It’s been nearly a month, so I better have something to say about Otakon 2023

One of the things I try not to do at conventions is completely fill out my schedule, or spend my weekend on just one or two things. For me, a big part of the experience is getting to savor the variety of events and enjoy a lot of idle time between them where I get to chill, decompress, talk to strangers, whatever.

Anyway this year at Otakon I pretty much devoted my entire weekend to seeing panels by and getting autographs from just a couple of major guests. I’m not really used to this.

The two big guests in question were Shoji Kawamori, creator of the Macross sci-fi anime series, and Takanobu Terada, long-time producer of the Super Robot Wars video game series. Kawamori is a big deal in general, and Terada is more of a big deal “for me” and for other Super Robot-heads. This was Terada’s first time at a US convention, and as a game producer he’s not really the kind of dude you see running the anime convention circuit. Kawamori is a rare guest— the last time he came to visit was 20 years ago, but hey— but Terada? Extremely niche, extremely unlikely, you’re probably never gonna see him again.

In fact it was a pretty stacked lineup for robot nerds like me in particular, as the Otakon mecha crew consisted not just of Kawamori and Terada but also Macross mechanical designer Hidetaka Tenjin and the legendary director/designer Shinji Aramaki. The panel where all these guys shot the shit about their life’s work in big transforming robot sci-fi was a lot of fun.

The personality who made the biggest impression on me was Kawamori. The man who directed Macross: Do You Remember Love— one of the greatest animated sci-fi epics of all time— at 20 years old still has every ounce of his boyish enthusiasm almost 40 years later. When he talks about planes, you can see his eyes light up, that passion bubbling up to the top. At one point he enthusiastically pantomimed a co-worker (Ichiro Itano) passing out from the G-forces of a test flight. What a cool guy. I hope I can be like Shoji Kawamori in 20 years.

So I went and got his autograph. Truth is, I’ve been clearing out a lot of my 2000’s collection as I need money to live (your paid subscription to this Substack *directly* benefits my effort to live) and 2000s anime/manga now goes for a lot of money as the mainstream anime/manga audience has blown up in the last decade or so. I actually almost sold this original-series Macross DVD box on Ebay for $80. Not anymore.

Kawamori is a major guest and getting his signature took, I wanna say… three hours. It’s one thing to see a guest at a panel, but getting a signature is often a major sacrifice for the fan, as they have to throw out most of the rest of their day to get it done.

As the Kawaiikochan comic indicates, but Kawamori and Tenjin (Tenjin is delightful too, by the way) were very happy to see a SDF Macross box. If you were getting one autograph you were getting both, so Tenjin signed as a fan.

Contrary to expectations, Terada looked like he was just around for the ride. I had seriously suspected some kind of SRW-related announcement (though Terada is freelance these days; he left Bandai after SRW30 came out)1, but there was no such thing: the man was just on vacation and didn’t have too much to say at the panel.

You know what was fun, though? Getting my autograph from Terada. I brought him a copy of Super Robot Wars OG2, my sentimental favorite in the series that I’ve beaten maybe six times. He gave me the anecdote I used in the Kawaiikochan comic: “We put this out a long time ago! It didn’t sell at all.” You can’t put a price on that candor.

Other than Robot Guy Stuff

I wore my Birdie Wing T-shirt. Absolutely everybody wanted to compliment my Birdie Wing T-shirt, and then they wanted to talk about Birdie Wing. People who like Birdie Wing have great taste and are very interesting. I heard that there was an Aoi cosplayer at the con and I was very sad I didn’t run into her.

Friends put on great panels: I checked out Pat and Carl’s trains’n’robots panels, Carl’s panel on the forgotten mania of Densha Otoko, and wah’s panel on fun places to visit on the train in Japan.

Retro media such as vinyl— but even stuff like CD singles and cassettes— is now so expensive I can’t even look at it.2 Maybe the proprietor of one booth saw it in our eyes cause he told us “yeah, gotta feed the kids”. And may he feed them. Maybe one day I’ll get the rest of those Chojin Locke rock opera albums.

Meanwhile at Retro Saikou, the affordable chad champion of the anime con dealer’s room, you can get your hands on a more obtainable era of “retro”: the 2000s.3 You know you’re oldtaku when you start seeing stuff like Higurashi Daybreak on the shelves and realize “Hey, I never got around to buying that one…”

The game room arcades went for a high-quantity approach, which was perhaps not for the best. Every single machine my fighting game buddy and I played on had broken buttons. With what looked like 50+ candy cabs between different groups, it’s easy to imagine that it was a very difficult job to keep up with rapidly replacing buttons and sticks as the casual masses mashed them into disrepair.4

I would have rather had fewer machines better taken care of than a ton of machines playing every game I could imagine, except when you sit down to play something, three of the six buttons on the panel don’t work.

Thinking I wouldn’t spend a lot of money at this con, so I should buy *something*, I picked up the Aim for the Ace TV series and movie from Discotek. I’ve already gotten to the movie in the time between the con and this writing, and I got all the sumptuous Dezaki animation I could ask for. The style is inimitable. Gunbuster fans will also be interested in this series for the revelation— probably pretty obvious to a Japanese otaku— that the whole Noriko/Kazumi/Coach character dynamic is actually direct parody of this 70s shoujo sports series5.

Anyway, immediately after I made that decision I got hit in the artist’s alley by, god bless her, an artist who sold art and pins of every fighting game character as a cat. Talk about getting targeted. I bought Neco-Arc and SF6 Chun-Li (not a cat), but I was right behind the person who bought the last animated lenticular sticker of Neco-Arc doing the dougie.

I missed a ton to get those autographs

Looking at the Otakon guest page I would have loved to have seen Haruna Ikezawa6, Wataru Watari7, Junko Iwao8 (!!!), Yoshihiro Watanabe9, Kia Asamiya10, and Michael Vescera11. You never get to see it all at a big anime convention, but that’s the nature of the beast. It’s also my nature, as like I said above, I hate to be on a strict plan. This is my vacation, first and foremost.

In closing, at the room party we all watched this UFC dude knock out another dude with a single flying kick to the head. In the post-fight interview he said “I wanted to try some dumb shit to see if it would work”. Then he took off his pants and started strutting around the ring.

That’s got nothing to do with anime, I just thought it was really cool.