A frequent mistake that people make when they see me and my partner Endymion cosplaying together is that we’re an item. That’s not true – I am happily married for 13 years now, while Endymion is in a long relationship with a wonderful girl that he met at a party I dragged him to. But we ARE very close friends – one needs to develop a high degree of intimacy and trust in order to pull off the kind of projects we do together. And believe it or not, we met totally by accident.
In early 2013, when I started working on my Griffith cosplay for that year’s Japanizam, I wished to have a Guts by my side – we all know that the White Hawk is nothing without his right hand man. My first thought was to persuade my husband to take the role – and by the gods, he would have made a perfect Guts. He’s tall, so gloriously ripped he could have starred in „Spartacus“, has a cute face, a square jaw, and spikey black hair (not that I’m bragging, but he is the best looking man I know in person). However, while he’s quite a geek himself and he fully supports all my cosplaying shenanigans, my husband is a hard core introvert. Going to conventions in cosplay has always been a foreign idea to him. Therefore, he flatly refused to do Guts.
“All sorts of people will approach me, and they’ll want to talk,” he said. “And take pictures. And tag me in pictures. And then they’ll want to friend me on social networks and hassle me afterwards. Nope, nope, nope – I prefer to stay home, you go and have fun.”
I really, REALLY wanted him to be my Guts. I tried to persuade him, to no purpose. I tried begging, blackmail and bribery, all in vein. Japanizam was approaching, my Griffith costume was almost finished, but my husband’s “no can do” was as stubborn as ever. Much to my dismay, it became clear that my White Hawk will have to make it through the convention alone.
So when the day of Japanizam came, I went to the convention venue a bit earlier, changed into the costume, and started preparing for the cosplay event – as always, my duty was to host the main stage.
“And where’s Guts?” one of my fellow organizers asked when he saw me dressed up as Griffith.
“There is no Guts,” I replied, barely managing to mask my disappointment.
“Really? But I’ve just seen him,” an event volunteer added, joining the conversation. “He’s in the backstage, changing.”
Needless to say, I rushed to the backstage at full speed, almost tripping over my heavily armored legs.
Indeed, there he was. A handsome young man stood in front of the mirror applying makeup, turning himself into the spitting image of Guts right before my eyes.
I could barely believe the sight. And judging by the way he looked at my Griffith, the feeling was mutual.
“Hello!” I squealed like a proper fangirl. Thinking back, I was probably blushing too.
“Hello,” he answered, visibly confused.
But then I managed to get a hold of myself, lower my voice, and go full Griffith on the man, saying the infamous quote that sealed the relationship between the two:
“Guts… You’re mine.”
He smiled, and that was it.
We stayed together for the remainder of the convention – we hit it off immediately, happily noting that we shared strong chemistry which made it easy to act and pose in character.
These are some of our first pics together, taken by various convention photographers, only a few minutes after we met:
After the convention, we exchanged contacts and agreed to meet again for a joint photo shoot. A few weeks later, in the morning of our shooting day, I went to the train station to pick up the man who’d become my partner, as he wasn’t living in Belgrade – and I barely recognized him. Instead of the dark and surly Guts the Black Swordsman, I was greeted by a soft-spoken, somewhat shy young man who looked nothing like the character he was cosplaying. It was in that moment that I understood his immense transformation potential as a cosplayer - and my mind was blown. I knew I wanted to work more with him.
While preparing for the shooting, we had a super long talk about life (discovering we had so many things in common), cosplay (figuring out our skills were complementary), and future plans (concluding we looked damn good together, from our height difference to the intense energy we could feel flowing between us). It’s then that we struck our cosplay partnership – the deal to work together on our costumes and, whenever possible, to do joint projects.
To my deepest regret, that shooting went according to Murphy’s Law. We got chased away from the desired location by a very grumpy and persistent security guard who claimed we were “disturbing the passersby”, and our photographer (more like an amateur friend, because this was long before we started collaborating with professionals) had to urgently go back to work after taking only a few test shots - so we ended up in the middle of a random park, with a random friend behind the camera who had the best intentions but not the best of skills.
To make matters worse, when I rebooted Griffith in 2015 for a proper studio shooting, Endymion could not join me as Guts given that his costume had long fallen apart (if you want your armor to last, never make the breastplate out of cardboard, no matter how cheap that technique is – as soon as you start sweating in costume, and you WILL sweat, it will turn to mush). So, until Endymion does a new and improved version of Guts, these sh*tty pics are all we have:
Our next project – the first we did as official partners - was a fun, light-weight one. In the Fall of 2013, the organizers of Tolkien’s Fantasy Festival decided to highlight the cosplay aspect of their event. To stand out in the crowd of Legolases, Arwens and Galadriels, we decided to go for the D&D version of dark elves – the Drow – with their greyish skin, white locks and penchant for fetish wardrobe.
These costumes are pure improvisation: nothing but random black stuff from our closets, old wigs and body paint – and yet they were very effective, as we looked as if someone switched off the color on us. We keep saying we should redo these dark elves one of these days, but this time with pimped up costumes.
Pics by Peđa Bojković, body paint by Shunak/Ljubica Mirković
In late Fall of 2013, we also did our first take on Death and Dream of the Endless (you can read all about it in the here on my Althemy site, the article's called "Endless Nights http://ferashacosplay.althemy.com/blogpost/2583-endless-nights-the-story-of-our-most-ambitious-group-project-so-far "). We rebooted this cosplay in 2015, and had an epic studio shooting resulting in these babies.
Pics by Guru, post-processing by Shunak
However, it’s in May 2014 that we did our most (in)famous joint project so far: the Lannister twins.
The occasion was the East European Comic Con held in Bucharest, Romania. It was the first time that we went to a major regional convention, so I really wanted to come up with a project that would draw everyone’s attention to the Serbian cosplay scene – especially since we were given the opportunity to present our costumes on stage. The idea was to choose recognizable characters from a popular franchise, who won’t only have iconic costumes, but also complex personalities that would be a challenge to portray. And the incestuous Lannister twins, with their twisted relationship of codependency, love, lust, manipulation and loathing, were exactly what I had in mind – edgy yet epic, controversial yet cool.
The Lannisters took a lot of work – and not only the costumes, even though I dare say that at the time, Jaime’s armor was the best of what Serbian cosplay could provide (we’ve leveled up since then). He and I really had to work through the acting aspect of this project – how to go convincingly convey the hot mess of Jaime and Cersei’s feelings, while at the same time stay safe and sane as friends. In the end, our performance in Romania remains one of the best memories of my life as a cosplayer – during those three minutes on stage, while performing our act to the “Rains of Castamere”, I felt as if I were truly going through a turmoil of strong, conflicting emotions. Endymion later told me that he felt as if he completely turned into another man, with all his feelings and even memories flooding him. And yet, when the song ended and the crowd began to cheer and applaud, we slipped back into ourselves with ease, sharing our success and spotlight. That’s exactly how a true friendship and partnership works.
This is the official promotional picture of our Lannisters from Romania:
And here is the photo set we did with CoolADN, one of France’s best known cosplay photographers. These pics served as quite a breakthrough for us at the international cosplay scene – it’s after this that we established contacts with world famous cosplayers, and started receiving invitations to be cosplay guests at conventions abroad:
Later that year, we had a new shooting of our Lannisters, with a young cosplayer going by the name of VaxSux who joined us as Joffrey. This was our first collaboration with Guru, the man who’d become our official cosplay photographer.
Edits by Marija Morticia:
In 2015, our joint project was the DC thing. Ever since he was a boy, Endymion wanted to be Batman. A lot of lil’ boys share that dream, but only a few get to make it come true. Bringing the Dark Knight to life was a serious challenge: it’s not a costume easily done in one’s living room, using only the limited range of materials we have available here. Yet Endymion worked hard every day for months, coming home from the office only to drudge more, often tinkering with the costume until wee hours of the morning. He said the entire experience made him feel a bit like Bruce Wayne – being a successful businessman by day, pursuing his true vocation by night.
As for me, I was never much of a superhero fan – the only genre thing I ever took seriously were “The Watchmen”, exactly because of the cynical deconstruction of masked vigilantes. However, since I really wanted to do this project with Endymion, I opted for Poison Ivy, purposely basing my costume on Uma Thurman from “Batman and Robin” – a horrible, horrible film that nevertheless works as an unintentional parody. With her pin up sex appeal and cringeworthy pick-up lines, Uma Thurman’s Ivy felt like something between a legendary femme fatale and a drunken matron, and it’s this blend of sexiness and humor that gave me something to work with against Endymion’s Batman. And when Wacky Cherry joined the project as Catwoman, also making her childhood dream come true and perfectly completing our little DC threesome, this turned out to be one of most fun group cosplays I took part in.
Pics by Guru, post-processing by Tenshi:
Concerning our plans for 2016, I’m happy to announce that this Fall we will debut as many as two joint projects. The first one is quite obvious: the season 6 version of the Lannister twins. My Sith Lord Cersei in her glorious mourning gown is already done, while currently we’re working on Jaime’s red leather jacket and golden hand. As for the other project, well, we haven’t announced it anywhere officially yet, so we might as well keep it a secret. Suffice to say that, just like for the Lannister twins, we will have matching haircuts – but our characters won’t be related.
To conclude, allow me to go back to the topic of my husband. See, I spend a lot of time with Endymion, which includes frequently travelling together and having more pictures with him after one convention than with my husband after 13 years of marriage – so of course that at some point some silly smartasses had to come up and ask my husband if, perchance, he was jealous.
“Jealous?” my husband asked, genuinely baffled. “Why on Earth would I be jealous? I’m grateful to gods for sending that man our way. Ever since she has him, she stopped bugging me to join her in her fancy dress-ups!”
***
For more on my cosplay shenanigans, find me on Facebook:
ferashacosplay/
And don't forget to check our Endymion's page too:
AnimemanijaVladineRukotvorine/?fref=ts
