It's always kinda tricky to do a cosplay from a series you're not fond of - or, as is the case with me and "Kill la Kill", that you actively dislike. When I wore Ragyo's costume, I was approached by many a "Kill la Kill" enthusiast who'd happily start gushing about the anime's awesomeness and how amazing it was to meet a fellow fan. Though I was tempted to say "to tell you the truth, y'know, I kinda hated the show and finished it only because a friend made me promise", I figured that opening such a debate would be sort of pointless. So in the end I would just stand there, awkwardly nodding my head and avoiding eye contact, until the enthusiastic fan would go away. Lucky me for having a blog where I can vent my true feelings.

There are too many things I hold against "Kill la Kill" - rampant fan service being the least of the show's problems. I cannot forgive the series that it COULD have been great. The potential was right there. But then, its creators - a brilliant team that had already proven, with "Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann", that it was very much possible to create a fun, silly, light-hearted series and still make it memorable, meaningful and PROFOUND - decided to deliberately discard any attempts at substance, and make the anime as predictable, shallow and gratifying as possible. The show's story - which was RIGHT THERE, in theory - was thrown under the bus in order to make more room for crazy action, random silliness and friendship-is-magic cliches. Hell, even Ragyo is a poorly constructed villain: her motivation is deprived of any complexity or nuance, her evilness is straightforward and underlined with the cheapest narrative devices. And all because the creators knew that the current generation of fans would lap it up, as long as there's tits and ass (don't get me wrong, I'm fine with tits and ass as long as there's a solid story and character development to back it up - which "TTGL" had in abundance, but "KLK" lacks to the point of being offensive). There's nothing that upsets me more than when smart people decide to do something stupid just because they know they can. For a while, I even used the series as an example of why the anime industry went south and we cannot have nice things any longer.

So, you may wonder, why did I even bother doing a cosplay from an anime that I have so strongly disliked?

Reason One: in general, while I'm pretty open about my fascination with villains, this does not mean that I find their actions justified or, god forbid, I think they should win. Let's face it, Cersei Lannister on the Iron Throne is a Very Bad Thing, and Griffith deserves to be pummeled into the ground by Guts for what he did, and then some. But in this particular case, regardless of the flaws in her characterization, I ended up genuinely rooting for Ragyo - the good guys were so godawfully annoying that I actually wanted her to annihilate humanity. The fact that we were "united" in wishing painful deaths to the main cast made my attachment to Ragyo almost as strong as my aversion to the show.

Reason Two (and there's no way I can highlight this one strongly enough): older yet cool female characters are a rare thing in anime. A very, VERY rare thing. Let's face it - average heroine is aged between 12 and 15, and all that 30-something women get is
a) being the hero's mother and dying by episode 03, so that the hero can have stronger reasons for his bottomless angst, or
b) being a sexy office lady/sexy nurse/sexy scientist/sexy insert-profession-here, and wearing something that looks like regular corporate dress code, only tighter.
There's just a handful of iconic costumes or spotlight roles for mature women in the anime world - even more so in the mainstream anime. And that's not cool.

I pay obsessive head to cosplaying age-appropriate characters. Even if I might look good on the outside, posing as an underage herione feels so wrong on the inside, and given that my principle guideline in choosing my characters is that I have to relate to them on some level, that just won't work. So in that sense, for me, a ruthless, megalomaniac fashionista such as Ragyo - whose mortal enemies are exactly her brash teenage daughters, oh the symbolism - is an example to be cherished and celebrated. And it does feel empowering being in her skin.

Even though, for the projects I plan to do in the near future, there will be no more characters from the stuff that I loathe.

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Credits:
Costume planning by me
Styling and makeup by me
Dress by She&She
Wig by Shunak and me
Pic by Guru
Post-processing by Shunak