Otakon 2024: on Sunday walk into the game room, dethrone the guys winning at Gundam, then immediately leave

(I've got hardly any photos of interest from Sunday, so I'm going to continue to use Saturday shots, and use this space to show the cool cosplays that I didn't have room to put into prior reports.)

You partied hard on Saturday and you might be dashing to check out by noon. On Sunday you get a few more hours of programming, but really, the convention is effectively over. The con formally ends at 5 PM, but by 1 it’s a ghost town. The trip home is long, after all, so no matter where you are on Sunday, you can feel the convention shutting down around you.

My final act in the game room was to walk in, sit down with a total newbie teammate at Gundam EXVS, and destroy the guys running a five-game streak with my F91. Cecily!!

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Aya Uchida

Aya Uchida plays Kotori in the original Love Live series. I know nothing about her beyond having played the old gacha game back in the day. But over the weekend, I heard that a lot of people who went to her panel found her charming and a fun presenter. So lacking anything else to do, I walked into her panel about traveling in Japan.

It was a vacation photo panel. Uchida had a selection from various trips in Japan that her assistant kinda paged through. It was mostly standard stuff, like going to Okinawa or the Disney and Universal amusement parks, but the real otaku shone through the middle. One of Uchida’s stops was the location of the masterpiece basketball manga Slam Dunk, and she showed off both spots from famous scenes in the series like the openings as well as really deep cuts like “Rukawa, my favorite, rode a bike on top of this wall on the cover of one of the manga”. Your power level is commendable, Uchida-san.

Hiroshi Nagahama

I dropped in on a panel being run by the director of Mushishi, Hiroshi Nagahama, in which he just talked about how he fell upwards into directing anime by simply impressing a lot of important people with his intense work ethic. His origin story was watching Wicked City, a shocking sexploitation horror film (and the legend Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s debut), having his viewpoint forever changed, and coming to the anime production business running. Noticed by big shots like Kawajiri and Akitaro Daichi, he naturally moved up in the business until he was directing his own work.

When Nagahama asked as in the audience who’d seen Wicked City, he was shocked to see so many hands up (Kawajiri’s work is very popular in the US and basically unknown in Japan). One person even had a copy of the movie they’d bought at the con. His next question, given the work’s extreme contents— including a heroine who’s sexually assaulted almost every time she appears— was how old we were when we saw it. I held up ten fingers— I have vivid memories of the ending of this film, though I’m not sure how on earth I saw it— and he gasped. “Really? Wicked City? That movie?!” (Millennials who rented Ninja Scroll at Blockbuster Video or stumbled upon Vampire Hunter D on Sci-Fi Channel as kids know that mine is a common tale.)

A funny thread that ran through this panel was that whenever Nagahama continued to ask the crowd if they’d heard of an early work that he helped out on in the 90s, every time, half or more of the audience would raise their hands. But the thing is, these were mostly pretty obscure anime. It just followed that the kinds of super otaku who would come out to see the director of Mushishi and other cult titles like the experimental adaptation of Flowers of Evil tell his life story are also an audience where the majority has watched Sexy Commando Gaiden: Sugoiyo, Masaru-san.

Nagahama got so wrapped up in his early career that he actually ran out of time way before he was done talking. A shame; I could easily have listened to him go on for a second hour. He seemed to have vacation sketches ready and a Spider-Man action figure on hand.

AMVs/Closing

The gang and I like to check out closing ceremonies both because it’s the only thing to do during this time, and because they hold a long Q&A gripe session directly with staff at the very last thing that happens at-con. After that, it really is the "go home already!" point, as security leads the crowd to the door.

We walked into a concert from an easy-listening Korean duo, who lost me faster than an act has ever lost me with a too-revealing comedy song about earnestly wanting to become a rich guy like Elon, the kind who screws everybody over. (I’m paraphrasing the actual song here.) I had felt a little “hey kids” insincerity from the previous songs, and then, well… confirmed.

After this, you get AMVs. This is a cultural niche that is really interesting for me to view from the outside, because of all the places where Otakon still feels like the 2000s, the AMVs feel the most like the 2000s. I don’t know how to place this vibe. It’s kind of like if the 2000s internet aesthetic never ended, but also live on a big screen at 4k. Almost all of the AMV contest winners were extremely high-effort, and I thought a couple were actually quite good. But a lot of stuff was effort for showoff’s sake: just cavalcades of high-end editing effects smashed together, establishing no mood and carrying no message. (Pure otaku, in its way.)

But I don’t wanna get into bashing fanwork. It feels wrong.

At closing people bring up all kinds of little complaints, with a generally constructive spirit of communication between staff and con-goer. There is never any antagonism in this session, just an earnest desire from both parties to make the experience the best it can be. So I really like this session, and the extent to which the unpaid volunteers truly care about this event is amazing to me.

Staying after

As I mentioned before, I personally like to leave on Monday when I can help it. We leftover nerds simply hung out, took it easy, had a nice dinner and dessert, and watched the voice cast of the entire Final Fantasy franchise walk into the gelato place immediately after us. Again, it is great to be relaxing on Sunday when most of the congoers are gone and the city is starting to go back to normal.

Depleted after a fullfilling weekend, I fell asleep in the hotel room watching Japanese computer commercials. On Monday, my buddy and I drove home in style, because the rental place gave us a Mustang, because it was the last car they had (a waterbug jumped out of the steering column).

And we ate Waffle House, which as a Northeast person is a bigger deal than any number of anime convention celebrities.

Ah, I already miss it. The Waffle House and the convention, I mean.