Katarina (from League of Legends) by Spicy-Seasoning
Photographed by Silenceral and SmokyPixel at PAX 2012
"This costume is near and dear to my heart- it took me to Japan after all! When I first saw the Sweet Snake figurine set, I fell in love with how adorable each of the figurines was, and when my friend Jill said she was doing Sweet Snake, I knew I wanted to do Raiden. Hatsuu later joined us as the adorable Sweet Ocelot. I had a lot of fun cosplaying with them!
I heard about a Kojima signing at Comic Con and a supposed cosplay contest for Metal Gear. I figured the contest was a joke because I'd never heard of anything like that before, and just showed up to the signing hoping to get my costume signed. I never did get it signed, but the contest turned out to be real-- and the surprise prize was a trip to Tokyo Game Show. I later won the Kojima Productions Award with this costume at TGS and was told I increased sales of the figurines by Kojima himself. Not bad at all!"
"Rufio, played in the 1991 movie "Hook" by noted Filipino actor Dante Basco (Zuko of Avatar: The Last Airbender), is about as mainstream a Filipino character as we're gonna get, haha. My cousin Ish and I are both fans of the movie, so in 2007 he decided to make a screen-accurate Rufio costume. Ish saw many Rufio costumes online, but few of them had the level of quality he sought for; most had only a few fringes, few if any extras like the multiple necklaces or the bracelets and earrings, or just red spraypaint and spiked hair in place of Rufio's impressive tri-hawk. To build his screen accurate costume, Ish had his original VHS copy of the movie on a constant loop, and was taking screengrabs and doing online image research for months as he built the costume. He won 2 separate Halloween contests in 2007 and 2008, and then I borrowed it for 2009 and then again for SDCC '11."