Robin Rant!

Dear lord in heaven, where the hell do I start…

This October will be my 10 year cosplay anniversary, so I had this great idea of treating myself to a fully commission costume. And because it was my 10 year anniversary, I thought what better costume to get then Robin! But this wasn’t going to be any Rob in costume, this was going to be the best Robin costume ever. I scoured the Internet, looking for an incredible costume maker, and found one by the name of Roberts workshop. His work is outstanding, and I knew that I would be in good hands with him. Well, spoiler alert, it was a nightmare.

First of all, he asked for all $1500 upfront. It wasn’t a deposit, it wasn’t 50%, it was the whole total cost of the costume. The estimated time he gave me was 12 weeks which seemed reasonable at the time. When we were approaching 10 weeks, I sent him a message to see where the progress was and it wouldn’t be hyperBolic to say it was near zero. He sent me a concept rendering of what the costume look like. Now I understand It might be my fault for not checking in sooner but as someone who gets stressed out really easily, I like to give other artists, space, and I’d like to trust that they are doing what they said they would.

He gave me excuses after excuses, but being a creator myself, I believed him, and got dragged on into the 18 week mark. At that point I was starting to get a little frustrated but I knew it wouldn’t be done because it hadn’t even been started at 12 weeks. To keep me complacent he kept occasionally sending me pictures of what he was working on. This went on for months, and although he was making progress, it was going very slowly. I asked if you could send me half of the money back because I was feeling uneasy he said “no” and that I should “trust him”. Again, me being stupid I excepted that.

Fast forward a little, and we are nearing six months which, for those of you who don’t know, that is the deadline to put in a complaint on PayPal if you have not received your product. If you wait six months, and one day you are ineligible to dispute a payment. Since that day was coming up, I Messaged Robert and told him that I would be contacting PayPal if it was not done by six months. He kept asking me to believe in him and trust in the process, but my faith in him as a decent person was faltering.

Needless to say, I put in the claim through PayPal, and he got really pissed off at me and sent me a bunch of really aggressive and angry emails. Even took the social media to try to sell the suit because he told me he didn’t have the money to pay back the refund. He tried his best not to pay me back, but thank God I put in that dispute because PayPal came in and demanded the refund the money.

Anyway, this rent is long enough, but I just needed to get that out of my system. I’m kind of pissed off because I really think this suit would have been amazing but I’m glad I didn’t give my money to that con artist. I’ve already got something new in the works and I’m excited to show that off in the next few month. I’ll attach some pictures of that costume and the conversation just so we can all wallow in it.

Ok, rant over.

PS I know I always have spelling mistakes but please bear with me on this one because I’ve had three drinks and Tylenol, cold and flu and I have been trying for almost 20 hours!