Tomorrow I'm going to comiccon.
It'll be my second time ever.
Unfortunately though, I do not have a cosplay with me this time. Not that I had one last year either.
I was thinking about making a cosplay. I had a specific character in mind as well.
You see, a few months ago, I lucked upon finding a copy of 'Cyberpunk2077:PsychoSquad' in a book store.
I thought, "This is fantasic! There ought to be a lot of different poses and angles of the characters in this for me to use as reference when developing my costume".
My character idea wasn't exactly a character so to speak. Rather, I was interested in going as a generic 'MaxTac Netrunner' due to the fact I have a very unique appearance that not a lot of characters represent.
Wearing a helmet would be extremely beneficial to me.
Listen, I know that cosplay doesn't know any bounds. I could be anyone, disregarding my underlying physical form. But it makes me feel uncomfortable to act and dress as someone I don't feel like I resonate with or could pull off.
I'm not going to project this onto anybody else though, ok? I have the self awareness to know that if I find something uncomfortable personally, to just ignore it when someone else does it.
I'm scared of spiders, but I'm not going to harass people who aren't right?
So anyway, back to the book, looking at this character, I thought this would be a sinch.
It looked very easy and basic:
But then I looked for more shots. What does he look like from the back? Is there a close up image? That kinda thing.
And that's when it all fell apart.
It went from really easy, to impossible.
And by impossible, I mean my weak willed ass gave up.
I could have had this done ages ago if I committed to it. But I didn't.
There isn't just one uniform that the maxtac netrunners wear in this book.
I counted 3.
3
It's a uniform.
Uni means one.
Why the fuck are there 3 different styles that the same character* wears.
This isn't when or why I gave up hope though.
Can you imagine.
Only sinkholes cave that easily.
At this point I was still thinking to myself that this was recoverable. That I could hone in one one of the outfits "the correct outfit", and wear that.
In hindsight, I should've just picked one at random and chosen that one. Then I would have something to wear.
Instead I tried to find this mythical "correct uniform" by looking at the MaxTac operatives in CyberpunkEdgerunners, Cyberpunk 2077 and Cyberpunk2077:PhantomLiberty.
Here's a breakdown of all the different things I've noticed:
I couldn't get a good shot of a netrunner in Edgerunners, but the rest of the crew look the same as in the comics.
In the comic, there are 3 netrunner uniforms. One is a grey jumper I think, and it has MAXTAC written on the forearm. One is a blue jumper with no text. And the last is a grey long-sleeved T-Shirt.
As for in Cyberpunk2077 - there are also 2 distinct styles of MaxTac uniform.
There's the outfit the player can equip going down the Judy storyline, and the one the actual enemies and NPCs wear.
The player's is black. It's also very hard to cosplay, unlike the comic renditions because it has glowing things in it, and is made of two materials stitched together. One being some kind of carbon fibre looking weave.
The enemy uniforms are just as bad as the players. Same two materials and flashy, light up bullshit, but it's purple this time. Or blue. Maybe Blurple.
And that's why I gave up.
After all that research, looking at the different designs - just became overwhelmed.
I didn't know what colour it should be. What materials. Anything. So instead of trying to figure it out, I went back to playing warframe. It's easier.