Con Post~!
Finally, at long last, the Ohayocon con report! It's long and very image heavy, so beware.
Ohayocon was awesome! It was my first time attending a con other than ACen. Although Ohayocon was smaller than ACen, it was still a lot of fun~.
Early Friday afternoon, as soon as everyone was out of class, we hit the road. We piled me,
stellawind, yangwarrior, immelmanturn , trombonesonmars , Greta, and Kristi, into Kristi’s car (the Abyss) for the drive to Columbus. Despite having seven people, plus food and luggage for the weekend, the car wasn’t quite as packed as I was expecting it might be. The car ride was spent listening to mix CDs and was overall fairly uneventful.
The backseat of the car as we began our adventure. Kristi and Greta were in the front seat.
I think it was around 5:30 when we got to Columbus. We unloaded our stuff and got our hotel room in the Hyatt (the con hotel). We originally had a room with two double beds reserved, but the hotel had been overbooked and there weren’t any more of the rooms left by the time we got there. The hotel gave us a hospitality suite instead, which turned out to be a pretty nice room, with enough space for all seven of us. On the way to our room we ran into some of Greta’s friends and were introduced to them. They seemed nice, and we ran into them periodically throughout the weekend. They came with us up to our hotel room. Luckily, our room was only on the 5th floor, because waiting for the elevators tended to take forever. Although I curse the hotel for having more than five flights of stairs between the 1st and 5th floors (I swear there were at least 8 flights of stairs we had to climb).
We quickly got yangwarrior into her Bridget cosplay, with much tugging and chest binding.
Then we headed off to pick up our badges and explore the con. We had pre-registered, so there was practically no waiting in line for our badges, which was quite nice. We then headed up to the dealer’s room and artist’s alley to start our shopping. Sara and I stopped by
bigbigtruck’s art table, with the intention of commissioning her, only to find that she had just left for a panel. I made a mental note to visit her table again later that night. I then poked around the dealer’s room and picked up volumes 1 & 2 of the Crimson Spell manga. Unfortunately, the dealer’s room closed soon after. Wandered around the con a bit more. In our explorations we wandered past the Dare 2 Share ministries convention that also happened to be going on that weekend. yangwarrior was still in her Bridget cosplay at the time. You should have seen the way the Christian conventioners were staring at her! It was great.
A little later stellawind came back dressed in her Yuuko cosplay.
After that I decided that I wanted to go put on my Axel cosplay. It’s gotten to a point that I feel weirdly naked when I’m at a con and not in cosplay. So I went back to the room and changed into my Axel costume. yangwarrior helped me pin my hair back and put on my make-up. This process resulted in some interesting pictures.
And here is the Axel cosplay.
I’ve got on a pleather coat, pleather leggings, and leather gloves. And the platform boots, to make me taller than yangwarrior when she was Roxas. God, I love those boots. I wish the wig had stayed on a bit better, but there was nothing I could do to fix it at the con. I plan on finding a solution for it before I wear the costume again. I adore getting to dress up as Axel! I’m pretty sure that he’s been my favorite cosplay so far. I had my picture taken a fair amount of times which is always fun, but I swear that I ended up getting just as many requests for hugs.
I went back down to the con. I shyly made my way over to bigbigtruck’s artist alley table, with a little push from stellawind. I told her how much I love her tjandamal.com and look at her work. I wanted to buy one of her comic preview booklets, but she told me she sold out for the day, but to come back tomorrow and she would have more of them. I said I would definitely be back the next day. I also commissioned sketch of “Axel and Roxas being cute together” from her.
There was then more wandering around. Eventually we ended up going to Anime Hell. I think my favorite video was the one of the Obama Convention in Obama, Japan. Anime Hell was amusing, but I could only take watching it for so long. So I cut out a little before it ended and headed back to the room for the night.
Onto Saturday, the biggest and best day of the con! We got up fairly early to get into our cosplay. I was Axel again, and yangwarrior was my Roxas. We definitely had fun playing up the Axel/Roxas dynamic (with some fanserivce…).
Stellawind was still Yuuko, trombonesonmars got to wear yangwarrior’s Bridget cosplay, immelmanturn was Rock Lee, and Greta was Shion from Higurashi. We headed into the con. First things first, I made my way back to bigbigtruck’s table to pick up one of her
Then yangwarrior and I went Kingdom Hearts photoshoot, which immelmanturn graciously agreed to be our photo bitch for. There was about 5 minutes where we ran into a bunch of other Kingdom Hearts cosplayers and wandered around looking for the photoshoot location. Fortunately, it didn’t take us long to find it at all. We had a pretty large group of people present for it. The photoshoot was so much fun, and we had sooo many pictures taken. These are some of my favorites, but there are like a hundred more pictures from the photoshoot.
Group pic.
Battle time.
This Dusk was pretty cool. I was impressed that she was able to bend like that.
Sora and Roxas are adorable.
Axel bitch face.
Technically this photo should have been the other way around, but I was too much of a stick to be able to pick up my Roxas. And we still made the yaoi fangirls happy.
The Superiors don't know what to do with us.
Roxas is being punished. Lol. This is one of mine and yangwarrior's favorite shots from the photoshoot.
Poor Kairi.
Orgy XIII conga line. It's always a party in the Organization.
Jack Sparrow showed up and we all piled on him.
Stellawind made a stop at the CLAMP photoshoot.
And immelmanturn made her way over to the Naruto photoshoot.
Then it was time for more dealer’s room shopping! I stopped by the artist’s alley to pick up my commission. It was a completely adorable picture of Axel and Roxas eating sea salt ice cream~. I’m in love with it! Just look!
Then it was back up to the room to drop off purchases and grab some food. There is a series of pictures of us in various states of cosplay attire eating peanut butter sandwiches.
I love the look on stellawind's face.
This was also the time when we decided to take some pictures in the hallway.
Kristi bought this cute outfit at the con.
Rock Lee secretly always wanted to be a janitor.
Axel <3 Lee
We stopped taking pics to let people walk by, and it turned out one of them was Vic Mignogna (dub voice actor for Edward Elric, among others). I said hello to him and he said hi back. I have somewhat mixed feelings on Vic, but at least he seemed nice.
When all of that was over, we loitered around the 1st floor level of the hotel by the bar and café, killing time until we needed to line up for the masquerade. We ended up sitting on a low wall by an L, Ryuk, and Itachi. We chatted with them for a bit. I guess we made for a good photo opportunity because people kept taking pictures of all of us. After we left them our group ran around taking pictures at the café.
Axel and Roxas endorse Starbucks.
Axel/Roxas
Axel/Lee?
And then we went outside in the snow. Yangwarrior and I were getting pretty hot in all our pleather, so the cold outside felt very nice.
Then it was finally time to get in line for the masquerade.
Greta, yangwarrior, and immelmanturn pictochatting in line.
We waited in line for quite some time, but it was worth it. The masquerade was pretty good. I was pleased that it was hosted by Stripper Vash and Voltz. I love Stripper Vash. My personal favorite skit was probably the Bleach Picture Book. That or the Apollo Justice skit. They were really funny!
After the masquerade, some of us decided to attend the yaoi panel. I normally try to catch the yaoi panel when I go to cons. I can tell you that this yaoi panel was by far the most disorganized one I have ever seen. It quickly degenerated into fangirl squeeing, “OMG, look at these sexy pictures!”, and “Lulz, Boku no Sexual Harassment! Corn!!!”. Yeah. It was hardly worth going to.
Yangwarrior, immelmanturn, and I then got changed into our outfits for the rave. We were some sexy bitches.
We went and waited in line to get in to the dance. It was super long. We soon found out that it was because someone inside had apparently passed out. Security wanted the rave to be shut down, but staff came up with the compromise that they would have DJs play 45 minute sets of music. During each 45 minute period, they would let 500 people into the dance. After the 45 minutes was up, they would kick everybody out of the dance and let another 500 people in. Repeat process. While we waited in line we amused ourselves by chatting with Greta’s friends, and looking for Cute Security Guy (who hearted at us when we told him that con staff was underappreciated). The dance was fun, except for Creepy Guy, who kept standing by yangwarrior. And I’m glad that they didn’t have to shut the rave down, but it sucked that we only got 45 minutes to dance, and right when everybody was in their groove, our time was up. We opted not to wait in line again, because it really wasn’t worth waiting 45 minutes, or more, for only another 45 minutes of dancing. So we grabbed water to cool down, and chilled out while we people watched. Two guys came up to us and started chatting us up. We, of course, ended up talking about con stuff with them. One of the guys had been cosplaying Ichigo and had apparently made his own sword for the costume. He started joking with us, asking if we wanted to come up to their room and see his Ichigo sword. yangwarrior eventually took him up on the offer because she wanted to see how the sword was made, so immelmanturn and I suspiciously followed along. Safety in numbers and all that. So he showed us the sword and we chatted for a few minutes. That was it and we were on our way. We made our way back to the room and decided it was time for sleep.
Sunday was not overly eventful. We decided that we weren’t going to cosplay. We ran around making our final purchases in the dealer’s room. Yangwarrior bought a beautiful kimono. Then we headed over to the Translation panel, where we learned some interesting information about translating in the anime and manga industry. After that con events started winding down, so we decided that we had better hit the road.
Here's some of my favorite random pictures of our group throughout the weekend.
Lee joins the Organization.
Mine.
We decided that yangwarrior looked kind of like David Bowie in Labyrinth.
A happy, yet sleepy trombonesonmars.
Sexy no Jutsu Lee, now with Wolverine hair.
Shion pierces the heavens with her drill.
Fighting over Roxas.
Here are some of the other awesome cosplayers we saw.
An adorable Howl & Sophie.
Issac & Miria!
Yangwarrior with another Bridget. Team Trap ftw.
A fierce Viral.
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
One of the best Renji's I've seen.
An awesome Grimmjow.
Yangwarrior and I literally chased down Setsuna and Lockon to get this picture.
A crossdressing Cloud~.
Rufus & Aerith
Never take cookies from Pyramid Head.
Kisame and his sword that shaves.
I was super exicted when I found this Kuroshitsuji group! I was especially pleased that their Sebastian was armed with cutlery.
Memorable quotes from the weekend included:
-"Fuck Cheese."
-"I can pay you in ones."
"I'm not a stripper."
-"Move your legs so I can shove it in."
-"Yuffie's talking with Jesus."
"She's going to steal his junk...not in that way!"
-"Roxas is all up in Axel's chain."
And that was Ohayocon. It was such a great time! I say it everytime I go to one, but I’ll say it again. Cons are my favorite time of the year.
If anyone cares to see all of the 450+ photos we took, they can be found on our photobucket account. :D
Ohayocon was awesome! It was my first time attending a con other than ACen. Although Ohayocon was smaller than ACen, it was still a lot of fun~.
Early Friday afternoon, as soon as everyone was out of class, we hit the road. We piled me,
stellawind, yangwarrior, immelmanturn , trombonesonmars , Greta, and Kristi, into Kristi’s car (the Abyss) for the drive to Columbus. Despite having seven people, plus food and luggage for the weekend, the car wasn’t quite as packed as I was expecting it might be. The car ride was spent listening to mix CDs and was overall fairly uneventful.
The backseat of the car as we began our adventure. Kristi and Greta were in the front seat.
I think it was around 5:30 when we got to Columbus. We unloaded our stuff and got our hotel room in the Hyatt (the con hotel). We originally had a room with two double beds reserved, but the hotel had been overbooked and there weren’t any more of the rooms left by the time we got there. The hotel gave us a hospitality suite instead, which turned out to be a pretty nice room, with enough space for all seven of us. On the way to our room we ran into some of Greta’s friends and were introduced to them. They seemed nice, and we ran into them periodically throughout the weekend. They came with us up to our hotel room. Luckily, our room was only on the 5th floor, because waiting for the elevators tended to take forever. Although I curse the hotel for having more than five flights of stairs between the 1st and 5th floors (I swear there were at least 8 flights of stairs we had to climb).
We quickly got yangwarrior into her Bridget cosplay, with much tugging and chest binding.
Then we headed off to pick up our badges and explore the con. We had pre-registered, so there was practically no waiting in line for our badges, which was quite nice. We then headed up to the dealer’s room and artist’s alley to start our shopping. Sara and I stopped by
bigbigtruck’s art table, with the intention of commissioning her, only to find that she had just left for a panel. I made a mental note to visit her table again later that night. I then poked around the dealer’s room and picked up volumes 1 & 2 of the Crimson Spell manga. Unfortunately, the dealer’s room closed soon after. Wandered around the con a bit more. In our explorations we wandered past the Dare 2 Share ministries convention that also happened to be going on that weekend. yangwarrior was still in her Bridget cosplay at the time. You should have seen the way the Christian conventioners were staring at her! It was great.
A little later stellawind came back dressed in her Yuuko cosplay.
After that I decided that I wanted to go put on my Axel cosplay. It’s gotten to a point that I feel weirdly naked when I’m at a con and not in cosplay. So I went back to the room and changed into my Axel costume. yangwarrior helped me pin my hair back and put on my make-up. This process resulted in some interesting pictures.
And here is the Axel cosplay.
I’ve got on a pleather coat, pleather leggings, and leather gloves. And the platform boots, to make me taller than yangwarrior when she was Roxas. God, I love those boots. I wish the wig had stayed on a bit better, but there was nothing I could do to fix it at the con. I plan on finding a solution for it before I wear the costume again. I adore getting to dress up as Axel! I’m pretty sure that he’s been my favorite cosplay so far. I had my picture taken a fair amount of times which is always fun, but I swear that I ended up getting just as many requests for hugs.
I went back down to the con. I shyly made my way over to bigbigtruck’s artist alley table, with a little push from stellawind. I told her how much I love her tjandamal.com and look at her work. I wanted to buy one of her comic preview booklets, but she told me she sold out for the day, but to come back tomorrow and she would have more of them. I said I would definitely be back the next day. I also commissioned sketch of “Axel and Roxas being cute together” from her.
There was then more wandering around. Eventually we ended up going to Anime Hell. I think my favorite video was the one of the Obama Convention in Obama, Japan. Anime Hell was amusing, but I could only take watching it for so long. So I cut out a little before it ended and headed back to the room for the night.
Onto Saturday, the biggest and best day of the con! We got up fairly early to get into our cosplay. I was Axel again, and yangwarrior was my Roxas. We definitely had fun playing up the Axel/Roxas dynamic (with some fanserivce…).
Stellawind was still Yuuko, trombonesonmars got to wear yangwarrior’s Bridget cosplay, immelmanturn was Rock Lee, and Greta was Shion from Higurashi. We headed into the con. First things first, I made my way back to bigbigtruck’s table to pick up one of her
Then yangwarrior and I went Kingdom Hearts photoshoot, which immelmanturn graciously agreed to be our photo bitch for. There was about 5 minutes where we ran into a bunch of other Kingdom Hearts cosplayers and wandered around looking for the photoshoot location. Fortunately, it didn’t take us long to find it at all. We had a pretty large group of people present for it. The photoshoot was so much fun, and we had sooo many pictures taken. These are some of my favorites, but there are like a hundred more pictures from the photoshoot.
Group pic.
Battle time.
This Dusk was pretty cool. I was impressed that she was able to bend like that.
Sora and Roxas are adorable.
Axel bitch face.
Technically this photo should have been the other way around, but I was too much of a stick to be able to pick up my Roxas. And we still made the yaoi fangirls happy.
The Superiors don't know what to do with us.
Roxas is being punished. Lol. This is one of mine and yangwarrior's favorite shots from the photoshoot.
Poor Kairi.
Orgy XIII conga line. It's always a party in the Organization.
Jack Sparrow showed up and we all piled on him.
Stellawind made a stop at the CLAMP photoshoot.
And immelmanturn made her way over to the Naruto photoshoot.
Then it was time for more dealer’s room shopping! I stopped by the artist’s alley to pick up my commission. It was a completely adorable picture of Axel and Roxas eating sea salt ice cream~. I’m in love with it! Just look!
Then it was back up to the room to drop off purchases and grab some food. There is a series of pictures of us in various states of cosplay attire eating peanut butter sandwiches.
I love the look on stellawind's face.
This was also the time when we decided to take some pictures in the hallway.
Kristi bought this cute outfit at the con.
Rock Lee secretly always wanted to be a janitor.
Axel <3 Lee
We stopped taking pics to let people walk by, and it turned out one of them was Vic Mignogna (dub voice actor for Edward Elric, among others). I said hello to him and he said hi back. I have somewhat mixed feelings on Vic, but at least he seemed nice.
When all of that was over, we loitered around the 1st floor level of the hotel by the bar and café, killing time until we needed to line up for the masquerade. We ended up sitting on a low wall by an L, Ryuk, and Itachi. We chatted with them for a bit. I guess we made for a good photo opportunity because people kept taking pictures of all of us. After we left them our group ran around taking pictures at the café.
Axel and Roxas endorse Starbucks.
Axel/Roxas
Axel/Lee?
And then we went outside in the snow. Yangwarrior and I were getting pretty hot in all our pleather, so the cold outside felt very nice.
Then it was finally time to get in line for the masquerade.
Greta, yangwarrior, and immelmanturn pictochatting in line.
We waited in line for quite some time, but it was worth it. The masquerade was pretty good. I was pleased that it was hosted by Stripper Vash and Voltz. I love Stripper Vash. My personal favorite skit was probably the Bleach Picture Book. That or the Apollo Justice skit. They were really funny!
After the masquerade, some of us decided to attend the yaoi panel. I normally try to catch the yaoi panel when I go to cons. I can tell you that this yaoi panel was by far the most disorganized one I have ever seen. It quickly degenerated into fangirl squeeing, “OMG, look at these sexy pictures!”, and “Lulz, Boku no Sexual Harassment! Corn!!!”. Yeah. It was hardly worth going to.
Yangwarrior, immelmanturn, and I then got changed into our outfits for the rave. We were some sexy bitches.
We went and waited in line to get in to the dance. It was super long. We soon found out that it was because someone inside had apparently passed out. Security wanted the rave to be shut down, but staff came up with the compromise that they would have DJs play 45 minute sets of music. During each 45 minute period, they would let 500 people into the dance. After the 45 minutes was up, they would kick everybody out of the dance and let another 500 people in. Repeat process. While we waited in line we amused ourselves by chatting with Greta’s friends, and looking for Cute Security Guy (who hearted at us when we told him that con staff was underappreciated). The dance was fun, except for Creepy Guy, who kept standing by yangwarrior. And I’m glad that they didn’t have to shut the rave down, but it sucked that we only got 45 minutes to dance, and right when everybody was in their groove, our time was up. We opted not to wait in line again, because it really wasn’t worth waiting 45 minutes, or more, for only another 45 minutes of dancing. So we grabbed water to cool down, and chilled out while we people watched. Two guys came up to us and started chatting us up. We, of course, ended up talking about con stuff with them. One of the guys had been cosplaying Ichigo and had apparently made his own sword for the costume. He started joking with us, asking if we wanted to come up to their room and see his Ichigo sword. yangwarrior eventually took him up on the offer because she wanted to see how the sword was made, so immelmanturn and I suspiciously followed along. Safety in numbers and all that. So he showed us the sword and we chatted for a few minutes. That was it and we were on our way. We made our way back to the room and decided it was time for sleep.
Sunday was not overly eventful. We decided that we weren’t going to cosplay. We ran around making our final purchases in the dealer’s room. Yangwarrior bought a beautiful kimono. Then we headed over to the Translation panel, where we learned some interesting information about translating in the anime and manga industry. After that con events started winding down, so we decided that we had better hit the road.
Here's some of my favorite random pictures of our group throughout the weekend.
Lee joins the Organization.
Mine.
We decided that yangwarrior looked kind of like David Bowie in Labyrinth.
A happy, yet sleepy trombonesonmars.
Sexy no Jutsu Lee, now with Wolverine hair.
Shion pierces the heavens with her drill.
Fighting over Roxas.
Here are some of the other awesome cosplayers we saw.
An adorable Howl & Sophie.
Issac & Miria!
Yangwarrior with another Bridget. Team Trap ftw.
A fierce Viral.
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
One of the best Renji's I've seen.
An awesome Grimmjow.
Yangwarrior and I literally chased down Setsuna and Lockon to get this picture.
A crossdressing Cloud~.
Rufus & Aerith
Never take cookies from Pyramid Head.
Kisame and his sword that shaves.
I was super exicted when I found this Kuroshitsuji group! I was especially pleased that their Sebastian was armed with cutlery.
Memorable quotes from the weekend included:
-"Fuck Cheese."
-"I can pay you in ones."
"I'm not a stripper."
-"Move your legs so I can shove it in."
-"Yuffie's talking with Jesus."
"She's going to steal his junk...not in that way!"
-"Roxas is all up in Axel's chain."
And that was Ohayocon. It was such a great time! I say it everytime I go to one, but I’ll say it again. Cons are my favorite time of the year.
If anyone cares to see all of the 450+ photos we took, they can be found on our photobucket account. :D