This post is a bit off-brand for my usual photos, but in late March, I attended a small convention on a retired battleship. I also attended this the year prior.
When I attended last year, it occurred to me the location would’ve been a perfect backdrop to a Gundam cosplay group. For background, cosplaying is one of my biggest hobbies, and I’ve cosplayed Gundam1 multiple times. My lofty dream was always to make my own ZAFT unit with all four characters, but I only had myself cosplaying one of them.
I have a lot more cosplayers friends now than I used to know, and so from summer of last year, I started planning how I could make this happen. I got one friend to watch the series with me, and others to humor me by just being bodies. Then I funded the whole thing and provided the costume and wigs, because at some point, you just have to realize if you want something to happen, you need to do it yourself.
All that planning eventually culminated to this day in late March, and we all gathered about in full cosplay and posed for lots of photos. I reached out to someone I knew to take our group photos, and one of our unit cosplayers knew another person2 who offered to take photos, too.
Below are the photos I took. I’m only posting the ones that don’t show anyone’s faces, and there’s one shot of my character I had someone else take with my camera.
We had a blast taking silly photos in and out of character, and it was an amazing day full of wonderful memories.
The ship itself acts as a museum now, so we took one of the tours through the radar room and used that as backdrop for some in-character photos.
After we finished up photoshoots with our photographers, we continued below deck for more fun photos using the ship’s many interesting rooms.
This is a series I’ve loved for decades now, and I’m so happy this finally came together. It’s never too late to make your dream plans come true.
Footnotes
- I’ve only really cosplayed from Gundam 00 (Allelujah) and Gundam SEED (Athrun & Yzak), though there are other series I want to cosplay from in the future. ↩︎
- I originally thought it was just a photographer friend who wanted to take photos of her, but it turned out the photographer wanted all of us and was actually a fan of Gundam SEED. He didn’t know the rest of us, so he just started calling us by our character names lol. ↩︎
