Offering to the old gods

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Shieldmaiden

When Marvel won’t make the best costume designs, sometimes you gotta do it yourself. 😏

It still feels wild to finally have this costume on my “completed” list. It clocked in at 184 working hours (Daenerys still holds the record for 240), most of which was the leather tooling and assembling. And hey, I enjoyed it so much that my next project ALSO involves leather armour 😅

The build process is documented in my WIP tag, but I’m always happy to answer questions that photos may not convey well enough!

wip tag | more of this costume

Photos by @sennedjem

Spring days got me like. 🪷🌸🪻

Things have been so busy lately, but I just had to stop and take a moment to enjoy this amazing weather we've been having. ☀️

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. ❤️

This image from 2021 is inspired by @elenaskitalets' gorgeous rendition of “Freya”.

I highly recommend checking out Elena’s wondrous art page @ https://www.artstation.com/skitalets

Raven bracers, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, hand-tooled in 10 oz veg-tan leather.

(Available from Armory Rasa)

Alexander Ludwig as Superman

Viking Braided Wig // Frejas Garden on Etsy

Kennison (Oregon)

Hey y'all apologies for ignoring this blog for so long, just got super busy! Anyways, here's my pattern instructions for making your own Guddal tunic! Available for FREE on my Patreon

Viking Cosplay. Earrings are plated with real gold and ear hooks are made out of stainless steel.

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100% fake fur

The nature of time is that (culturally) Christian Euro/Anglo colonial consumers (hereafter white ‘people’) fetishize the idea of being ‘close to nature’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ and latch on to the idea that there are groups of people in the world who are somehow bestial or who have some kind of special powers from holding animist beliefs/beliefs that acknowledge the body as opposed to the Christian belief that the body is a kind of useless appendage to a person. We see this across decades from the 19thC to today in the racist fetishization of indigenous people across the globe, particularly residents of the Americas, Australasia, and southern/eastern Africa.

White consumers use a warped conception of other cultures to live out the fantasies that the Christian soul/body stuff engenders. You keep getting told that your emotions and physical sensations are the devil’s work? You want to get in touch with those physical sensations, but you don’t want it to interfere with your worldview? Simply project them on to a convenient group of people with slightly different conventions from you. Imagine how cool it would be to be 100% physical sensation (especially those pesky violent and/or sexual urges) and no mental burden, then unleash that in a way that causes millions of deaths worldwide via the dehumanization of entire nations of people just trying to live their lives. White consumers love a Proud Warrior Race Guy.

Flash forward to the 2010s, it’s generally considered impolite to spread the same propaganda that justified the genocide and dispossession of many different groups of people. However white culture hasn’t changed that much and normal human activities still need to be explained away to maintain the veneer of white intellectualism that has been used to justify white violence for years and years. You can’t just stomp around and clap your hands and dance badly, you’ve got to project it somewhere else.

But wait! There’s a community of people considered ‘tribal’ and ‘savage’, considered violent and bestial, who were never colonized! It’s…the Norse. Fetishizing early medieval North Sea raiders can’t be cultural appropriation, see, they’re white! It’s not offensive to replace an entire culture with white (male) ideas of what’s cool if that culture is totally unassociated with colonizer stereotypes and is in fact a culture of colonizers!

And that’s my theory on why there are so many Norse-inspired folk bands/video games/tv shows/memes/literally anything in the 2010s. VSaga not counted because that manga has been running since 2003 and is actually well-researched and comes out of a culture with a similar but distinct tradition of racism. The Euro storytelling tendencies of needing some kind of violent avatar have taken on ye anciente Norseman now that people care a little bit about the gallons of blood used to sketch other ethnic stereotypes. Done and dusted. Except the other side is that the fetishization of early medieval Norse culture is literally just white supremacist 101 and a lot of artists don’t step around that nearly as carefully as they should

Comic con Prague 2024

Part 4

I made an Iron Age Toothless cosplay, and this is how it turned out!

For this costume I made everything except for the shoes, belt, turtle broaches, and wig. (Though I did do a little bit of styling to the wig and I painted and strung the beads from the broaches.) There are scales painted on the tail and underdress that you can’t see in this picture- overall I used 3 bottles of black slick paint for all of the scales on this costume. I even drafted some of my own patterns for this, but the underdress and apron dress are made using two patterns from Rabbit & Hat Patterns.

Full build book is on my Insta: AdorkableMeCosplay

My full BOY cosplay. I love being Atreus. People just yell, "BOY!!" all day. Now to just wait for the dealer room to open in 2 hours.