{"id":18794,"date":"2022-01-23T23:00:10","date_gmt":"2022-01-24T04:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=18794"},"modified":"2022-01-23T23:00:10","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T04:00:10","slug":"dungeons-and-dragons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2022\/01\/23\/dungeons-and-dragons\/","title":{"rendered":"Dungeons and Drag(ons)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

I have the utmost respect for cosplayers and cosplay queens, but I myself am not one. Cosplayers, for the uninitiate<\/span>d, are people who dress as a character from a movie, book, or video game. These artists use painstaking detail in their recreations of outfits and wigs, and I\u2019ve witnessed some that included tentacles, working wings that would pop out, satyr goat legs, a fully working back half of a centaur, and tons more. Cosplayers are some of the most incredibly talented artists around.<\/p>\n

As a drag artist who can lean into the more bizarre or inhuman side of drag, some people might mistake me for a cosplayer. After all, most mainstream drag doesn\u2019t include people with bright red or blue skin tones or wearing elf ears or such. However, as I am not trying to make accurate recreations of any character that already exists, this would be an incorrect label for me. Furthermore, drag is performance art. While plenty of drag artists focus on their looks or online presence or don\u2019t perform live much, they are still not cosplayers. A drag queen is not required to perform, although the majority do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So in accordance to all that I\u2019ve laid out above, we can come to the conclusion that I am, in fact, not a cosplayer (although I wish I had so many of their incredible construction skills). However, this doesn\u2019t bar me, as a drag artist (or any drag artist<\/span>) from creating cosplays or cosplay-esque looks. For me, my more fantasy character looks lean toward cosplay, and I\u2019ve even created looks inspired by characters who exist in the Critical Role world of Exandria.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

See, aside from drag, I adore playing Dungeons&Dragons, also known as D&D. I also love live-play D&D shows, particularly Critical Role, a Twitch-streamed D&D series of eight (now nine!) voice actors playing large campaigns of D&D over several years. They\u2019ve grown from a single home game to three full-length campaigns, hundreds of thousands of hours of content, millions of fans around the world, several canonical books detailing the world Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer created, and now an animated series on Amazon Prime. They\u2019re kind of a big deal. And I\u2019m kind of obsessed with them and with D&D as a whole!<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So this week\u2019s look was inspired by Opal, the Twice-Crowned from their Exandria U<\/span>nlimited series, created and played by Aimee Carrero. While it\u2019s not a totally accurate recreation of how Opal appeared in the campaign, it\u2019s my version of her character. And one of my most popular looks, surprisingly enough!<\/span>\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have the utmost respect for cosplayers and cosplay queens, but I myself am not one. Cosplayers, for the uninitiated, are people who dress as a character from a movie, book, or video game. These artists use painstaking detail in their recreations of outfits and wigs, and I\u2019ve witnessed some that included tentacles, working wings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2247,"featured_media":18178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1792,330,1757,1793,24,458],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18794"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18800,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18794\/revisions\/18800"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}