So this happened.

Yesterday, I was browsing the web looking for pictures of Gackt - you know the dude, Gackt Camui, Japan's greatest rock star, Mr. Perfect himself, the man who served as the inspiration for numerous pop-culture characters. While looking at the pics, I stumbled upon the cover for his latest album, "Last Moon", released this April, after a few years break from the scene. On the cover, Gackt has huge black wings.

See the wings?



My first thought was: "How awesome, Gackt has black wings with paper feathers, he really looks cool with them."

Then: "Oh wow, some of these feathers are a bit crooked. And they look sort of familiar."

Then: "Wait a second... Is that...? OH. MY. GOD."

Take a good look at the wings again. Can you remember where you've seen them before?



That's right - right here on this site. It's from my Sephiroth cosplay.





Here's a direct comparison, made by a friend:


So yeah. That's my wing right over there, on the poster, on the album cover, in the CD booklet - basically everywhere related to "Last Moon" visuals:





I had to take a double shot of whiskey to calm down from a fit of fangirl hyperventilation, and I still cannot recover from the shock.

Now, before someone asks, Gackt's graphic design team obtained the pic in a perfectly legit manner. According to my agreement with Guru, the photographer that I work with, I get fancy studio shootings for free and I can do whatever I want with all the pictures taken - edit them, sell them as prints, use them for promotion, whatever. On the other hand, he's allowed to upload the selected few photographs to stock sites, from where people can download them for their own purposes. Some of my pictures have appeared in odd places before - the most bizarre case was Endymion and me as Jaime and Cersei Lannister on the cover of a German bodice ripper. But this... This takes things on a whole new level.

Because there's one thing that makes me confused as f*ck, still struggling to accept that this has really happened.

Namely, while I dare say that my Sephiroth's wing is quite good - my friends and me worked our asses off to make it, and we did it to the best of our abilities - I know very well that it isn't perfect. Some feathers are oddly shaped. Not all are perfectly aligned. Some tips are broken or crooked. The materials we used are far from fancy, as here in Serbia we cannot access half the stuff that Western cosplayers use for their projects - the wing is made of paper, cardboard and black garbage bags. While it looked more than suitable for my cosplay needs, there are far better wings out there - including what you can find on stock photo sites.

One would think that a person of Gackt's caliber would have props made for him, instead of photoshopping them on - and I'm sure some Japanese cosplay wizards would be more than happy to make him perfect-looking black wings, even for free. But okay, if having real props is too complicated, one would think that Gackt's - and his graphic design team - would have wanted a perfect wing for the album cover. Perhaps even a real bird's wing, reshaped to fit his frame.

But no. They chose my Sephiroth. They didn't even fix the wing's faults - the feathers are still crooked and misaligned. And while I'm honored and flattered and as excited as a schoolgirl who just got noticed by her senpai, I still don't understand WHY. Perhaps because of the Final Fantasy connection, because Gackt is a well known fan of the franchise...? I guess we'll never know.

What I do know is that it feels like a miracle.