[Marisa Kirisame Cosplay] Riding the Wind: Golden Fantasy and Youthful Memories in Autumn

Looking back at this photoset shot at Lijiang Wildland a year ago gives a feeling of being a world away. At that time, I happened to read Baudelaire's "Paris Spleen": "The autumn sun seemed happy to forget to return, and a few golden clouds floated across the already greening sky like traveling continents." I was instantly struck by that distant and magical mood, which perfectly matched the outdoor location we were preparing in Lijiang, so we had this creative attempt titled "Riding the Wind."

Many friends asked me why the first picture sitting on the wooden board gives off a feeling of flying on a broomstick. The birth of this atmosphere actually owes a great deal to the warm yet slightly crisp light of that autumn afternoon, along with bursts of gentle breeze that happened to blow the lace of the hat brim. Combined with this uniquely styled golden wand in my hand and the snapshot of a slight head tilt back then, it accidentally left an illusion of dynamic movement and a fairytale feel for this Autumn photography piece.

The shooting location, "Lijiang Wildland," is truly perfect for this type of retro fantasy themes. For the outdoor section, those wasteland-style sheet-metal houses, abandoned train carriages, and the interwoven texture of rust and raw wood, combined with dried reeds and the late autumn blue sky, made the color contrast exceptionally comfortable. As for the indoor section, especially that caravan bookstore that looked transformed, it was filled with wooden bookshelves and yellowed old books, along with vintage kerosene lamps, tape recorders, and a guitar, filling the entire space with a very serene retro atmosphere. The old photo album and the ancient book with red patterns that I leafed through in Figures 4 and 5 also felt very much like a "spellbook" or a "travel diary" under the enhancement of this environment, allowing the character to reasonably "come alive" in this scene.

Regarding styling details, the wide-brimmed hat with a black base and white lace edges is indeed very characteristic. For the clothing, a cream-white lantern-sleeve shirt was chosen as the base, paired with an outer black velvet vest adorned with red ribbons, as well as a yellow-brown apron and layered white lace skirt hem. This color scheme presents a retro yet playful sense of layering under the sun, and the material of the long skirt and the patchwork of the apron can naturally spread out when walking or sitting down, making the image feel more dynamic.

More than a year has passed, and to be honest, looking at it now with a more mature eye, the makeup details, the fixing method of the props, and the composition of some scenes back then do show a lot of immaturity and greenness. If I were to shoot it now, I might do things a bit more exquisitely in terms of the range of motion, eye contact transmission, and interaction with props. But interestingly, it is precisely this "unintentional" shooting state that left our most authentic state of that year. Without carefully calculated standing poses, nor overly tense expressions, that laziness and randomness under the Lijiang plateau sunshine, as well as the spontaneous on-site communication and collision with the photographer Mr. "Iron Plate Squid" (Tie Ban You Yu), instead gave this photoset an extra layer of "flavor of fantasy" that was not over-packaged for this Retro style cosplay.

I feel that for cosplay, besides matching the appearance and the character, the more important thing is to find the resonance between the character, oneself, and the environment. This set of images might not be perfect, but it records that autumn afternoon when we chased light and shadow, felt the wind, and enjoyed a true moment of a fantasy journey in the universe of Touhou Project. This is where the greatest charm of cosplay lies in my heart, and it is the original aspiration that keeps me persisting in this.