The Source

”An all-purpose battle android on a mission to eradicate machine lifeforms on Earth."

"Everything that lives is designed to end. We are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. Is this a curse? Or some kind of punishment? I often think about the god who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle…and wonder if we’ll ever get the chance to kill him."

"A future is not given to you. It is something you must take for yourself.” — Pod 042

Charles asked me to be on his Battlebots team right as I had just finished playing Nier:Automata through ending E for the first time. Naturally my mind went straight to combining the two. The desert filming location, the machine mayhem, 2B being a robot-killing android…it was just all too fitting. At the time I was also growing out my natural hair color, so wearing a wig would help cloak the awkward transition period as opposed to immortalizing it in television history.

Team Overhaul has a cyberpunk weeb theme that originated as an aesthetic cross between Vocaloid’s Hatsune Miku and RWBY’s Ruby. Our team’s costume designer was nice enough to accomodate my wishes for a 2B inspired costume matching the overall Overhaul theming. She designed and sewed a crop jacket and black shirt that would be stylistically compatible with a self-provided flared skirt. Aside from these items, it was left to me to “accessorize” how I pleased.

The Costume (2022)

Battlebots filming involves wrenching on 250lb robots that look like they’ve been run over by a semi and/or shat out an industrial meat grinder. I wanted to accessorize in a way that could be dressed up for the tv filming parts, but also dressed down for repair work. Ideally I would be able to swiftly transition between a “casual” mode (dirt resistant, high mobility & comfort) and a “formal” mode (tv ready, moderate mobility & comfort). In both modes, the priority was on retaining functionality.

2B is dressed head to toe in funeral blacks with only small flashes of exposed skin. Since I wouldn’t have a high-tech Yorha issue heat-shedding skirt, thermal regulation would be key given I would be spending 2 weeks in a tent in the Mojave Desert. That my designer crop top and undershirt was sleeveless already helped immensely with this.

I bought two pairs of fingerless pleather gloves (one long pair, one short pair with a snazzy cuff) from Amazon that I layered on top of each other to get a look I liked. I would only wear the long pair for matches and would just wear the short pair when tenting around. Actual thigh-high boots were out of the question - they limit knee and ankle mobility too much. Instead, I would pair ankle boots with some sort of very stretchy tights. I ordered some suede ankle boots with a 2Bish heel silhouette off Zappos for going on stage, but wore a simple pair of combat boots at all other times.

For the “casual” mode, I wore simple knit tights (comfortable, breathable, and cheap - I expected these would be trashed by the end of filming). For the “formal” mode, I struggled to find something a bit more upscale that suited my tastes. My first night there, I stumbled across some stretchy pleather leggings at the Vegas Strip Target that were way better than what I had packed. I had to guess the sizing since it was a micro-target with no changing rooms but they fit like a glove. The combination of the suede ankle boots with the pleather gloves and leggings helped replicate the contrasting shiny/matte textures of her uniform while maintaining an elegant 2B-esque silhouette.

I bought a white wig from Epic Cosplay expecting to dye it to the weird silver-blonde-ash Yorha shade. Unfortunately, it was unusably short in the front: they had massively shortened the bangs across their entire product line and didn’t update the product photos. ARGH. Out of desperation, I bought an ANOGOL 2B character wig off Amazon. It turned out to be the perfect 2B shade color and just surprisingly decent overall for a $20 wig. In our hotel room, I cut the extra hair off the back, teased it for volume, and formatted it into the small piece-y strands she has. Sadly, I didn’t get time to do the front until after the team photos (ack), but I fluffed up the bangs that night and you can see they are properly voluminous in all the televised matches on the show. The only thing I didn’t like about the ANOGOL wig was that it became too short in the front after I fluffed it. It really needs another 2” of the longest length continuing around the front. I may try to add some wefts from a second copy but at least for now this is “Automata inspired” and not “actual Automata cosplay.” One benefit of the current length is that it’s pretty easy to push the eye covering bangs out of the way for mechanicing and/or operating the arena hammers. :D (Aka Pod Program R030. ;P)

Our costume designer was kind enough to send me swatches of the teal fabrics used for the other costumes (which she had all custom-dyed :O) and with that I was able to confidently select a matching headband. (The headband is the most important part. :) ) My real eye color is pretty close to 2B’s, but since hers is a few shades lighter I got some contacts with a subtle enlarging effect.

I sewed a skirt, spending a lot of time fine-tuning the pattern (2B’s skirt is not a circle skirt, it’s worse than that). But I only got to try everything on together for the first time after arriving in Vegas and it just didn’t pair up super well with everything else, especially my last-minute pleather tights discovery (their weird knit inset waistband was visible through the slit). My real wardrobe is basically entirely flared skirts anyway, so I just wore my daily skirts for both “modes.” One of the auxiliary team members didn’t have a dedicated outfit of his own (there are a few “general use” pieces in the Overhaul wardrobe for this but all were in use). I ended up pinning the skirt on him to wear as a cape LOL. You can see it briefly at the end of the Cobalt match. I used upholstery velvet from Joann’s but if I make an actual 2B costume, I’m going to use uninterfaced garment velvet instead. After 6” horsehairing, the interfaced velvet makes the upper portion a bit too stiff IMO.

In a stroke of fate, Team Skorpios came over the first day and handed us a katana. This was promptly spraypainted with a teal accent and equipped on me. Being used to the aggressive policing of anime convention props, I had not thought for even a second that I could have a real metal sword with me. Of course, when you have 250 lb robots shredding each other into their constituent metals, a real sword is rather low on the safety priority list. In the end, this sword ended up equipped to Rusty for his match against Hydra, at which point it mostly stopped being recognizable as a sword. :P (Rusty looks a LOT like Pascal from Automata…)

To a cosplayer it is obvious I am wearing a wig (it not being a lacefront) but the roboteers kept thinking it was my real hair. I didn’t wear it every day, but I did on every day we had a match, and a few others besides for basically the whole day. The people who I met while wearing the wig had to be re-introduced to me when I wasn’t because I inevitably ended up being referred to in the third person while standing there. (They didn’t realize I was the same person…)

All in all, this was a very nice way to (partially) come out of cosplay retirement now that my life situation has stabilized. There were also a decent amount of Automata fans at filming, as one would expect at a robotics-enthused event. ;) Cheers to the guy from Ripperoni who kept quipping lines from the game at me whenever he could fit one in. :P

Photos

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