Xebek\’s Blog

Ok, I’m going to be dividing my posts about the anime convention I went to in three parts. The first one, this one, will be about my general impressions about the convention, what kinds of things I went to, and so on. The second part will be about all the stuff I bought and the third part will be the pictures of the convention itself.

First off, one of my favorite stories of the convention. There was a contest, name that tune, where they would play the OP or the ED to an anime and you guessed it got points and so on. Well, even though I didn’t win, I tied for third or something because of the huge number of over commercialized crap anime I don’t watch. Anyways, they did have one song that was of a new anime, the Kanon Remake. Now, this being one of my favorite animes I got it, however I myself was surprised at how fast. As some of you may know, the OP for the Kanon Remake kind of goes: do do do… doooo… DOOO… arigatou…and so on. Well, I kid you not, as soon as it played, it went: do do do…and then my hand just shot up and I yelled KANON! THE REMAKE! Everyone looked at me so shocked it was hilarious. The song had to be like two seconds in and there was no vocal yet but I got it. I did get a couple that no one else did too, such as the ED to Mai HiME. Also, the way the contest was arranged, out of the batch of contestants I was in, I made it to the final round but they had to narrow another batch, so I was sitting in the audience during one round. They played the OP to Ichigo Mashimarow and as soon as it went “Kawaii no…” I went like GAH and shifted around in my chair. The people running guessed I knew it and none of the people currently up got it so I then said what it was, although for no points.

My Panel. Well, on Sunday the day I had my panel; it was scheduled for 9:00am, which is when the convention started. However that is also about the time that the security guard opened toe doors, so no one, not even any staff got into the building till about 9:00-9:10. Then by the time that I got to the room and got all the necessary things ready for the panel, had the guy in charge of activities it was about 9:20. Then, no one came for like 15 minutes. I don’t really blame anyone except myself, because after all I only got my panel idea to the guy in charge two days before the convention. So at about 9:35 I actually had one person show up. I just talked to them directly about stuff for ten minutes and then two more people came because the had nothing else to do until some of the other panels they wanted. so I gave them my spiel for he next ten minutes until my time was about up, so for the most part it wasn’t a huge riveting success, but I didn’t expect it to be really. It’s not so much that I screwed up, just that there was basically no one there.

Other Panels. There were a lot of panels that were pretty fun, some of them that weren’t anything like what they were supposed to be but still enjoyable. One was supposed to be an anime debate but one of the people didn’t show up so it turned into a just discussion of anime and manga between a couple of staff and half a dozen other people, such as favorite anime and why, and more and more anime being based off of games and such.

Other Events. One of my favorite things they had is they had an amateur humor film contest. Basically, you were to have previously made a (hopefully) purposely outrageously stupid video. The one they showed that some of the staff did was absolutely hilarious. The staff did two of them, one was a sword fight where they would make fun of clichés, showing them drawing the sword like 20 times in different ways, and when hit rolling on the ground for ever until hitting something. The other one they did was a Power Rangers parody, which was absolutely hilarious. They made fun of not only the power ranges but some normal clichés you would find in normal movies and anime.

Viewing Room. There was one of the rooms that just played anime all day. For the most part, at least some of the ones they first had were some older shows. A lot of them were extremely horrible that it was funny, and I think it was on purpose. Later on near the end and in the middle of the 2nd day they had some shows like Suzumiya Haruhi, Kanon Remake, Ouran High and so on. It was a pretty nice place to go if there wasn’t a panel I was interested in for another half hour or hour. In between series they showed a couple of AMVs too.

The Dealers Room. There were a couple of stands that had a lot of figures. One that had just some, but then one stands that had like a wall full of figures. I freaked out and was overwhelmed by them. Although I did manage to hold myself back to only buying one, as its more expensive to buy it there even considering other shipping. I bought the Yakumo figure because it’s discontinued but more on that in Part II. There were some stands that had a lot of anime DVDs and Manga, which I didn’t really pay that much attention to because I can just get any manga I need easy somewhere else, and don’t really buy Anime DVDs for the most part. There were a lot of people who had posters and wallscrolls, which I bought a lot. First off because this is the cheapest you can get posters and such is in person, because online shipping makes them like twice as much. Lots of Pocky for sale. One stand had A LOT of gasaphons and trading figures, however I didn’t really buy any of those because I want to concentrate on buying PVC figures and there weren’t any there that really popped out or anything.

The cosplayers, way too many Naruto cosplayers. For the most part there was a lot more cosplayers then I thought there would be. There were also a lot of people with small unimpressive costumes that for the most part were just half the damn people in Naruto headbands. Although there were some cool original non over-commercialized ones. There was someone in Saber’s dress, someone as Mikuru, and then just a couple of random original ones, I think there was one of Karura to, based on the chain thing they had on their neck. Although there were too many Naruto cosplayers, there was one that kind of impressed me. The one character with the huge fan. Someone had a huge 4-5 foot fan that had actual cloth and seemed to be pretty well made.