JACON 2007
JACON 2007 was definitely fun, though not quite as good as the last year or so. Maybe the con didn't have as many panel applications (or at least usable ones) this time, but there seemed to be a lot of spaces in the schedule where nothing was happening. But there were some good panels in what they had scheduled, and I had fun.
I missed most of the con on Friday, due to being at graduation. But I got there just in time for Wasabi's Animusical, and especially for Daryl's assassination of the inner clowns of both Naruto and Tom Croom. It's the first Animusical that I've actually been to the whole thing, and overall it was decently enjoyable. My favorite segment had to be the old school one, with Macross and Gatchaman. Of course, only a couple of us had any idea who the characters were, so the majority of the audience had no reaction whatsoever until Duo from Gundam Wing was included. Heathens.
After that was Daryl's Panel of Doom, which was fairly much like usual. Of course, the "air sex" segment from Japanorama had to show, and Daryl decided to use an impromptu air sex competition to get rid of those two sets of Get Backers we had sent to the podcast. The air sex was priceless, even if Spooky Electric was terrible and only lasted five seconds before rolling over and going to sleep. :D There should be video of this that'll get posted on YouTube, so look forward to that.
I stopped in briefly at the PJ Party, but honestly there's not much reason to go anymore. Apparently there was an incident with underage people sneaking into the adults only yaoi segment of the PJ Party last year, so of course now said little punk idiots have ruined it for everyone. No more adult material, and in fact it seems like the thing is now just a "let's run a bunch of crappy shows that happen to have pretty boys in them" event. Meh. Looked like they were still doing the raffles, with some pretty good prizes, so that's probably the best reason to go, unless you're like me and despise raffle giveaways for these things.
Let me pause to again say something about underage people and porn. Look, I don't give a shit if you look at adult material or not. I did it when I was underage, so do lots of people, whatever. But for fuck's sake, don't go blabbing your big teenybopper mouth about what age-restricted yaoi groups you're on or what events you snuck into. Because while I don't personally care how much smut you're looking at, the law certainly does (so do your parents, most likely). Which means that you run the risk of getting the rest of us in trouble and generally fucking things up for everyone else. I've seen it happen with web sites getting shut down, and panels like Nicole's getting clamped down on. So I'm sorry that you have to jump through some extra hoops to get your porn, but you need to either suck it up and wait, or at the very least shut the fuck up about getting it when you're not supposed to. You know, like the rest of us did.
I ended up sitting around playing DS and talking to people for the beginning of the day rather than going to the guest panels. In retrospect maybe I should have hit the panels, but ah well.
A friend and I decided to check out the Anime We Love to Hate panel to see if it would be as completely godawful as it was last year. And it was! We sat through a few minutes and then left before our brains could shrivel up and die entirely. I was tempted to stay for the X-Treme Fan Fic panel hosted by the same annoying guy afterwards, but decided to spare myself the trauma of watching this dude think he's really funny pulling people up to act out random scenes as anime characters. Since I guess that's what constitutes "X-Treme" fanfic.
orz
We left to go eat, and came back for the second half of the Transformers panel. It's pretty much the same every time, but with the movie nearing release I figured there'd be a few new things that Tom and Ken could bitch about. Sadly, Ken wasn't there for it, but it was pretty entertaining.
After that was Kitsune Myths, run by people I don't know at all, but it went fairly well. It was pretty simple, mostly just the panelists and a few audience members going through different traditional Japanese stories about kitsune and talking a bit about the anime you see them in, but I hadn't heard all the stories so it was informative.
The next thing I went to was the Yaoi Press panel. Yamila Abraham talked about her company and what they offer, and she also announced that their next art book (following up Yaoi Gothic) will be titled Reflections, and will be a collection of illustrations by studio Kosen. They also mentioned that they've licensed a prominent German BL title, though specifics are still under wraps. Abraham also discussed Yaoi Press' submissions policy, and noted that they're in more need of qualified writers than artists at the moment (in case any of you awesome writers in fandom are thinking of putting out some original BL).
Finally on Saturday was Gerald's Hentai Panel, which was just as horrifying and hilarious as always. There was a lot of reused stuff, but there's always a lot of new people at the panels, so everyone hasn't seen it. He did throw on the preview for Japanese porn where women punch and kick men repeatedly in the balls, and closed the panel with Final Flesh, which successfully drove out a sizable chunk of the audience, the reasonable human beings wimps. He also ran part of Samurai Fantasy, which thankfully shouldn't spoil it when I use it if I do the yaoi panel at AFO this year, as there shouldn't be too much audience overlap there.
The biggest problem with the hentai panel was a weird logistics thing. The Death Note panel got rescheduled to the same room immediately afterwards, which nobody told us about ahead of time. We were given no setup time for the panel, and since everyone coming in had to be carded, it took what seemed like half an hour just to get the panel seated and started. We thought it would be okay, but not long after starting they had to kick us out so the DN panel could start. Luckily it didn't seem to affect the audience's enjoyment, if that's the right word to use in this case. XD
Saturday night was the casino and host/hostess club, which some of our friends were staffing, so we stopped by there. I hung out to talk to Miko and Amanda, but unfortunately by the time we got there the free food was pretty much gone. By that time we were getting hungry again, so several of us left to hit IHOP.
Sunday's usually pretty slow, since everything's winding down. There were a few things though.
Gerald's Anime and Hollywood panel got rescheduled from Saturday to Sunday at 11:00, so we did that. Not a lot of people showed up, but more than we expected (which was basically just us). I discovered due to this panel that there are people who haven't seen The Terminator, Star Wars, or Blade Runner. Fuck, I must be getting old.
After that, I caught Phil LaMarr. He was really great, very personable and funny, and he's a big comic book fan too, which made it kind of interesting to hear him talk about Justice League of America as both a cast member and a fanboy. Also, IIRC he confirmed that he'd recorded Vamp for Metal Gear Solid 4, and I haven't been keeping up much with MGS news but I don't think that character's presence was announced. I was going to bring my Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law DVDs for him to sign (since I haven't bought JL yet) but I'm a retard and totally forgot. Wah.
The next panel was the Let's Talk about Tokusatsu panel, which was awesome. There were lots of amazing clips to watch, which reminded me that I really need to watch Kamen Rider Kabuto and demonstrated that I totally need to watch Garou. Really, I just need more really gay emo boys spin kicking monsters and making them explode in my life. This panel also made me want to buy ridiculous children's toys that make lots of noise and have cool flashing lights on them. Also, they played some sort of ridiculous Kamen Rider 555 musical, which was *almost* as ridiculous and gay as TeniMyu, which is saying something.
There wasn't really anything else after that except the last half of Family Feud and Closing Ceremonies. We decided to head out and see Spiderman 3, but we were delayed by the fact that it started storming heavily. There was a tornado warning too, so they had to move us all away from the windows. It didn't last too long though, so we did get out of there with plenty of time to see the film.
We did go see Spiderman 3. Nonspoilery review: it wasn't as good as the first two, and it had problems, but it was fun.
I missed most of the con on Friday, due to being at graduation. But I got there just in time for Wasabi's Animusical, and especially for Daryl's assassination of the inner clowns of both Naruto and Tom Croom. It's the first Animusical that I've actually been to the whole thing, and overall it was decently enjoyable. My favorite segment had to be the old school one, with Macross and Gatchaman. Of course, only a couple of us had any idea who the characters were, so the majority of the audience had no reaction whatsoever until Duo from Gundam Wing was included. Heathens.
After that was Daryl's Panel of Doom, which was fairly much like usual. Of course, the "air sex" segment from Japanorama had to show, and Daryl decided to use an impromptu air sex competition to get rid of those two sets of Get Backers we had sent to the podcast. The air sex was priceless, even if Spooky Electric was terrible and only lasted five seconds before rolling over and going to sleep. :D There should be video of this that'll get posted on YouTube, so look forward to that.
I stopped in briefly at the PJ Party, but honestly there's not much reason to go anymore. Apparently there was an incident with underage people sneaking into the adults only yaoi segment of the PJ Party last year, so of course now said little punk idiots have ruined it for everyone. No more adult material, and in fact it seems like the thing is now just a "let's run a bunch of crappy shows that happen to have pretty boys in them" event. Meh. Looked like they were still doing the raffles, with some pretty good prizes, so that's probably the best reason to go, unless you're like me and despise raffle giveaways for these things.
Let me pause to again say something about underage people and porn. Look, I don't give a shit if you look at adult material or not. I did it when I was underage, so do lots of people, whatever. But for fuck's sake, don't go blabbing your big teenybopper mouth about what age-restricted yaoi groups you're on or what events you snuck into. Because while I don't personally care how much smut you're looking at, the law certainly does (so do your parents, most likely). Which means that you run the risk of getting the rest of us in trouble and generally fucking things up for everyone else. I've seen it happen with web sites getting shut down, and panels like Nicole's getting clamped down on. So I'm sorry that you have to jump through some extra hoops to get your porn, but you need to either suck it up and wait, or at the very least shut the fuck up about getting it when you're not supposed to. You know, like the rest of us did.
I ended up sitting around playing DS and talking to people for the beginning of the day rather than going to the guest panels. In retrospect maybe I should have hit the panels, but ah well.
A friend and I decided to check out the Anime We Love to Hate panel to see if it would be as completely godawful as it was last year. And it was! We sat through a few minutes and then left before our brains could shrivel up and die entirely. I was tempted to stay for the X-Treme Fan Fic panel hosted by the same annoying guy afterwards, but decided to spare myself the trauma of watching this dude think he's really funny pulling people up to act out random scenes as anime characters. Since I guess that's what constitutes "X-Treme" fanfic.
orz
We left to go eat, and came back for the second half of the Transformers panel. It's pretty much the same every time, but with the movie nearing release I figured there'd be a few new things that Tom and Ken could bitch about. Sadly, Ken wasn't there for it, but it was pretty entertaining.
After that was Kitsune Myths, run by people I don't know at all, but it went fairly well. It was pretty simple, mostly just the panelists and a few audience members going through different traditional Japanese stories about kitsune and talking a bit about the anime you see them in, but I hadn't heard all the stories so it was informative.
The next thing I went to was the Yaoi Press panel. Yamila Abraham talked about her company and what they offer, and she also announced that their next art book (following up Yaoi Gothic) will be titled Reflections, and will be a collection of illustrations by studio Kosen. They also mentioned that they've licensed a prominent German BL title, though specifics are still under wraps. Abraham also discussed Yaoi Press' submissions policy, and noted that they're in more need of qualified writers than artists at the moment (in case any of you awesome writers in fandom are thinking of putting out some original BL).
Finally on Saturday was Gerald's Hentai Panel, which was just as horrifying and hilarious as always. There was a lot of reused stuff, but there's always a lot of new people at the panels, so everyone hasn't seen it. He did throw on the preview for Japanese porn where women punch and kick men repeatedly in the balls, and closed the panel with Final Flesh, which successfully drove out a sizable chunk of the audience, the reasonable human beings wimps. He also ran part of Samurai Fantasy, which thankfully shouldn't spoil it when I use it if I do the yaoi panel at AFO this year, as there shouldn't be too much audience overlap there.
The biggest problem with the hentai panel was a weird logistics thing. The Death Note panel got rescheduled to the same room immediately afterwards, which nobody told us about ahead of time. We were given no setup time for the panel, and since everyone coming in had to be carded, it took what seemed like half an hour just to get the panel seated and started. We thought it would be okay, but not long after starting they had to kick us out so the DN panel could start. Luckily it didn't seem to affect the audience's enjoyment, if that's the right word to use in this case. XD
Saturday night was the casino and host/hostess club, which some of our friends were staffing, so we stopped by there. I hung out to talk to Miko and Amanda, but unfortunately by the time we got there the free food was pretty much gone. By that time we were getting hungry again, so several of us left to hit IHOP.
Sunday's usually pretty slow, since everything's winding down. There were a few things though.
Gerald's Anime and Hollywood panel got rescheduled from Saturday to Sunday at 11:00, so we did that. Not a lot of people showed up, but more than we expected (which was basically just us). I discovered due to this panel that there are people who haven't seen The Terminator, Star Wars, or Blade Runner. Fuck, I must be getting old.
After that, I caught Phil LaMarr. He was really great, very personable and funny, and he's a big comic book fan too, which made it kind of interesting to hear him talk about Justice League of America as both a cast member and a fanboy. Also, IIRC he confirmed that he'd recorded Vamp for Metal Gear Solid 4, and I haven't been keeping up much with MGS news but I don't think that character's presence was announced. I was going to bring my Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law DVDs for him to sign (since I haven't bought JL yet) but I'm a retard and totally forgot. Wah.
The next panel was the Let's Talk about Tokusatsu panel, which was awesome. There were lots of amazing clips to watch, which reminded me that I really need to watch Kamen Rider Kabuto and demonstrated that I totally need to watch Garou. Really, I just need more really gay emo boys spin kicking monsters and making them explode in my life. This panel also made me want to buy ridiculous children's toys that make lots of noise and have cool flashing lights on them. Also, they played some sort of ridiculous Kamen Rider 555 musical, which was *almost* as ridiculous and gay as TeniMyu, which is saying something.
There wasn't really anything else after that except the last half of Family Feud and Closing Ceremonies. We decided to head out and see Spiderman 3, but we were delayed by the fact that it started storming heavily. There was a tornado warning too, so they had to move us all away from the windows. It didn't last too long though, so we did get out of there with plenty of time to see the film.
We did go see Spiderman 3. Nonspoilery review: it wasn't as good as the first two, and it had problems, but it was fun.