy marathon... Red Mage! He has an awesome hat and I'm a big hat guy. Beyond needing to find the hat I'd need to find some sort of red suit or cloak or something. Really the hat is the key to the bit here. In trying to find an image here I found an incredible number of awesome red mage cosplays from FFXI and I'm not going to come anywhere close to those in a month's time which is a little sad. But then that is a different game...

But staying on the Final Fantasy topic there's a veritable gold mine of options. One character I've always wanted to dress up as is probably the most iconic Final Fantasy character: Sephiroth! I even found a website selling a detailed black cloak and long wig which makes this a real option. They claim to custom tailor it in China and ship it out in about 25 days so if I decide quickly I could really make this happen. Even if it showed up late I could be Sephiroth for something else as long as the quality is actually decent. They're charging a lot for it which is initially off-putting but then I just need to remind myself how much I paid for Waluigi last year and can almost rationalize it. As an added bonus I could try to hook something up to play the following as I walk around:



Beyond that as options I like we have Locke, Squall, Black Mage, and an impossible to do on short notice Kimarhi. I'd put Kefka on here but my sister ran into a perfect Kefka at Fan eXpo already. Another option from FFVI that I could actually pull off even though I wasn't a huge fan of the character is Gau. The same website with the Sephiroth costume had a pretty sweet Squall one as well...


Moving away from games for a bit, Fan eXpo has lots of parts to it. One of those is science fiction and I've spent a lot of time recently rewatching Battlestar Galactica. There aren't really any characters there that I could pull off, but one thing I want to do is be a cylon centurion. I did some searching and found that people have made their own original centurion but couldn't find any new ones. What I found about the original ones was very discouraging. Hundreds of dollars and months of work for just a helmet, for example. I had visions of building a little electronic device to make the red light on the front swoosh but this ultimately seems like too much work. Much like when I thought of making a borg costume for Hallowe'en a while ago.


How about a costume that doesn't fit in with Fan eXpo at all except that it's an internet meme? I could carry a song around with me for this one, too! You just got Nick Roll'd!

Back to gaming, a game I've been playing a lot lately is Ocarina of Time on my 3DS. The Chinese costume shop also has a good Link costume. Definitely iconic for sure, but a pretty good chance of duplication at the event. I finished the game today and restarted on 'Master Quest' difficulty whatever that is. I played the start of the game again, and the Deku Tree told me to make sure I listened to Navi and the key to my perfect Link costume came to me... I need to make a Navi! My thinking is getting a wire setup to attach to my shoulders and suspend a lightweight ball from it. Tape some translucent paper on there for wings and you're good to go. But the real key to the bit? Going back to my cylon plans, and my Rick Astley plans, build a little device inside that would light up. And, most importantly, have it periodically yell out "HEY! LISTEN!"

And finally, following on from the listen note, the king of listening (after you've stayed a while): Deckard Cain.

Any opinions or other suggestions? I’m open to ideas here!