Otakon 2013 - Friday (OreImo World Premiere)

Honestly, the way Otakon went this time, was that there was one thing per day that I wanted to do. On Friday, there was the World Premiere of... OreImo (that's the shortened name). It was attended (and unveiled) by the author of the series himself, Tsukasa Fushimi, along with the director of the anime series and its editor, Hiroyuki Kanbe and Kazuma Miki. Everyone attending got a poster as free swag.

Unfortunately, they didn't let you so much as take any electronic device out while in the room. No cameras, no cell phones even... they really wanted to keep a lid on this, so I don't have pictures of the event itself. My actual review is also for another day. I started typing it up, and didn't stop for a while, and that's when I knew it had to be its own blog post.

After the showing, the author and the director both had a signing, which I was sure to attend (the editor was supposed to be there too, but ended up being too tired). I ended up being one of the first people in line (once the thing finally formed, I think I was number 8), and... well there's an interesting story with what I wanted to get signed. I already mentioned that (a) I like to get things to sign before I go to the con, and (b) I went to Otakon just because of the World Premiere here and the signing session with the author and director of a large part of my current fandom. So, imagine what would happen if I lost what I wanted to get signed in the middle of the con. Imagine what it would feel like if what you wanted to get signed was part of a limited edition run, as a pre-order bonus you got only if you ordered a game from a specific chain of stores.

Yeah, I kinda wanted to go home. That was literally half the reason I was there.

I think I must have left it somewhere near registration as I was rearranging my stuff after a bathroom trip... and literally in the one or two minutes it took for me to rearrange my stuff, not see it in my immediate vicinity, then go back to the bathroom to check if it was there and come back out, a staff member must have picked it up and taken it to the lost and found. I panicked for a while, and I'll be the first to admit that I was not being the most dignified person at the time, but I finally talked to someone about it... and when I say talked, I mean like the-guy-drowning-his-sorrows-in-alcohol sort of talked. Now, I had actually gone earlier to the lost and found, but he suggested I go down there again just in case. And it was there.

By the way, Luis, you rock. Sorry for the trouble, hope you found your friend.

But in the meantime, you all can see what I got. Me being an Ayase fan, I had to get something related to her to get signed. I had a figure base... that I don't think would have taken kindly to markers, so I started looking for other things. And through the magic of second-hand stores and forwarding services... it actually got to my place one week (yes, a single week) after I ordered it from Japan.

Tsukasa Fushimi's signature is on the left, above Ayase's name.

Hiroyuki Kanbe's is on the right, across Manami.

And here's what the bottom portion, with both their signatures, look like up close.

I cooled down that day doing a little sweating in the Okinawan Karate panel, which was kinda interesting. Thing about martial arts, is that a lot of the motions you see in them are in other styles. Everyone does push kicks. Everyone has a straight. They're packaged a little differently, but they're there. What you'll see in some of the traditional arts though... well, it's a little misleading. I can't really explain it well without showing (and I certainly can't do that over text), but more or less, there's the textbook versions of these techniques that only serve to illustrate what the physics of the motion are like. They show you the textbook version, because the combat version... maybe you see the arm swing forward, but the foot pushing off the ground might slip by or the hip turn might totally fly over your head, especially if all it looks like is the guy stands in place and throws his arm out. But that's personal opinion.

Food this day was courtesy Seven-Eleven, Noodles and Company, and Johnny Rockets. By the way, the buttered noodles I'm not a fan of, and the fries at Johnny Rocket's were atrocious.