Event: Kumori Con 2005

Date: 2005.09.03~05

Location: Doubletree Hotel, Portland, Oregon

Written: 2006.05.27

It was two weeks after my wedding. The pearly white nail polish I had worn on my big day still adorned my finger and toenails. In my new apartment tons of boxes were still waiting to be unpacked. Dozens of thank you notes were still unwritten. So of course I wanted to devote any possible time to these pressing matters, right? Hell no, not with an anime con in town! It was kind of nice having a con about a ten minute drive from my apartment, since it meant I didn't have to cough up money for a hotel room, and also not have the hassle of either hauling around coolers or paying a bunch of money for food (though since the con was right across the street from a mall, we did have some food court meals....the Japanese food booth got soooo much business that weekend ^_^). I don't have the programming schedule anymore, so I'm not sure of everything I did, but here are some of the highlights:

Before the Con started, I had decided that I was going to enter my Gravitation fanfic In My Life in the fanfic contest. The night before I had gone to my parents' place to use their printer (it turned to be, like, over 80 pages printed out!) plus write the backstory for it, since that was one of the things they requested be turned in with the fic (basically just a little thing to explain the series for people who may not have seen it and the reason why you wrote the fic). While we were waiting in the pre-reg line on Saturday morning, Josh asked to look at the fic while we waited. I didn't really want him to read it, since he sometimes has a bit of a mocking attitude towards boy's love things, but I eventually caved and let him see it. He kind of flipped around a bit, read a few parts out loud (he always did some mocking porno voice, even if the scene he read wasn't sexual ^_^;;) and eventually handed it back to me once we started to move. Soon after getting our badges, I headed over to the fan creation room to turn in my work. I was told that long fanfics were supposed to have been turned in before the con began to allow ample time for judging, even though the rules I read on the website had specifically said there would be two judging stages for long fics, one for ones turned in before the deadline and one after the con for ones turned in later....whatever, it's not my fault if they didn't know what their own rules were, I left my fic with them anyway ('cause hell if I was going to keep carrying it around!) After the con, I found out I had won the best backstory category, so at least I know they read that, though who knows if they read the whole fic since they thought it was against the rules. But I was happy to win something, anyway ^_^;;

One of the first things we did at the con was go to the dealer's room. We were some of the first people in line when it opened, so we got to have a pretty clean first pass without having to worry that the good stuff may have already be gone. The dealer's room was a huge improvement over the previous year, when it had been pretty barren. Some of the things I got were a "convention exclusive" Sesshomaru figure and cute little Kyou Kara Maou plushies (they were boxed so you couldn't tell which ones you were getting, I ended up getting Yuuri and Conrad....wish I'd gotten Wolfram instead of Conrad ^_^).

One of my other major con activities, as you may have noticed from previous reports, is gaming. I always spend many hours in the gaming room, usually late at night. Unfortunately for me at the previous Kumori Con they had to shut all activities down at midnight, but this year the gaming was open til about 2AM. Josh and I got hooked on Mario Kart Double Dash, and on Friday night we even had our friend Tara bring her GameCube to our apartment so we could play some more (we also played Wario Ware, which I turned out to be pretty bad at ^_^;;). It's a good thing we got some practice, because on one of the days Josh and I ended up playing with the people who had placed highest in the Double Dash tournament. We usually lost, since we were both still new to the game, but it was always nice when one of us would get first place (though Josh got mad at me because I directed my attacks at everyone in my way, including him, rather than just concentrating on beating the other two....what can I say, I'm competitive ^_^;;)

After a stroke of bad luck at the previous Kumori Con's anime trivia contest, I had to redeem myself by trying again. This year the format was much improved in my opinion. It was still the same in that there were rounds with three people each and the winner from each round would go on to the final round, but this time instead each person being asked a question individually, this time the questions were asked of all three contestants and each person would write their answer on a dry erase board. The people running the contest were Battle Royale cosplayers (same as the previous year) and this time around the contestants all had "exploding collars" (i.e., little strips of cardboard painted to look like the collars from the movie ^_^) and started out with 10 points, representing the countdown to when the collar would explode. Every time a contestant answered a question wrong, a point (or, as the questions got tougher, 2 points) would be taken off your total, and once you reached zero you were dead.

I participated in the first round of the contest with two others, one of whom was the trivia contest winner of the previous year. I started off well, and ended up being the person who went the longest without losing any points. My strength was mainly in that I knew some of the more obscure/old things that the others didn't, like knowing what the main character from Otaku no Video aspired to be (The Otaking! It pays to be a ten-year otaku ^_^) All three of us went for a pretty long time, and in the end I was the last one left standing (I still had 5 or 6 points left when my opponents got down to zero). For the second round, people didn't seem to be volunteering to participate, so I urged Josh to go up there. I thought it would be cool if he won his round and we ended up in the finals together. So he went up there....and while the first round had been a pretty good competition, the second round ended up going pretty quickly ^_^;; At least one person was losing points on each question, and after not too long it was just Josh (3 points) and some other guy (2 points). They had reached the time when wrong answers cost 2 points, so all Josh needed was for the other guy to get the next question wrong....and he did! I don't think Josh got it, either, but it didn't matter since that would still leave him with one point. So Josh advanced to the final round (he asked if he could take his remaining points with him....I said if he could, then I got to, too, since I'd ended with a lot more points than him ^_^ But the points were non-transferrable :P).

At that point, the contest runners said that we were running low on time, so they were going to skip the third round and go straight to the finale, which meant it was just me and Josh against each other. I proclaimed it to be the husband-wife battle of the century ^_^ There were no points in the final round, they just asked us questions and whoever was the first to get one that the other didn't know would win. There were a couple that either both of us knew or neither of us knew, and then we got this question: What classic series is the imagery of Utena based on? Well, thinking of Utena imagery I think roses, and thinking of roses in classic anime I thought of Rose of Versailles, so I picked that as my answer. It turned out to be correct, and Josh didn't know it, so I won! Pretty good job on a question about a series I'd barely seen (one episode!) referring to an anime I'd never seen....like I said, being a long time otaku paid off, since even though I haven't seen everything, I've at least heard about a lot of things. So anyway, I got some prizes (Pocky, Armitage figure, Battle Royale manga, other stuff), but for me the best prize was sweet, sweet, redemption (and beating my husband at something....ha ha ;P). Pictures of the contest can be found at the bottom of the page.

An event that we always make a point of seeing is the Music Video Contest. Some of the categories at the Kumori Con version were a bit different than the traditional "Action", "Drama", etc. Some of the categories had the label "cutting edge" attached to them, which meant they had to be from anime that were new in Japan, having to been aired in the last year or something. This meant these categories were mostly full of obscure things that most people hadn't seen yet. While I'm sure most AMV fans can appreciate good video making despite which series is used, I also think most people tend to enjoy AMVs of stuff they've actually seen. There was also an Instrumental category, a "traditional Japanese setting" category, and the much-loved Comedy and Parody categories, always a highlight. All in all, there were a few good videos, though not as many good ones as I've seen at the Sakura Con contests (but that's a bigger Con, so you'd expect it to draw a higher level of competition).

On Saturday night, Tara and I decided to go to Antonia Levi's "Yaoi Zowie, I think they're gay!" panel (God, how I loathe the American pronunciation >_<). The room was pretty crowded, which meant that the presentation was marred by a constant barrage of fangirl tangents. A few are fine, but when the presenter has to skip through tons and tons of Power Point slides just because she can't say one sentence without someone (usually the same handful of people over and over) having to add in their input, it gets ridiculous. I already knew most of what she was going to say since I'd taken her anime class twice before and a lot of the slides were the same ones she'd shown in class, but I'm sure other people would have liked to hear more of what she had to say about decades of boy's love history, instead of listening to fangirls talk about what they like to write about in their fanfiction. Tara and I ended up leaving early because we just couldn't take it anymore!

Tara and I tried attending another Antonia Levi panel the following day, this one being specifically about fanfiction. Tara doesn't really read fanfics, but I was interested in what might be discussed (we were later joined by Josh and Nate after they found the room). It was a less formal panel than the yaoi one in that the main point of it was supposed to be fan discussion. We talked about things like the gender divide in fanfics (Some surveys Professor Levi has done have shown as high as 95% of fanfics are written by females), and also self-insertion fics. It was mentioned that portrayals of one's self as a character are almost always positive, but then I mentioned my habit of putting conversations between myself and the characters before and/or after each chapter in the author's notes of my fics and having them always bash me personally or even try to kill me. I think the reaction I got was that it sounded kind of masochistic ^_^ It was a pretty fun discussion, but just like the night before, there were people who would hijack discussions over and over for their own purposes (some were even the same people as the previous night, saying the same things!) We ended up leaving early again ^_^;;

On Sunday afternoon, Josh and I attended the Ramen Fire Bowl Attack! contest, which was basically an eating contest with instant ramen bowls. Josh had planned on entering, but forgot about it and ended up getting food from the Cajun Grill in the food court beforehand :P I was kind of leary about watching since I was worried some people might throw up from eating too much too fast, and that's pretty much my biggest squick trigger >_< A couple of people looked like they came close, but lucky for me no one lost their lunch. The contest was actually supposed to be for spicy ramen bowls, but it looked like the ones the people had bought for the contest were random ones of varying flavors. If Josh hadn't been full, I'm sure he could have whooped all their asses ^_^

A fun panel that we went to was called "Anime that Scarred me for Life". It was basically a place for fans to air their grievences about stuff that happened in anime that just made them go "WTF?!" Series we talked about included the X movie, Utena (the series and especially the movie), Last Exile, and, of course, Evangelion. Josh and I were glad that the person running the panel brought up Last Exile, because (possible spoiler ahead!) we just had to make sure it wasn't just us and that a previously dead character really did randomly appear alive and well again in the final scene of the last episode. We hadn't seen the Utena movie, but when we watched it a few weeks later we agreed that it made no goddamn sense (because of course all women can turn into cars). Some of the series that audience members brought up were kind of funny. One girl said she was scarred by the Fake manga when the guys had sex in the final volume (I later talked to her and found out that the sex itself wasn't scarring, it was the fact that she didn't think the guys were hot enough to be doing that ^_^;;) Then there was a guy who kept bringing up Pokemon....over and over :P In the end, we ran out of time and Tara didn't get to talk about how she had been scarred because we made her watch Kekko Kamen (come on, there's nothing scarring about watching a school girl being strapped to a spinning swastika as her clothes are whipped off in front of her whole school ;P) and The Ping Pong Club (just mentioning "Sea Turtle" will make her go "Nooooooo!" ^_^)

On Sunday night as I wandered the Con by myself (Josh and Tara both had to work on Monday, so they'd left already), I walked into a room where there was a panel about adult content in anime. I got there pretty late into it, so I'd missed a lot of the discussion, but I did get to see an episode of Ogenki Clinic, starring a horny doctor whose penis has a little face on it ^_^ In the episode I saw, he had to pay the rent to his landlady through sexual means (what else would you expect from a hentai? ;P) I actually thought the show was pretty funny (though the dubbing was horrible), if I saw it for rent somewhere I'd probably watch more ^_^

All in all, I'd say it was a pretty fun experience. The Con had grown and improved tremendously from the previous year, and I look forward to seeing how it will continue to improve in the future.

Pictures

My badge.

The first round of competition starts. Let the games begin!

Hope my exploding necklace doesn't detonate too soon!

Josh is deep in thought as he contemplates a question.

As the final round begins, Josh makes a plea to keep his points from the previous round.

We write messages of love to each other (I originally had written "he sucks" with an arrow pointing towards Josh, but he altered mine to read "she sucks" with an arrow pointing at me :P)

Husband and wife do battle. Wife is victorious. Huzzah!