TAKE BACK THE SKIES Blog Tour Character Cosplay

Hey everyone! Today, the blog tour for Lucy Saxon's fun debut Take Back the Skies (which is released today!) stops by Finding Bliss in Books. Below you'll find some information about the book itself, and also what the post is about (hint: I take a stab at putting together virtual costumes)! (Also, when reading the post keep in mind that I am not the most creative person, but I tried; I should most certainly not be a cosplayer.) Hope you enjoy!

Catherine Hunter is the daughter of a senior government official on the island of Anglya. She’s one of the privileged – she has luxurious clothes, plenty to eat, and is protected from the Collections which have ravaged families throughout the land. But Catherine longs to escape the confines of her life, before her dad can marry her off to a government brat and trap her forever.
So Catherine becomes Cat, pretends to be a kid escaping the Collections, and stows away on the skyship Stormdancer. As they leave Anglya behind and brave the storms that fill the skies around the islands of Tellus, Cat’s world becomes more turbulent than she could ever have imagined, and dangerous secrets unravel her old life once and for all . .

So, today I am going to do something I've never done before, and I'm going to make an attempt at cosplay customer. I don't have much of a creative bone in my body when it comes to costuming and clothing, but since the main character in Take Back the Skies, Cat, and her love interest first meet since she was hiding in his armoire, I felt it fitting to do something to do with clothing for today's post. Not only that, but the author of Take Back the Skies, Lucy Saxon, is an awesome cosplayer, so let's bring some rivalry and see who's the victor of cosplaying here. (Just a spoiler alert, but the victor will not be me.) Since Take Back the Skies takes place in a light steampunk world, I hope this won't be too much of a disaster, but if it is, hey, at least you can point fingers at me and laugh at my attempts. I probably will be right there with you. Let's goooo!

Before boarding the skyship: In the beginning of the novel, Cat is wealthy having been the son of an esteemed government official and lives a generally royal life, despite her contempt towards it. That, coupled with the setting of steampunk Victorian England, makes me imagine her wardrobe to have looked something like the gorgeous and gothic dress in the first picture.

(DON'T MIND THE ARROW, I KNOW IT LOOKS TERRIBLE.)

After boarding the skyship: OF COURSE Hatsune Miku Cosplay. This is probably totally not allowed in the rules of cosplay, since this is already the outfit of a character, but you can't have a character that's a girl disguised as a boy and have my mind not wander to Elizabeth Swann! Not only that, but the ruggedness of the outfit and, of course, the little hat totally fit the setting of the novel, and Cat's character as a whole. She's trying to escape from this grand world of royalty she's grown up around, and dresses herself in grimy clothing to best separate herself from said world. Also, she has to borrow some clothing from her love interest for some of the beginning, and this is totally the type of clothing I'd imagine her love interest wearing. However, Cat is 14 and 15 years old throughout Take Back the Skies, so maybe not quite Keira Knightley. Maybe.

Fox's character took a little bit of mixing and matching, because apparently it's highly difficult to find minimalist steampunk pictures of redheaded teenage boys living on a skyship.

For this, the first picture fits his characteristics more accurately, I think; the second picture fits his attire more accurately than the first, since he's not living particularly extravagantly on the smuggler's skyship. Fox is 17 years old and red-headed, so the physical characteristics of the man in the first picture complement his character well; I'm not 100% sure if he had such...prevalent sideburns, but the goggles and overall height and physique of the model work well for his character.

The second picture, however, reflects the clothing and life on the skyship and as a teenage smuggler a lot better than the first picture. Although I'd say it's not as Avatar: TLA in the novel as the second picture would imply, the colors of the outfit (you know, brown) were what I had imagined Fox and the other members of the skyship wearing throughout the novel. There's a lot of running going on, and a lot of things that you should probably be undetected for that Fox and the other characters do in Take Back the Skies, and I'm not sure the flashiness of the first outfit would bode too well for the intents of Fox. Also, more goggles!