Anime Detour was… okay.
Friday
AMV Panel.
Unlike the shit that was awaiting me on Saturday, these AMVs were actually pretty fucking good. Some 40-year-old guy on animemusicvideos.org put this stuff together. Example songs (skip to 20 seconds in on the first vid):
Mathematics in Anime.
The presenter was around 50 years old but he had some interesting material. By “interesting material” I mean Sailor Moon videos and a clip from Soredemo. I bounced from the panel to grab my phone charger cuz I was running out of juice.
Protip: Carrying around your phone charger at cons is fucking smart. There are tons of outlets around that aren’t used because nobody else brings their chargers with them.
Weiss Schwarz.
As a card game fiend, when I saw this panel I immediately flipped the fuck out. For the plebeians, Weiss Schwarz is a card game where you can build decks based on popular series like Fate/Zero, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Disgaea. Then you can battle them against other people’s decks. If you’re a card game otaku, this kinda shit makes you salivate.
When I got there, we were taught the rules and shown an example of how to play a game. He gave us each a pack of cards and some faggot tried to take them all for himself. Fucking hate our fandom. Anyway…
So why has no one heard of this shit before? Well, that’s because it’s Japanese only. …or is it? Yeah, apparently this shit was licensed late last year. Unfortunately, the company in charge of the license is fucking retarded and you can only buy this shit from only one of ten different card game stores. Talk about limiting your audience, guys.
Put these cards on Amazon and make $1,000 off Dark_Sage in one day. Pretty easy profit, just saying.
Vocaloid Dancers.
I got here about 15 minutes and didn’t see anyone around. Figuring I was just super early, I wandered around for ten minutes and came back. Still nothing. Whatever. I walked into the room to empty chairs and eight Vocaloid cosplayers standing around. 2 minutes to 7:00 a guy walked into the room and ran away after seeing the empty room.
So yeah, I had eight girls do Vocaloid dances just for me for about an hour. Were they disappointed by such a small audience? Of course they fucking weren’t. I’m fucking awesome and we had a great time.
They promised to put the dances they performed up on their site, but I don’t think they’ve done that shit yet.
Karaoke.
I didn’t have anything to do after the Vocaloid dance, so Caly forced me to go to karaoke so she could get footage of her singing. If you ever want to hear society’s rejects singing shitty songs, I don’t think there will ever be a better venue than the karaoke panel at an anime convention.
Video of this shit: (Yes, I plan on being a director in the future.)
Yuri 2012.
After that ear cancer, I went to Caly’s yuri panel where I got to hear about how cool she is for being a fansubber and how she pirates anime instead of buying it. As an audience member, no, that was not really impressive. She handled the discussion part well, though.
That ended the night.
Friday night tl;dr: Eight cosplayers danced just for me, I went deaf in one ear, a cat girl licked my cheek, and I got a free pack of Disgaea cards.
Saturday
Morning.
I headed over to the morning AMV panel, but Caly texted me, saying that some guy named Omex wanted to talk to me. Turns out the guy was actually Tim Schafer a dirty imposter.
We talked for a bit and headed over this room called consuite because Caly/Omex were spazzing out over the idea of free rice and chex mix that they were serving. I was relatively unimpressed because I have a job and can afford actual food.
We sat down on the consuite couch and watched live action Cartoon Network shows while Omex kept going on and on about this one time when he kissed a dude and liked it. Yeah, I get it. You’re bisexual. Congrats for being so unique and special.
The shows sucked and I wanted to get to the AMV contest early, so I headed off to that.
Taiko Demonstration.
I had about 50 minutes until the AMVs started, so I decided to catch the end of the taiko panel. Kids banging on drums for 20 minutes was exciting as you can imagine.
AMV Contest.
After the shitty taiko panel, I went to the AMV Contest. Goddamn, was this poorly run.
There wasn’t any way for the audience to vote on which AMVs were the best, there were no defined categories, and all the AMVs were just shoved together into one 60-minute .wmv video. There was no info before/after the videos, so you didn’t know when one video ended and the other started, or who should have been credited for the videos/what genre they were competing in. The audio was crackling because the people in charge were unable to set up audio properly and the video quality was 120p QUALITY.
If the presentation wasn’t shitty enough, none of the videos in the contest even approached “mediocre”. They all fucking sucked. Goddamn, I didn’t think AMVs were that hard to make, but apparently Minnesotans just can’t handle it.
Post-AMV Contest Fun.
I took a bottle of sleeping pills and passed out in my hotel room. Unfortunately, I woke up after an hour or two.
Maximum Weeaboo Magazine.
Tempted by the allure of an 18+ panel and the idea of a panel that makes fun of waps, I headed into this with low expectations nonetheless. Good call on my part.
What started out as an interesting panel complete with quick-witted panelists and an intriguing print-out magazine soon devolved into a terrible q&a session with the audience. It wasn’t necessarily the panelists’ fault that it came to this, but there were about four people in the audience who were obviously mentally handicapped (seriously) and they decided to dominate the “discussion” by throwing out the names of ecchi animes and asking for the panelists’ opinions on them when the panelists already made it clear that they despised anything approaching fanservice.
“Did you like Sekirei?”
“Did you like Rosario+Vampire?”
“Did you like Witchblade?”
I left, muttering shit about eugenics under my breath.
Gender for the Mature Anime Fan.
I knew this was going to suck but I didn’t have anything else to go to. Imagine a room packed with fat-fuck feminists (if you’re decent looking, you probably didn’t major in women’s studies) all bitching about random shit and you have this room in a nutshell.
I’m relatively certain that everyone in that room graduated from middle school so why they had to spend the entire hour going over that gender is self-defined just blew my mind. To put it another way, that’s basically like an astronomy panel where the discussion solely consists of people talking about the big dipper being a constellation and every argument ends up reiterating that fact.
Thanks for wasting my hour.
Haters Gonna Hate.
This was supposed to be a humorous Pokemon panel, but I guess I was expecting too much from Pokemon fans. The most memorable part was trying to explain the memes to Caly without annoying everyone else around me by explaining the fucking jokes.
The entire thing was extremely awkward (the head panelist was reading off a laptop and got to the word “nigger” where he looked at the one black guy in the room and said “I can’t say this word, but I bet someone here could”, a girl dressed up as a Farfetch’d and hit people in the audience with a stick, and people stopped talking so the presenter just put up Pokemon images on the screen), so let’s just pretend it never happened.
Saturday tl;dr: Met up with an IRC dude, groped a Celty cosplayer, and did two girls at once.
Sunday
~A Couple Hours of Boring Panels Go Here. Yes, at this point I’ve pretty much stopped giving a fuck about this Detour article~
Shin Megami Tensei.
The presenter opened this panel off with “Devil Survivor 2 just came out and the only people who will be able to talk about it will need to have played 40 hours every week just to beat it.” I yelled at the dipshit that it was a 25-hour game and wasn’t even that hard, but he was very concerned about the 100+ hours it would take to beat the thing. Protip: If you’re grinding in Devil Survivor 2 for anything other than money for fusions, your strategy sucks.
After a few minutes, we ditched this panel. Worthless scrub panelists don’t deserve my attention.
Finale.
I finally saw a cosplayer worth taking a picture of right before we were about to leave. And yeah, over the course of the entire con, she was the only cosplayer I bothered stopping to ask for a picture.
Sunday tl;dr: Article over. I’m going to sleep now.
I have WS cards… ONLY TO LOOK AT THE PRETTY PICTURES.
BRO DID U TAP DAT?
“We talked for a bit and headed over this room called consuite because Caly/Omex were spazzing out over the idea of free rice and chex mix that they were serving. I was relatively unimpressed because I have a job and can afford actual food.”
Can’t stop lol’ing. Poor baby. You really had a rough time! Well, now you are back and can continue to be an ass without worrying about needless shit.
Loved this entry. Keep up da good work. XXXO
…And that is why you never go to a con in the Midwest.
Or anywhere.
This.
When I go to the Taiko Panel at Anime Boston, maybe I should leave when they start allowing people to try out the drums for themselves. I don’t particularly care about hitting the drums myself. I just want to be there for the professional performance / history lesson.
wasn’t i doing the gay thing because you were saying that edgey live action show on cartoon network was gay
come now it’s degrading to put gays and TOKEN BLACK MIROKU in the same sentence i’m just horribly unfunny and can’t do the lisp like my friend can!
How do you play Weiss Schwarz anyway? I’ve got a few that came as extras with other stuff I’ve bought. No clue what to do with them.
The gameplay is kind of… weird. The goal is to level up your opponent to level 4 with the idea being that at every level you can use more powerful cards. I’m not a big fan of the pacing to be honest but you don’t play Weiss Schwarz for the finely tuned gameplay. The site I linked in the article has the rules if you’re interested in getting the gist of the game.
Ever tried Sword Girls, that online card game? It’s pretty nice.
I play Yugioh. That is all.
brofist
I play YGO, Pokemon, WS and Cardfight trolol. Pictures are pretty.
Revy are you a card game god
Thanks Neku, I love dem cards.
Hopefully there will be less faggotry at AB…oh, wait
Really? Weiβ Schwarz was licensed? That’s news to me.
I checked out the authorised dealers on the website. Blah, I might as well just import them directly from Japan.
Anyway, who cares about cons? The new season’s started, and Hadena awaits!
My thoughts exactly.
OMG, I thought the last con I attended in my country was a bit weak, only 10,000 persons went there, a bit crowded with too many merchandise stands, only one international cosplayer as guest, and the main event was a Moon Kana live concert, but after reading your story I’ve changed my mind, the last Anime Con I went to… was awesome.
Remember when D_S used to review things? Those were good times.
As a Japanese, I’m disgusted by the paucity of Asians that I see in the convention. Well, at least it’s not something unusual.
Ehehe~ Hadena’s coming up! Considering that “hadena” means “flashy,” let’s see what sort of inspiring show they’ll be hosting!
派手 【はで】 (adj-na,n) showy; loud; gay; flashy; gaudy
Whiners.pro Anime Detour summary:
Calyrica: O(≧∇≦)O
Dark_Sage: ( ̄へ ̄)
Reviews fuggen where?
I want to see another Hadena thrashing.
Please restore the review_summary page.
Some reviews to put on it would be good too
Cons suck. They’ve gone way too commercial. Every time I’ve gone to them, even before they started getting too commercial, I’ve felt I’d rather have stayed home and watched fansubs. At least it costs less. But sure, they can be an okay way to pass the time if you can get a group together, split the cost of a room, and meet awesome people while you’re there.
Also, don’t ever buy anime card games. Remember Ani-mayhem? Neither does anyone else. Spend $1000 on cards now, you’ll be lucky to sell them for $1 in a few years.
What was she cosplaying as?
Cool, someone went to our panel and was mildly entertained by it except for all the dumb people that ended up being really vocal. Anyone else like the part where we warned everyone with thin skin to leave and then someone was immediately offended by the next slide?
So, to help make improvements for next year, is there anything in particular anyone would like us to cover? Oh, and before anyone says “make fun of weeaboos,” we have to tread a fin line because AD is all about “inclusiveness” and shit, and we don’t want to get our panel rejected in the future. Of course since only 12 people showed up I guess that might happen anyway. :D
Ivnhdinvid! I’m so honored ! My friend sent me this link….and then there is a picture of me! Whoa! I’m flattered you thought I was the best cosplayer! Totally the best compliment ever. I was Yuki Cross from Vampire Knight. :P