Event: Sakura Con 2005

Date: 2005.04.08~10

Location: Airport Hilton, SeaTac, Washington

Written: 2005.04.19

Another year, another trek up I-5 to SeaTac to participate in a full weekend of geeking out to my favorite obsession. As usual, I made the trip with my fiance Josh in tow. We left Portland around 9PM and had a mostly uneventful drive to the con location (there was a little incident with a ladder being on the freeway not too far outside of Portland....I didn't have enough time to avoid it and had to run over it, which was pretty scary and incredibly unlucky considering the car had just gotten new tires that very day! Thankfully, there was no damage). We arrived close to midnight and met with my friend Tara, who had arrived earlier in the day, and she took us to our hotel room. Tara had been spending much of the day watching anime on TV, and when we arrived she was in the middle of Cyber Team in Akihabara, which seemed to be a Pokemon like show, only the Pokemon were scantily clad women with naked transformation sequences o_O;; The TV schedule was apparently messed up and another show that Tara had wanted to watch, Real Bout High School, was playing at the same time, leading us all to joke about how the con had only been going for a few hours and already they were messing things up. This turned out to be the first of several screwups that weekend, but we still had an enjoyable time.

We awoke at around 7AM Friday morning (after finally falling asleep at about 4 or 5 >_<) so Josh and I could go get in the Pre-reg line to pick up our badges when the con officially started at 8AM (Tara had picked hers up the day before, but she got up to get AMV tickets). Josh and I weren't too far back in the line, and I expected we would get our badges within 15 minutes of the doors opening. Josh, on the other hand, said there would probably be problems and said it would take us an hour. Well, things started looking bad for my prediction right away when the doors failed to open on time. Once they did several minutes later, the line seemed to be moving pretty well for awhile, but then we heard people in charge of the registration starting to call out for people whose last names began with certain letters, like A-D and E-J. Me and Josh's last names start with R and M, respectively, so we ended up having to watch as tons of people got to cut in front of us, which got really annoying after standing outside in the cold for a half hour. Apparently the problem was that a huge chunk of the alphabet (P-Z) was all stuck together, and that group also contained staff badges, so it had ended up that that line was swamped while most of the other lines had no one in them. Josh and I felt the obvious solution was to move some of the later letters to the lines with no one in them, and once we were finally inside after about 45 minutes we saw them start to do that. After all line problems were resolved (the person right ahead of me in the P-Z line was apparently a gaurdian to some kids and didn't know she had to register, too, which led to more delays), it was nearly 9AM (meaning Josh's prediction had been correct :P) and I said "Let's get the hell out of here!" Josh and I went to pick up AMV tickets and then pretty much went right back to the hotel room, since not much was going on at that time of the morning. We found Tara there, who was watching E's Otherwise, and we all took a nap for a couple hours, bringing my total number of hours slept up to about four (hey, it's better than two :P)

After our refresher nap, we headed off for our first dealer's room trip, which was once again spread out over three rooms in the Marriott. I had surprising restraint for my first trip and came away with only a Gravitation shirt (so cute!) At 2PM, the three of us attended a panel with information about the JET Program, which my friend Kristen, who had come with us to the Con in previous years, will be participating in starting this summer. The three of us were there before the hosts showed up, and I did some impromptu karaoke with the mic in the room ("some" means that I sang one line from the Gravi song "The Rage Beat" and then sat down ^_^;;) We left the panel a bit early so we could go get seated for the AMV contest, which started at 4PM. I enjoyed the contest for the most part, though I sometimes found myself feeling puzzled by the categories people put things in. One video about blowing up plushies, which was clearly meant to be comedic, was in the action category (which it ended up winning). A Gravitation AMV about Yuki and Touma that seemed more like a dramatic piece was also in the action category. There were three Hoshi no Koe AMVs, one in action and two in drama, and one of the ones in drama seemed to have more action than the one in action! But, really, who cares about action and drama when there's comedy AMVs? There was an awesome Trigun AMV (I think it was to a Beastie Boys song?) that ended up winning awards for best comedy, best technical, and best of show. I also got a laugh out of a Gravitation AMV that used the song with the line that goes "Somebody told me you had a boyfriend, he looks like a girlfriend" ^_^ I remember hearing that song before the con and wondering whether anyone would think of using Gravitation with it. In the trailers category, there was a really funny LOTR parody using footage from Transformers (it ended up winning best trailer). All in all, the main reason I go to AMV contests (the comedy and trailers categories) did not disappoint.

The three of us returned to our room after the contest to get some foodage (who am I, Pauly Shore?) While there we watched some Initial D, which Tara quickly became obsessed with. Shortly before 9PM we headed to The Wired (AKA, the arcade gaming room) for the anime music guessing game. You may recall that at the contest last year I sucked major donkey balls and only got one point. Well, this year I managed to do slightly better. This time around it was possible to get three points for each song if you could guess the anime it was from, the song title, and the artist. I got one point for a BGM from the Rayearth OAV series (the host decided to give a hint on the song title by saying it was a character's name, and I guessed Emeraude, which was wrong. After a few other people's wrong guesses, he said that the title was "Clef", to which one person in the audience responded "He died in the first episode!" While that's technically not true, especially so since this was the OAV and not the TV series, it was still a pretty funny comment ^_^). I ended up getting three points on the ending theme song to Dragon Half, since I also knew who sung it (Mitsuishi Kotono, the seiyuu for Mink) and the title ("My Egg", though the people running the contest seemed to think it should be "My Ommelette." I'm pretty sure the original title is "Watashi no Tamago", but they decided I was close enough to the answer they had and gave me the point). I got one more point near the end of the contest when the song from Rurouni Kenshin "1/3 Pure Heart Emotion" was played. There was a big Jan Ken Pon battle because a lot of people knew it, and the person who ended up answering only got the series. I gave my guess for the title as "1/3 Heart Emotion" and I think a couple other people had similar answers that were close like "1/3 Pure Emotion" or something. The host decided that the three of us combined had come close enough to the right answer and we all got a point ^_^ In the end, I got five points total, which wasn't good enough for me to rank in the top three, but at least it was a huge improvement over the previous year!

After the contest, we hung around in the gaming room for awhile. I did some Para Para and In the Groove (a DDR imitator that has the super annoying feature of bombs that make you lose life if you step on them, but it also has shorter lines than DDR ^_^) and the three of us proved that we could still kick ass at the nine-button game on Pop 'n' Music if we all worked together, controlling three buttons each ^_^ We eventually made it back to our room for the night, where we watched some Kekko Kamen, a Go Nagai series about a female superhero who wears a mask....and not much else ^_- Josh and I warned Tara that Go Nagai was not known for subtlety, which she soon saw first hand as a school girl was whipped by a S&M queen until her clothes fell off while strapped to a spinning swastika....yeah, that's Go Nagai for ya ^_^ An interesting series, to say the least.

The next morning I awoke to the sounds of Princess Tutu, another series that Tara found that she liked and decided she wanted to buy the DVDs for. This led to a trip to the dealer's room, where she picked up the first DVD to that series along with all the Initial D she could find. I ended up getting a cute little magnet of Armstrong from Full Metal Alchemist and also a couple of FMA wash cloths. They came in boxes so you couldn't see which one you were getting, and Josh and I were hoping at least one of them would be Armstrong, since we both like him a lot (he's so sparkly ^o^). Well, we were lucky and ended up getting one of him (the other one we got was Al). We spent a good chunk of the afternoon in our hotel room watching TV (there were a couple of times when we even *gasp* switched from the anime channels and watched other things, like Kim Possible and, for some reason, the World's Strongest Man competition. I predicted the Polish guy would win, but we didn't finish watching it....of course, Armstrong could have kicked all of their asses ^o^)

Josh and I had a little break from the con when his sister Andi came and took us out to eat at a place that served Vietnamese food (I ended up getting Pad Thai, which is....well, Thai food ^_^). She ended up coming back to the con with us to hang out for awhile (there was someone she knew who was staff there, so she just borrowed her badge, on the stipulation that we take her son with us for awhile). We looked around the art room and then made another trip to the dealer's room, where I didn't expect to be buying anything. I should have learned by now that this is never a reasonable expectation to have, though, as I ended up finding a place that had something I wanted. I had looked through doujinshi bins at a few of the dealers looking for Gravitation stuff and had discovered that most of them only had the Remixes, which I already have (for anyone unfamiliar with the Gravitation series, it's a boy's love series that doesn't get very graphic sexually, but the creator of the series made a series of doujinshi based on them called the Remixes that are filled with graphic sex scenes). At the dealer I found that day, though, they had a copy of a doujinshi Murakami-sensei made before Gravitation that features some of the same characters, and I just had to pick it up ^_^

After Andi left, the three of us, along with Tara's friend Mike, went to attend an ADV sneak peak panel, which showed episodes from upcoming releases. The first one we saw was Madlax, a show from the people who did Noir that....well, looks pretty damn similar to Noir ^_^;; The next one we saw was Maburaho, which looks to be another "nice guy with a harem" show....only this time, they're all magic users! How original :P (Tara ended up winning the DVD for this one by answering a trivia question about the episode we watched). Next was Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, which Josh and I have seen (even though we haven't seen the original FMP ^_^;;), but we didn't mind watching it again since it's pretty damn funny (though it can be a little disappointing to watch something dubbed after hearing the original Japanese....I especially had issues with how the characters pronounced "Chidori" like it was "chittery" or something). The next show was Elven Reign or something (I can never remember the title of this one), which Josh and I had also seen before at a meeting of the PSU anime club. I'll use Josh's description of it, which is "Fist of the North Star violence meets typical love comedy....and then the main character pees on the floor." Yeah, that's pretty much it. Since we had seen it before and I wanted to get some foodage (there I go again with the Pauly Shore speak), we went back to our room.

Around 9PM it was time to go to The Wired for the anime trivia contest. Josh and I were quite amused that one of the first questions asked was about Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, and from one of the episodes we had just seen less than an hour before, no less. We ended up in a Jan Ken Pon battle against each other to answer the question, which I won and thus scored my first point of the game (the question was about why Sousuke ends up using a real gun on an arcade shooting game). I got another point later for a question about who the original composer of the music used in the Dragon Half ending theme song was (Beethoven), which makes four total points that I got from that song during both of the contests, counting the three I got in the music contest ^_^ The last of the points I got was during the portion of the contest that had quotes from characters, and I recognized one as being from Last Exile (they said multiple points would be awarded for getting other details such as the character, but they didn't have that information for the one I answered, even though I was pretty sure it was Lavie). In the end, just like the year before, I got three points and ended up in a tie for third place (though instead of it being a five-way tie, this time there were only three of us). Instead of taking questions from the audience for a tie-breaker like the year before, this time we just had to do a Jan Ken Pon battle, which I ended up winning. So, yay, I can finally say that I got a good ranking in an anime trivia contest! The prizes I got were an Argentosoma T-shirt and a Vandread DVD. Even though I've never seen either of those series, I was still pretty excited ^_^

We returned to our hotel room for awhile, where Mike had set up his laptop and we watched some AMVs (like the spectacular "Lord of the Yen" LOTR parody trailer using footage from Azumanga Daiou) and listened to the "Real Otaku Heroes" parodies of those commercials (I think they're beer commercials?) that pay tribute to certain kinds of people, only these ones all had to do with anime (like the "harem anime inventor guy" ^_^)

Around midnight Josh, Tara and I went to the console gaming room, where Josh played a boating game, I played some DBZ Budoukai #1, and then Josh and I battled each other in a game that seemed like Rival Schools (but I think it had a different name). I ended up having to play on the huge bulky controller, but I still ended up beating him a few times ^o^ Tara was tired and went back to the room, but Josh and I continued on to the arcade gaming room and spent time trying to master the five button version of Pop 'n' Music playing solo. I planned to slowly work my way up, going up one level at a time, but Josh would go, "well, I just finished a five-star song, now I'll try for level eight!" ^_^;; Since no one else was in line for it, we got to play for quite awhile as we switched off, and we eventually ended up beating the highest level (though we found that a song we had played that was a couple levels lower was actually harder) and then tried to work together on the nine-button mode. While the two of us could beat some of the easier levels, we totally failed the higher level songs ^_^;; It was around 2:30AM when we finally went back to the room, and after a pretty tiring weekend we went to sleep pretty soon.

Nothing much to report about Sunday. We got up for awhile, packed up, took a nap, moseyed on over to the dealer's room (I bought one more Gravitation doujinshi) and, after a little mishap with having to get another key so we could leave the parking lot after getting rid of our keys at checkout, left the convention. I don't feel like I did as much stuff this time around as I did at some other conventions, but a good time was had by all, and next year Sakura Con is going to be even bigger than ever when it moves to downtown Seattle and a much larger convention space. I look forward to seeing what new things the new space will have to offer!

Pictures

None yet....isn't that pathetic? I'm still combing the Internet trying to find pictures of stuff that I did....I know a couple people took pictures of the trivia contest winners, so that seems to be my best bet of finding myself ^_^;;