Costume: Jenny, The Doctor's Daughter
Posted: August 4, 2015
Worn: October 26, 2014
This is a considerable departure from my usual fare, but I'd like to beg your indulgence for three weeks of costumes from Doctor Who. If you're underwhelmed by these offerings, I'll be back to my ordinary style August 25th.
I've mentioned before in passing that I play tabletop roleplaying games. A few weeks prior to this photoshoot, I joined a "Doctor Who: Adventures in Time & Space" game that a friend of mine was starting. The most typical set of player characters for the system would be the Doctor and his companions, but the GM didn't feel entirely comfortable having someone as knowledgeable and competent as the Doctor in the game. But he really liked the idea of having a Time Lord in the party. So he proposed the premise that a prison TARDIS was damaged during the Time War, its crew killed. It sustained itself for a long while in a pocket dimension it built, but eventually, on the verge of failure, reached out across time and space for a new crew to repair it. Jenny was the only Gallifreyan it could locate, so it plucked her up, along with a few other people with useful skills.
There have almost always been other women present in my various roleplaying groups, but not this time. Playing Jenny naturally fell to me. In the first session, we evaded escaped prisoners of a dozen species while figuring out where we were and why. We fixed the TARDIS well enough to escape from the collapsing pocket dimension, then decided to stay with the ship and explore time and space together (And maybe find Dad and let him know I'm still alive.)
Marks and Spencer green t-shirt from eBay, 2014 (Screen Accurate)
7 For All Mankind rubber coated black jeans from eBay, 2014 (Possibly SA)
LC-2 tactical webbed belt in Olive Drab from eBay, 2014 (Screen Accurate)
Dr. Martens Triumph 1914 black boots from Amazon, 2013
The campaign was amazing. I may have had one GM as good, and another in the same league, but never any better.
When I make a character myself, I generally go with a very bookish character, a non-fighter with a lot of internal conflicts and emotional complexity. Jenny is a very physical character who knows a lot about fighting and very little about life. She's very confident, very enthusiastic, and not at all cautious. It was a huge stretch for me as a roleplayer, so I watched at least a few clips from her episode before each game to make sure I could recapture the mindset. I had more fun playing Jenny than any other character I've ever played. And after a few hours of being absolutely as ON as I could be, I was pretty much high from sheer endorphins.
See? I totally get more out of watching the show than new phobias. There are, after all, entire episodes that Moffat didn't write!
Since I had been doing Amy Pond costuming at TimeGate and some other conventions for a couple of years, I idly wondered one day how difficult it would be to put together a Jenny costume. I checked online and found the screen accurate t-shirts readily available on eBay for just a few pounds. And the screen accurate belt for just a few dollars. So I decided, somewhat whimsically, to do the costume.
The pants were a bit tricky, since only the manufacturer is known, not the exact model, and since finding jeans that fit decently is hard enough in a store. The screen accurate version is probably wax coated rather than rubber coated, but rubber ones were available at the time and somewhat fit. And since the exact boots aren't known and I've got way to many pairs of black boots already, I decided to save a bit of money by using screen accurate Amy Pond boots instead of trying to find a good alternate.
I debuted the costume at the last game before Halloween and greeted everyone with an innocent, "Oh, we weren't LARPing?"
Oops! US? That doesn't sound right! In the show, there are hardly any shots of the belt from the rear, but I did find one screen capture showing that the inconvenient writing is covered by a pouch. I couldn't find a pouch at the time that I considered acceptable, but when I was subsequently trying to upgrade to costume to convention level, I picked up a Condor MA26 Tactical Gadget Pouch. I may do a better photoshoot of the costume down the road, with the pouch, possibly with better pants and boots, and definitely without that dreadfully inappropriate watch I neglected to remove.
At a New Who costuming panel I attended at TimeGate a few years ago, we were advised, if approached for a picture and in doubt about a pose, to do something like what is shown above. Supposedly it bears a faint resemblance to poses used in some promotional images of the show. All of the panelists demonstrated it. I don't think it's especially flattering, but I'll keep trying to make it work.
I've done four different Amy Pond costumes, though I've only managed photoshoots of two of them so far. I'll cover those in the next two posts.
