Auckland had been very cold for the past few days. It'd been raining non stop, and the wind is so chilly that it cuts straight to your bones. So chilly, in fact, that it makes you not want to go to school, or do anything outside, for that matter. Hopefully the weather can improve in a few days time, but I'm pretty sure that I won't be going outside any time soon. Which ironically is what I usually do to begin with, but the weather is a pretty good excuse for wanting to stay indoors out of principle.

I have two essays due quite soon, so it's rather ironic that I'd be talking about the last anime convention I attended rather than getting those essays done. Then again, I already know what I want to talk about in those essays so you can't say that I'm procrastinating per se. More like 'planned procrastination', if you ask me. In any case, the subject of this post is going to be about an anime convention I attended last week Saturday. I went by myself, as usual, since no one I knew were interested or had the time I attend this sort of thing.

The convention was held at a stadium about 20 minutes drive from my house, but since I couldn't drive, I had to take public transport. It was so terrible and cold, and not even two layers of clothing could stop those goosebumps from popping up. Auckland weather is so strange, because on one side of the sky there'd be sunshine but on your side, it's always raining. Luckily the rain quietened down somewhat once I got there, but with a weather as temperamental as Auckland, you never know what's going to happen next.

This year's special guest for this convention was Yoshitoshi Abe, who's a character designer and artist heavily involved in the production of Texhnolyze, Haibane Renmei and last, but not least, Cereal Experiments Lain. All three of those shows left a deep impression on me, with Texhnolyze in particular being a personal favourite, no less due to the fact that every show Abe worked on bore his trademark style, a combination of mellow linework with dull, earthen colours in between. The day before the convention, I actually went to an exhibition of Abe's work at Auckland. As the photos will show you, it was a solemn affair, and I was the only person there. But the artworks were quite beautiful. It almost prompted me to pick up NieA_7.

Last year, they invited over Range Murata, who did some live drawing and signing sessions. This year, Abe also had a drawing session as well as a Q&A session. I had time for neither, and by the time I got there it was already finished. A shame that I couldn't see Abe in real life! To be honest, though, I'm not too sure what I wanted to ask him. Perhaps I would've asked him about the aesthetics of Texhnolyze and what he thought about those subtle references to Edward Hopper. But I doubt he spoke English, and even if he did it'd be hardly the sort of 1-on-1 conversation I was hoping for.

This convention actually has a really grassroot feel to it since most of the exhibitors are amateurs. Or to put it more precisely: Tumblr users who are also Free! fangirls. I think that the amount of amateur fanart by shows represented is a good indication of how popular shows actually are. So last year, most of the fan art was on Free! and SnK, although there were a good chunk of SAO and Madoka as well. This year, things got a lot more diverse. Besides the ones aforementioned, there's also Love Live (which sold incredibly well in Japan thanks to its obsessive fan base), a bit of Raildex and Frozen. And Kuroko no Basuke.

Many of the artists who attended last year's convention attended this one as well. So many of them sat at the same place, in fact, that the convention felt like a deja vu. It felt almost kind of scary. The quality of the artists in general improved, though. Some of the 'doujin groups' produced some really good fan art, and some of them were really really good. I've found, however, that the people who are really really good tend not to be talkative, while the ones who are mediocre tend to be more sociable. Maybe it's because the latter got into this scene just for fun.

Anime is sometimes called 'Chinese cartoons' as a sort of joke. But after attending this convention (after my experiences at Fanime and two other ones in America), I've become convinced that the biggest consumers of anime are actually the Chinese. It's hard to say whether it's because the Chinese are overrepresented due to their population size, or maybe it's because anime is just that popular amongst those people. I think there were two people in the whole convention who were actually Japanese: a doujin artist who previously sold his doujins at Comiket and a Japanese couple in their 30s trying their best to recognize which anime the fanart came through. So I heard things like 'Keion desu ne' or 'Ooooh, Nisekoi desu!' or something like that. It was surreal listening to actual Japanese in an anime convention.

I gave myself a budget of fifty dollars to spend on stuff. Most of the vendors there were pretty awful in terms of prices. They would charge, for example, 50 dollars for a prize figure, when its actual value in Japan would be no more than 1500 yen. What I really wanted to do was to spend a bit of money in the so-called 'New Zealand doujin scene' to show my support for those people. Some of them are really talented, and if they diverted their attention away from drawing gay doujins of Free! and Jojo, then we could definitely see a Kiwi vendor at Comiket real soon.

Since this is basically a Free! convention, it makes sense to buy things Free! related. So as you can see, I bought four keychains from that show (which, by the way, is KyoAni's second worst anime, with Nichijou being the worst). Speaking of Free!: I really like Nagisa Hazuki, mostly because my fondness for blond hair extends to males as well, and Nagisa has really blond hair. The vendors consisted of three girls, one of whom couldn't actually recognize the name of the anime the merchandise was from. So when I asked her that I wanted one Nagisa and one Makoto keychain, her friend had to say that I wanted the 'yellow' and 'blue' ones. Free! has become, for those people, the equivalent of Color Wars for those who are into harem.

The Free! A4 poster is actually drawn by a friend of my friend's sister. Or to put it this way: my friend's sister decided to help out her friend at selling her fan art. You'd think that there'd be no drama involved since we are so far apart, but she actually recognized me as the friend of her brother, and gave me some really unfriendly and weird looks. I also paced around the stadium about three times before finally buying the poster for the sake of being 'nice', which made things seem even stranger. She gave me the most unfriendly look when I passed her the seven dollars, as if saying 'Wow you're a guy and like, guys don't even watch Free! Now I bet, like, you're just here 'cos you're my brother's friend and, like, you're just trying to nice! OMG'. 

Link to the his blog

The Love Live laminated posters came from an artist who, unlike a third of the people there, was actually good at drawing. Unfortunately he wasn't there when I were buying his posters so I had to talk with his Chinese friend, whom I had a brief conversation with regarding the fact that his friend was so into Love Live. He seems to really like Eri, Nozomi and Honoka, all three of whom I consider to be the better characters in what is otherwise a pretty average show. He also drew some Madoka and PreCure fan art. His taste is very similar to mine, with the exception that I enjoy those shows somewhat ironically while he seems really emotionally invested in those characters, so much so that he drew those impossibly beautiful girls in the same way Pygmalion sculpted his woman. 

The anime club at my university also showed up. I've never thought about joining the anime club, so when I told them that I was a student at the same university (and collected figures, no less) and was 'too busy' to go to an anime club, they told me to stop making up excuses. They resembled, in every way, the characters of Genshiken. They looked like happy, moderately sociable people who are lanky and nerdy but not yet complete social outcasts. They were also showing a photo album, made by two of their figure collectors. The photos mostly resembled generic Photos of the Week entries from MFC -- you take your figure out to the nearest harbour/forest and take a super close-up picture of them under the starlight or something. The guy looked a bit disappointed since I told him that I won't be joining the club, but I think it's all for the best.

There were quite a few cosplayers there. There's your obligatory pair who dress up as Doctor Who characters in an anime convention, something which just can't be helped. But most of them were decently dressed, I suppose. Most of the cosplayers were Chinese. Even the guy dressed in the titan costume is probably Chinese, since he was holding a pack of Chinese cigarettes. And so I imagined that after his brief stint as a titan, he'd go outside and sigh and start smoking.

Well, that's it for this post, I guess. Sorry for the late photos.

(An acquaintance of mine also suggested that I should cosplay as Asuna for an upcoming convention at the end of the month. I've never watched SAO but the notion of dressing up as a woman sounds strangely appealing, somehow.)

For a preview of what I'd look like as Asuna, please click this link!