You can be a princess. You can be a queen. You can even be a goddess. You can be anything you want. To love your cosplay is to love yourself.
Morning reblog for the daytime people :)
You can be a princess. You can be a queen. You can even be a goddess. You can be anything you want. To love your cosplay is to love yourself.
EDIT!
Tiana photo credits here.
Neo Queen Serenity photo credits here.
I want to showcase a cosplayer today: my wifey. She makes me such wonderful cosplays, but she rarely gets in costume herself. So as a confidence booster, she borrowed my Belle dress and a corset so that it would fit her better, and we walked around together at Daisho Con <3 She got to see what it was like to be stopped for pictures and be called beautiful, and it was really great to see her reactions. Because I think she’s so lovely but I’m always the one wearing the fancy dresses.
I think the best moment was meeting J. Michael Tatum, because he spazzed over our dresses and I was like, “She’s the one who makes them.” His face after that and her reaction? Yes. It’s about time she got to be in the spotlight :)
So yeah, here’s my costume making wifey. Tell her that she needs to cosplay in more things like this with me! Oh, and she found a Rumpelstiltskin from Once Upon a Time and spazzed all cute like :)
That one time we were at Daisho Con and J. Michael Tatum spazzed over our Disney Princess cosplay and asked for a picture with us <3
More Daisho pictures to come, most are on my wifey’s camera, including me with my Lottie, and my wifey working my Belle dress. OMG you guys we got stopped SO MUCH and I ran into people who were fans of me and I couldn’t believe it at all and just EVERYONE AT THIS CON HAS BEEN SO WONDERFUL THAT I HAVE TO USE ALL CAPS.
And to top it all off I get to end this weekend with a bunch of Persona announcements AND picking my mama up from the airport on the way home for her week vacation with us for Thanksgiving OMG WHY IS LIFE SO PERFECT RIGHT NOW?!
Princess Belle sailor scout WIP
I’ve got the base done, now to add the details! I’m pretty happy with is so far and I’m SO glad the gold from the gloves doesn’t clash with the dress, I was scared. Now I need to hunt for some socks!!!!!!!!!!!
This is going to be so cute!
*incoherent fangirl noises*
Hi everyone! Trying something new. I decided to embrace my natural hair for some pictures. I’ve been slowly trying to build my confidence about my natural hair and wearing it the way it is. It’s really, really hard not to work on auto pilot and slick it back into a pony tail, or wear a hat, or straighten it. So I thought I’d wear my Belle dress and take pictures. I felt the whole Belle/Beauty thing would be fitting. That, and I’ve been wanting to get good pictures in this dress.
The dress is, of course, made by my wifey (as always). She also took the pictures, right in our backyard :) I thought that since Peach went over so well (which was my actual hair and not a wig, which is what I was going to do) I would try this :) I was a little nervous, but I think the pictures turned out really good ^^
My wifey’s page (she takes commissions)
My wifey’s page, the sequel (this is tumblr, above is Facebook)
Gaston really is the most terrifying Disney villain because he could be anyone in the world.
Later he convinces the whole town to set up his wedding with the knowledge that the would-be bride would be thrown into it. Everyone finds his creepy-ass tactics as cute and “boys will be boys” esque. So yeah, he is terrifying.
Yeah, the truly scary thing about Beauty and the Beast isn’t that Gaston exists, but that society fucking loves him. People who deride the movie by saying it’s about Stockholm Syndrome are ignoring that it’s actually about the various ways that truly decent people get othered by society. People don’t trust the Beast because of the way he looks, which only feeds his anger issues and pushes him further away. Gaston isn’t the only one who criticizes Belle for being bookish, either; the whole town says there must be something wrong with her. And her father gets carted off to a mental asylum for being just a little eccentric.
Howard Ashman, who collaborated on the film’s score and had a huge influence on the movie’s story and themes, was a gay man who died of AIDS shortly after work on the film was completed. If you watch the film with that in mind, the message of it becomes clear. Gaston demonstrates that bullies are rewarded and beloved by society as long as they possess a certain set of characteristics, while nice people who don’t are ostracized. The love story between Belle and the Beast is about them finding solace in each other after society rejects them both.
Notice how the Beast reacts when the whole town comes for him. He’s not angry, he’s sad. He’s tired. And he almost gives up because he has nothing to live for. But then he sees that Belle has come back for him, and suddenly he does. In the original fairy tale, the Beast asks Belle to marry him every night, and the spell is broken when she accepts. In the Disney movie, he waits for her to love him, because he cannot love himself. That’s how badly being ostracized from society and told that you’re a monster all your life can fuck with your head and make you stop seeing yourself as human.
Society rewards the bullies because we’ve been brought up to believe that their victims don’t belong. That if someone doesn’t fit in, then they have to be put in their place, or destroyed. And this movie demonstrates that this line of thinking is wrong. It’s so much deeper than a standard “be yourself” message, and that’s why it’s one of my favorite Disney movies.
Ooooo I like this a lot! I wanna add something else, too.
Another way to look at it, is that Beast actually tried things the way Gaston was going to do them. Gaston essentially went to Belle like, “Hey, everyone wants me, you should too, end of story.” Even after she showed no interest, he showed up at her house with an entire wedding. Then, after the second no, and after getting reassurance from the entire town that “no one is as perfect as Gaston,” he keeps at it, so much so that he locks her father up and tries to use him against her.
Now, Beast pretty much did the same thing, EXCEPT, overtime he realized that that was not the way you did things. After yelling and screaming, he scared her away. Then, he saved her, brought her back, and after she yelled back at him… he actually listened. He actually listened, took his time, and they developed a relationship (and how symbolic is it that he gave her a library, full of books, the thing that Gaston said she was weird for liking). He learned so much, in fact, that he let her go. He let her go home. Because keeping her there was not the thing to do unless if SHE WANTED TO STAY!
Also, he let her have a voice. She yelled at him even after he saved her, “Well if you hold still it wouldn’t hurt as much,” while she was patching him up, and, “You need to control your temper.” She’s tried to get it through Gaston’s head but he won’t listen. Beast, on the other hand, did. I think that’s important. Like this post says, these two were both shunned, and sure the way they got together wasn’t great, but Beast improves. Gaston never, ever did. And what makes him frightening even with the sinister likes of Ursula or Jafar or other more supernatural villains in Disney is that… he’s real. He’s very, very real. No one in the town cares that Belle is like, “… no.” In fact, they’re a mix of, “Ugh what does he see in her,” and, “How could she say no?”
Like, the entire town worships him, and are o.k. with locking Belle’s father away. blindly storming a castle, and just… doing anything Gaston wants. Not because of magic or it being against their will, they just… want to. I mean sure Disney villains have their henchman, Gaston did too, but he had THE ENTIRE TOWN as his beck and call because… he said so. Anyone can see that Belle isn’t interested. But no, she’s lucky that he wants her because she’s so weird, and it’s an honor to be around Gaston. Period. You’re crazy not to agree.
Her and Beast started out on bad ground, but he learned. Gaston was like, “Nope. Gonna keep your father here unless you marry me. End of story,” after she came back from the castle. And even worse, “Gonna lock you up too while we storm the castle,” even after she said that Beast was kind and wouldn’t hurt anybody. In fact, when Gaston approached him, he had no interest in fighting and he didn’t care. He just sent all these townspeople into this unknown castle (and he had no way of knowing if they survived or not as he charged for the Beast’s room) then started fighting someone who didn’t even want to fight him. Real great guy, huh?
Someone suggested that I take a stab at Merida. I hadn’t considered it before, but then I saw that she had a Jim Shore style outfit. I’ve done this before (as seen in the picture ^^) My partner made me a ridiculously gorgeous Belle dress based on a Jim Shore statue we have, and now I can do it for Merida. Originally I was thinking of doing Tiana, but it would be fun doing a completely new cosplay.
That and we, randomly, have a Merida wig in our wig collection in the basement O.o I tried it on and it doesn’t look super stupid like I thought it would, sweet!
More shots of the Beauty and the Beast Jim Shore cosplay I made for myself and my wifey! The library shots are at Anime Iowa, while the kiss is from Anime Central in the Disney group.
Oddly enough, these are the first dresses where I experimented with making the outfits out of quilter’s cotton so that I could get the patterns to match the Jim Shore statues. Belle’s dress is a combination of different dress patterns I had (I think about 3) while Beast’s outfit is an altered Uncle Sam costume, lol.
I can’t make clothing patterns myself, so instead I Frankenstein different patterns together to get all the pieces I want, then tailor it to each of our bodies.
Any questions about the cosplay? What do you guys think?
The Belle dress :)
Ummm… hey everyone who stumbled over to my tumblr from my wifey’s page
Since a lot of you seem to like the Belle dress I’ve made for her, I thought I’d share a close up of the handpainted panel from the front of the dress. This is what it looked like before I sewed it in.
So yeah, my tumblr is going to be full of progress pictures and crafty things and all of that. Feel free to poke me for sewing stuff. I’m not an expert but if I don’t know it, I’ll find out someone who does and point you in the right direction… or something… ^_^;;;;;
(I didn’t expect this to get so popular!, still adjusting!)
This is my wifey/costume maker’s tumblr :) This is a picture of the Belle dress front panel before she sewed it. She actually printed out this huge picture, taped it all together, traced around it and then drew the rest and painted it. So this is hand done. I’m super lucky she’s so patient with the cosplay I want :) She’s getting into doing commissions more, which is great! We need more plus size positive costume makers :)
And randomly, hello new followers, somehow I’ve over 400 in the span of about three days O.o Hi!
