Otakuthon 2006

Held at Concordia last Saturday and Sunday, this is the first that time the Concordia anime club has attempted to host this convention. Unfortunately, they were very short-handed and stretched to wacky limits, as I don't think they ever expected so many people attending. From what I gathered of forum information, there was about 600 people pre-registered, and most likely a good 1.5 to 2 thousand people attending.

Jorgh and I attended Saturday early afternoon only, as I had to get back to Quebec Sunday. We also got to meet up with Julie and meet her boyfriend Sean. We spent most of the time standing in line, since the chaotic mess of registration prevented anyone from understanding what the crap was going on. Considering my experience from Anime North 2003 volunteering at registration, I forgave the poor organizers for their short tempers, especially that Tsunade cosplayer who was screaming at the attendees from behind the pre-registration table.

Jorgh and I sampled a bit of the sights from the (scant) merchants and artist alley, while suffocating from the lack of air and smells of the unwashed kids dressed in greasy handmade costumes. I appreciated the lack of completely inappropriate costumes among the attendees (except for one particular case that will haunt Jorghnassen for the rest of eternity).

We watched part of an anime called Ginban Kaleidoscope, which featured an olympic athlete girl who is haunted by the ghost of a Canadian boy named Peet Pumps (no, that's not a typo). I have no clue.

We then attended two panels; the first one was given by the editor of Anime News Network, Chris, who gave a combined talk about the website and the state of the anime industry, since no one from the anime industry went to the convention. The second panel was given by Chris and Claude, the editor of the anime magazine, Protoculture Addicts. In both panels, they gave us incentives to ask well-formulated questions to keep the talk moving. The incentives happened to be anime DVDs. (Unfortunately we only found out after viewing them that they weren't particularly good DVDs.)

Jorgh and I, along with the 5 other people in the room, asked sufficient questions to forward the panel interestingly enough for the entire two hours. In fact, we enjoyed asking questions to Chris, especially regarding the anime industry in North America, seeing that someone who was knowledgeable enough to answer the nagging thoughts in our mind. For example, what of fansubs? How does it affect the sales of anime? Which companies in NA makes reasonably good decisions regarding distribution and production? What happened between 2000 and 2006 that screwed up distribution of anime across this continent? (I'm not going to answer these questions here.)

What both Jorghnassen and I found completely inconsiderate and immature was that waiting outside of the panels were kids who were impatiently waiting for the next panel. They were being loud and obnoxious, as only young people can get, and didn't realize that their stupid comments about how boring the panels sounded could be heard by everyone inside the room. Way to make the panelists feel good, jerks. If I had had presence of mind, I would have chewed their heads off made them apologize to Chris and Claude.

In fact, those kids were waiting for the totally awesome and intellectually stimulating panel called "Les anime que vous aimez détester." </sarcasm> The panel apparently consisted of random debates between people intent on pissing everyone else off in the room, and squealing fangirls.

Afterwards, we left the place feeling sufficiently creeped out from too many people, but satisfied with the two DVDs we gained from attending. Until we watched them, that is. Why HOW did they make 26 episodes of that show?!

No, we didn't see Irulanne.