Anime Central 2013 – Day 3 – Sunday

Parting is such sweet. Wait, you were expecting more to that line? No, that’s it.

Day 1: http://www.crymore.net/2013/05/24/anime-central-2013-days-01-thursdayfriday/

Day 2: http://www.crymore.net/2013/09/01/archives-anime-central-2013-day-2-saturday/

 

8:00 Morn~

Woke up, turned off alarm, went back to sleep.

 

 

10:00 Morn~~

Woke up for real and headed off to the Crunchy panel after grabbing our shit from the hotel.

 

 

10:30 Third time’s the Crunchy charm

After the fuck-ups on Saturday, the Crunchyroll panel finally got a set date.

Turns out, the issues with scheduling resulted from ACen’s incompetence rather than CR’s (surprise, surprise). ACen changed panels on the panelist without letting her know OR anyone with the Guidebook app know. Well the fuck done.

 

It was a pretty standard panel once it got started, but there was some cool, new info to be gleaned from it:

• If Naruto ever ends, Crunchyroll will pretty much cease to be as a company.
• Nobody watches the dramas, and they are painfully aware of this but still promote them with a desperation only otaku can muster up.

Okay, that wasn’t cool or new info, but I needed to pad out this section.

There was also this creepy sex-offender-in-training in the audience who was much too big a fan of Crunchyroll, and they had a “Crunchyroll ambassador” show up as well (basically, someone who gets paid to wear a Crunchyroll t-shirt and be attractive to desperate people).

Not particularly the greatest industry panel I’ve been to, no.

 

 

11:30 A hot dog and tea ran me $8.

Gotta love these dining options.

 

 

12:00 AMV Awards

Browsing over what to hit up earlier, I was a bit confused by something listed as “AMV Awards”. “That’s interesting,” thought Dark_Sage super sexily and confusedly, “I must have missed the AMV contest this weekend. Well, let’s see who won.”

Turns out, the AMV Awards were the AMV contest. Unlike literally every other con in the anime fandom, Anime Central ghettoed the shit out of the AMVs. So I – and 20 other people – got to experience all 12 entries in the contest. (Let me just point out again that this is a 25k+ attendee convention. So, no, that was not the best turnout.)

After the AMVs all finished playing (they were all displayed with Windows Media Player, of course), the presenter had the AMV editors come up on stage to receive their shitty prizes. He didn’t manage to tell us what these people won for, or even what AMV they had, but presenter-kun did remember to beg us to thank Funimation for generously providing like three shitty DVDs as prizes.

Aside: If three DVDs is all it takes for people to lose their pride as humans, then I think Crymore is gonna have to start hosting AMV contests at cons.

 

This was the winner, BTW (had to visit the ACen forums to find it):

The editor who did this also submitted half the AMVs to the panel (you think I’m joking but I’m not).

 

 

1:30 Japanese Exploitation & B-Movies

The panelists here showed a bunch of shitty clips from movies and hoped that those could carry the panel. (I’m sure you can guess the result.)

Among their amazing examples of B-movies were Battle Royale and 13 Assassins. Film buffs, definitely.

I guess the necrophilia-heroin-breast milk scene they showed from one movie was okay though, so we’ll call it even.

 

 

2:45 What is most kawaii in life? {A panel entirely about moe}

Like any good panel, the panelists started off by providing a copy-pasted definition of the word from Wikipedia. Let me save you the time of looking it up.

Moe (萌え?, pronounced [mo.e]) is a Japanese slang word. Moe does not have one concrete definition, but is used in a variety of ways. People use Moe as a feeling or characteristic. The term “moe” can be tacked on to the end of any personality trait or physical trait to create a new type of moe. According to Patrick W. Galbraith it means “a rarefied pseudo-love for certain fictional characters (in anime, manga, and the like) and their related embodiments.”[1][2] notes that it is a pun derived from a Japanese word that literally means “budding,” as with a plant that is about to flower, and thus it can also be used to mean “budding” as with a preadolescent girl.[3]

Since this word is also a homonym for “burning” pronounced moe (燃え?), there is also speculation that the word stems from the burning passion felt for the characters.[4] The word has come to be used to mean one particular kind of “adorable”, one specific type of “cute”, mainly as applied to fictional characters.

The word is occasionally spelled Moé, and was originally related to a strong interest in a particular type or style of character in video games, anime or manga. “Moe!” is also used within anime fandom as an interjection[citation needed]. Girls who are moe are called moekko (萌えっ娘?) from the honorific “娘” meaning “female child”.

Oh what, you don’t want to read that? Why ever would you not? The panelists were even kind enough to read it verbatim to us.

Yeah, after that clusterfuck of an explanation, I heard a guy behind me say “So I still don’t know what moe is…” Great fucking job, panelist-kuns.

So let’s move on and see what else was in the panelists’ brains. Here are some of the things they described as moe:

• That fat fuck MC from Accel World
• Digimon (as in the digital monsters, not the trainers, and not even the hot female/male digis — it was a bunnymon or someshit)
• Goku

No, I’m not kidding. They were completely serious about this too.

One of the panelists was in a really cute Ririchiyo cosplay, but that wasn’t enough to keep me at the panel (though it must be stated again that she was super cute). I figured I’d rather leave the con rather than bother with any more of their stupid shit.

 

And so I did.

 

4:00 Bye bye, baby

Ate at Chipotle with Soup, then hit up the airport so I could fly back to the fun of normalfag life.

(First class of course, cuz there’s nothing like being 23 and having platinum status at an airline cuz you travel every fucking week.)

 

 

Thoughts in Finality

The con wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good either. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and I certainly won’t be going again. I’m sure there are better ways to blow $500. Anyone know how much it costs to gold-plate teeth?