I was on Instagram a while back and I got a message. It was a guy who had obviously been going through my posts, and liked what he saw. He asked a bit about my cosplay work, but we were talking for no more than ten minutes when he asked the dreaded question.

“So are you with anyone? Like dating?”

Gentlemen, please… Don’t do this. Keep in mind, this is some random guy from the internet. I had never met him before, and I probably never will. All he knows about me is that I cosplay and he thinks I’m pretty. Now, being a woman on the internet, this doesn’t phase me. This was tame compared to some of the offers I’ve gotten over the years, believe me. But still, to ask about my relationship status when you’ve barely said two sentences to me in your life… Come on.

So I tried to steer the conversation away from the topic, saying that’s a bit of a personal question. What he responded with is what really got under my skin:

“I want to get to know you but obv don’t want to if your seeing someone”

Now, let’s think about that sentence a moment… “I want to get to know you” fine, I’m an open book, I love sharing my interests and getting to know new people. Nevermind the fact that you have a private profile, I don’t know your name, and from your profile pic, evidently you’re a sentient pile of sneakers that can type. And then we get to the second part, “obv don’t want to if your seeing someone”… So… You don’t actually want to get to know me. You’re only messaging me because you want to get WITH me. Therein lies the difference. What that really tells me is that you don’t actually want to “get to know” me, and the only value you see in talking to me is if I’m a dating prospect.

I didn’t get mad. To be honest, I just think it’s funny how self-contradictory that sentence is. I took the opportunity to remind him that I’m asexual (evidently he missed that memo), and that I’m not interested in dating strangers from the internet. Now, I don’t mean to say that my orientation makes me inherently undateable. It doesn’t. But it does mean that if all you’re interested in is getting me in bed, you picked absolutely the wrong target.

I get it. Really, I do. It’s so easy to objectify people online, to forget that there’s another human being on the other side of the screen. To a lot of you, I’m nothing more than a few pictures and a paragraph or two in your browser window. You can put down your phone, walk away from your computer, and I cease to exist to you. But I’m here to remind you that I’m a living, breathing person, same as you. I have a family and friends, I have likes and dislikes, I laugh, I cry, and I have a whole personality that you probably don’t even see.

I’m not here to discourage anyone from talking to me. On the contrary, please do. The entire point of this website, the reason I use Instagram, all my social media is so I can interact with people. I want to talk, I want to share my feelings and my opinions. But if the sole reason you approach me is part of some ploy to get me into bed, I urge you to think again. Please don’t objectify me, and try to remember that I’m more than just my picture.

The post More Than Just My Picture appeared first on Jennifer Lidikay.

At first, I thought about starting with Alucard because he’s the big flashy one that everyone’s interested in right now, but I figured it was better to start at the beginning. The first cosplay I made was for Anime Expo 2011, as Hungary from the anime Axis Powers Hetalia. I was still in high school, and my friends and I had all gotten obsessed with Hetalia after spending new year’s eve watching the first two seasons. We all giggled over this show about personified countries, and it wasn’t long before we started assigning characters to each other. Thus began my descent into fandom culture.

The Outfit

We all agreed to go to anime expo together once school let out, and we had the rest of the school year to prepare. I was in Fashion class in school, so I had ample time to put together my costume, working both at school and at home. During a field trip to the fashion district in downtown LA, I bought my fabric, and used a couple store bought patterns from Simplicity ( #2325 and #4282 for those who might be interested). From a technical standpoint, Hungary is not a difficult outfit, but 15-year-old me was just learning how to sew, so everything was a bit more difficult; appropriate fabric choice was one of the things I’d not yet gotten the grasp of. See, I had an obsession with shiny fabric. Just about everything I made in class was made from some sort of satin, including Hungary’s dress and apron. The dress held together through its years of use and abuse, but I did end up having to remake the apron over the summer; I had picked out a lightweight lining fabric that just couldn’t handle the stress and frayed like you wouldn’t believe. If I made it again today, would I go the same route? No, probably not. But as a teenager, I would have accepted nothing else.

Accessory wise, everything else in Hungary’s first run was mainly cobbled together from whatever I could find. I armed myself with a frying pan I brought from home (con security nowadays would never have let me through), and I had to double up on socks because my shoes were too big for me. I wore just about every skirt I owned underneath to act like a petticoat. My first wig was a cheap Halloween store Dorothy wig that I unbraided, and used my actual hair (dyed brown at the time) for her bangs. It wasn’t fancy, but it worked.

On the topic of wigs, I wore Hungary so often and for so long, I actually had 4 wigs for her. The first, as I said, was a cheap Halloween one I already had from an old costume. I had no idea how to care for wigs, and it soon turned into a frizzy mess atop my head. Her second was a generic wig I got off of Amazon, which I wore for a couple years, Compared to the first, it was a thing of beauty, long and silky curls falling to my waist. However, it also succumbed to the fate of getting super frizzy ends eventually, and not knowing how to fix it, I replaced it. It was with the third wig that I found the upside to name brand wigs: a gorgeous dark brown Hestia from Epic Cosplay, which became my default wig for a lot of looks (anyone see my Austria this year at ALA?). I still have that one, and have bought numerous Epic wigs since then. Unlike Hungary’s canon appearance, I usually went with a darker brown for her wigs, because I personally thought the dark brown would look better on me. Again, I would probably make a different decision now; in fact, my latest Hungary wig is a more caramel-colored Hera from Epic Cosplay, though I actually haven’t had the chance to wear it with her.

But see, the beauty of making a cosplay is the control you have over it. You get to decide whether to go with canon or break from it, and it all depends on what you want to create. I went with unconventional fabric and color choices. It still got the point across, people could distinguish my cosplay from the other Hungary cosplayers, and most importantly, I HAD FUN.

The Experience

What really sets Hungary apart from my other cosplays is my history with her. After our first con, the cosplay bug really bit me and my friends hard, and we looked for every excuse we could to cosplay. We went to the mall, the beach, school, everywhere. Any time we hung out, the question was raised: was this a cosplay event? More often than not, the answer was yes. I probably wore that costume more often than anything else in my closet in high school, and just about everything in my life became somehow related to Hetalia. I even turned in a piece of fan fiction once as homework… My English teacher was not amused.

To be honest, without Hungary, none of my other cosplays would have existed. I fell so in love with the cosplay community, and I have so many good friends thanks to Hetalia. Seriously, about 90% of my cosplay friends first knew me as Hungary, and my whole group of high school friends bonded over fandom. For years, she became like a new part of my identity. Even out of cosplay, my friends and I called each other by our country names for years (seriously, I think I only changed all the contacts in my phone to their real names like a year and a half ago?). It was all new and exciting, and although it might be strange to someone outside the community, I’m really grateful for everything starting to cosplay has brought me.

Before I got started cosplaying, I never would have thought about costume design as a career path; I got into fashion when I was about 11 and started watching Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model. I thought costume design was a little silly, actually, because no one expects to see someone walk down the street in a costume and go, “Oh yes, that’s a Jennifer Lidikay design!” Ha… Ha… If only middle school me could see the future, she’d have known that I am now the weirdo walking down the street in a costume. Not to mention the fact that movies and TV shows need costume designers too. Without starting to cosplay, I wouldn’t have my current dreams and ambitions.

The Future

I actually don’t have Hungary’s original outfit anymore; I have a couple other versions I bought and/or made later, but I outgrew the little green dress I made in high school. She sat in my closet for a while, begging me for adventures and attention I couldn’t give her anymore. I didn’t quite want to let her go completely, selling the costume at a yard sale or Goodwill or anything like that. It meant so much to me, I couldn’t just let it go to a stranger who had no idea of its history. Still, it was unfair to let her sit in my closet, unused.

Then the opportunity arose to give her a new life; a friend of mine posted to facebook that she was looking for an outfit for Chibitalia, For those who haven’t seen Hetalia, in the show, Italy as a child also wore a green dress, supposedly an old outfit of Hungary’s that was passed down. I messaged her about it, and we arranged for her to have my old costume. It was bittersweet to let it go, but I was so happy to know it was going to someone who would love it as much as I did. So although it’s not mine anymore, who knows; you may just see it floating around at a con or event somewhere!

As for me personally cosplaying Hungary, she’s kind of taken a back burner for the time being. After I retired my dress, I was working on making her uniform for the show for a while, but I hit a bit of a snag with getting that done, and I’m not sure when I’ll have a chance to complete it. So while there’s no plans in the immediate future for her, she’s still waiting in the wings, waiting for her chance to once again take center stage. I will probably never completely retire her, because there will always be a place in my heart for my first fandom.

The post Cosplay Highlights: APH Hungary appeared first on Jennifer Lidikay.

But anyway, on to the topic of this post: happy pride month! As some of you may know, and for those of you who may not, I am asexual. I came out last October, so this is the first time I was able to celebrate pride month with all my brothers, sisters, and assorted siblings in the LGBT+ community. And even though yes, pride month is technically over, I see no reason to stop celebrating who I am. Every day, every month can be filled with the same love dor ourselves and each other, no matter whether you’re gay, straight, ace, or whatever you may define yourself as.

When I tell someone I’m asexual, I almost always have to explain to them what that means. It’s sort of like that island from pirates of the Caribbean, the one you can only find if you already know where it is. Largely, unless you know someone who is ace, you’ve probably never even heard the term before. Asexuality is defined as a lack of sexual attraction to anyone of any gender. I’ve seen people describe it using a soda analogy: some people like coke, others like Pepsi, some like both, and some people don’t drink soda at all. Side note: I also happen to not drink soda, ace well as being ace. Fun fact!

For a lot of people, it can be a hard concept to imagine. Ace people get a lot of “oh, you just haven’t found the right soda yet” or “were you traumatized by soda when you were little?” Some aces, yes, come to identify as such after a traumatic event. However, that is not true in all cases, and it is not true in mine. All of us have different stories, and different ways of coming into our identities. I don’t claim to speak for everyone in the community, as I only know about my story and my experiences. But for anyone who wants to know my story, I’m pretty much an open book.

Discovering one is asexual can be really confusing, because it’s literally trying to look for a lack of something. For most of my life, I was looking at it as “okay, I think guys are cute, so I’m straight. I’m just not ready for that yet.” As time went on, I just kept thinking that. I just wasn’t ready. I hadn’t found the right person. I heard about asexuality online, but brushed it off as “someone else’s thing”. I didn’t think it could fit me, because I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes; I didn’t want to intrude on someone else’s space. So it wasn’t until a friend brought it up to me later that I really started to wonder “is this me?” And boy let me tell you, it was so hard to get out of the “I like guys, so I must be straight” mentality. I had to reevaluate myself, look back at all the situations I had chalked up to “not ready”, and realize that not ready was really just… Not interested. I’ve had boyfriends before, and I’m all for the mushy romance movies and long walks on the beach. But when it came to sex, I could think of a thousand things I would rather be doing. To me, it’s just… Meh.

When I came to terms with being ace, the next question was how the rest of the world would see me. I took baby steps in coming out to people: first my friends, then some of my family, a few people at a time. Now most of my friends are in the LGBT+ community, so I got nothing but support on that front. Others have been rather mixed. One guy I was potentially interested in seeing, when I told him, asked me “That’s such a shame. Who would you date if you were asexual?” And honestly, if you have to ask that, the short answer is NOT YOU. Another person blatantly told me that asexuality was a fake thing the internet made up. The term, yes, was coined recently, but there were those who said the same thing about gravity, electricity, and every other concept in history. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

The things people said to me when I first started coming out hurt me, but the more time I spent in my self reflection and soul searching, the clearer my orientation became in my mind. I did a lot of research on the topic, and though I wasn’t quite ready to announce myself to the world completely, I bought a ring. For those who don’t know, a black ring worn on the middle finger of one’s right hand is a symbol of asexuality. I’ve been wearing mine since March of 2017. When I first got it, it was mainly a reminder for myself that there are others in the world who feel the way I do, and almost like a mini coming-out without quite as much commitment. I was dipping my toes into the concept, and I was 99% sure I was ace, but if I wasn’t really, really, REALLY sure, I wasn’t completely out. Over the next few months I got more comfortable with calling myself ace, but every time one of my friends mentioned something about my orientation in front of someone who didn’t know or wholeheartedly approve, my stomach flip flopped. There was still that barrier of “Oh no, they can’t find out, AAAHHHHHHHH!!” I had made a deal with myself that by pride month 2017, I would be out. June last year came and went, but I chickened out. I sat quietly and watched everyone else celebrate pride, still hiding in my own little corner of “yes, ace, but not quite ace enough, I don’t know, maybe, aaaaahhhhhhh”.

Frankly, it was exhausting, being out to some people but not to others. So I made a new deal with myself: Asexual Awareness Week, the last week of October. I knew who I was, I just needed to get over thinking of what everyone else was going to think. It didn’t matter to them; support or no support wouldn’t make me any LESS asexual, and I was tired of running circles around my head, being careful not to accidentally let my identity slip. I’m queer, not a superhero: my identity doesn’t have to be some huge secret. So I typed up a big “coming out” post, took some cute selfies to go with it, and by the time I got ready to post it, my hands were shaking. I was nervous, but no way in hell was I going to back down. So I posted my feelings for the world to see, and you know what? It felt pretty damn good. There was no reason for me to hide, and I don’t need to apologize for being who I am. I’m not taking up “someone else’s space” by calling myself ace. My identity has nothing to do with anyone else, and everything to do with myself.

So this year, I got to celebrate my pride along with everyone else. I could loudly proclaim to the world “this is who I am, and I love myself!” Let others think what they want, but I’m secure in getting to know this part of me that I never had a name for before. And I just hope that maybe, just maybe, I can help someone else who needs to feel a little less lost. Because no matter your orientation, you are not broken, and you are not alone. I’m proud of myself, and I’m proud of you, too.

The post Happy (Belated) Pride Month! appeared first on Jennifer Lidikay.

Some people have some very funny definitions of “modeling”. When I say I’m a model, in some it conjures images of glamorous red carpets, perfect hair and eating next to nothing. Others think of porn. Either way, I’m an air-headed girl that is just meant to stand around and look pretty. I am an object that exists for the consumption of others.

I look for jobs in a variety of places. Many of the offers I get from Craigslist and other sites are nothing more than thinly veiled inquiries for prostitution. I can’t tell you how many “wealthy, attractive businessmen” I’ve had in my inbox looking to “sponsor a girl like me”.

On my Instagram, I had one person message me about “promo modeling”, a term usually reserved for models to run convention booths, attend car/boat shows and talk to people, and other legitimate marketing. What this circumstance offered, on the other hand, was “I’ll pay you to go to parties as my date. I’ll pay for you to get your hair and nails done, and spoil you like a princess.” While it sounds lovely to be spoiled like a princess, I am personally offended by offers such as these. At best, it’s someone just wanting a piece of arm candy, because that’s what they see me as. An accessory they can hang on their shoulder like a decoration. At worst, it’s not even a legitimate offer and I end up in a dangerous situation. Almost inevitably, sex is what’s expected from these offers.

The bottom line is simple: models are not sex workers. I am in the interest of creating art. I have a mind, and a personality, and a life of my own. It’s easy to see pictures on a computer screen and dehumanize the subject. Regarding a couple pictures I posted on Instagram from my childhood, I’ve had people tell me it felt “wrong” to go from looking at my nude work to suddenly seeing me at eight years old. It was unfathomable that yes, I was once a child. I don’t even post anything extremely provocative, as it’s not my style, and yet it was still unbelievable that I was capable of being anything other than a sexual fantasy to them.

I, and every other model on the planet, am more than that. I am a person.

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