Welcome to the second long-delayed episode from A-Kon 27 in Dallas, Texas!
Ryuu Lavitz
Ryuu Lavitz is a cosplayer, judge, panel moderator, and even a Twitch streamer. Ryuu started by cosplaying at Anime Boston and soon branched out to other conventions since May 2014. She does her own costumes, photography, and has been able to use those skills (which spun off of her mother’s craftiness) to create a career that allows her to travel the world. If you’d like to find more of Ryuu Lavitz online, you can find her at her website, her facebook page, Twitter, Twitch, and finally her Patreon site. She is everywhere online and I’m sure that I’m still not listing all of the ways you can connect with her!
We asked lots of questions, but for those that we didn’t cover, Ryuu Lavitz has a nice FAQ page detailing other common questions that she gets.
Interview Transcript
My Geek Confessions: Alright everyone, we are here with our next interview, and I will let you introduce yourself.
Ryuu Lavitz: Hi, my name is Ryuu Lavitz, I am 23, from Boston, Massachusetts, and I do a lot of artsy stuff, like photography, and crafting, and sowing, and drawing, so it’s my schtick.
MGC: It’s a very good schtick, apparently. And I guess that goes right into our first question: how did you get your start?
RL: I used to do photography in high school, because I really wanted to be a photographer, and I’d done a lot of self-photography. So, I got bored of just taking pictures of all my normal clothes, and decided I was gonna start making stuff based off of characters. I started with Pikachu, and I was like, “Oh, I’m just gonna do some ears and a tail, and throw in a yellow shirt.”
MGC: Okay?
RL: The next one up was Lara Croft, and I was like, “Why not? I know a place with some giant rocks, that’ll be fun.” I didn’t think anything of it, and then the internet started calling me a cosplayer, and I was like, “What is that?
MGC: Ahh, the rest is history, then?
RL: The rest is I had to go on the internet and google it. Now I know I’m a cosplayer.
MGC: Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?
RL: Yeah, it was cool! I was like, “Alright there’s this category of people doing the same thing as me, I can get down with that!”
MGC: Okay, and obviously that’s kind of brought you a lot of different things along the way. It was saying in your kind-of bio that you’ve done judging, you’ve done all these different things. How’d that kind of come about?
RL: Oh, I started doing cosplay the first year, and then the next following year I had this little, tiny convention going I’d never heard of in Florida called Omnicon. And they were like, “Come down here and guest for us!” And it wasn’t really a guesting gig as much as they were giving me passes and having me pay the rest of my way in. I paid a lot of money to be there, and it was a really tiny con. But, I think that’s where it started, because that’s where I got my first judging experience. I read a couple panels, did some photoshoots, and it was my first real professional setting, and I think I learned a lot from it and how to go about guesting in general. And then from there,
