Marin Stumpf is a sophomore this year at Fossil Ridge and has an interest that has been rapidly spreading the past few years, cosplay. For those of you who don’t know, cosplay is where people dress up as characters from books, movies, or video games. It is most common to dress up as someone from a Japanese anime, Japanese animated TV show or film, or manga, Japanese style book or graphic novel.
Stumpf has been cosplaying since October of 2011, when she first moved to Colorado. She said she didn’t have a lot of friends and had plenty of free time, the internet introduced her to this world. She first dressed up as Zoey from a manga called Mew Mew Power.
She says that she is “proud of the costume, just not proud of the character it was” since it is generally a children’s manga. She does however mention that she is proud because “Especially for my first try, it was a pretty detailed costume, it had a lot of elements that a beginner wouldn’t normally start out with.”
Creating these costumes takes a lot longer than you would think. Marin said for an easy costume like a super hero it generally takes her “two weeks in total. For a more complicated costume probably a month.”
There are a lot of different costume contests and conventions that she wears her costumes at, the biggest being Denver Comic Con where she has gone for 4 years. She finds out about these through researching it online. Another large time of year she goes into costuming and cosplay is the Tour de Fat and Halloween. She creates costumes for herself during Halloween, and because of her knowledge, gets called upon by many of her friends to create costumes for them.
Stumpf is currently co-costume lead for the Fossil Ridge play, Our Town, and also is acting in A Christmas Carol through La De Da, and does believe that cosplaying started her love for costumes and theatre in general. “When you’re in cosplay you have to assume this new character. You have to act like a fictional character for a day. You’re doing the exact same thing when you are on stage except [theatre] is more fun because you get to sing on stage. But it definitely influenced my wanting to work for the costume department”.
Overall, Stumpf believes that her love of cosplay has in general helped her fashion sense. She said she started to pay attention to little details in actual clothing because of her cosplay, and that got her actually interested in fashion. She now is starting to sew some of her own clothes and looks forward to continuing with cosplay.
