Osakada Tomoka (小坂田 朋香)
About the character : Osakada Tomoka (小坂田 朋香) is a rather irritating middle-school first-year girl in the anime and manga Tennis no Ouji-sama (Prince of Tennis) (テニスの王子様). ^_^ She is best friends with Ryuuzaki Sakuno (竜崎 桜乃), the "main" female lead of the series who has a huge crush on the main character of Tennis no Ouji-sama, a genius tennis player middle-school first-year called Echizen Ryouma (越前 リョーマ). The series revolves around Echizen and his team mates and their long and arduous journey competing with other middle schools in Japan in tennis, so Sakuno and Tomoka are actually rather small characters.
Even so, that doesn't stop Tomoka from making quite the impression every time she shows up. Early in the series, she proclaims herself in charge of the Echizen fan club, and makes all sorts of banners and posters to proclaim her support for Echizen. Later she even makes Sakuno wear a cheerleader's outfit with her when she cheers on the team. Not that she's all that loyal to Echizen either. Not too long after seeing the rest of the team, she proclaims Fuji to be "Too COOL" and starts fangirling him too. ^_^ But to be honest, Tomoka's character, although a little noisy and over-enthusiastic, is a very straightforward and cheerful girl, and is actually pretty likeable. At least I prefer her over Sakuno, whose slightly wimpy character irritates the heck out of me... >_<
Why her? : My friends and I were in the midst of a Tennis no Ouji-sama fan-fever when we decided to cosplay the characters. Actually it was more of us realising that our personalities fit the characters from the series, and wanting to cosplay them. Being so not-fitted to play a male character, I became Tomoka, because BN, my "twin" was more appropriate for Sakuno (her younger sister Grace cosplayed as Ryoma so there was some interesting symmetry there). Besides, with my own slightly-bossy and cheery personality, Tomoka was a better character for me to cosplay. I actually grew to like her character more through cosplaying her! ^_^
About the costume : Tomoka's winter school uniform consists of a white tucked-in sailor-collar shirt, with a green long-sleeved jacket on top of it, tied with a pink bow. She wears a green pleated short skirt, black socks and normal school shoes, and her hair is characteristically in two high ponytails.
I actually handsewed my entire costume before BN was to do hers, which is basically the same uniform, so she actually brought my handsewn clothes to the tailor for her to copy the same design and colours! LOL! ^_^ The Seigaku female school skirt was the exact same colour and pattern as my old junior college's school uniform, so I simply shortened one of my skirts and saved myself a lot of trouble making the pleats. For the sailor collar, I actually searched on the net for patterns and had to modify one to fit into the collar line of one of my shirt patterns, sewing the whole thing myself, together with the green jacket. I can still remember intending to sew buttons and buttonholes down the front of the white shirt and giving up because of lack of time, sewing snap buttons instead!
First Appearance
Event : Private Photoshoot (named POT Day Out), mid 2004.
About the cosplay : POT Day Out was named because we wanted to go to a bowling alley and bowl in our costumes, to reflect the omake episode in Prince of Tennis when the members did the same thing. We spent the morning preparing at our Kaidoh (Ka)'s house, and shooting some photos around her bungalow house, before surprising Nic, who was cosplaying as Momo (?) with a pink birthday cake coated with cocoa powder! It was pretty funny when she blew on the cake and all the cocoa powder flew off and revealed this bright pink cake underneath! (Nic is like... allergic to pink. ^_^)
We had everything prepared, our Inui (Justin) even made Aozu according to the recipe from the books and it was BRIGHT BLUE. O_O. Our trip down to the bowling alley was really fun too, I remember both our Echizen Ryoma and Echizen Papa scored really high, creating wry comments about how the tensai and tensai father (who is also a tensai) really flow through their cosplay. And! Our dark horse, Ka as Kaidoh, was the silent and innocuous killer, an inconspicuous bowler who suddenly overtook everyone and finally won the game! Very Kaidoh-like indeed!
Picture credits : Reference pictures taken from wildCARD and photo credits go to kazoku~ ^_^.