How I Lost My Life Savings

Article: Otakon 2002

A review of Otakon 2002

Article by: Bad Jew

Article rating: PG-13

Thursday

Around 8 we finally got down to the convention center, with our friend Lupin IV taking the role of Alpha Male (or, as Adamus Prime chose to call him, Alpha Male Jerkoff) and me taking the role of Joe from Digimon, checking the map every block and making sure there was adequate lighting for our nighttime treks back. When we finally made it to the convention hall, and I finally realized that we weren't going to miss a 200,000-square-foot building, we met up with the rest of the group (who had flown down earlier) and I found out the best part of going to anime conventions: the otaku.

Wouldn't be a con without a Dom cosplay.

In normal life, you can't just go up and talk to people randomly; well, you can, but you'll get a lot of strange looks and a surprisingly high number of restraining orders. But when you're at Otakon, you're surrounded by 13,000 people with similar interests who are all very friendly (well, everyone except asshole fanboys but they don't count). While I was hanging around the convention center I met Erika and Mike from Pennsylvania and New Jersey respectively, whom I would hang out with off and on for the rest of the weekend. Mike was, no insult intended, one of the most bishounen men I have ever had the privilege of meeting, and they were both very, very cool.

Afterwards, all of our eight-member group, except for Lianne who got to wine and dine with all the kickass guests including but not limited to Piro, Largo, and Dom of Megatokyo, wandered around Baltimore's inner harbor 'till about 12:30. We called it a night after laughing at all the pretend sailors who must have been dead on the inside judging by the blank stares they had.

Thursday Totals: 5 hours sleep, 1 meal

Friday

We woke up around 7:30 and fought over the shower for far too long. The Machine had gotten up much earlier to get into his X (*shudder*) costume and get a jump on the ticket line, which required me to get up and help him bandage his eye (don't ask, I care not for these CLAMP creations). There was not a word of breakfast for me as I had to rush to get to the Tokyopop booth. Lupin IV and Adamus Prime, on the other hand, decided to out-wait the line and have a luxuriating breakfast at a little dive we'd found the night before.

Ah, the Tokyopop booth, a 6x6 foot space filled to the brim with Miyu, GTO, and Real Bout High School DVDs and GTO, Love Hina, and Initial D manga that we just had to give away. Our plan for Friday was simple. We had a bucket. We had a deck of cards. People had to throw a card in the bucket to get their choice of anything we had. After a few people took horrible advantage of us, we moved the bucket back a few feet and all was good.

I got to be in the Dealers Room (which, for the uninitiated, is the giant hall where anime dealers come from all over to sell you the stuff you've always wanted) a good hour before the general public was allowed in, and I took full advantage of the situation. For a brief, shining period of time there were no crowds, no lines, no pushing my way to the front of the mob to look at some dealer's wares. I picked up a NERV t-shirt and a Nami (from One Piece) keychain, and later I was able to get a NERV backpack (noticing a theme here?) and a great fanzine called Eastern Standard Time. Not only did it have Furi Kuri/FLCL and One Piece reviews, it also had great previews, especially of a new show coming out in April under the auspices of Manga Entertainment named Read or Die, which I am looking forward to with great interest. The only real problem with the magazine was that it must have gone to print too early; at some points, when the writer couldn't remember a character's name it was replaced with something like "OUR HERO"--but hey, it's a fanzine so I'm willing to forgive and forget.

Easiest Cosplay Ever.

Random Webcomic Pic #1: the guys of Mac Hall

Speaking of forgetting (man I'm good with these transitions), let's not forget about all the free stuff I got. ADV was giving out free "Excel Saga is Yummy" posters, which I have on my wall right now, and Newtype, an anime magazine whose English version has been generating a lot of excitement recently, was giving out huge free issues so I snapped one up as fast as I could. Diamond Comics was giving away free copies of Previews, a comic industry catalog which was so big it almost separated my shoulders, and Trigun and "Girls of Anime" wall calendars. Both Bandai and Pioneer were giving away free sampler DVDs filled with trailers and other promotional materials. And last but not least was the Tokyopop booth. I got one of everything we were giving away, plus a press copy of the GTO soundtrack, which is very good. Check out the English song "School's in Session"--available for free download from the Tokyopop website.

But there were some things I did have to buy like every other con-goer, namely, a Pillows CD. And this wasn't one of the Furi Kuri soundtracks you can pick up at any good anime shop--I had to pony up 40 bucks for an import copy of their album SMILE. It's a great CD, with a very different sound from their Furi Kuri tracks, but given the extremely high price I can only recommend it to the most hardcore Pillows fan. For everyone else, that's what Gnutella is for.

Unfortunately the only panel I could attend over the entire 3 days was Lianne's speech on getting published. Over the past few months Lianne had made it quite clear that she didn't want a "Chasing Amy"-like scene there, though I tried to convince her it was vastly increase the attendance at next year's panel. Oh well, once I get popular enough to get my own panel you'd better know there's going to be some gunfire. Fred Perry, who is responsible for the comic Gold Digger, went first and talked about the tricks to getting your comic noticed by publishers. I had always though that self-immolation was the best idea, but he told me I was dead wrong. Lianne talked about how to get your fiction published, which basically entails not submitting your fanfics to the MIT University Press and addressing your letters correctly, and everything was wrapped up with Gilles Poitras, the author of several anime books, talking about publishing nonfiction. As a Supreme Court Decision prevents me from ever getting published (thank you very much Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I once loved you, but never again. You here me? Never!) the panel didn't concern me too much. Though Lianne did give a very good presentation and wasn't once tripped up by my questions like, "Where am I?" and, "What is my purpose in life?"

The rest of Friday was spent working at the Tokyopop booth, wandering around the Dealers Room, Artists Alley, and the Gaming Room and otherwise wasting time to get a feel for my first con. One very fun thing I did was find cosplayers and lure the best back to the booth for free stuff.

Friday Totals: 6 hours sleep, 1 meal

Why in the world would you want to cosplay as Meg Ryan? Great job on it, though.

Saturday

Saturday was the day that I should have seen Naze Nani Megatokyo, the day I should have seen Latenight: Megatokyo, when I should have gone to the Mecha-cessorizing panel--none of which I did. However, it was the day I saw two of Gainax's newest shows and I sang English Light Opera for a ticket to the Dead or Alive 3 tournament (which I promptly lost), but I'll start from the beginning.

I had to get to the convention center fairly early because of the booth. Instead of the card toss thing we were doing a raffle, which consisted of us finding out what manga people wanted Tokyopop to license, and then laughing at the entrant's name. The only downside of working at the booth Saturday was giving away Lianne's book. Now, don't get me wrong--Lianne's books are great, but not everyone at the con was a girl between the ages of 8 and 12. I got a lot of weird looks as people tried to duck and cover to avoid me. You'd think I was a leper the way people tried to flee; but that was only one hour out of the day, so it was all good.

I did get the opportunity to spend 45 minutes waiting in line for the autograph of Fred Gallagher, of Megatokyo fame, on my newly purchased "Capture the B34r" poster. I must say, Mr. Gallagher is the Americanized version of every angsty boy from every shoujo (girls') anime I've ever seen. In the few brief sentences we shared (much less than Lianne, though, Bragggragh [new word I made up for this occasion] I'm so filled with envy!) as he signed my poster, he angsted about no one liking his work and being flamed for not having a comic up on Friday. Even though everyone in the line declared their undying love for him, he still refused to admit that he was one of the driving forces behind the entire webcomic movement. I swear, if his life was a Gainax show, it would have cut to a black and white drawing of him streaked with red across his face. Then, of course, the Earth would've been destroyed to classical music.

At 4 pm I got to see Magical Shopping District Abenobasi, Gainax's newest show. Now, while the subs weren't too good and the projector was out of focus, it was Gainax so I squinted as much as my eyes would let me. I think we all know I'm a big Gainax fan--in that I worship them as Gods--and with Magical Shopping District my faith was reconfirmed (not that it was flagging in any way whatsoever). The show's about the adventures of two kids who are constantly thrown between alternate dimensions of the shopping district they were raised in. And like "Excel Saga," each episode is a parody of a certain genre: the first episode is a shoujo love saga, the second is an RPG (role-playing game) parody with a great 16-bit scene, the third is a sci-fi homage with the required, "Oh my God, it's full of stars" bit, and the fourth is a shounen fighting parody. That one contains one of the funniest scenes I've ever seen where the boy (can't remember any names, but he had a great cowboy hat) drops a Kamya Maya wave he'd been forming because it was too hot. Come to think of it, how did Goku hold onto that thing? Must have been all those push-ups.

Look, a picture that has something to do with what I'm writing about.

And then came the Dead or Alive 3 tournament. Now, all of us had been playing this game for over a year obstinately to practice for this tournament. I had mastered Gen-Fu (i.e Old Man) to the point where he was no longer a character, but a canvas upon which I painted my genius. However, due to the complete lack of any restaurants in the city of Baltimore (I'm not kidding, their "Subways" keep freaking banking hours), Adamus Prime and I were too late to sign up. Of course, the mere fact that there were no open slots did not dismay me in the slightest, I simply offered the staff who were running the video game room an offer they couldn't refuse: if they would let me in, I would sing them English Light Opera. Initially they laughed, but a scant 5 minutes later a call went out over the PA system for the kid who offered to sing for them. And so I gave them a very good rendition of the first few lines from The Pirates of Penzance, followed by a quick sea jig. You'd better believe I was playing in that tournament.

Fate, however, had different plans for me. See, I'm a nice guy (unless you're an orphan, and if you are you'd better watch out 'cause I'm coming for you), so when my opponent asked if he could use the standard X-Box controller and leave me with the smaller "S" controller I quickly agreed. I figured I would be playing better without a controller that was frequently mistaken for a 600-pound black bear. Ohh, how I was mistaken. When Old Man should have been blocking, he was asking to be punched. And when he should have been shoving, he was, again, asking quite politely to be kicked in the face. I lost pretty quickly but learned a valuable lesson: be a complete and total jerk, a knee-biter if you will, when you're in a tournament of this nature. Ah, those lifelong lessons.

After getting my ass kicked came "Ebichu Runs the House", another of Gainax's new shows. Now let's get one thing straight: Gainax has reached the point where they can do anything they want and have the entire anime community bend over and say, "Thank you sir, may I have another?" The otaku at Gainax have taken full advantage of this fact with Ebichu. The show features graphic sex--and by graphic sex I don't mean tentacles or nurses, no, this is graphic sex between crudely drawn people. This is not hentai (high levels of sexual content), this is not even Gainax's famous fan service, this is fan disservice. Don't take this to mean that Ebichu is a bad show as it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It has more puns in it than Punland during their annual Pun Festival, and the sex, when put in conjunction with the incredible cuteness of Ebichu (a housekeeping hamster who tries to keep her promiscuous master on the straight and narrow), is absolutely hilarious. If you were born before the first Bush administration and would like to see it, it's being digi-subbed by Elite-fansubs so you should be able to find it on IRC.

Then Adamus Prime and I tried to get into Latenight: Megatokyo, but when we saw the line was about 16 miles long we decided to skip it in favor of the sweet embrace of sleep.

Saturday Totals: 6 hours sleep, 2 meals

The kid who beat me at DOA3 was later found dead. There are no known suspects.

Sunday

Sunday was possibly the best day to be alive. When I got to the Tokyopop booth at 10 am we had about 3 or 4 boxes of DVDs and manga left, and by 2 PM, when the Dealers Room closed, we couldn't have those. Then Amethist had an idea--a quiz game. Her first question was "Do you like free stuff?" If the contestant answered "Yes," they were rewarded with a DVD or manga. If they answered "No," they were looked at strangely. Slowly the quiz drew a crowd and we were forced to make our questions a touch more difficult, like "Explain to me why you want this DVD without using the letter 'e,'" or "DANCE FOR ME AHAHAHAH!!!" (Well, that's not really a question, but you get the idea.)
We did this for about 2 hours until we finally ran out of stuff to give away, but the fans weren't happy with that. The posters that we had were furiously contested over with ultra-hard questions such as "What are the names of all the Sailor Scouts, in the original Japanese?" or "What was Ed from Cowboy Bebop's full name?" Eventually we had to give away our official Tokyopop bucket and sponge, too. All the energy and excitement made this incredibly fun, and I want to thank everyone who stopped by the booth over the course of the three days.

And then all there was left to do was rationalize my decision to buy the Eva Perfect Collection, pick up a few more buttons, and start the ride home. In the end, all I can say is if you ever get the chance to go to a con take it without hesitation--it'll be the best weekend of your life. My biggest regret is that I didn't cosplay as Taishi from Comic Party, but, in a shocking display of he's-even-cooler-than-I-thought-he-was, Dom of Megatokyo did. Next year I'll just go as the Giant Octagon of Death from Eva.

Sunday totals: 6 hours sleep, 1 meal

Total for 4 days: 23 hours sleep, 5 meals, far too much money spent.

All of the MT crew; they look like they're caught in the headlights of a car.