About some anime conventions – Anime Boston (2/2)
I decided at the last minute to go to Anime Boston after I realized I’d scheduled myself out of Otakon. Not having been there before, I had no idea if it was any good, but had heard positive things about it… probably from seeing Anime Hell on the schedule.
It actually turned out to be a little uneventful. Not as much as MomoCon, of course, since there were ~17,000 people, but I never really met anyone – all the attendees seemed to spend their time sitting in the hallways and not going to the same panels as me. The con organizers had decided that their con theme was “mad science”, which is something that doesn’t really exist in anime and is kind of hard to work with (AWA has since ditched con themes for similar reasons). Anime World Order, who were doing all the featured panels, gave it their best by playing important scientific anime Baoh and some villainous plots from Sailor Moon, but it didn’t quite work.
Some things which did actually happen:
I got there just in time to see the end of wah’s Shinbo panel, which consisted of him playing five different clips of Bakemonogatari and reading random translated jokes from his Uncyclopedia article, which nobody understood. It sounded pretty unfocused and his presentation skills aren’t really up there, but I guess that’s what you’d expect from a first-time panel. We stayed in his apartment for the weekend, and it was truly an otaku_room.
I went to one of Alex Leavitt‘s eight million panels, this one about pilgrimages to the sites of your favorite anime background paintings. He spent the first half talking about his attempt at the actual Shikoku pilgrimage, to the point where I thought he was just going to talk about that the entire time, but came back at the end and we all found out where the the anime pilgrimage wiki was.
(I just remembered that I went to see Emma’s house in London in 2006, but it’s a bit too late to write that one up now.)
Vertical’s Ed Chavez had a discussion people where he asked various Internet manga-knowing-about people questions about the state of manga and the industry. In keeping with the philosophy of this blog, he didn’t introduce any of them and you were just expected to know who all of them were. One of them was kransom, contributing his knowledge of “having actually been to Comic Market” and his skill at beating down evil. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten most of the panel content, but you can hear it all here!
We went into the Touhou panel long enough to take this picture and leave. Nobody seems to know what the audience for those things is supposed to be – this one started off by explaining that Touhou is a shooting game “like DoDonPachi”, which would just confuse anyone who didn’t know what it was, and then they just started playing one of the slower stages from PCB, which would just bore everyone else. They could just talk about pixiv memes the entire time, that’d be pretty good.
I tried to play Sonic 3 but got stuck in a pit. The game room, despite being in a huge badly lit garage-style room, is somehow still not as depressing as Otakon’s. I guess that’s something!
Photos here, although few survived review this time around.