So I don’t think I’ve posted about this on my Tumblr yet, but a few weeks ago I was told that my cosplay presentation idea for the “Body Love Conference” made it through round one!  Round two was to make a video that pretty much goes into what your presentation is, why its important, and things like that.  If the video makes it through, then I get to go to the conference :)  

I decided that on top of telling, I would show why it would be important. So my partner and I made this shirt, which is just a handful of comments I’ve gotten this year alone about my cosplay.  This isn’t everything, because everything wouldn’t fit on the front of the shirt.  How sad is that? Cosplay is supposed to be fun, right?  We’re dressing up as fictional characters, who are these people who have time to say such harsh things to someone they don’t even know?  

But I’m not the only one this happens to.  I’m sure everyone has a story where someone said something out of line to them, whether they were cosplaying or not.  And, oddly enough, that creates an understanding, a bond, between us.  And through the negativity it shows why positivity is so important.  It shows why your happiness and your opinion of yourself is what matters.  You can’t go off of someone else’s blind judgment.  You can’t let these words keep you down, I say “keep” because, honestly, they will hurt and I will never deny that part, because it’s important to be honest with your feelings.  Being called these names does hurt and they will make you pause in your steps.  They made me pause, but they didn’t make me completely stop.  They never will.  Why should they?  

I know the truth about myself.  I’m a writer.  I’m a cosplayer.  I’m an artist. I have a loving partner, great friends and family.  Why is one “fat slob” comment going to stop me from living the life I want to live?  

It’s not, and it shouldn’t stop you, either.

<3 Brichibi Cosplays

So there was a Smash Brothers event at the GameStop I used to work at.  Once upon a time, when Smash Brothers Brawl came out, I debuted my Princess Peach cosplay and worked the midnight launch.  I decided to go to the event as Peach, just for fun, and got a couple of pics  :)

Smash Brothers is AMAZING, btw, it’s so fun and graphically it’s gorgeous.  I can’t wait until it comes out.  I like lost all of my skill since Brawl though so I’m gonna need to practice, lol.

Cosplay was made by my wifey, as always, and you can check out more of my cosplay here.  Peachy!

So according to Gail Simone it’s Cosplay Appreciation Day!  So here are some of my pics from this year.  It’s been quite the year and we’ve gone to more cons than ever with our art, our books, and our costumes.  It’s also been quite the year in spreading the message that cosplay is for everyone, and it’ll continue on into next year and years to come <3

Special thanks to my wifey (the Belle with the design on the front of the dress and pretty much the girl in every pic with me except for the group shot of Disney characters) for making these costumes and always being a supportive voice.  Also thanks to all of the cool people I’ve met at all of these conventions and online through my cosplay page, I hope we all have just as much fun, or even more fun, next year.  Thanks for all of the support in what I do, it means a lot to me :)

Also thanks to ilessthan3photography, Nude Carbon Studios, DWB Photography, Stray Things Photography and Cerulean Photography for the professional photos throughout the year :)  And thanks to artists like asieybarbie and Timothy Lim for letting us use their work for our cosplay (asieybarbie for Neo Queen Serenity and Timothy Lim for the Five Nights at Freddy’s pizza box).  

Also cosplay credits to the following people in the pictures above:

Queen of Hearts is Sweets4aSweet Cosplay

Belle (in the pic with the Queen of Hearts) is Pretty Lush Cosplay

Freddy Fazbear is Brad Duct-Tape Hale

My cosplay page is here and, as always, remember that to love your cosplay is to love yourself <3

I think plus size women (and men) need to see positive, beautiful representation of people who are their size.  I also think they need to see plus size people being happy with who they are.  The stereotype of the unhappy, fat loaf who sits on the couch being lazy is such a lie, and it kills me that that’s what some people expect when they think of a chubby person.  I hate that it’s such a surprise to some people to see a plus size person wearing nice clothes and looking good, so I’m really glad to see positive representation out there.

Honestly, I think it’s just a great thing for everyone to see, not just plus size individuals.  Society has such a skewed view on beauty.  It’s always changing and the things we see aren’t always truthful (Photoshop, etc.)  I get support from all sorts of people, not just plus size.  There are plenty of people who are smaller than me who feel encouraged to love themselves when they see me.  I feel like body positivity is something that’s beneficial to everyone.  I feel like everyone has their insecurities, so seeing people embrace who they are is such a huge confidence booster.

My interview with The Curvy Fashionista went up today and I haven’t stopped smiling since :)

chubby-bunnies:

Being Wonder Woman always makes me feel powerful and beautiful  :)

Cosplayer is me!

Cosplay was made by my wonderful and talented wifey <3

Yay!  Thanks for posting me  <3 <3 <3

Sometimes you kiss a frog and he turns into an abridged series creator…? Seriously though, martininamerica is one of the nicest, sweetest people you’ll ever meet at a con, so you should definitely take time out to go see him.  He’s such a great person and I’m really happy to be able to call him a friend  :)  

Yesterday I was Princess Tiana on the last day of Anime Fusion  :)  

thatjayjustice:

This is just the most recent of countless similar messages I have received because of my Wonder Woman costumes. I am so tired of white, white passing, and anti-Black people from any and all ethnic backgrounds and nationalities looking at me in my costume and telling me ‘You don’t deserve to wear that. Wonder Woman isn’t for Black people.’

It’s nothing to do with ‘accuracy’, it’s racism and I’m sick of it. In before ‘Oh but they just didn’t know about Nubia!!’ Please. You can try to use ignorance as an excuse but you have to ask yourself, even if these people don’t know there IS a Black Wonder Woman, what makes them feel like they have the right to tell Black people what they can and cannot do? What gives them this supposed authority over our imaginations and our desire to create? This mentality is the reason why so many potential cosplayers of color are afraid to even wear a costume.

I can and have sent these people panels, pages and issues of official DC comics full of images of Black Wonder Women (yes, there are more than one!) and it doesn’t matter to them. My skin is still too dark, my nose too broad, my hair too nappy, in their words, not mine. I have been told to my face that I disgrace the Wonder Woman costume with my Blackness. Many other people of color have gone through similar experiences. I know of only one way for us to combat this.

Create, design, display and wear whatever we damn well please. Let our differences enhance our art. Let every single privileged individual who thinks to question our rights to self expression choke on their words. Feel free to be yourself in whatever way you see fit. Do not let other people’s opinions of your race or ethnicity dictate your choices. Don’t let the way they see you have anything to do with who you are. 

Jay is amazing~

brichibi:

These quotes are all things that have been said to me in regards to my body and my race.  It’s not everything that’s ever been said to me, oh no, not even close, but they’ve been said as recently as last month.  

Don’t let the negatives take over, don’t let them weigh you down and dictate who you are.  Don’t let them cover up the things that make you, you.

<3 Brichibi Cosplays

Reblogging because it’s totally relevant for today.  Today we can add the following to that list above: Cow, Hippo, Wonder What to Eat Woman, Wonder Bread Woman, Wonder Blob, Wonder Water Buffalo, Blunder Woman, Fat Slob, Wonder Whale, Wonder Why Woman.  All in one day. This is not including questions like, “I wonder how she got in that costume.”

The message at the bottom is still the same: Don’t let someone else’s hang-ups cover who you really are.  People don’t like a fat, black Wonder Woman?  The amount of fucks I give about that is the fattest form of zero.    

13 years ago I was a freshman at Iowa State University. 18 years old, it was my first time away from home, from the friends I knew, my family, and my boyfriend. Over the summer I had joined a Gundam Wing yaoi mailing list and had been making some online friends through it, so I at least had that while I was away. I was the baby of the list, the youngest one on it, since I was only 18, but we all got along well and had a lot of fun writing fics and sharing fanart of Heero Yuy and Duo Maxwell.

One day, on the list, I inadvertently started a “war” of sorts with one of the other ladies. It was all in good fun, to this day this is the only fandom I was a part of where “ship wars” weren’t terrible. We were debating who was on top: Heero or Duo, and we started a war where we all took sides and wrote fic/did fanart to “fire shots” at the other side. In the end we all won because, huzzah for more fanworks of our OTP! Anyhow, while taking sides, I was all Heero x Duo and this other lady was all Duo x Heero, and surprisingly, someone by the name of Snow Tigra took my side. It was odd because she geared more towards Duo x Heero, but she decided for a change of pace.

Neither of us knew that, 13 years later, we’d be living together, cosplaying together, writing books together, and planning a Mortal Kombat wedding.

Once Snow joined my side we started talking. It was mostly about fandom stuff, geeky things, ect. We even wrote a terrible fic where the Gundam Wing boys had to deal with the T-virus from Resident Evil (omg you haven’t lived until you write a scene of Trowa shooting a zombie dog who tries to bite Quatre) I learned about anime conventions through her, cosplay, and even about canon boy’s love series like Gravitation and such (she even burned cds of it and mailed it out to everyone on the list so we could all watch, which is how you watched anime before streaming was a thing). At some point, my boyfriend and I broke up. He stopped talking to me while I was away and I was pretty depressed. Snow sent me a white tiger to keep me company, and I actually still have her and sleep with her every night. During all this we also sent each other pictures of ourselves (through actual mail, lol, because phones that took pictures whut are the things?). I remember being really anxious and hoping that she thought I was cute, which was odd because she’s a girl, and I had had a boyfriend once upon a time. But anyway… we kept talking and one day she told me about this girl in her class that she had a crush on. And… I got jealous. Which, again, odd right? I had had a boyfriend and girls were supposed to like boys. 

Unless…

… no.

No!

So then I proceeded to ignore her for about a week. No chatting online. No emails. No nothing. Because there was no way in hell I could like a girl. That’s not the sort of thing that happened! Don’t get me wrong I had no issue with gay people, I just knew damn well that that wasn’t me. It couldn’t be. All of my friends at home either had boyfriends or were boy crazy. And forget telling my parents, I still remember to this day a conversation one of my aunts had with my dad about, “What if she were gay?” And he was like, “She’s not. No.” This was before I met Snow and during the movie “In and Out” where the guy gets called gay by one of his students who was a celebrity at the time, and he goes down the alter with his wifey and just blurts out that he is, in fact, gay. But that movie spurred on that conversation where my dad was like, “Nope, not even a possibility,” and I stuck with that mentality. No. No. No!

But after a week I started to miss her. She was sending me emails asking if I was o.k., if something had happened because I wasn’t online, and finally I just said… tell her. So I stood in my campus library and wrote this long email about how I was jealous of the girl she had a crush on, that I never had feelings like this before for a girl, and that I liked her.

Again, 13 years later, who knew?

She said it would be best if we stayed friends until we met in person, which would be at Anime Central 2002 in April, and we did try, but just… there was a connection, and we just gave up. We were dating, plain and simple. Our online conversations were our ways of communication, and it turned into roleplaying with anime characters which, oddly enough, would give birth to the book series we have going now. When we finally met at Anime Central that was it, it just added to the love we had for each other, and we knew that we’d be together for a long time.

We’ve been through a lot along the way. Learning about each other, dealing with telling our families. It didn’t go well at first. My dad and I fought during my Christmas break. Her parents flat out denied it. My mom could care less, honestly, so we at least had that going. There were many holidays with her family where I was just a roommate. My dad slowly got used to the idea and finally came around. We’ve had months of struggling financially because I moved up here after college with no job. We had to deal with me losing said job 6 years later. We’ve had to deal with losing two cats. We’ve had to deal with being broken into. There’s been a lot of hurdles, you know? But I don’t think I’ve ever met someone so determined to keep me happy. She takes on so much, and I do the same, too. We work together to make our dreams come true. These dreams have been festering over time and now we’re working together to make them happen. Writing, going to conventions, all of that. We’re a team, and I don’t think either of us imagined that we’d have so much support going into this. Cosplay was a flat out accident, honestly, I’m still in awe over the people we meet who say we’re an inspiration. But if you ever want to know how I can keep going, it’s because of her. She works her ass off doing these costumes, and she’s always encouraging the second I feel insecure. If too many negatives try to bring me down she’s always my positive. She’s everything, really.

As for her parents? They’ve turned around completely. Not only did they help us pay for our house a couple years back, but they helped us repair it and even announce us as being together when we’re over at their house and new people are coming over. My mother has met them and she even talks with Snow’s mom online. It took some time, but everything clicks now, and neither of us could be happier. 

So happy anniversary to the love of my life. 13 years and still going <3