Story by Adrian Black

Photo by Will Kanellos

Curbside in the pick-up lane at Portland International Airport, a timid figure approached the idling car. Through the midday sun’s gleam on the tail of a white Ford Taurus, the woman could just make out the vanity plate’s letters—FFFFUN. Her apprehension began to fade.
Separated by 2,000 miles, but Internet pals for many months, Krystal Stoner and Kathryn Griffin, also known as Sumikins and Rynn, were finally face to face. “We squealed a little and ran up to each other and hugged,” says Griffin.
The intrepid rendezvous was for Sakura-Con 2007, a Portland, Oregon gathering for costume play or cosplay, surrounding—in this case—animated entertainment media. Cosplayers compete through designing and modeling costumes, often acting out scenes from their character’s related stories. Many cons, or conventions, focus on American comics, but Stoner and Griffin were joining hundreds of other enthusiasts paying tribute to their favorite characters from Japanese art—manga (comics and graphic novels), anime (television and film), and video games.
In late 2005, Stoner, living in Portland, began to notice that Griffin, from Chicago, was commenting on a lot of her costume photos online. Soon, the two were privately messaging regularly and discovered a mutual interest in Fullmetal Alchemist, a serialized magazine-published manga that was later adapted into an anime television series. “You have to wait a month for the next chapter to come out and I just don’t have the patience,” Stoner says. “When it came out on DVD, I went home and watched all 51 episodes in one weekend.” At SakuraCon, Stoner and Griffin adapted the identities of the story’s brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric.
Griffin, a childhood thespian, recalls her birth as a cosplayer: “It started with Sailor Moon in second grade. At recess, four of my friends and I would be Sailor Scouts. We convinced the boys to be the bad guys.” Griffin was Sailor Venus. “I was Sailor Mercury,” says Kayla Lagmay, lifetime friend, college roommate, and once fellow scout, who shared a maiden voyage with Griffin. “When we first started cosplaying,” Lagmay admits somewhat shamefully, “we didn’t actually make our own costumes. Her mom helped us.” But Griffin, like Stoner, quickly learned to sew, blazing through online tutorials.
Choosing a costume is often more about aesthetic value and stageworthiness than personal attachment to the character, according to Stoner. Once the character is selected, it’s time to shop. Eclectic lists of rare fabrics and embellishments make for all-day hunting. “I’ve always been an arts and crafts kind of kid. I’ve learned to manipulate different materials,” says Stoner, who has learned how to use just about anything to create unique protrusions and props. She takes great pains to be accurate—dying, styling, and often grafting together multiple wigs to bring characters to life.

Stoner embraced fantasy as a child, playing favorite Disney characters on Halloween, and eventually realized that limiting herself to one day a year was absurd. When she started cosplaying, her best friend Kelsey Elsfield figured, “That’s a bizarre hobby that she’s gonna grow out of.”  Reflecting on it now, Elsfield says Stoner’s interests “seem totally normal.” The two spent ten years in dance classes together, where Stoner developed her edge as a performer. “Krystal’s not really competitive,” Elsfield says, “She’s just in it for the love of the art.” Stoner went on to study animation at DigiPen, a Redmond, Washington academy for electronic arts that shares campus space with Nintendo of America. Griffin attended DePaul University, focusing on public relations and advertising. Stoner, a tells-it-like-it-is gal who sees cosplay as an anytime Halloween and Griffin, a diplomat by nature who equates it more to prom, are truly magnetic halves to a whole.
Cosplay doesn’t exactly have corporate sponsors, so these girls have day jobs, but still try to further their projects on the sly. Stoner, who works for a mortgage company, has been known to retreat to her car during her lunch breaks with a pile of hand sewing to knock out. Griffin, who works for a promotion agency, doesn’t hold back. “One day I was sitting at my desk cutting up different colored folders for a Dragonball Z headpiece. I had taken apart these headphones and there were wires everywhere. I had some superglue lying out. The whole time I was thinking, ‘It legitimately looks like I’m making a bomb here.’”
Their shared passion led Stoner and Griffin to become not only performance partners, but also members of the five-person collective called Ninja of the Night, which enters in group competitions at conventions. However, many entries are only for pairs, which meant Sumikins and Rynn had to step aside from the group temporarily to make a crucial bid at FanimeCon 2010 in San Jose, California that would earn them the chance to compete as the two-person US delegation for the World Cosplay Summit (WCS) in Japan.
Staying up all night in a San Jose hotel room, tensions grew. “Krystal broke down into tears trying to iron her costume, and I just walked right out of the room,” says Griffin. Having only corresponded by video parcel as they worked to assemble their elegant, prismatic attire and brainstorm choreography, the two had expected a disjointed performance. In the end, they managed to compose themselves reaching a new pinnacle, and stealing the show with a performance from Fushigi Yugi, a classic manga. As the champions of Fanime-Con, they were bound for Japan, the origin of their greatest obsessions.
Arriving in Japan, with their luggage came a dark omen. Baggage handlers had crushed Stoner’s carefully-packed raven head, her most essential prop. Griffin, who knows her partner to be a detail-oriented professional worrier, was shocked by Stoner’s deadpan reaction: “I’m gonna get some tape and fix this.”
Stoner came even further out of her shell when the mayor of the hosting city of Nagoya approached her with an off-color joke. “Remember that time when you bombed the city of Nagoya?” asked the ordinarily formal Japanese businessman, momentarily bearing the likeness of a big-haired Dragonball Z character. Stoner’s nervous “We’re sorry?” was met with laughter. “Japan broke me in a way, but it was a good way,” says Stoner, who finally passed the test as a performer who couldn’t afford to lose her cool.
The two performed an ethereal courtship scene from Princess Tutu, Stoner’s all time favorite anime. There was no win for them in Japan, at least not on paper. The judge’s rankings were trumped by something far more important. “WCS is pretty known for either making or breaking relationships with your partner,” says Griffin. They were just happy that after all they had been through, no love was lost. “Japan was the turning point for us,” Stoner says, “That’s when we really became not just cosplay buddies, but serious friends. I was like, ‘We’re in it for the long haul. Even if we stop cosplaying, we’re always gonna be close.’”

Gallery • 2 Photos

Will Kanellos

Stoner recently cleared out and reorganized her workspace, allowing space to neatly arrange her sewing station and fabric closet. As with her workspace, Stoner is detail-oriented when sewing her intricate costumes.