Otakon 2024: the important thing is you show up on Thursday

(Due to the sheer unexpected length of this convention report, I will be posting it in multiple parts, with some of those parts paywalled to subscribers. Barring any hiccups, this should come out daily on weekdays. I'm posting the first one on a Friday because I think my subscribers have waited long enough.)

I was once again drinking fancy whisky with my old anime club boys— the guys I had once stayed ten-to-a-room at my first Otakons with, the guys who are doing a lot better than that these days— when I told them that not only had I just been at Otakon last weekend, but that it was the 30th anniversary of the event.

“Otakon’s still around?! It’s 30?!” Lately I’ve had a lot of opportunities to make my 2000s contemporaries feel old.

We reminisced about the old building, and I told them about the new building. I told them it’s actually a really comfortable and easy vacation these days, so long as you’ve got a reliable group of friends. And that it’s kind of like taking a vacation back into the 2000s.

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Staying on mission, or not, whatever, I’m on vacation

There wasn’t too much this year that I needed to see or get done. I’ve been doing this for years and after this long I know that I’ve never been one to schedule out my day: I just let it flow.

The only real “goal” this year was, again, in autographs. I wanted to get my childhood Final Fantasy III (US) cartridge signed by director Yoshinori Kitase. (Kitase came along in an absolute cavalcade of voice actors and devs promoting Final Fantasy XIV and VII Rebirth for Square-Enix.) I was nuts for Square all through elementary to high school until I started really getting into arcade games and Sega and ultimately switched religions. This game carries a lot of memories for me, and fast-forwarding to the end, I did successfully get my autograph and now have yet another priceless sentimental item. I’ll talk about the particulars of that later.

Other than that goal, I partied, I overslept, and I ran on vibes.

Thursday

I am a proponent of the Thursday-Monday convention trip. I realize it’s not something everyone can pull off, but if you can manage it, it removes a huge amount of stress from your weekend. Arriving on Thursday is important so you can pick up a badge early and quickly. Having a badge early is important so that you can just walk into the building rather than waste your Friday morning waiting in line. Leaving on Monday is luxurious and relaxing because you miss the massive Sunday afternoon rush to leave the city. Though the convention is over, you can enjoy the DC neighborhood and maybe have a nice dinner. I really recommend doing it this way, if your work will allow it. (NOTE: DAVE IS A PROFESSIONAL WRITER AND AVAILABLE FOR HIRE)

Anyway, because so many people are already in town on Thursday picking up their badges, Otakon has a little pre-convention party in the park across from the con center. Local businesses that couldn’t actually get into the con proper advertise here. There were some performances that sounded pretty cool: traditional Japanese stuff like taiko drum and sumo wrestling. We unfortunately caught a very different kind of traditional performance.

I witnessed a man “karaoke” the Love Live classic Snow Halation with no backing track or any familiarity with the language, just reading the Japanese lyrics phonetically off a phone. It went so badly that any sane person would have let it go at the end of the first verse, but this brave man “sang” through the whole thing. I felt like I was there for longer than five minutes, and that song is five minutes long.

My friends and I did not raise our phones, as we knew that none of us wanted to be responsible for an internet cringe video phenomenon. Be responsible, after all. As bad as that guy was, I understand the potential life-destroying effects of uploading a video of him, and nobody deserves that over a bad karaoke performance. But I had to tell someone this happened. I’m sorry.

I'm going to put the retrospective stuff here even though I did it on Friday or Saturday I can't remember

The con had a little "remembrances" exhibit that made me feel extremely old, with the JAM Project and L'arc-en-ciel concerts playing on screens in the back. The Otakon Doom mod– set in a map of the old convention building– was on display, paired of course with the Bubblegum Crisis mod. Having completely lost any 90s keyboard skills I may have had, I was killed instantly.

Otakon 2004 was the year L'arc-en-ciel, a major Japanese rock band, showed up. The megaton cultural event of the 2000s east coast millennial weeb; bringing up this concert with an anime nerd you just met is like Boomers talking about Woodstock. A girl I liked dragged me into the show and as soon as the boys showed up she started to cry and cry and when Blurry Eyes started playing she cried some more. So I think Blurry Eyes will always mean that to me. (My favorite L'arc anisong is Driver's High, the Japanese Born to Run.)

When I saw JAM Project in 2008, I was the one ready to fall over weeping. I was too embarrassed to check for myself in the video. I have had this T-shirt, signed by all the singers, in a Ziploc in a closet ever since the show.

It was tough to count the years as I walked through this exhibit. For good and bad, I found myself marking way too many periods in my life by the Otakon they were going down. Friends made and lost. The years Otakon was the best party of my life, the years that I couldn't leave soon enough, the years that became sad in retrospect. The Chinatown van that nearly killed me, the Megabus that nearly killed me.

I've really been through a whole lot at my now-and-forever home convention. Next time the normal con report resumes.