I cosplayed genderbend Luffy for AnimeNYC 2026!

My friend once told me I am the Luffy of the friend group and I took that to be the HIGHEST COMPLIMENT IT IS MY HONOR

I love how One Piece portrays friendships. It's so refreshing to see Luffy and Nami's affection and genuine care for one another without any future shipping/fanservice (not that I hate shipping, I am a fangirl of many things myself), but it's so rare to see a healthy platonic friendship between people of the opposite sex!! Of course I also love the male friendships between Luffy/Zoro and Zoro/Sanji. They all care about each other so deeply and are not allergic to affection which seems to be the norm nowadays...

I ESPECIALLY love how unabashedly campy the live action show is. They committed to the nonsensical whimsiness 100% and it WORKS. Like Igaram's guns in his wig-- the producers were like, "how would this even wor-- WHO CARES JUST DO IT" and that is amazing.

And thank you to the live action show for fixing Sanji's entire personality and making him NOT a sexual harasser (which is unfortunately a "comedic" trope in most older animes). He is so cool now.

My partner cosplayed genderbend Nico Robin (Miss All Sunday) and my friend cosplayed Nami!

Nico Robin was the talk of the town in AnimeNYC

this pic is mirrored so the scar is on the correct side

I got to attend their panel!! It was Mackenyu's first convention in North America! <3

Attended Velinxi's live drawing and Q&A panel, and got my copy of Daughter of a Thousand Faces!

Then had a very important lunch. Important because the meal taught me to never buy food at AnimeNYC

PACK YOUR OWN SNACKS NEXT TIME!! You will never guess how much this measly meal was... Darn you New York and capitalism

My humble haul... 2 prints and 1 art book!

This was a chaotic One Piece Cosplay Meetup

Ended the day with an Anime Rave that should really have been called Early 2000s Emo Rave, with the amount of anime music they actually played...