MORE ABOUT KILLUA

While I've always been a huge sucker for shounen anime, it had been quite a while since I'd gotten very attached to one when I chose to watch Hunter x Hunter... and got to see the genre completely deconstructed. Watching the shounen formula be disassembled piece by piece had the reminder of that love hitting me like a ton of bricks. Since watching it I have become a fan of all of Yoshihiro Togashi's works as his writing is great fun and his characters just jump off of the page, but Hunter x Hunter remains my favorite work of his for both its shounen deconstruction and for the way he wrote the arc of one of my favorite characters of all time, Killua Zoldyck. It's not every day you get to see a character start off a series in such a horrendous almost completely irredeemable state and FAIL — literally sink lower — before setting off on a course for true and beautiful change. Killua and his spectacular character arc are always going to hold a special place in my heart, so of course I had to cosplay him.

The garments in this costume are thrifted and modified. I spent by far the most time on the wig. Killua changes outfits many times throughout Hunter x Hunter — in fact he's known for being kind of a fashion icon — but his face and hair tend to stay the same throughout. So I wanted to make the wig the best and most accurate I could make. Up until this point I had never styled a wig even remotely like this, so it was a huge learning process. And ultimately the process I ended up following was teasing the wig layer by wefted layer, blow drying it to set the teased fibers, brushing it out so the fibers were crimped and easier to style, and then cutting and shaping the spikes with these altered fibers. There were a lot of mishaps along the way and I think if I were given the opportunity I could do a much better job styling a new wig a second time around, but overall I'm quite happy with how it came out!