Anime Detour 2015

So I keep meaning to write this, but forgetting.

Anyway.

It turns out that 2015 is the year of Love Live, which made me super fucking happy since I ran a Love Live panel on Saturday. But we’ll get there. First, is…

FRIDAY

I was unable to get a room at the convention hotel or any of the designated overflow hotels, so I grabbed a room across the highway. I wanted to check in and change first thing, but check-in wasn’t until 3pm and my room wasn’t ready. Thankfully, they had a public bathroom on the first floor as most hotels do, so I was able to get all swagged up schoolgirl-lolita style. And then I forgot to grab a picture, but you know, whatever.

I got to the convention around 12:30pm, but there was nothing to do. I went to the Artist Alley and bought some sweet shit like:

(The clock was purchased later that day in the Dealer’s room.)

I went to my first panel at 2pm, a Tales of Jeopardy panel. It was fun and awesome, Pascal from Tales of Xilia ran it. I texted Dark_Sage and told him he should have been there to win it. He disagreed with me.

The 3:30 panel slot was shit so I went to the Dealer’s Room. Since I had already dropped over $100 on shit in the Artist’s Alley, I was really only looking for one nice figure of something. Instead, I ended up with this:

I didn’t have enough cash, so out came the credit card. Oops.

I then went and had some fun at room parties, where I ate food, played Yahtzee, taught a kid Calculus, and met an awesome Vincent who had never played FF7.

We threw him an entire deck of 52 cards one at a time to see how many he could catch with those gloves. The answer was five.

At 5pm, I went to the Welcome to the Velvet Room panel run by these two awesome Atlus nerds. They were a pretty fun pair and made the panel an open discussion. I learned a lot of things about Persona 5 and lost big time in Persona trivia since I’ve only played 3, 3 FES, 3 PSP, and 4.

I believe this is around the time I met up with Omex, who’s a totally cool Nanoha fanatic. Our conversations look a bit like this:

He gushed about Phantasy Star Online 2 the entire convention. But it must have worked because I’m playing it with him now, so whatever.

I skipped the 6:30 panel timeslot because nothing looked good and instead went to the 8pm Attack on Detour panel. It was run by a different group of Attack on Titan cosplayers than last year.

Left to right: Some guy. Hanji. Sasha. Armin (who was adorable and the best of all of them. I asked him what his favourite book was and he said “the dictionary”!). Eren. Mikasa. Jean. Marco (who left 10 minutes into the panel and never came back).

At 9:30pm, I went to Geek Philosophy, which was a bit pretentious, but what do you expect from a panel with that name? Anyway, it was two people who had probably never watched anime talk about philosophies they learned from Star Wars, Futurama, and other Western media. I raised my hand at the end and spouted the great Mewtwo quote from the Pokemon movie and that was by far the best part of that panel.

My next panel was in the same room, so I just hung out there. Somehow, I got dragged into a conversation about FFXIV, which I haven’t played since like last April or May or something. It was weird.

The 11pm panel I attended was Chrono Trigger vs. Chrono Cross. I was expecting it to be a fun and interactive debate, but it wasn’t. It was two guys, one on each side, and the audience was supposed to act as “moderators” and “judges”. Waste of an hour if you ask me.

I went back to my hotel at this point to find that there was no open parking. The lady at the front desk told me I could park in handicapped. SCORE!

Friday’s cosplay haul:

(Notice that Kirito’s pants are windpants and that you can totally see his boxers.)

Yes, Lightning is a man.

NICO NICO NIIIIII

(By the way, the Princess Peach behind her is a man.)

SATURDAY

Arrived at the con at 10:20am (as you could see on the texts with Omex above), decked out in pretty lolita cosplay, of which I forgot to get a picture of again. My hotel had Continental Breakfast, unlike the convention hotel and both of the overflow hotels, so SUCK IT!

We went up to the game room on the 26th floor to see what was happening that day. I signed up to play Settlers of Catan and Ascension. I would have played in the Modern Magic the Gathering tournament, but it conflicted with a panel I was going to be running, so I couldn’t.

So at noon, I helped run Yuri Club for the fifth year in a row! It was great fun. I accidentally hit on one of the co-panelist’s ex-girlfriends, and the audience reaction was hilarious!

The Love Live photo shoot was at the same time, so Omex ran there to grab a few pictures for me before coming to the panel. I’ll let him post them because he still hasn’t emailed them to me.

My Catan game was at 2, so I went up to the 26th floor again to play. It was awesome because it was on this giant board!

Ascension at 4 was pretty fun, too. I’ve played it on iOS so I knew what to expect. I wanted to play mahjong with some people afterwards but we couldn’t get enough people together.

I think the next thing I went to was Hold the Dragon Age Inquisition at 7:30pm. We had some great discussion of Dragon Age and a bunch of us just fangirled like crazy, so it was the best. I met some great cosplayers there, too, but I didn’t get pictures of everyone. I did get this Cassandra (who just about died no less than four times during the panel because she actually fell out of her chair because she was fangirling so hard) and Leliana!

At 9pm I helped the same group from before run the 18+ Yuri panel. Apparently we filled the room because Omex complained later that he couldn’t get in because they hit the cap. Which was stupid because there were empty seats in the back and we’ve done standing room only in panels before. Whatever. We got through like half the presentation we meant to.

My next thing was my Love Live panel at midnight, so I went on a quest to get some alcohol beforehand. One of my copanelists and Omex accompanied me to the Gummy Room room party where I was hoping to get like a hard cider or something. All they had were shots. I’d never had a shot. Omex doesn’t drink, but my copanelist offered to take it with me, so we threw back this cherry thing and I coughed and barely finished it, but everyone in the room clapped for me. My chest felt warm for like 20 minutes, but I didn’t really get tipsy like I do with wine or mixed drinks. We sat and played Channel A for awhile before I went to my panel.

Detour changed all the presentation hookups to HDMI without letting anyone know, and all I had was VGA. It took 40 minutes for them to get me an HDMI cable. Luckily, I contacted tech staff 30 minutes before the start of my panel. Unluckily, only 12 people were in attendance anyway, so I couldn’t really get a discussion going before I got my presentation fixed. We went through it and it was great fun, but it was late.

At 1am after my panel ended, I said goodbye to my friends and then got cornered by some guy who had also been at a few other panels I had attended (but not the yuri ones, so he was clueless). He asked me for my number and Facebook and if I wanted to go get coffee and chat. I didn’t know if he was just being nice or if he was asking me out, so I warily obliged before running away and hoping he never contacted me again.

Once again, I was forced into handicapped parking. Score!

Saturday’s cosplay haul:

This is Ash if he aged properly.

SUNDAY

I tried SO HARD to get up for the 9am Utena panel, but I had horrible food poisoning in the night and could barely wake up when I did manage to roll out of bed at 9:30.

At 10:30am, I went to a panel about Anime Styled Video Games, but the presenters weren’t there. Turns out the panel was cancelled at the last minute, but no one communicated this to us. The people who ran the Persona panel were there, so they took over and we had a great discussion. Aaaand then Mr. Creepy from last night showed up and tried to chat with me. I was able to escape and meet up with Omex, who went on Bodyguard Duty.

We skipped the noon panel slot to head to video gaming. I had gotten kicked out of there the day before for trying to DDR without shoes on (because I had my shoes on but my heels got caught on the metal and I fell). This time, we went to some arcade machine and attempted to melt it. We succeeded. It was great.

At 1:30pm was the American Aidoru panel, which advertised itself as Love Live vs. Idolmaster. It was actually three great Idolmaster cosplayers and three horrible Love Live cosplayers competing in stupid competitions, like a lip synching competition, in which the Love Live cosplayers didn’t even know the words to the songs they were lip synching to. I was ashamed. Omex had to leave about halfway through, and Mr. Creepy was there, so left as well.

That meant Detour was over.

Sunday’s cosplay haul:

No one cosplays on Sundays.