I arrive at like 7:30 because of work. This makes me discover that I basically everything at the con ends at 8pm except for stuff like the hentai video rooms. This must’ve been why there was not a single person near the registration table when I got there.
it’s a (pair of) trap(s)!
Day 2
The first thing that I noticed today was the gi-normous line to get into the dealer room. This lasted until around 2pm. I’d been to three other cons before and never saw a huge line like this for the dealer room at any of them. New York Comic Con was much, much larger than AnimeNEXT (30,000 people when I went in 2006), and I’d say that ICON was about the same size, but neither had dealer room lines.
The next big thing that I took saw (I was going to say “took part in”, but that might make peole think that I actually participated) was the Naruto photoshoot. I was surprised by the fact that there were like a gazillion Akatsuki members, but only about two or three Narutos there. There were also a TON of traps. There were both standard traps like, girls cosplaying Neji, as well as a lot of Sexy no Jutsu traps. This also prompted Hinano to launch into a tirade about how only Naruto, (as of the recent chapters) Konohamaru, and hypothetically Sasuke, Itachi, and Kakashi can do Sexy no Jutsu, so all of those Rock Lees are non-canonical. lol, getting worked up about naruto, etc.
I went to the Del Rey panel. When I was at either New York Comic Con 2006 or MangaNEXT, someone said that Del Rey should give out Mamotte Lolipop lolipops to promote that manga. Well, they had some at AnimeNEXT. I left after about 10 minutes, though because Dallas Middaugh wasn’t giving the presentation (we had April Flores instead—MangaNEXT had both of them plus another dude whose name I forget) and it seemed like most of the titles she talked about were just the next volume of already-running titles like Negima.
I ended up spending much of the rest of the day in the artist alley selling everyone’s stuff while they went to things like photoshoots, the dealer room, etc. It was here that I first noticed the huge number of yaoi fangirls. As I’ve tried to point out before, “fat” yaoi fangirls are really “annoying” yaoi fangirls, and just as anecdotal evidence, it seemed more likely that the yaoi fangirls not only weren’t fat, but I rarely saw any uh, “attendees of size” walking around with a yaoi paddle or a “watashi heart yaoi” shirt on.
Secondly, they were EVERYWHERE. When they were showing the AMV contest winners during the masquerade, the squealing was intense. Whenever there were some boys kissing or shirtless bishies, the crowd went crazy. Meanwhile, any bouncing boobies barely caused a peep. Similarly, while I saw tons of yaoi-related merchandise being bandied about by what seemed like almost every female congoer between the ages of 12 and 17, I almost never saw any guys wearing shirts like “Porn-free for 5 minutes”. I’ll chalk that up to American culture producing shitloads of porn for men and the fact that teenage guys (especially in the current age of the internet) are basically expected to watch porn, so it’s not like they made some amazing discovery about buttsecks.
I was greatly relieved that not a single person at the con thought that my Zinedine Zidane jersey was some kind of Final Fantasy 9 joke.
At the cosplay awards, a trio of lolis won an award for their Maria-sama ga Miteru skit. That thought is was wrong in so many ways. They gave out what felt like too many honorable mention awards. I personally only thought that honorable mentions should be weird creative costumes, like the guy who got one for painting his car like the Initial D car.
Day 3
After spending more and more time in the artist alley, it became clear that there were some things that just would not sell. Nobody was able to sell their messenger bags, original comics/prints, or T-shirts. You could sell art and commissions if you were a good artist. There was also this one girl who was selling an assload of buttons, which was probably because she made them all with official (read: illegally) art. If you were selling anything that had to compete with the dealer room, forget it.
I’ve been less and less interested in the dealer room after seeing what can be purchased online. $20 T-shirts are kinda excessive, as are $25 DVDs. But the most nonsensical one to me are the people with bags and bags of manga. You don’t even have to go to Amazon to get manga. You can buy it at like, Barnes and Noble or Borders. I can at least understand the idea behind buying $2.50 bottles of Ramune and $4 boxes of Pocky in the dealer’s room, since not everyone was access to an Asian grocery store, but the practice (and the whole marketing) still bothers me a little. I mean, a $16 box of giant Pocky made me think about how sick I’d get from eating $16 worth of candy (had I been buying normal candy, of course.)
What’s the deal with those yaoi paddles, anyway? I saw three different kinds for sale (and they were expensive, too! Like $30 each!): ones that said “UKE”, ones that said “SEME”, and ones that said “HARDCORE SIDE” and “SOFTCORE SIDE”. Do you smack people because they are yaoi-ing it up? Do you smack them so they will yaoi it up? And like I mentioned in my ACen post, do people understand that it’s really not socially acceptable to go around spanking people? Anywhere else but an anime con, that would be considered sexual harassment.
I last thing that I went to was the MangaNEXT preview panel. There was a bunch of executive staff there from Universal Animation (the group that runs both AnimeNEXT and MangaNEXT), and they said that they have two objectives with MangaNEXT. The first is that they really want to encourage the doujinshi scene in America so that there can be a Komiket-type event here. Because of this, they purposely kept the dealer room very small (which in turn lead to dealers like Kinokuniya and Book-Off declining to attend since they wouldn’t have much room to hold their inventory) and put the artist alley in the same room as the video games in order to drive traffic there. The second is that they use MangaNEXT as their testing ground for new ideas. For example, they want to try out a festival there to see if they can pull one off before trying to do one at AnimeNEXT.
After getting home, we also came across this, which we’ll definitely go to.
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