anime

Otakon 2026 report: fake food, dolls, an orchestra, ramen, and The Most Impregnatable Man In Fiction

I know a headline image when I see it

we met a cool robot and i decided to put that picture here

Otakon’s my home convention; I rarely miss a year. Despite its very large size, a raw spirit of grassroots fan enthusiasm seems to fuel the event, even after its decades of operation.

Today anime/manga has completely settled into the culture, and we get events here in New York that we couldn’t have dreamed of 20 years ago— I saw an obscure single-episode OVA in the theater, I saw Yoasobi at a packed show in Brooklyn’s biggest arena. But that’s big Sony’s doing, and these events are very shiny, corporate, and expensive. Like Comiket for Japanese nerds, a fan con holds a certain magic that Sony, by definition, cannot summon.

You don’t know what’s gonna happen at the anime con. My first Ota was 2003, where I stumbled nervously into an empty autograph room to discover Pokemon legend Rica Matsumoto chewing out some poor kid over her Starbucks order before she signed my Ash Ketchum hat. (I couldn’t afford a JAM Project album. Today I regularly weigh selling that hat for a small fortune.) That’s how it was: ten or twenty people would show up for actual stars. Every random encounter on the con floor still felt like a new discovery, perhaps shared by you and a couple of strangers.

After 20+ years in Baltimore and DC, it still kinda feels like that over at Otakon. That’s why the guys and I keep going.

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Thursday

The beers, in a Kawaiikochans-branded bag, art by @shinggg.bsky.social

It is important to have a good, compatible and chill convention group, because a fun trip with friends can very easily turn into a nightmare. Interpersonal drama, money trouble, and bad roommates can all ruin your weekend— trust me, I’ve lived it— so I’m really grateful for my guys. We’re all chill old nerds who I can talk forever with over beers, who can take care of ourselves and each other, who go to bed at a reasonable time. We like to leave early Thursday morning and head home early Monday morning, which makes travel a bit less of a rush and gives us time to relax, especially on Sunday.

Though I won’t go on too long about it, the road trip might honestly be my favorite part of the convention. Good conversation, blue skies, and America’s finest rest stops. I only get to have Waffle House hash browns this one time of year.

More relevantly to this newsletter, we stopped off at the House of Fun in New Jersey. This is a little toy shop attached to a huge warehouse, a spot absolutely worth treasure hunting in. The place has everything in my strike zone and more, from vintage robots under glass to new anime PVCs and 90s Marvel figures. It is a testament to the sheer range of their wares that I was able to buy a tiny rubber Braiger.

Anyway, once we got in early Thursday afternoon, the con had a registration desk set up right inside our hotel lobby (the Westin; by the way, our room was much better than the equivalent at the Marriott). This is not new, but it’s such a great idea. It was a tremendous relief to just walk into the hotel lobby and instantly be able to grab a badge, cutting out what might have been an hour on the main registration line. This is the kind of feature you get when an organization really thinks of the fan first.

The badges were Final Fantasy XIV-themed, and depending on which badge you had and where you picked it up, you could choose a class. I never played XIV much, but I chose Astrologian. Otakon seems to have a good relationship with Squenix’s people, and one of the featured events was a concert with music from various Square games past and present. More on that later.

Every so often someone will wave from those windows

After getting our stuff in order, we stopped by the unofficial party space of the pre-con: the Marriott hotel lobby. I love this spot because it’s tingling with pre-convention anticipation and excitement; people are extra eager to party and mingle, and many of them are already in costume. It’s a lot of fun to just hang out here and take in the vibes, even if it gets a little crowded from all the people who had the same idea as you, and who aren’t staying at the Marriott either.

as a tired middle aged man myself, I was thrilled to meet Tayama

The balcony above has been a particularly poppin’ space for the last few years, with people setting up cosplay shoots using heavy LED lighting, and the party naturally forming around them as they do so. This year there was a semi-official space (quietly being supervised by con staff) where people traded ribbons to be attached to one’s badge, as well as homemade fan bracelets bearing the name of your favorite whatever. This is a really fun fan trend, and I think it’s great that Otakon gave the kids room to do this.

The unquestioned star of this event was the “Most Impregnatable Man in Fiction” voting board, which was exactly what it looked like. At the time that we came in, Resident Evil hero Leon Kennedy was of course leading by a mile. If you know who won this vote, by all means, please tell me. I haven’t been able to find answers anywhere, and it torments me.

Friday

A 5-foot RX-78 Gundam outside the Mecha Kaikan

Early on Friday, we headed straight for the the “Mecha Kaikan” area, which is, as you can imagine, a spot specifically for giant robot nerds like us. The model kit retailer Gundam Planet is there selling its wares (and doing extremely brisk business), the panel presentations are all devoted to mecha anime, and unlike the other panel rooms, the audience sits at roomy flat wood tables that are perfect for building kits on the premises. It’s a really nice setup that Otakon has had for the past few years, and it seems like all involved parties— especially Gundam Planet, who had to restock the booth multiple times— are very happy with it.

Our buddy (and our ride) Doug ran a panel on scores from mecha anime later in the weekend; I thought an hour where you just relax and listen to music was such a great panel concept, and at the moment I sat down in the room, I really needed it.

Shopping Friday

I love Raden; Her blend of high culture and weird-girl sickoness really speaks to me.

Over in the dealer’s room I almost immediately ended up on a long line for an item which, after checking with friends, I found would be difficult at best to buy anywhere else. There was a good reason for this: this retailer (Akihabara Anime) had come from Japan, taking advantage of the strong American dollar and the limited availability of their wares— Vtuber goods and Umamusume/horse racing merch— to rake it in. Plushes of the real horses the Umas are named after were particularly flying off the shelves.

My buy was an extremely cute official plush of the cultured Vtuber Juufuutei Raden: some plushes for graduated (retired) characters, or rare variants, hit the $400 area. (I paid $60 for my perfectly normal Raden. She even has a little Noh mask.)

Speaking of not getting another chance, Discotek. The popular boutique publisher of vintage anime, cult Japanese movies, tokusatsu superheroes, and Saturday morning cartoons is a dead-on match for the Otakon crowd. I always try to have money ready for Discotek’s table at a con, because they keep a lot of copies of their out-of-print Blu-Rays to sell in person to people who aren’t scalpers. Almost all the titles I got at the Discotek table are extremely difficult to impossible to find online for their original prices. (I got Combattler V, Juspion, the Mazinkaiser movie, and Sharivan, almost all of which were titles I thought I'd never see.) If you’re looking for something to fill a hole in your collection, I strongly recommend checking them out. I even saw a guy asking for really old out of print titles by name (like Acrobunch!) and getting them.

Kunio Oka and fake food

Likely the most fascinating and left-field event I saw at Otakon was Kunio Oka’s panel on the craft of making realistic models of food, for use in restaurant displays and such. It seems like the Final Fantasy folks brought him along, as he later did a Final Fantasy XIV-themed food model panel… but we couldn’t get into that one. We barely made it into this one. Otakon fans know what they want.

Oka’s an unbelievable craftsman: the convention placed a bunch of his models out on display to attract people to his events, and they’re shockingly real. Passing by, you’d think someone just left a bunch of food out. The panel discussed how he got into the trade, his meticulous and hard-earned techniques, and some of his proudest achievements. This man models rice grain-by-grain. This man made a model of an egg cracking.

If you ask me, it is precisely this kind of topic— not quite anime/manga culture, but deeply nerdy in a different and unexpected way— that makes Otakon so much fun. I missed a lot of the actual big ticket anime events like the Ghost in the Shell panel or the boys from Trigger studio, but you can always count on something like this at Ota. Probably several such things. They’re always what I remember the most.

Squenix concert

I unfortunately spent most of Friday afternoon— nearly three hours— waiting in line for the Square-Enix concert. This was the first time in years I’d been on a miserable, hot, sticky convention line alone (my friends were press), and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. The venue’s AC gave way to the hundreds of folks in line, and even if you try sitting down you can’t quite get comfortable on the hard floor. By the end I was desperate for it to be over, even having brought books and video games to pass the time.

There admittedly isn’t a hell of a lot you can do about this; this was one of the main events of the weekend at a show with 40,000 people, and they filled the ballroom where it took place. This is just how these events go down.

But especially unpleasant was getting cut in line twenty minutes before the concert by two shameless assholes. I know this sounds petty, but consider we’d been in line for three hours at this point and there were literally hundreds of people behind us. When others in line called them out, they stared blankly and mumbled “Huh?” repeatedly. People, including myself, pointed them out to staff before and after they cut, and staff shrugged and let them go by. It is a profoundly depressing thing to sacrifice a large and precious chunk of time on your convention weekend and then, at the very last moment, be shown that there was no point to it and you should have just cheated.

I don’t know how staff solves the Problem of Douchebags with an event on this scale, but I wish they’d at least tried. And taken those guys' badges, and kicked their asses out.

The actual show did quite a lot to lift that mood, though. The orchestra led with the beloved One-Winged Angel from Final Fantasy 7, as if to ease the fans’ expectations by getting it right out of the way. From there, they played a much more unexpected set that didn’t really care whether a track was old or new, popular or not: themes from Final Fantasy Tactics and Chrono Trigger played alongside music from the defunct mobile game Nier:Reincarnation and the lesser-known episodic RPG Live-A-Live (the audience were audibly confused during that one). Nostalgic videos from the games accompanied the music: during the Xenogears bit, I was genuinely transported.

(If you don’t like the video game the music is from, guy directly behind me, please shut the fuck up about it. I don’t care, I’m here to listen to an orchestra play beautiful music, not listen to your angry gamer review of Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days.)

I can’t leave out the way the MC/conductor cruelly owned the audience early in the show, either. After “Do you guys like Nier?”, he announced that the singer of Nier:Automata tearjerker Weight of the World was present at this show, to gasps and squeals from the crowd… but she was in the audience, MC continued, so she won’t be singing and let her enjoy the show. I felt sort of grateful to hear this, because I didn’t want to ugly-cry in public. A few years ago I bought a music box that plays Weight of the World, and I can’t even touch that thing without reliving the ending credits.

I was pretty much done with convention events after the concert: it was dinner, then the game room, then hanging out with the guys in the hotel room. We kind of had a room party that night, in that we were all there playing ROMs on a MISTer, and if someone comes in, we make them watch a promotional video for betting on boat races.

SD Gundam: Psycho Salamander no Kyoui (The Menace of Psycho Salamander) is a simple action game with extremely cute and lovingly rendered sprites for the cast of lil’ robots. It is also an excruciatingly tiresome quarter-muncher that refuses to end, running nearly an hour with a 13-minute final stage. That may not sound crazy for a conventional video game, but for an arcade game it’s madness.

Saturday

I mostly posted character dolls because they're incredible, but the DIY spirit is also really compelling

We’d heard about a doll exhibition in the convention, and that’s exactly the kind of off-center, fan-driven stuff I’m interested in seeing at this con. The lower levels of the Marriott housed a lot of small events and exhibitions this year, the doll house among them. (We also stopped by an exhibit on traditional Korean clothing.)

The Volks dolls are stunning, *especially* the clothing

The doll house turned out to be a really cool community effort: just a lot of fans together to show off their extremely impressive dolls. These are art pieces of such detail and quality that you can only truly understand their luxury price tags once you’ve seen them in person.

There were sections for the big companies’ dolls, homemade projects, premade anime character dolls and even vintage kids’ stuff.

I was of course particularly taken with the Dollfie Lina Inverse, with her cute :3 expression and impeccable bejeweled mage armor. (A sign helpfully noted that yes, she has the mole under her bandanna.) My dreams were later dashed when I Googled the doll and found she goes for two grand on the aftermarket.

Alley

I realize this picture doesn't match the FG art that I actually bought, but I really wanted you to see this image. *Of course* this sold out.

I also kind of went nuts at Artist’s Alley. Now that there are a lot of regulars at Ota that specifically deal in fighting game characters, I’m in danger every time I walk in there. I bought a pile of items for fighting game girls… and also Axl. An “And Knuckles” ribbon for my badge also proved irresistible. Call me “$60 on stickers” guy. I deserve it.

Rayearth premiere

The afternoon event I caught was the premiere for the remake of Magic Knight Rayearth, the Clamp classic about three teenage girls whisked to a magical world to— well, I’ll stop there. This doesn’t air until October, and it’s definitely something I wanted to watch, so I came out to watch it ahead of time. We got to watch two episodes of the series cut together with no opening or ending followed by some very scripted-feeling PR talk from cast and crew, which we didn’t bother to stay for past a few minutes.

(The remake is gonna have a tough time following on up on one of the actual greatest anime openings of all time. I would not be surprised if they went with a cover of Yuzurenai Negai (Unyielding Wish), which was a major crossover pop hit in its day.)

The new version sticks really closely to the original work; it’s not just an aesthetic 90s homage, it’s doing all the dated 90s stuff straight out of the manga, like constantly cutting to super-deformed character asides for gags. Unfortunately it is so straight that almost the entire first episode consists everyone standing on a cliff while the sage Clef explains the premise of the series for twenty minutes. There’s a reason we were given two episodes.

Because it was Otakon, I’m pretty sure I was there watching it with a whole lot of other people who were old enough to have seen the original series; the 90s anime fan atmosphere was tangible in that room. And the crowd hadn’t aged much on the inside: they squealed, applauded, and screamed the moment every single significant character appeared on screen. It was a true throwback. I wonder how their kids felt.

Afterwards was a typically Japanese-corporate Q&A session that clearly wasn’t going to deliver any big insights, so we dipped out.

Game room

I didn’t take a lot of pictures at the game room— it is the usual collection of cabinets from private collections— but it’s still a fine way to kill some time around the con when you’re not interested in anything else going on: it’s important to greet your FGC friends with the customary 30-game set on Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax Ignition.

The collection has remained consistent over the last few years: a lot of retro (including some ancient pinball machines!), Japanese fighting game and rhythm cabs, and the occasional feature-size game that you’re never going to be able to play elsewhere, like say Densha de Go. I like to hover around and sneak into Gundam Extreme Versus when a spot opens up: it’s really hard to find four people to play this game outside of the context of an anime convention. We tend to run streaks with me in the back running G-Self or F91, until a team that can actually execute proper team-play shows up to murder us.

The big miss for me this year was not getting to play Gundam: Senjou no Kizuna 2, the slightly less immersive sequel to the immersive Mobile Suit cockpit simulator. The game takes 15 minutes a play, and the line was just too long.

The Discotek panel—like a Nintendo Direct for aging anime nerds, MC’d by the smooth-voiced Mike Toole— already had such a line when we arrived that there was no getting in. That was about it for the night as we went for dinner, then headed back to the hotel room to get a bunch of friends drunk and make them watch The Pricemaster. Highest-power-level room party in the business, accept no substitutes, satisfaction not guaranteed at all.

Boat Race is guaranteed.

Sunday

We have luxurious Sundays, in that we stay the night and thus don’t have to rush to leave town at 1PM along with tens of thousands of fellow travelers. Even though the convention is pretty much packing up and leaving at this point, there is room for a last little bit of fun. We chose to chill at panels; particularly two panels that we had been curious about all weekend from their descriptions in the schedule.

You've probably noticed, but I love panels where someone in the business talks about a completely different topic from the actual product, preferably one of their nerdy passions. So of course I went to the voice actress' nutrition panel.

First was Ayaka Fukuhara’s “Optimizing Nutrition and Training for a Successful Voice Acting Career.” As it turns out, Fukuhara (voice of Idolmaster Cinderella Girls’ Rin Shibuya) went to school to be a nutritionist before she went into voice work; in fact, if I recall correctly, she was working on her finals during her debut. As such, she has a unique point of view on maintaining herself for her very specific work.

I would have been snapping pictures of Fukuhara’s slides, but this was a no-photo panel, likely due to her idol status. There was a specific, designated moment at the very end of the panel that she sat and smiled, and we were all instructed to photograph the nice lady.

The tips that I recall were stuff like drinking a spoonful of olive oil to maintain the vocal cords (she was very specific about quality), getting balanced meals (she’s cooked for her co-workers), and of course always thinking during your workouts about how your favorite idol or horse girl is doing her best on stage, and she’d never give up, so you’d better not give up either. At the end was a live follow-along exercise that we could do from our seats: hold your fists together between your thighs and push out, while pushing back against your fists with your thighs. Maybe that's what they didn’t want us taking pictures of, huh…

But the most important panel was the one we’d been looking forward to all weekend. Representing a sharp contrast to Ayaka Fukuhara’s healthy, reasonable advice, Yoko Ueda, a producer at Production I.G., went on for an hour about the joys of ramen from cupped to bagged to the restaurant. Ramen noodles are all things at all times for the tired, overworked anime industry cog: a cheap subsistence meal you can slurp down at your desk while you work, a sit-down meal for celebrating a victory or for comfort after a defeat, and according to Ueda, the main ingredient by volume of an anime creator.

Yeah I'm like halfway through this bowl, yeah I was too hungry to remember to take the picture

It was the sort of joke that comes from a place of deep emotional truth. After being preached to from the altar of ramen for an hour, we immediately broke our "No Japanese food at the anime con" rule and went to wait an hour in line to get some for ourselves.

(It's more like "don't get in line for Japanese food at the anime con." It's one thing to waste precious convention time in line for an event; it's another to waste that time when you could be eating delicious food from another cuisine much faster, in one of many less busy restaurants in DC's Chinatown.)

We always get a care package from the homie and there is always an idol poster to watch over our festivities in the hotel room. This year it was Manhattan Cafe. Thanks, Manhattan Cafe.

A rainstorm started raging outside as we ate our ramen, and despite our best efforts to stall for time, the busy ramen shop eventually booted us out into the storm. We all got soaked through while we ran back to the hotel, and that's effectively where my Otakon ends, fading into the usual crackin' one open with the boys while we watch Youtube videos of transforming robot toys. Which is what it's all about, when it comes down to it.