Who Are These Shadow Irregulars?

The Shadow Irregulars, sounds kind of like a video game enemy cult that you end up realizing was behind the whole thing in the end. In fact it’s homage to both my favorite character of the Firefly series, Captain Malcolm Reynolds, and the civil war itself. Mal was born and raised on the planet Shadow, a Rim planet that sided with the Independents in the Unification War. As most of you already know it was also bombed into oblivion by the Alliance, burnt to the point that it could never be inhabitable again. Though we have, gloriously, gotten a Big Damn Movie out of the wreckage of the cancellation of Firefly the show after a decade we have to admit that perhaps Fox did manage to do what the Alliance did to Shadow. When Shadow fell the war didn’t end, and as we all know the Independent spirit is still strong in much of the ‘Verse. It’s a comforting corollary to the Browncoat Nation that keeps Firefly alive, but can never go home to the comforting world of waiting for the next new episode next week.

As for Irregulars, well I don’t think I have to explain to you the parallels between the fictional war from the show and the not so fabricated American Civil War. Just like the real war, it cannot be expected that the Rim and Border worlds had a standing army ready when it came down to making the succession decision. The fact that a regular Independent Army developed, just as the Confederate Army did, is not under dispute but in the beginning (and through most of the war) the Independents were a rag tag group of individuals willing to fight together to protect their way of life. Extending that logical progression it has to be assumed that militias and irregular units dominated the beginning of the war. And that’s a big key to what I intend to do here, take what we know from canon story, visual realities from screen captures, and add the seldom used logical rationalization to make the costume not just accurate but realistic. Well, as realistic as being a space rebel can be.

Just like Confederate Irregulars is it reasonable that every poor farmer kid had the money or wherewithal to purchase the exact uniform down to the correct style boots? Did the burgeoning Independent command, what with fighting an already lopsided war, have the funds to equip everyone down to the underpants or were major military equipment provided and the rest left up to mothers and wives to seamstress? Though the series leaves us with precious minutes of screen time in Independent uniform, it also shows a beautiful variation and variety of accoutrement that all follow a basic uniform without being strictly uniform. I think that’s important. You may not be able to tell one purple belly from the other because they are outfitted by ‘The Man.’ But the Independents were made up of individuals and to try to regiment that too strictly would visually diminish the spirit of the Browncoats.

Joss and the design team were brilliant enough to understand that and I think we, as cosplayers, owe it to him to get on board with the culture of the costume and not just rote adherence to screen captures. So I don’t want to just discuss and understand the costumes as they are, but also how they logically would have been in all their variety and glory.