Närcon report

Or what I did on my vacation. It's been an intense three week period for me, basically going non-stop from NärCon, a roadtrip with my mother and then Medieval week in Visby. I will try and summarize them, and lets start with NärCon.

Närcon this year was hot, the temperatures rarely dropped below 27 degrees, and that definitely affected the costumes. Närcon had actually gone out and ased people not to bring their warm and heavy costumes. As such there were a lot of more casual costumes walking around.

I arrived on Thursday afternoon. I chose to wear my Bellossom cosplay, since it's comfy and easy to wear. We watched Ann-Sofie and Mattias compete in their first cosplay competition (novice level) and Mattias won the "best stage impact"-award. They were cosplaying Tintin and captain Haddock, and they were so popular the whole weekend.

Niklas wore his Zeb Macahan costume for the first time, and of course he chose Texas chili for dinner.

It wasn't uch fun wearing Bellossom without any other pokemon cosplayers, so I switched to my remade Her Universe Endor dress instead.

A lot of Närcon is really cosplayers taking photos of other cosplayers.

 On Friday and Saturday I trooped with the Nordic Legions. It was too warm to be able to do a lot of trooping, but we did march through the area twice a day.

I spent most of Friday and Saturday wearing my Melisandre. It was actually quite comfortable, like walking around in a big bathrobe.

The heat and walking around all day really killed my feet though, despite wearing a pair of extra comfortable walking shoes under Melisandre's gown. I didn't get any blisters, but they were swollen and really tired. I brought them back to life by washing them in cold water every evening and sleeping with them elevated.

This year I had friends in all the levels of cosplay competition, so I made sure to watch them all. On Saturday evening Anna and Henrik were really nice and gave me and Tom backstage passes to the Nordic Championships, where Henrik competed with his Benny the Lego figure.  It was really nice to be able to look at the competing costumes up close, and admire the workmanship that goes into the best cosplay projects in the Nordic Countries.

I was really bad with taking photos this year, but here are some of my favorite costumes of the weekend.

My absolute favorite was Tomtemor from my absolute favorite childhood story Tomtebobarnen. Overall it's evident that some of the most popular costumes at NärCon are the ones that goes back to childhood memories and children's stories, or later TV-shows.

 I stumbled upon a whole group of Les Miserables cosplayers. It is my favorite musical.

 Rincewind from Discworld was there. One of my dream cosplay projects would be Cheery Littlebottom from Discworld, but I don't dare to a big project that is based on literature, and where there are no images. As a Discworld fan I could definitely recognize the worst wizzard in the world.

There weren't a lot of Game of Thrones costumes around, but at least I met a Jaime Lannister.

NärCon is really inspiring though, and since it is a cosplay festival it's possible to play around with the cosplay format. I have a few ideas for fun costumes for next year, so we will see what happens.