Denver Comic Con Recap! (Patreon)

This is gonna be a long one, so I'll include a tl;dr version at the bottom for those of you who don't want to read a novel, haha!

FRIDAY

On Friday I wore Iris Amicitia from Final Fantasy, and got to meet up with my friends from Jessolaurus Rex as Gladio and Gentiana. (There's going to be a whole photoshoot for Final Fantasy next weekend, as well as a music video, so I hope you guys are Final Fantasy fans, haha!)

I had a panel that went... uh, not exactly as planned. It was supposed to be a cosplay panel but it ended up mostly being consumed by a bodybuilder who doesn't cosplay talking about how she's psychic and a real life superhero. SO. That was... an experience.

Then I went to Club Cosplay to perform Sexy Gandalf's new music video live to celebrate it's debut! You can watch the music video here. I got to play Arwen (which I still need to do a photoshoot for! Ack!)

SATURDAY

Saturday was the big one... the centaurette! Unfortunately it started out poorly. We were late leaving the house, finding parking took forever, and then carrying the horse body from the parking lot (just a few blocks, but in heels) meant I was exhausted and sweaty when we got to the con, or should I say... when we got to the line. The line circled the entire convention center, but it was also moving super fast, so I basically did a sprint around the entire building, in heels, with the horse butt on, before getting inside. By the time we got inside, I already had scraped off skin on my feet from the heels, the back hooves were scuffed, and I wanted to take it all off and go home. On top of all that, the "walking" rigging wasn't working properly.

Luckily, my amazing dad saved the day. I took off the whole rig and the shoes and sat down for a bit to calm down and cool off. I decided to forego the heels completely (which is against the rules, I might note...) and my dad took his own black socks off of his feet so that my toes peeking out from under the fur would look like matching hooves, haha! He helped me adjust the fishing line for the walk, and I felt SO much better.

Once I was comfortable and the legs were working properly, it was a big hit!! We could barely move across the convention center with all the photos being taken. The reactions were so gratifying — people literally dropping their jaws. One dad approached while I was standing still and requested that I take a few steps to show his son (maybe 8 years old) that I could really walk, since he didn't believe I could. His face when I obliged was hilarious!!

This was the first truly impressive convention costume I've ever done, so I also got some invasiveness and rudeness for the first time, too. One woman took a photo of me while I was sitting on the floor eating a muffin with the horse butt on the floor next to me. That's not even a good photo?? Why would you want that? And while I was on the escalator, the guy behind me grabbed my back leg and pulled on it "to see how it worked," which ticked me off just because he could've easily damaged it or snapped the fishing line. (I didn't tell him off because I was pretty shocked it happened, honestly.)

But overall, the experience was a net positive!! It was so much fun to see people's faces when I walked, and even though it was exhausting to wear, it was worth it. Unfortunately I was only able to wear it (with breaks every hour or so) for about 4 hours, so a lot of people missed seeing it, which was sad. But I made the tail detachable specifically so that I could wear a satyr-style version of the costume once the body got too uncomfortable, and people seemed to like that, too!

That night we had a lovely dinner with friends at a Cuban place and then hung out at the Air Bnb. Cons are social experiences in many ways, but often you don't get to spend a ton of time hanging out with your friends at a big event like DCC, so this was a really nice change from previous years.

SUNDAY

Sunday was shopping & photo op day! I wore my 50s Dr. Horrible on this day, which was cute and fun, but a VERY bad shoe choice. My friend Nicole did a 50s Captain Hammer and while most people didn't recognize the costumes, the ones who did were very excited to see us!

Our first photo op was with Felicia Day. Some of you may remember that I met her at Dragon Con a few years ago as Codex and had a great experience then — she asked me to come by her table so she could take a photo, and just was really genuinely excited to see me.

As we got ready to take the photo, I mentioned that I had met her at Dragon Con and she immediately remembered me. We took our photo and then she asked me to remind her of my name, and when I said "Ginny," she got this look like it all clicked and she said "I love seeing your cosplay stuff online." I was totally stunned at that and the staff were herding me away already, but as I was leaving she called out "you're my favorite Codex, seriously!" Part me thinks she probably says that to every Codex, but like.... I wasn't even wearing Codex so I kind of think maybe she was being honest.

Then we wandered the vendor room, got lunch, and headed back for our photo op with Nathan Fillion (photo forthcoming... couldn't get a good one on the con floor, and am still trying to dig everything out of the car, haha!)

We had a bit of an odd experience with that one, because DCC's server went down for a moment, and a bunch of us had to reshoot. I hope they told Nathan why some people had to come back for a second round, because I'm a little afraid that he thought we bought two identical photo ops, haha! When we approached, he pretended like he was gonna fight me — it was funny, but I was so nervous that I probably jumped a mile when he brought his fists up!

Then we went home, because we were wiped out!! All of last week, I kept telling myself "that's a problem for future Ginny" about anything that didn't related to DCC — well, now I'm future Ginny, so this week will be mostly me dealing with problems!

Coming up this weekend are the Final Fantasy photo (WeNeals Photography) & video (Drew PewPew) shoots, and I'm in the process of scheduling my centaurette shoot with Anne Barhyte once I've made a few updates to the costume. I also have three self-shoots on my plate for this month (Arwen, Dr. Horrible, and the new Cinderella shoot I want to do since we have CHICKENS), and of course I have some big Patreon updates planned, and two new costumes to make before August. Phew!! (Whoever sent me that caffeinated energy water off of my Amazon wishlist... your gift is literally going to save my life this month.)

Thank you guys for reading this whole mess, if you did!! I LOVE YOU ALL <3

tl;dr

The con was fun! I wore Iris Amicitia on Friday, my centaurette on Saturday, and Dr. Horrible on Sunday. On Friday I did a weird panel with a girl who thought she was psychic. On Saturday the centaurette started out as a disaster, but my dad saved the day and it ended up being great. On Sunday I got to meet Felicia Day again and she strongly implied that she follows or at least recognizes my cosplay work online. I also met Nathan Fillion. I'm super tired and have a lot of work to do this month!