Ouro's Vriska Cosplay Journal

This is gonna be a thread in which I chronicle the process of cospaying everyone's favourite heroine Vriska Serket as a might-as-well-be beginner to the craft. It is certainly possible that the write-up will end up being a vaguely useful tutorial when I'm done, but for now the intended function is as a journal documenting approaches, failures, and the thought processes which led to them. I'm a firm believer in running into walls a few times before resorting to the paradigmatic solutions. It's always good to know why something is done a certain way, and who knows, sometimes walls do have additional weak spots in unexpected places.

Vriska Serket

You love her, you hate her. Even if you hate her you probably love her. I'd know, as my HS videos are a flytrap for those weirdos to inevitably come my way to cast spurious allegations of wickedness upon the virtuous and trust me: They love it. Vris' existence gives them meaning, severs as a fictional idol to all they deem evil in this world (women etc). It sustains them, unsightly as this might be to the rest of us. So you do love Vriska, whatever else you may think of her, and so do I and this is as good an excuse as any to finally go even more thoroughly off the deep end. There's a convention coming up around these parts and it's time I take the step every self avowed Vriska liker eventually takes: I'm gonna fucking become her (or fail horribly and learn some interesting things about cosplay in the process). I have done some cosplay at anime conventions in the past —Eight years back. Christ, I'm old— but the most high level I got was cutting wigs a little and re-sewing a lab coat to be more dynamic in silhouette because they are sadly quite baggy in reality. Anime lies to you, kids, much to the disappointment of younger chem-student-ouro. Anyway, I don't know makeup, I don't know much about wig styling and I haven't made any kinds of prosthetics, so this is gonna be fun.

Starting materials

This is what I look like: I'm twenty six, slim, white, mostly male presenting, average height, have the correct shape of glasses already, hair which is an absolute bitch to fit under a wig and a somewhat angular face. If it looks familiar to you, you might have seen Vriska did nothing wrong and here's why. Additionally I own basic arts and crafts supplies but will probably need to acquire more stuff as I go along.

Glasses, hubris and getting godfeels'd

Looking back it started with the glasses. I did not go out of my way to get Vriska glasses, I just needed new ones a few months ago and this pair looked good. I didn't even notice. The thought didn't cross my mind until I drew a kidsona some days after picking them up, wondering how I should stylize them and going "Oh. Oh this sure is the shape, isn't it? Fuck." Naturally people made fun of me and that was that for a while, but I kept thinking that I could totally make an eye cover to click in there. It would be so easy. It would be fun.

Then, two weeks ago, I did and it was easy and it was fun and something inside of me had begun to hunger. Have you ever been godfeels'd dear reader? I fear that this is what it feels like to be godfeels'd. I'm currently still thinking that I could totally build a robot arm. Just get some sheet metal, cut it into strips, bend it into rings and put divots in, then kind of just tie them together with wire. It doesn't need much flexibility apart from the joint and I could simply put a literal hinge there, strap the shoulder to my torso with a belt and it really doesn't sound that hard. But maybe it is, in which case I'll just put seven red dots on the eye patch to go for a pre-sploded Vris. Should be fine.

Eye Patch

There's probably some clever way to actually trace the shape of your glasses, but geometrically it's kind of annoying to hold a piece of card up to them and draw lines at the same time, so I just did a shoddy, slightly-too-large approximation by way of ruler-measurements and then cut away parts which stood out. With tape I affixed some wire to the back of the eye patch at the approximate height that the bridge of my glasses would be on. A little more cardboard was stuck on the back with glue stick for structural integrity and to cover up the wire (though that's probably only necessary because I was working with very thin card stock). It might also not be necessary to lead the wire back forth and back again between the layers of cardboard as I did (see picture). I though this would keep it from tilting/rotating around the wire, and while it definitely does accomplish that, there being a piece of glass right in front of it should also do the trick. Lastly I bent the wire at both sides such that it slots in somewhat securely around the left hinge and the bridge of the glasses respectively without tilting and without being difficult to remove (i.e. don't form loops). Also make sure that the exposed ends of the wire don't face towards the glass in a way which might cause them to scratch it. Not impressive, I know, but if there's one thing I'm an inveterate fan of, it's very very easy first steps to something large such that you are suddenly bought in without noticing, and believe me, when I put that eye patch in —even though I didn't know it yet— I was bought in entirely. Dipped my toes into the shallows and was sucked under like a chump. It's all just one more step until it isn't.

Cutting Teeth

I love a good fang. Only a coward claims that they don't. But most of the commercially available options kind of suck in my experience. The standard Halloween vampire teeth are obviously a non starter from both an aesthetics- and a "being able to speak without sounding like an asshole"-standpoint. The separate fangs you can get which attach via fitting beads are out on grounds of previous bad experiences. They're too thick, keep falling off with the way my teeth interlock and they're always the entirely wrong colour in one direction or another such that it looks like I have a piece of candy stuck to my tooth, so that wasn't an option. It seems like you can have just the right oral conditions for those to work great for you but I am absolutely not in that privileged set, so dentures made from fake nails and fitting beads it is. I know that that's a standard way of doing it, but I can't think of anything else I'd want to try and the store bought solutions are out. This writeup is still going over things that already happened, since I didn't think to note things down at first. After finishing the eye patch I was still thoroughly in a mindset of "well this was fun, but it's not like I'm gonna take the next step" and then I found myself reading the old troll teeth tutorial and liking a good fang as much as the next guy and suddenly I had a bunch of fake nails. Slowly it was dawning on me that I'm actually doing this. That I've passed a point where quitting now would feel like giving up on something. Here's the tutorial I consulted for the basic idea, and it explains the process well, though I've had to make a few alterations which we'll get to. I measured the width of my teeth with a ruler, marked those on the largest fake nails and then kind of just winged the shape. If you try to cut directly across them they break, so it's best to just chip away diagonally until you've chiselled out the right shape. I ended up starting with this elongated hexagon-shape and going from there. I knew I wouldn't be able to fit dentures for my bottom teeth into my mouth such that it wouldn't chip, so I only bothered with the top row of teeth. Two fangs, two broader teeth for the medial incisors and six more for the lateral incisors and first and second molars (I did not end up using the second molars because they'd be visible too rarely to be worth the hassle).

Constructing a Jaw

My fitting beads hadn't arrived by this point, so I tried the teeth on to see how they look by gluing them on one by one with blue tack. This only works after you get your teeth bone fucking dry, but other than that it's a pretty low effort way of trying different shapes in context. I hope blue tack isn't that poisonous. Not that I ate it, but you know. Then I bent some more wire into the shape of my jaw and lined the finished teeth up on that for demonstration and so they'd stay in the correct constellation until the beads arrive. The first draft I think was much too long across the board. It made it so that all teeth were visible if my mouth was normal-speaking-amounts of open and that makes it so that the fangs stand out less. I kept the "regular teeth" slightly pointed, but reduced them to a point where they are only barely longer than my real teeth.

This whole process makes you really aware of how small teeth are. They feel so large in your jaw, which of course is because you mostly feel them with your tongue and its unreasonable amount of nerve endings. Something something sensory homunculus. Anyway it's pretty nice that the natural inclination is to go too large, because making subtractive corrections is obviously much easier than correcting in the other direction and not making the actual dentures immediately gave me a good few days to stew over the prototype and make adjustments. In addition to lengths, I wasn't sure whether to make the fangs the canines as is typical of real earth creatures or the lateral incisors (so slightly further towards the centre because a bunch of Vris art places them quite centrally). The wire construction made it pretty easy to switch between those during deliberation, and getting outside opinions eventually convinced me to go with the traditional canines. Special shout-out to Aidan AHP-cast for input on that question.

Bending it Horn-ways

I was under the impression from people I've personally seen at cons that the default way of creating troll horns is from foam, which I have texture issues with. The idea of having to cut the stuff into shape (the squeaking!) and then to wear it directly on my head for hours was just a little too much for my delicate disposition to handle. I was so convinced of this being the norm in fact that I didn't even look at online tutorials before deciding that I could probably get the job done with this hexagonal mesh I had lying around from gardening tasks. The first prototype came out much too large and also wouldn't curve properly. It just sort of creases in in the middle like when you try to bend a roll of cardboard. This is because the long twirled parts of the mesh were vertical, which makes the roll much less pliant. With less mesh and a horizontal orientation the whole thing worked much better. I placed a cut at the two thirds line for the decorative horn tips and gave the piece of mesh a taper so that the thinner pieces of horn wouldn't contain much denser, more bunched up mesh, but don't consider these patterns to be optimal. They're just the first thing that worked decently well.

I ended up cutting both of these slightly shorter as a whole and the crescent horn had too much material at the top as you can see, but here, like with the teeth, correcting subtractively is easy and the flexible mesh as a whole lends itself well to minor corrections over time by bending, squishing etc. Its texture also presented a pretty obvious solution for affixing the horns to the headband (we'll get to that later), but this was the moment when curiosity about how that part worked for foam horns led me to finally do some research, and figure out that the standard method is actually aluminium foil as a modelling base surrounded by clay. That does seem sturdier than my solution, but I was happy with the results so far and chose to keep going on this path anyway. The mesh is very light by the way and I would not be surprised if it compared favourably to the clay version on that front. It's probably less sturdy which might be an issue depending on your use case, but the shape bounces back from normal bumping-into-something-shocks without issue and I don't really expect anyone to come up to me and deliberately bend my horns or such.

Gordian Mesh-inations

To affix the horns to my head I got a cheap hairband and made twelve small incisions into the outer bit of fabric in the pattern shown below. I threaded a bit of wire through those such that it surfaces at the bottom of each side and at the horns where it weaves through the mesh on each side to hold them firmly in place. On the other side of the headband I then twirled the wire to hold everything in shape.

The original plan was to cut a long strip out of kitchen roll, paint it with acrylic paint and wrap that around the horns before leaving it to harden, but as an experiment before going through with something so messy I wanted to test if it had any chance of success, so I just wrapped one of the horns in a strip of wet kitchen towel and let it dry over night. The result was very promising and convinced me that it would work really well with the much more rigidly drying paint keeping it all together... However, by then I had realized that it would be much easier to just wrap it in crepe tape, which sticks to itself by default, is much less messy and affords more control. This would allow the painting to be a separate step and is exactly what I did.

Fang-tuning

Something I still didn't like was that the teeth looked quite flat in some pictures, especially the fangs. This is in part because I only used the very largest nails, which are also the least strongly curved, and canines do have a good bit of bulge to them. So, now that my intuition for how large teeth really are was re-calibrated to something more sane, I recreated the fangs out of some midsize nails instead, with much nicer results. An issue that remains is that the fake nails are very very white compared to my own yellowed chompers. Statesians might not have this issue but as a European by teeth are contractually discoloured by tea, coffee and the various noxious emissions of coal plants we've neglected to shut down because... Nuclear is scawy apparently, unlike global ecological collapse. Anyway I can't put another denture on my bottom teeth because they're too close. I'd either have to retract my chin in a way that would probably give me horrible jaw cramps really quickly (and even then they'd likely hit my actual top teeth and chip when I'm not paying attention), emote in such a way that my bottom teeth simply aren't visible or —if possible— to stain the dentures somehow. As a little experiment I dropped one of those fake nails in coffee for a few days to see what would happen. Let's be real, Vriska Serket would not have pearly whites anyway. Her teeth are a nightmare.

The Agonies

My fitting beads arrived, which prompted the hardest part of the project so far. I melted them into a large blob in hot water as described in the tutorial, tore off a chunk and pressed it into my upper jaw. The first few attempts had too much material and for one of them I forgot to close my mouth, causing the cast to have a bulge at the backside which prevented me from closing my mouth while wearing it. Subsequent attempts with less goo and some light chewing to make sure I could comfortably close my mouth were too fragile to remove without deforming when I wanted to put them in cold water to set. This happened often enough that I eventually resorted to filling my mouth with ice water to set it firmly without removing it. I'm unsure whether my beads are more malleable than the ones used in the tutorial, whether my mouth is unusually warm or whether I just didn't wait long enough before dropping in water, though I did wait a good bit of time. Either way, I don't actually see a problem with the "harden in mouth"-method. I think my final cast had too little fitting bead material in the front, because I could not push the teeth far enough in to have full contact. The method I eventually found was putting some of the molten bead goo on the backside of the teeth and melting the front of the mould in my mouth by pouring hot water over the tooth in question through a thin spout. This resulted in very solid fits, but the fact that my procedure ended up so elaborate should give you a decent estimate of how much I failed. The teeth just kept falling off and I got very frustrated over the course of the three hours it took me to go from a finished set of teeth to finished, sturdy dentures. This also came after discovering that my little stain-Experiment did not work. The plastic nails were just as white after four days in coffee as they were before. Oh well.

Candy Corn

Lending the horns colour was pretty easy. I first painted the topmost part in yellow acrylic paint (while overshooting by some decent margin for blending) and then moved downwards step by step with two gradually more reddish oranges, blending as I went without letting the paint dry to achieve a relatively smooth gradient. I prefer this over the three-stage discrete look.

One could seal the colour in to make it waterproof and maybe I will do so at some point, but since the con I want to go to is indoors this isn't a priority, sooo... horns done! I quite enjoy the somewhat gnarled look afforded by the tape around mesh approach and they're light and comfortable to wear. I would still sort of like to have the hairband below the wig for aesthetic reasons, meaning that this whole construction will have to be integrated into the hair.

Greasy Gamer Hair

I actually still have a long black cosplay wig from years ago but I'm plagued by some doubts as to whether it will be suited to the job. See, Fafnir Maiddragon has limp, perfectly straight, boring, deflated, greasy gamer-hair whereas Vriska Serket has luscious, voluminous, messily tangled, greasy gamer-hair.
Maybe I can fix this with wig glue but I've never actually worked with the stuff and thus don't know its limits. Always had pretty simple hairstyles when doing cosplay because I never really delved into it as an art. It was moreso to signal some membership to the community. To not be a tourist but a part of the Con in some ill-defined way. You know, out of the whole miasma of strange fucking "Vriska bad"-arguments that get thrown my way, it's always weird how people miss the obvious. Not even once has someone gone "well didn't you know that your alleged bastion of moral goodness is a fucking gamer?" Because I've got nothing on that front. Like yeah. She sure is, huh? I have to execute a cowardly retreat into claiming that nobody's record is perfect and everyone's got one dark secret stashed away somewhere. Her's is being a gamer. Mine is being a youtuber.

Gender Trouble

Off with the sad little thing I call a beard for the next few stages and this is the point where I should probably admit that I've never used makeup on myself. I have worn makeup a couple of times but I was never the person to apply it, which —I'll be the first to admit— shows. All I used here is lipstick, partially smudged eyeliner and mascara, the former especially leaving loads of room for improvement. When asking my more makeup-savvy friends what to do about this extreme degree of feathering, they gave me very helpful notes such as:

All very fair, but hey, that's what test-runs are for. On a meta-note I hear you ask (or at least am projecting onto you) the question of whether this is a gender-thing. The answer is "Yes, obviously". I consider myself agender or lazily non-binary, but this still is not a region of the spectrum of gender expressions I usually explore, and it's fun. It's very exciting to see what I can do with my features, and the impulse to embody a character whose prevailing (and in my mind most interesting) read is as a trans woman does make one reexamine some things, which is a bit of introspection any well adjusted person should indulge in from time to time anyway. Will I come out of this experience with she/her pronouns? Doubt it, but there's a pretty competitive betting pool among my friends on that question since long before this particular incident, so who knows! I'd also be surprised in equal and opposite measure if this left my self-image with regards to gender entirely unmoved though. That's how experiments go, it's very rare for you to figure out nothing, but at the same time the thing you figure out is often not what you expected. If you could always predict the outcome the whole thing would be a boring formality and could never such a thing.

Holes in the Web

After experimenting a bit with the wig glue, I've decided that this wig just doesn't have the structure I'm looking for, in addition to not having enough hair, so I ordered a second, wavy wig and will use this one as an experiment in inserting the horns from below. This worked really well, I marked the right spots for the horns with safety pins while wearing it and then made cuts in between the wefts. With my bendy horns it was pretty easy to push them through from below without making the cuts longer than they had to be, but for anyone who wants to imitate this process, I recommend only assembling the hair-band after this step so that you can insert the horns from above. When the new wig arrives I will probably cut this one apart and sew some of its wefts into that one to add volume.

Simulacra

The wavy wig has arrived, but I haven't inserted the horns yet, nor have I styled it or added volume by scrapping the other wig for parts, but this will have to do for now. Instead I'm attempting makeup again, this time with primer, foundation and blue eyeliner being used as lipliner. This is apparently a relatively common practice since eyeliner is available in a wider variety of colours, though doing so comes with a risk of irritation if the web and my friends are to be believed. My skin is not particularly sensitive and the liner I bought was reviewed by people claiming that they had a (for them) unusual lack of irritation using it the normal way, which I took to mean that it was comparatively easy on the skin. I am not a dermatologist, experiment at your own risk.
Sadly I couldn't quite be fucked to do A/B testing to figure out which of these products did most to eliminate the feathering issue, but cumulatively they definitely did the job (which the photos are a bit too grainy to fully show, but take my word for it). Applying mascara on the eyebrows worked great and is dead easy so that won't need any further optimizing, though I am growing dissatisfied with the sort of grittiness that results from smudging eyeliner all around my eyes rather than using actual eye-shadow. The reason for why I didn't do that from the start is that I deeply hate buying things and will bend over backwards to work with the stuff I already own until presented with overwhelming evidence that it just won't do. This is that. Begrudgingly I take out my wallet again. Speaking of quirks of character that stand in the way of having particularly good makeup: I think we can all agree that Vriska Serket would not bother with this, right? Vriska the character does not have a makeup routine outside of mindfang-cosplay, and as such that's not really what I'm imitating. I think a lot of cosplay involves makeup that the character in question wouldn't actually wear, even beyond the obvious stuff like contouring to simulate a different facial anatomy or white eyeliner to make the eyes look larger. You're kind of emulating the medium to the same extent that you're impersonating the character. There's a stylized heightened reality you're trying to capture whenever you're trying to mimic something that isn't itself naturalistic. Would Vriska wear this eye makeup? No, but it does point at a certain cartoon stylization of manic tiredness which doesn't actually look like anything in reality. You're trying to evoke artistic flourishes and importing them back into meatspace. Pure, triple-distilled simulacrum.

Eyepatch2

As fun as it seems to make a robotic arm, it sounds profoundly unfun to lug it around for two convention days, so instead I'll substitute my eyepatch for the vision eightfold lens. Seven red dots are perfectly respectable of course, but I chose to interpret that as artistic simplification and went a little TMA with the design instead (this decision was endorsed by the magic eight ball)

I also wanted the lens to be glossy and have a little bit of depth to it and while there's probably more idiomatic ways of going about the former, I chose to use around six layers of red and black nail polish respectively on two pieces of my green cardboard (yes, this is what it takes to get full coverage and as for why I keep using green cardboard I'll refer back to the last post. It's what I have). I drew the pattern I eventually settled on onto the backside of the black piece and cut the holes with a razor blade (make sure to use something properly sharp to get clean edges). After one last coat of nail polish on the red piece, the black one can just be pressed onto it and voila, just make sure to let it dry before you do anything else with it. This time I didn't lead the wire back and forth behind the eyepatch and affixed it with duct-tape to minimise weight, which worked perfectly fine.

A Sacrifice

After some glue-experimentation the straight wig is even more weathered than it was at the start of this whole endeavour, so I cut it into wefts and piled them up to get decently thick strands as you see in the middle image. I wanted to spike them to look something like Vris' Pesterquest sprite, though this always ended up looking weird and so I just sewed them onto the inner rim of the wavy wig to add a bit of extra volume. The horns were inserted exactly like last time.

You can see that the hair bulges around the horns in a way that looks a bit like pigtails, which is not an effect I was particularly going for, but it was easily fixed by applying wig glue to that area and pinning the hair down over night. All that was left at that point was fixing the bangs in place with glue and styling the rest with hairspray. Done.

Gray Area

So, I couldn't get my hands on any of the bespoke skin paints. What I could find though was a pure #ffffff white foundation, which seemed worth a shot seeing as I am rather pale anyway and also running out of options. I dusted some black and some dark blue eye-shadow into the foundation until it had the desired grey and then applied it the way one does on top of the primer. The rest of the makeup was done like last time except for the use of actual eye-shadow and eyeliner instead of two layers of eyeliner with the first having the hell smudged out of it. I did not have any transparent powder nor indeed the final seal at the time, so I couldn't really test how well it fixes and could only apply a very thin film without causing loads of smudging. This is pretty promising though. If I can get it smudge-resistant at a slightly increased thickness, this will probably look good. A bit of contouring will also go a long way, but all in all this worked a lot better than I expected it to, seeing how it was a bit of a Hail Mary.

Dweeb in Wolf's Clothing

Let's get to the outfit, delayed for being not that interesting all things considered. Vriska's wardrobe obviously isn't that inspired, but it still bears little overlap with the way I usually dress, which is unfortunate. While I'm getting good day-to-day mileage out of most of the makeup I've acquired throughout this process, it's a bit of a shame to have had to buy clothes that I won't wear again. I owned a pair of blue jeans, I'll probably wear the grey jeans jacket from time to time, but I don't wear o-neck shirts, and I'm not gonna wear the red knock-off converse for anything else (though knock-off converse were the shoes of my teens). Maybe I can find a friend who wants them but more likely I'll just donate them. Cosplay is expensive. I was aware of this from the get go and it's why I only made a real attempt at it now, but I spent around 250€ all in all while staying relatively basic on materials, which is an amount of money that I definitely don't want to spend on a hobby regularly. Was it worth it? Yes. A single cigarette is indeed quite good, but addiction is a powerful thing and one that shouldn't be stumbled into carelessly. Side note: this photo is half a month old and I in fact returned from the Con I prepared this cosplay for yesterday. Things have just been busy.

Before the Con

I felt pretty well prepared when I went to bed the day before DoKomi, concerned mostly about how much sleep I would get in the heat of my hostel room before the alarm wakes me at 07:00 to start with the makeup. Not that much, it turned out, but also not so little as to circumscribe my ability to function properly. I shaved, moisturized, ate a sandwich first so I wouldn't have to worry about fixing the lipstick too early in the day, pinned my hair into place and put on a wig-cap. Then I applied primer, mixed my white foundation with black and blue eye shadow in a tea light cup —preparing more than I thought I would need and ending up with just barely enough— and applied it generously across my face and neck, leaving some over for contouring and corrections. I added some more black eye-shadow into half of the cup and used that darker gray on the sides of my face, the sides and underside of my jaw, the undersides of my cheek-bones and nose and my temples (if my forehead weren't hidden, the top of that would also be on this list). This was set with an ungodly amount of fixing powder before highlighting the undersides of my eyebrows and the corners of my eyes with white eyeshadow, applying eyeliner to the lower tearline, the medial canthus and the upper eyelid with a very slight wing and then using black eye shadow on the rest of the upper eyelids and blue for the lower lids and stylized epicanthal folds. After that: Mascara on both eyelids and eyebrows, fixing whatever bits of foundation got damaged during all of this or which just need some thickening, another layer of fixing powder and a few sprays of final-seal while making sure to also seal in the neck. Lastly I outlined my lips with liner, making them a bit larger in the process and filling the resultant area in with lipstick. Makeup done! Then you dread like hell while you very carefully put the shirt on, which you weren't wearing before out of fear of getting foundation on it, succeed, put on the rest of the outfit, the wig, the glasses, inset the teeth and bring a spare set in case they break, realize that you should have put on your shoulder bag before the wig, clumsily lift if over the horns, get the hair out from under the strap and you're done! With less buffer than expected but with buffer nonetheless (I took almost two hours from the alarm ringing to leaving the hostel). In my bag I brought a compact umbrella, spare dentures and lipstick for corrections, but for the second day I also brought extra mascara since it does pick up some of the gray and gets duller as the day goes on.

DoKomi

DoKomi is amazing. It's the largest anime convention in Germany and I've only missed one year of it since 2013 with the prevalence of homestuck cosplayers significantly diminishing over the course of that decade. This was pointed out by pretty much everyone who approached me, turning me into an unwitting agent of nostalgia and purveyor of the fact that "HS is still going actually. Also read my epilogue-fic". Sincerely though, there is a lot of dopamine to be had in these excited gasps of recognition and it was a delight to be able to offer all those lovely artists showcasing their work to me something in return. m3ll0wing, weisbrot, and riotbreaker especially were a blast to talk to (buy their art please!)

Despite the apparent drought, I did manage to find at least five more cosplayers repping our favourite mass-delusion of a webcomic, which was lovely. While walking around the con, I got a few folks to say "Vriska did nothing wrong" (and two to very adamantly refuse), received a confirmation of moral virtue from Jesus and had a wonderful time overall. Thank you to everyone who approached me, I hope you had remotely as much fun as I did!

Battles Fought — Lessons Learned

I know this admission will come as a shock to some, not least of all myself, but I might —possibly— have done some things wrong:

Then there's some bits that I didn't exactly do wrong (I don't know what do do better) but which were unexpected negative experiences nonetheless:

Lastly a bonus story to end this thread. Since I had to catch a train directly after the con, I did not have time to de-vriskafy in Düsseldorf, meaning that I ended up removing my makeup and changing in the bathroom of a random train station in which I had a 40 minute transfer. The looks of piss-drunk football fans to whom I kept having to explain how the faucet-sensor works while looking like a half-molten demon sure were interesting. Fun times.

(†ↄ) Telomagnetic Copyleft