Photo essay...
While waiting in line Friday to get in (yes, I preregistered, but so did about 22,000 other people!) I met a wonderful young woman from our area, Arras, in line next to me. I didn't mind waiting nearly 1 1/2 hours to get in because we had great conversations. She's a dancer as well as an anime and manga fan. I'm having problems posting her photo so I'll put up more Otakon pictures above this posting...
Anyway, Megan, the youngest person I supervise, is also an anime and manga fan. I encouraged her to dress in costume, and here she is, as Ichigo from Kamikaze Girls (a book turned into a movie that she loaned me and I read and watched while I had that awful flu).
Yes, yes, I dressed up too, as Shinonome-sensei, the middle-school teacher from Loveless. (There's a link about the anime and manga series 2 postings ago, or you can Google it, if you're curious about the plot. Or you can call or email me and hear me obsess over it for half an hour or so.) I'll identify Megan (not the one I work with), who arranged this silliness, in one of the later pictures.
Here I am with my students, in the centered photo. The dark-haired people are all Ritsuka (one of the main characters), the two girls with pink hair are Yuiko, the boy with the long hair is Yayoi. Actually, I think most of them are girls, this series has much more appeal to girls/women than boys/men.
And here I am (on the right) being menaced (not very intensely, we were all having too much fun) by Natsuo (3 of them, with red hair) and Youji (aqua hair), otherwise known as the Zero Boys. I'm not very convincing at being scared--can't act worth a darn! Megan's the way cute one in the front.
The photo shoot was at 6pm, after I'd watched a ton of anime and met Megan-our-page-from-work in the art area (amateur and professional artists of various kinds showing and selling their work, doing drawings and stuff on commission, and generally talking with attenders).
Then I met my friend John and we went out for sushi and maki rolls at Edo, an excellent Japanese restaurant by the harbor. I had the best salmon sushi I'd ever eaten! Then back for the art show in the art room, and a couple of panels about anime and manga.
Saturday morning I watched the Anime Music Videos contest and voted. One of the best, and funniest, was Lives of the Animated and Fabulous. Hysterical! In the afternoon I mostly shopped in the dealers' room. Bought two Loveless pencil boards--pencil boards are used to provide a solid surface to write well, so they're really sturdy. In other words, they won't tear the way posters or other delicate stuff would while you haul them around a convention (or move from home to home) and at $4 each, they provide more great art per dollar than anything I can think of! (I love my pencil boards, can you tell?)
Saturday night my colleage (from another library) Mathew, his friend Carolyn, and I had dinner at Edo, where John and I had dinner the night before.
Sunday I saw some of Rumiko Takahashi's short anime, and spent a ton of money in the dealers' room: four manga, a DVD, and a couple of other random items.
And took this really cool picture. I forgot what the character's from but this woman is a great costumer!
So that was Otakon for this year. Wanna come next year?
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