Hello! If you're reading this then you must at least an idea of who we are, but for those few of you who are stumbling blind into the territory of this years WCS Team UK, allow me to introduce us!
You can find out more information about each of us in the About page to the side, or you can follow the links to our cosplay pages to see what we do.
So that's the two of us mostly covered - what is WCS then? You probably guessed that neither of us are Starcraft pros, my APM at best is more accurately measured by APH, so why do we keep referencing those acronyms?
What we're talking about here is the pièce de résistance of cosplay competitions, and a quick Google will give you all the answers you need:
"The World Cosplay Summit (世界コスプレサミット, Sekai Kosupure Samitto. ), also known as WCS, is an annual international cosplay event that promotes friendly international exchange through Japanese pop culture. In 2012 the WCS was incorporated as a company and until that year was organized by the events division of TV Aichi."
Thank you, Wikipedia! What I mean when I say it's a pretty big deal as far as cosplay competitions go is that is possibly the oldest and most established international event. It takes cosplayers from all over the world to the motherland of the hobby (Japan, specifically Nagoya) and spoils them rotten with parades, TV ops, photo sessions and official visits for a week.
Then they put them all together in a ring and force them to fight to the death, until one country is left standing as the rulers of all things cosplay!
Okay, so maybe that's not true.... The run up to the event is, indeed, filled with fancy events for the representatives to enjoy and at the end capped with a prestigious championship competition. Each team performs on a live stage, which is also broadcast simultaneously online, to compete for first place.
I feel like from our perspective, as reps from an underdog country with a still-developing competitive cosplay scene, the real prize has already been won. We get flown to Japan for a week and a half to enjoy and immerse ourselves in this amazing culture, as well as meet and make friends on an international stage.
Retrospectively, maybe we should have started this blog 8 months ago when we won our preliminaries (probably could say the same thing about our finals costumes....), but better late than never, right? Same goes for the proper introduction of the purpose of this page, so I'll get to that now, too.
The reason for that is pretty simple, I thought it would be neat to have a place that we could speak with transparency about our time as representatives, what the processes and expectations involved are and ultimately give an inside peek to those of you who have no clue about where to start with WCS.
That's it, I guess. I hope the subject will intrigue people into coming back for the content, and I hope the content itself will be entertaining! The next post will be in a few days time, so please look forward to it :)
