It seems there are more and more people each year who keep quiet about their cosplay costumes for Blizzcon and other conventions. I never did before; I was never shy to let people know what I was doing as far as costumes go. However, you may have noticed that this year, I haven’t said a word about what I’m doing for my Blizzcon costume.

Some people don’t announce their costume because they don’t want it to get ‘stolen’. Well, honestly, unless that costume is something of your own creation, I don’t see the reasoning in that. If it’s a tier set or a plain old NPC in game, even a boss, if people have seen it, they’ve thought about cosplaying it. I have no problems with people cosplaying the same thing as me. Why?

I’m confident in my abilities as a cosplayer. Mario and I strive to make everything we do as accurate as possible, we take our time, we do months of research on new techniques. I wouldn’t have cared if there were six other Witch Doctors last year at Blizzcon (there weren’t, but it was a crazy costume to attempt anyway), because none of them would have looked exactly like mine. People would have done the mask differently, the hair differently, everything would have their style, their techniques.

You can try to ‘claim’ a costume- I’ve seen it happen a few times over the years- but that gets you nothing but rage when someone still cosplays the same thing. There’s no reason to think that everyone in the cosplay community knows who you are, or that people will even care enough to not cosplay whatever it is you’re doing. It’s better to just be confident in what you’re doing, be confident that everyone has different styles and ways of making costumes.

I haven’t announced what I’m doing yet because we’re working with a ton of new techniques. None of the techniques we’re using for this costume is anything we’ve ever done before, and there is still a lot that could go wrong.

Granted, our new motto is ‘if it’s not broken into a million pieces or on fire, it can still be finished’, but there’s one step in our costume making that, if we screw it up, we’re back to square… two. Not all the way back at the beginning, but we’ll have lost lots of work, and honestly, at that point, I’m not sure if it can be saved.

So. Instead of saying ‘when we get so many likes on our Facebook page, we’ll announce what I’m doing’, I’m saying ‘when I get to that point in my costume that I know we can pull it off, I’ll announce what I’m doing’.