As we’ve established, some of the best cosplay on the planet comes out of Russia, a point I’m only going to further emphasise today by sharing some of niamash’s work.
Niamash has also done some incredible recreations of Bioware games, along with Dark Souls and Diablo.
You can see more of niamash’s work at her DeviantArt page.
Cosplay by niamash | Photo by JustMoolti
Cosplay by niamash | Photo by Sei
Cosplay by niamash | Photo by Phantasm
Cosplay by niamash | Photo by Tatyana Michurina
Cosplay by niamash | Photo by Eva
Cosplay by niamash
Cosplay by niamash | Photo by Catherine Badulina
Cosplay by niamash | Photo by 412ART
Cosplay by niamash | Photo by 412ART
Cosplay by niamash
Cosplay by niamash
Comments
9 responses to “One Cosplayer Brings Bioware, Souls And Witcher Games To Life”
Pretty friggin good!
Do unattractive people not get good at cosplay? Or is just that they never get any attention?
Attractive is subjective really, but I think it’s more about how closely the source material is matched. They’ve run photos of cosplayers doing classically unattractive characters before like Trevor from GTA5, the basement nerd from South Park or Ellie from Borderlands 2 (unless you’re into that!).
Attractiveness or beauty have subjective components. There are fields of research devoted to categorising and understand beauty, and there are certainly universal qualities attributed to attractiveness. We should also consider that the average concept of physical attractiveness and beauty are going to create in an given society a predominant model.
Proximity to source material is a large factor, but when so much of the source material is rooted in conventional views of attractiveness, it all but precludes unattractive cosplayers from gaining attention.
I don’t discount the possibility. Kotaku does a good job of covering all cosplay when it does compilation articles from conventions and such where you’ll certainly find less model-like cosplayers appearing. I think these articles by Plunkett mostly cover professional cosplayers and the societal factors you mentioned have probably already affected who succeeds or doesn’t with cosplay. Maybe it’s also the case that there are more classically attractive cosplayers because they have more confidence to put their photos out there than others might be?
@hayleywilliams I’m curious if you have any thoughts on this?
Haha oh boy it’s too easy to go down the “what is conventionally attractive” rabbithole with this whole thing, not to even mention societal issues that are way bigger than cosplay (ie, conventionally attractive people are always going to get more good attention online and etc etc).
But yeah… I feel like cosplays are definitely more likely to be massively popular or go viral when the cosplayer does resemble a video game character, and video game characters (female ones, at least) tend to be conventionally attractive. It’s a little different with male characters. A lot of them aren’t designed to be attractive, so the cosplayer doesn’t have those expectations (which is why you get popular and unattractive costumes like Trevor or the South Park cosplay that you mentioned earlier).
I mean, personally, I like to feature cosplays that are interesting in some way, whether it’s an unusual shoot location or intense motorised parts or a cool original design. Sometimes it is just “hey look this attractive cosplayer could actually be X attractive video game character”. Aaand generally those are the ones that get shared because, like I said before, it’s a much bigger thing than just cosplay.
Once the game industry starts making more varied female characters who are less ‘conventionally’ attractive? We’ll probably see a shift in ‘popular’ cosplay too. Hopefully.
(Also I just now realised this is a super late response, I was on leave!)
No worries about the delay, I’m glad to hear your view. I’m not part of the cosplay community so I only really have the view from outside looking in, it’s great to hear the thoughts of someone with an inside perspective.
Cosplay in the sense of this article is essentially modelling. You’re unlikely to see unattractive people gaining success in the cosplay realm for the same reasons you wouldn’t see them in the modelling realm.
That’s not to say there aren’t also incredibly talented cosplayers who inhabit other areas of the hobby/industry that are less driven by the function of modelling.
God bless Russia.