Fanime 2015

Fanime con 2015.  Perhaps one of the smoothest-run fanimecons yet?  A pleasant little gathering - Friend E, Cousin T and Friend M and J were all able to come this year.  Missing J's wife Friend R, and our Cal Poly friends, but all in all a nice group of people! Plus my sister. Can't forget her haha.

Taken on the last day. Hence, Sak's crazy hair.

Let's recap the events/halls.

- Registration.  Smooth sailing as it was last year. The new system of QR code scanning and tons of printers is really working well for them.  We picked up in a matter of minutes on Day 0 (Thursday night).  Someday I'd like to be able to pick which badge design I get, like at Otakon, but it's really a trivial matter.

Not reg, just a hall shot

not reg, but beginning of con when the pamphlet table was still somewhat orderly lol

- Swap Meet.  SO MUCH BETTER.  They moved swap meet to South Hall this year, which gave it necessary floor space and none of that fire-code capacity limitations that the civic center had.  I'd like to see it continue in the South Hall, as there was plenty of room (sellers only took up half the space).  In future years it'd be great if it could be filled up completely with sellers!

I found a few small things in Swap this year. Little Big Planet bookends and a mini sackboy plush for under $10 total, and a small CC figurine and Munna plushie for $3 each or so.

Sackboy!

- Hotel.  We stayed at Saint Claire again, and they re-did the bathrooms which was nice.  Fanime policy changed to only handing out 2 special design room keys though, so we couldn't "collect 'em all".  There was also a fridge in our room, which was awesome! I don't remember if that's a new addition or not, but I like to think it is?

The room keys are always so fancy, I guess I can see why they were limiting them this year.

- AMV Contest. Fairly solid line up this year, nothing too bad, but nothing super stand-out either.  My favorite (and also best in show) was a Tonari No Seki-Kun amv, you can see here.  It's such an under-rated, yet amazing anime, and very short, non-committal episodes to boot.  Definitely a must watch/must read in my opinion.

- Anime Hell/AMV Hell/Midnight Madness.  Laugh out loud riot as usual. Always some of my favorite events.  However, being pregnant put a damper on things, and I had to go to bed just as midnight madness was starting. Exhaustion ain't no joke.  Sister was pissed, but I couldn't leave her there at con by herself, and none of the other "adults" wanted to stay and watch with her.  We are all too old and crochetey. So sad.  Next year, hopefully I'll find a bit more stamina.

- Dealer Hall.  To be honest, I don't get much thrill out of dealer halls anymore. Most of the stuff I can find online, and I'm not convinced their convention pricing is the greatest.  That said, we did get a nice big messenger bag to use as a diaper bag.  Sak was not interested in toting around some of the standard feminine options at most baby stores, so an otaku bag was the way to go.  Also, Sak bought me the Zelda heart necklace I've been fawning over since forever. It's so PRETTY.  I'm considering this my early push present. Haha.

- Artist Alley.  I was a lady on a mission this year.  A mission for cute nursery art. With animals perferably.  I spent a lot on prints, but ultimately got what I wanted (which I'll show someday when I ever finish the nursery..).  Mostly Pokemon, since that seemed to be the "animal" of choice in the hall.  Overall, the vibe from the AA was mostly prints (not as many crafts), a lot of Steven Universe (sister told me it'd be the "it" show this year), and a lot of custom "washi" tape (not actually washi material).  The tape was a new thing to me.  Someone must have found a supplier to do the custom tape, because many people sold it and it all looked to be the same size/quality.  I liked the idea a lot though! I bought two rolls for about $5 each I think?  The average hall price was $8 a roll.  Which is pricey, but remember it is custom designed tape.

- Gaming Hall.  Pretty much on par as year's past, at least from my weak gamer perspective.  My sister got into magic the gathering this year, so she and a couple of our friends planned to enter a tournament.  Unfortunately the staff member they asked gave them they wrong day for the particular tourney rule set they wanted to join, so they didn't participate.  Next year hopefully!  She got a few nice mats from swap meet in any case, and plenty of people to play magic with.

Tabletop, arcade, console, handheld - all types of games in their respective sections!

And giant jenga. Of course.

- Masquerade.  Still had a lot of issues like last year, it seems. Though the host was *much* better, there were still a LOT of audio/visual issues. Many of the acts had to start and stop. Also interestingly, masquerade ended super early. And the entrance system was different (and not well-advertised).  You had to go early in the morning to get a colored dot put on your badge, and then later your color would determine what group you could enter with.  We went semi-early and got the first grouping, so we didn't have to stand in line at all! So nice.  But I kind of felt bad for everyone in line that didn't know about the dot-system.

  

- Food.  So our Fanime staple - Hydration (the bento/boba place), is GONE. LAMENT. Instead, it was replaced with a place called "Boba Bar".  The drink selection was much smaller (and according to some, inferior).  The food selection was also much smaller. No more grilled saba (mackeral) bento for me :(  The one bright spot though - was the absolutely delicious pork belly rice bowl they had. So fatty and delicious though.  Aside from pork bowls we had the usual Pita Pit, giant naan, breakfast burritos, and grilled onion hot dogs. Not a fan of all the litter that the hot dog carts left on the floor though :/

There were little blue bun tabs everywhere.

- New Stuff.  Cousin T signed up to do the Anime Game Show this year, and she won second place and even got to do the championship round. But over a decade of being otaku, she really knows her stuff!  She's so awesome - dunno how she could keep her cool in front of all the people and remember things to answer the trivia questions!

Also, Cousin T and I went to the very tail end of the yaoi bingo event.  They hold it every year and we always say we'll go but never do for whatever reason.  We didn't see much, just a bit of dancing and prize raffles.  The prizes were really good though - pillows and signed prints and stuff - so if they have an event next year I think we'll have to go for the whole thing!

- Cosplay.  Good I guess? Fanime always has pretty good cosplay.  I was too tired to put anything together, unless this Kirby shirt counts lol. Only one person "got it", probably because I just looked like a rounder person in a frumpy shirt.  I should have found a more form-fitting shirt I guess.

Penga-Sis had two costumes this year - Medli, from Zelda windwaker.

Our Paw Paw helped her sew the dress, and the apron/bib thing is glued felt pieces.

She found the rest of the windwaker crew! 

And she also did a casualish Charizard X from Pokemon.  I think she needed wings, because she was a little too obscure at con.

Love Charizard X's colors though! 

Friend E did his Friend cosplay from 20th Century Boys.

That was it for this year. No fun group cosplay :(  Are we getting too old and tired and busy?! I hope not.

Anyway, here's some more hall shots of others.  Unfortunately, I did not take too many :P

Adventure time ladies

Assassination Classroom

Foxy from Five Nights at Freddies. Have you played this?! Such a scary game!!

Girahim from Zelda. Love the pose!

Splatoon!

a trio of Rilakkuma!

And this is my one piece dressed cousin, lol.

All in all, I had a great time this year, even in my costume-less, energy-less state. This'll be the last convention for the year for me, sadly (we also went to Sacanime in January).  I don't intend to stop going to conventions once baby is born - in fact, we already pre-regged for 2016 Fanime - but I can't help wonder how it will change us as con-goers.  I don't feel like babies or small children belong at conventions (there's some crazy non-stroller friendly crowds and a lot of adult material - let's be real). So either we'll have to find a babysitter in the future or reduce the amount of time we spend at con.  I guess we'll figure it out as we go.

Japan Expo USA 2014

I've been to many different functions at the local San Mateo Event Center.  Maker Faire, the County Fair, a flower show - heck, even my professional engineer's test was held here.  So I somehow knew we couldn't pass up the event center's first(?) anime con.

But believe me, I tried to pass it up.  At $35 a head (just for Saturday), it was pricey for a newbie con.  Japan Expo is a popular French convention that they brought over to the Bay Area last year, to very mixed reviews.  My initial thoughts were that it seemed very forced - something worked very well in France, so they picked it up and moved it here.  They didn't start with a local fanbase, meaning a small con and a small entrance fee. Instead they planned for many people, charged an established-con price, and expected the otaku to show up.

However, with some coaxing from my friend, and the appeal of a great guest list,  I parted with my money and Sak, Sis and I were in the gates right at the 10 am opening on Saturday.

Wish they would have had nicer program guides for my collection, but eh, the lanyard is nice.

First thing first, we scanned our badges for chances at getting guest autographs! I liked their system actually. A portion of the tickets were first come first serve (only one per scanned badge), and the rest were lottery style, so you still had a chance even if you came late! Then if you get a ticket, they take your picture and print it on the ticket so you can't get people "scalping" for autographs.  Not bad. We'd come back later in the day to get signatures.

In the morning, it was pretty empty.  We sat at a shady table and ate breakfast, and then went to check out the exhibit hall (dealers/artist alley).

Though it was smaller than I'm used to (especially light on the artist alley), I felt like everything was pretty high quality.  Plus Kinokinuya/Animate was there, which I don't think I've ever seen at a con before.  We bought clear files, buy 3 get 1 free.

My sister's choices. As you can see she likes the bishounen. 

Noragami (squee Yato!) for me and Rail Wars for Sak. I don't understand that show at all. Why do all the women have shiny bums? Are their uniforms made of plastic?

They also had several art exhibits, which was interesting.

Hunter x Hunter character art

Yusuke Nakamura exhibit. Such amazing art (most recognizable from the Asian Kung Fu Generation album cover?)

There was also a booth doing free manicures! How fun!

And another making broken porcelain into beautiful new creations.

I got some more goodies too :)

There's a story behind the pouch - it's made from kimono fabric by women affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the proceeds go back to them, as many are still displaced from their homes. Runs through the San Jose Japan Town.

The cute Eevee card is from Lorraine Yee, who also did that pretty mermaid card I sent my sister at camp this year. And the otter was a random beanie thing I just couldnt pass up.  I think originally it was a gachapon toy or something.

Anyway, so I was fairly impressed by the variety in the exhibit hall. Let's go back outdoors.

Sword art online car

Cultural stage

Okinawan dancers

So. Here's a major difference between this 'festival' and your average North American convention. This one had a ton of traditional cultural events.  And I'm not saying that's bad - I like culture a lot, but it really did not seem to "mesh" well with the otaku culture.  And it doesn't even mesh that well in Japan, so it's not really surprising that it'd be a little weird here too.  There were a few bewildered looking normal people around, so I'm not sure if that works.  Speaking for myself, I like to feel totally free to be otaku at cons, and here I was even a bit self conscious just to wear my Tamama hat.  So I'd personally prefer a strictly otaku-culture con.

But it was cool, I admit. I didn't know the Bay Area had so many Japanese culture/martial arts clubs.

 They had legit katanas on display too, though there was a sign on one that said it'd be confiscated if it was ever brought back to Japan. :P I feel like things like that should probably belong in a museum.

Anyway, moving on now to the more standard con-fair - panels and video rooms were few.  There were two rooms of each, and none of the stuff I love the most - AMVs or fan-made videos. Bummer. We did go to one game show panel though, which was great! We all loved it, and the trivia was just the right amount of difficult to make it interesting.

Kind of reminded me of the "scene it" franchise. Unscramble the anagrams to guess the anime!

 The game room was small.

Sak was very mildly dressed as Switch-kun from Sket Dance. :P Lol.

Cosplay was a little scarce, but there were some really good ones.

Battleship girl!

I'm not sure if this is a cross of the Sailor scouts somehow? But I LOVE that accordion folded orange skirt, so cool!

The cutest! Swimsuit Taiga from Toradora! AHH makes me want to watch it all over again!

My sister debuted her Cubone cosplay, too!

I think it's awesome that her ear looks like an eyeball. HA.

Cubone and her friend L!

In the afternoon when our ticket times were coming up, we went to get autographs! I bought an Aldanoah Zero book - it's a new mech show out that I (surprisingly) like.

And Gen Urobuchi signed it for me, how awesome! He's the writer for the show (and also other famous shows like Madoka Magica and Fate/Stay).

I wanted to ask him not to kill off my favorite character, Slaine, but I'm pretty sure he's already finished writing the whole thing :P

Poor baby! I just want to give him a hug :/

Sak and my sister got signatures from Daigo Ikeno, who does art for Street Fighter!

He was amazing, doing a custom sketch on each person's autograph board. He must have drawn hundreds of them! Sak asked for his name in kanji, which I erased out, but that was pretty cool.

After autographs, we were famished, so we ate at a combination of the four food trucks in the center.

The food was reallly good. All solid Japanese food trucks. Prices were high of course, but at least it's better than standard con-center hot dog/pizza food.

We found our friends, M and S (unfortunately they had already changed out of costume at this point).

See? I took my hat off and have bad hair. :P

As evening came we bought a delicious nutella crepe and marveled at all the pretty stage lighting.

We watched a J-Pop singer, Mayuko, in concert.

And after that, Akira Yamaoka, best known for the music of Silent Hill. He came out to the sound of air raid sirens, looking like this:

Uh. CREEPY.

Though his music was mostly like, 80's hard rock, so we weren't scared once he took the mask off. haha!

Not scary looking normally.

We left about 10 PM, tired and sunburnt (just me =_=). A full 12 hours spent at con!!

So, pros and cons!

Pros: A lot of variety in the dealers hall, interesting cultural exhibits, no crowds, good food trucks, and relatively good chance of getting guests' signatures.
Cons: Pricey, too much outdoors, no sound isolation, limited fan panels, and no fan-made video programming.

And to add to the negative, just a general lack of convention vibe.  Maybe owing to the lack of sleep-deprived otaku running around in cosplay? Maybe because there were too many normal people there for the cultural exhibits?  Maybe because the location wasn't "exotic" enough for me to relax? I mean, it's practically next door to my house :P

However, if it's held in San Mateo again next year, I will attend.  I do think it's worth the one-day ticket price if you are interested in the guests attending.