Kawaii Kon 2014

Sak and I made it to Oahu again for Hawaii's anime convention, Kawaii Kon.  It happened to be their tenth anniversary, so I was pretty excited.

Though that last week of work leading up to our vacation was super stressful, and I had work nightmares for a couple days into the con.  Like the kind where you forgot to do something really important, screw up a presentation, or where you wake up and go to work in your dreams.  I realllllly needed a vacation!

The con expanded to the bottom floor this year, where the dealer's hall and artist alley were combined.  I picked up a cute bento tank for my sis from a local artisan (from the same town as Sak), as well as a new wallet (leather with the survey corp symbol stamped into it!) since my cheapy daiso one was falling apart. Sak also bought me some Zelda navi earrings from Sanshee, squeee.

Anyway, since it was the tenth anniversary, the guest list was extra awesome!  We saw Kageyama-san and Ishida-san in concert, two veteran anime theme song singers - including some Sailor Moon and of course, the crowd favorite - Cha La Head Cha La, the DBZ theme song.  Everyone was singing along just to the chorus :) Sparking!

Kageyama-san is pretty hip looking considering he started his career in the 70s!

The main stage was beautifully lit this year too.

We also saw Nozawa-san, the seiyuu (voice actress) for Goku, Doraemon, Astroboy and many, many, many other voices.  She was so cute! And she taught us how to do a proper kamehameha. Lol.

Though what I liked the most was the voice actor reading they had! Similar to the one we saw at Sacanime with war of the worlds, this one picked (in my opinion) a much more exciting script to read - Empire Strikes Back! :D

The voice actors, left to right, are famous for Pooh/Tigger/Darkwing Duck, Invader Zim/Billy/Alpha 5 from Power Rangers, middle guy is the host of the reading, Axel from Kingdom Hearts/Raiden from Metal Gear, and Korra!

Each scene they'd be asked to use a different voice, sometimes one of their characters and sometimes just celebrity impersonations.  It was pretty awesome! (You can see the whole thing here)

Moving on from guests, the rest of the standard rooms were there.  I liked the stage setup they had for rock band, though I still think game rooms need to be in big, open, well-ventilated areas! (still less stinky than California cons though, lol).

They had a Pokemon X/Y tourney too - which would've been so awesome if I wasn't such a chicken lol.

Speaking of Pokemon, our cosplay this time was the very obscure honeymoon trainers from X/Y. Very obscure as in, no one recognized us at all. Lol.

I think people were like, why's this guy wearing a scarf..in Hawaii??!

Here's the source material:

(source)

So obscure I can't even find a full body pic online. lol. Oh well. I thought it was cute, and I wanted the beret. :P I only made the scarves and the skirt for this one. Pretty simple cosplay.

Anyway, we also re-wore our Mgronalds uniforms, and I guess Hataraku Maou-sama has been out long enough, because a lot of people recognized it!  There were other people cosplaying it too! This guy found us so we took a picture together. Looks like he used the same transfer vinyl method for making his shirt/hat too!

Lines were manageable despite the 9-10k+ people in attendance.

AMVs were amazing, and if you haven't seen Anime 101 yet (it'll probably be making the contest circuit and sweeping up awards all year), you should! If you're a fan of school-life based anime, you'll appreciate the humor.

We stayed two nights at the Ala Moana hotel again, which I loooove. It's just so perfect, being attached to the mall and right across the street from con and the beach. So nice. And theres a fridge to store my poke in. Yess.

How's this for mall food? Sukiyaki noodles, delish!

Anyway, two new panels we tried this year were Iron cosplay and Otaku family feud.  I'm so glad we checked them out!

Iron cosplay was based on Iron Chef.  There were four teams and each team could use "ingredients" such as duct tape, fabric, foam, etc. to make a costume in like, 30 minutes. Though I could've used a little more audience interaction to keep us entertained during the 30 minutes, the end result was pretty cool! People were pretty creative.

I liked the creeper the best, but Duct tape Captain America won!

And Otaku family feud..what a great concept! The contestants could have been more diverse though. They were pretty much all hetalia/free fangirls.  The host was really really good at his job, which makes or breaks these types of games.

Questions was something like "Name a popular sports anime"

 It would've been good to get a larger sample size on the questions too, but both Sak and I really enjoyed the night panel as it was.  They had otaku confessions afterwards, where the host let you come up and spill your deep nerdy secrets.  A little disturbing but pretty funny as well :P

All in all, I really enjoyed the con this year! And it cured my work nightmares, so that was good! Haha >.>"