by Kate | Oct 29, 2018 | Blog, Cosplay, Doctor Who, Fandoms, Marvel


I really don’t know what direction this blog is going to take.
I haven’t posted anything regularly yet, but I’m constantly thinking of ideas for it. I think the problem is actually making time to sit down and do something about it but I am going to rededicate myself to this project as many times as I need to in order to get this thing going.
I was going to focus this blog mainly on books. Well, stories. Well, it was already a lot of things when I thought it up. Books, book reviews, movies, TV shows, comic books, fandoms, music. And I’ve been adding to my list of fandoms that I want to talk about, not the least of which is Doctor Who, which has become kind of a big thing for me. And I think Doctor Who has made me an official fan in that, for the first time, not only am I getting the strangest impulses to write fanfiction (why on earth I want to do that I have no idea – I usually stay away from that kind of stuff because it’s mostly smutty), but I have started to dress up as my favorite characters, as well.
It started as a Halloween thing. I’ve never celebrated Halloween officially before (Woo-hoo, popcorn/movie nights with all the porch lights off so we won’t get interrrupted!) but this year, being at college and participating in all this college stuff, I needed a costume. And it just so happens that my wonderful friend Emily made me some Loki horns and a scepter for my birthday party earlier this year.
So, decided to dress up as Loki for Halloween, even though I had never really done costumes before. But more on that later. Because – my Loki horns were really delicate and were disassembled from the trip to my university, I decided they weren’t really travel-hardy.
Enter the Plan B costume for the fall break trip I just came back from….
Amy Pond from Doctor Who!

I picked her because I look most like her, out of all the Doctor Who companions, as you can see in this next picture. Also, because I mostly dress like her anyway (what a coincidence!) and all I had to do was borrow a miniskirt from a hallmate (because I don’t wear miniskirts) and voila! I’m Amy Pond.


I put a lot of thought into this costume….I looked at pictures of Amy on Pinterest and picked out items in my wardrobe that I thought she would wear, then decided which ones represented her entire character best. It’s a mix of different style from different episodes, but the winners were the purple plaid shirt, the miniskirt (even though the red plaid shirt she wears in Series 5 isn’t paired with a miniskirt, it still represents the character best, in my opinion), the brown jacket and red scarf. I meant to also wear my maroon fingerless mitts that my mom made me like Amy wears in The Pandorica Opens, but it totally slipped my mind.


And absolutely, I decided to draw tally marks all over my face and arms because the Silence were an awesome foe for series 6 and because I think that for anyone who has seen the show, the marks would instantly remove any and all doubt as to who I was supposed to be.
Then, as I was deciding what shoes I should wear, because Amy wears several different kinds of shoes, I went, “Hey, I should wear my Converse to represent the Tenth Doctor, because he’s my favorite.” And Amy wears blue Converse in an episode so it’s not totally out of her style, even though mine are the Doctor’s off-white classic look.
So in a kind of weird Doctor-Amy mashup I then had to build myself a sonic screwdriver. I decimated probably around two dozen pens/markers/sharpies and it cost about two hours and some silver Sharpie’d fingers, but I’m really happy with what I came up with considering I’ve never built anything like it before. I had a blue glow-stick inside it that I’d cut down and taped so it glowed, but I couldn’t figure out a good cap to put on it that would still show the blue glow but not stick out too much. So right now the blue pom-pom is holding its place.
I’m thinking about building another screwdriver when I get the chance to buy some actual materials to work with, so I can have it actually lengthen out, glow blue and make the sonic sound when I press a button, but all in all, I’m super proud of my work. I would do Amy Pond again for Wednesday’s campus-wide costume contest, but, like I said: I have Loki horns, and I don’t want them to go to waste.

So. Back to the horns.
They’re made out of cardboard, foam, and tinfoil, and Emily cleverly glued the pieces together, then spray-painted them gold. Which is perfect – she’s really got her game up – except they came off soon after the party, and I transported them to my dorm room in pieces. The scepter came apart as well when it got knocked over.

So tonight I’m working on supergluing them back together. There are pieces scattered all over the floor right now, in various stages of drying, and I have them off to the side a little because I don’t want my roommate tripping over them when she comes back later. The horns are slightly difficult to re-glue because they are heavier than the cardboard headpiece and unbalance the helmet as a whole to create the look. I hope I don’t run out of superglue trying to keep them on, don’t think I will, but I have to use painters tape at the top for right now because that’s all I have to keep the horns attached. Fortunately, I won’t be doing any looking down in that thing (heaven forbid) so nobody will see it, but it feels tacky to me because I have no gold spray paint to cover it over.
Also, this afternoon, I came to the sudden realization that while I have horns and a scepter, and I can make do with a green sweater and black pants for the outfit, I don’t have a cape! Loki needs a green cape! So as soon as I got back from my fall break trip this afternoon, I hopped on my bike and pedaled over to the nearest party store to get a green cape.
It took me forever to find it because it was really well hidden. It felt like the entire store was secretly owned by Edna Mode (“NO CAPES!”) because I couldn’t find a single cape, let alone a green one, anywhere. I finally had to ask an employee where they were and she pointed me to the back corner of the sto
re. Fortunately, it was only about 5 bucks, so I felt like I could justify spending that much with my broke college student budget. I had to pass on the black wig, though, one because I didn’t see a wig I thought would work really well, and two because I couldn’t justify spending that much when I’m trying to save for my next tuition payment. So my own (very) red hair will have to do, slicked back and pulled into a ponytail at the base of my neck.
Since I now have a gorgeous green cape (doesn’t fall all the way down to the floor but you can’t have everything), I decided I should put a little more work into the other details of the costume. I have only cardboard, the Internet, and a printer to work with, but I took a template I found online for the arm guards and just traced the outline onto some cardboard and cut it out. I then got the cardboard wet at the sink and bent it around my forearms so that it has a shape to it. They’re drying on my water bottle and a glow stick package now and I’ll see how I want to decorate them in the morning.
I have a brown paper bag that I can cut up to make the other gold pieces of the costume (I’m thinking specifically the Avengers/Dark World look) but I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do it yet. And I want to take my popsicle stick sword that I used for one of the freshmen events earlier this semester and cut it down, sharpen it a bit and maybe color it silver so I can have a useful knife to hide in my costume and randomly stab someone (ehehehe).

Well, so far so good and I’ll try to keep you updated, but in a really really long nutshell that was how my hunt for a Halloween costume turned into a serious attempt at cosplay and this might very well become a major part of my life and my blog now.
And since we were on the topic of capes and Edna Mode, I thought I’d share this funny with you:

Happy Halloween (and happy cosplaying)!
by Kate | May 1, 2018 | Blog, Fandoms, Marvel, Movie Reviews
(Author’s Note: Avengers: Infinity War came out on April 26th, and I thought since there’s such a huge hype about it, and I personally have an emotional attachment to this thing, I should write a post on it. This isn’t a review of the movie, just me talking about the kinds of things that ran through my mind most while I was waiting for the movie to finally come out.)
Let’s get started!
I’m a HUGE Marvel fan, so much so that my family members (who are also fans) tease me about it. And last Thursday I got to finally watch Avengers: Infinity War!
My family usually goes together to see Marvel movies, but this time I got a text from a friend saying that there was a group of grads from my homeschool group going to see it together.
Of course I said yes, especially since the 26th was at least a day earlier than I had planned on seeing it, depending on when my family had time to go.
I was so excited.
The entire 10 years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has culminated in this moment, and though I’m not going to spoil anything in this post since it’s been less than two weeks since the movie came out, I just wanted to share some of my biggest feelings and hopes that I had regarding this movie before I saw it.
First of all, I wanted to see it as soon as possible. There was no way I was going to let social media spoil it for me (I saw my first spoiler post today on Pinterest, as a matter of fact, and I was so glad I’d seen the movie), and I didn’t want to have to stay off the Internet altogether if it was going to be a while before I’d seen it.
I also was (like I mentioned already) really, really pumped!
I mean, nothing like this has ever been done in the history of movies before. It’s such a big crossover! I have seen all the movies anywhere between one and two dozen times, except for Spiderman: Homecoming, and can practically quote some of them.
I’ve grown very attached to most of the characters, and was constantly reading and coming up with theories of my own about what the Russo brothers were going to do with the movie. But, judging from how amazing Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War turned out, I wasn’t really worried that the movie would be terrible.
I was worried about the characters, obviously. I have definitely have favorite characters, and I don’t want to see anything happen to them. But I also like to try to see movies from a storyteller’s point of view as well. So imagine seeing the story from both sides, both as a fan (“I really hope they don’t kill off this character! The universe wouldn’t be the same without him/her!”), and as a writer (“Hmm, this character’s story arc is just about complete. The best ending for this character would be to _______ and then probably die.”).
Like I said, I’m not giving away any spoilers in this post, but some of my theories turned out to be correct and others were way off mark. There were some things that were totally unexpected and had never even crossed my mind.
And finally, I was super impressed with the hype. The marketing was done so well! Every time I turned around, at least on my social media, there was a new poster, or a new trailer, or a new TV spot. By keeping the movie and what could possibly happen so public and yet so under wraps (no spoilers, Tom Holland and Mark Ruffalo!), it really kept people talking about it and wondering what was going to happen.
Overall, my general impression of the movie itself was that I probably shouldn’t make a decision yet – I need to wait for Avengers 4 before I can make a final judgement on what I really thought of it. But Marvel already has an A+ in market strategy, in my opinion.
As far as rating the movie goes, I’ll just say that I’m very glad I went to see it, and if you’re a Marvel fan, you should go and see it, too. I even got a cool souveneir
Avengers: Infinity War cup! I’m going to take it to college with me and use it for popcorn.
I will post again in a few weeks with a full-breakdown review – spoilers and everything – about my most and least favorite moments in Avengers: Infinity War. Make sure you see it before then!
Here’s the trailer for you (if you by some coincidence you haven’t seen it):
On a side note, what kind of a fan are you? Do you try and research everything you can about a movie beforehand – promos, clips, fan theories, because it increases the anticipation for you? Or do you try to stay away from anything related to the movie because you don’t want to have the experience ruined by possible spoilers?
I’m of the first opinion – in my mind, the anticipation before the event is half the fun! I always try to make the most of the wait, so even if I’m disappointed in the movie, I at least enjoyed something.
Comment below and tell me which one you are!