Otakon 2009 Report

Friday

I got down to the convention center around two, and met up with Ari and her kids and Tomoe-mun from Dystopian Flux by the fountain. Ari's older boy showed me three times the pins on his badge, explaining "This one is Kenshin, and this one is the Fullmetal Alchemist. He does magic." I don't know what to do with kids, but it was cute anyway. Sarah and her bunch found me shortly after, and since they were hungry, Ari and I just exchanged numbers and I went to go get sushi with them. Sarah's sister Emma and friends were all tired from staying up late and spending three hours in the registration line, so after lunch they decided to go collapse somewhere for a while. Sarah and I went to watch Baccano, which looks to be pretty cool. We didn't catch it from the beginning, but the animation is great and there's plenty of violence without the still-shot/flashy-background action sequences common to a lot of animes. It was the dub though, and while most of the voices were good and Sarah kept remarking on liking Jacuzzi's English voice, I... kind of didn't. I'll have to find it somewhere and watch it from the beginning in Japanese.

Around 4:30 we headed off to the Dealer's Room to have a look around. I found I had lost interest in most of the wares this time around, but we did come across a few things of note. One of the kimono dealers had a section of vintage kimono fabric, and I am a sucker for fabric stores of any kind. Ultimately I refrained from buying anything, since I have no idea what I'd do with kimono fabric. I picked up some volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist from the usual Japanese-language manga stand, which actually managed not to be crowded when I first walked in, so I grabbed them without difficulty. It filled up as I was making my way out though. My only other purchase was a pen that looks like a blood-filled syringe. The guy had two left, and there were two of us, so it worked out perfectly. I love this pen. It doesn't write in red like you would expect, but it'd be pretty easy to replace the ink.

We moved on to the Artists' Alley, now my favorite hang-out at Otakon. Sarah insisted on visiting the over-18-only section of the Art Show, which was worth it for the blush boob katamari (or titamari), complete with tiny prince. One day I should actually play the game for more than five minutes. We wandered around the alley in some course that made sense only to Sarah, chatting with a few of the artists along the way. At some point Ari called saying they were going to a photo shoot and then would come join us. We sat down for a while to rest our feet, at which point Sarah saw fit to have my Axel plushy do a strip tease for me. I really can't leave my plushies in other hands without them being undressed.

We walked around a little more before Sarah got impatient waiting for Ari, and was, impressively, hungry for a second time in one day. (It was by then close to 8 o'clock.) Calling up Ari again, we arranged to meet on the skywalk, since she said she was on it. Once we arrived there, we called her up to better locate her (since the skywalk extends pretty far), and discovered she had difficulty discerning whether or not she was actually on the skywalk. Somehow or other, we met up, Athy now part of the group, and headed down to the harbor for dinner. Ari kept taking photos of the Thai noodle place for reasons unknown to me. We almost ate at Hooters, since everywhere else seemed busy, but evidently despite the number of empty tables visible from the entrance, there was a fairly long wait. I guess they were understaffed. We ended up grabbing whatever from the food court and claiming a table from a group who was just leaving. A girl from another RP joined up, cosplaying I think a character from a zombie game.

After dinner, we split up and Sarah and I went back with Ari to her hotel room because Zully wanted to meet us and had been on child-watching duty for a while. One of Ari's kids was still up, and he showed us all the figurines he'd insisted on putting together. We chatted until around 10, when the rest of their crew returned to conk out for the day. Emma and the others had returned to the con and were in line to prove they were over 18 for something, but we were tired due to our lack of midday nap, so we just met up with them to ensure they'd be okay getting home and then called it a day.

Saturday

On Saturday I went as Ico and Sarah as Yorda. I met up with her, Emma, and one of their friends at their house, and I really do not understand why girls take so long getting ready for things. I was ready at 10, but we didn't get down to the city until around 11:30. On the way over from where we parked, a homeless woman followed us an entire block demanding to know what characters we were dressed as. Once we got to the convention center, Sarah was very in-character. I dragged her around by the hand most of the day, though we took some breaks since your hands get sweaty doing that all the time, and the rest of the time she'd wander off to look at random things. Whenever we moved on from somewhere, she'd just stand there unless I called her over or pulled her along. We even did the whole awkward-running thing a few times. I'm not sure how many people appreciated all this, but I'm sure someone did.

We met up briefly with Ari and the others (zombie-game-girl was now Giselle, and a very good one at that), but again split off to get lunch. Afterwards we went to the Artists' Alley to look around since Emma hadn't checked it out yet. She commissioned a sketch of Gambit from one of the artists, and since our feet were tired from walking, we decided to go watch something random to kill the hour it was supposed to take. I don't recall the title, but the anime had a pair of unwilling cyborgs fighting each other, a leader who loved milk, and gratuitous electrocution of an old man who turned out to be a robot built in the likeness of its creator, the cyborg girl's father. Like much random anime, it was good for a laugh. We wandered back to pick up the sketch, and then headed over to the Dealer's Room, primarily to look for cell phone charms for Emma. We didn't browse too long before we went to meet up with Emma's friend so they could go back and change for the rave. We ran into her other friend John and stopped by his hotel room on the promise of free food. We hung out there for a little while, chatting with him and his friends, and headed out without having obtained the promised food (although some soda was had).

Back at Sarah's, we took some photos, grabbed some food, and changed. Sarah took over as Ico and I changed back into my Roxas costume. We didn't make it back to the con until around 8:30, when we tried to get into the zombie disaster panel, but on learning they were full, opted to watch the end of L Change the World. It was pretty silly, but in a fun way, though I don't know much about Death Note to begin with. Anyway it seemed to please the audience. Once it had ended, we learned the zombie panel was no longer full and went to join up with everyone there, but it turned out to be sort of boring. After about five minutes, we went with Sarah's friend Anne (she has a friend named Anne) to the Artists' Alley. We were hoping to see an Axel or Hughes on the way or while there, but no such luck. As is becoming routine, any cosplayers I want to get pictures with disappear as soon as I'm looking for them in the appropriate costume. We did chat with a few more artists, and a Marluxia cosplayer (and either an accompanying Hojo or a similar mad scientist character) got creepy on me about cloning. Also, this one girl gave us cookies for doing the Ico cosplay. She had an actual bag of cookies. And they were good. Eventually we gave up our search and browsing and headed home.

Sunday

We managed to arrive early on Sunday, since the con ended earlier. We meant to visit the Dealer's Room, but the line was still long since it had just opened, so we headed for the Artists' Alley again instead. On the way over, two of the the security guard ladies flagged us down. At first I thought we were in trouble for something--no idea what--but it turned out they wanted a photo of us and the group of Katamari Damacy cosplayers who happened to be behind us. I've never seen the convention center security ask for photos and it sort of made my day. Around 11, we went to watch some of Samurai 7, but I was not terribly impressed with it. Nothing really grabbed me, and I don't like when they put CG in anime; but it was all right, I guess.

From there, we went down to the Kingdom Hearts photo shoot by the fountain, which the Olette cosplayer had very much under control. She'd call out groups of characters and situations, give us roughly 20 seconds, and then switch. Very efficient, and we got some fun stuff, not like typical shoots where everyone just stands around for a while and then someone yells "change pose." We got lunch at the sushi place again, met up with Emma in the Dealer's Room, and wandered until around when it closed. From there, we hung out at Ari's hotel room again. Her kids were very much awake this time, it being the afternoon, but my general lack of reaction made me the one person who wasn't assaulted with pillows. We decided to leave when Sarah announced she was getting tired, since we both preferred she be awake while driving.