July 17-19, 2009

We had a really great time at Otakon 2009, our third convention! Thursday night pre-registration badge pick-up was a crazy long line (after walking around the entire convention building we realized it wrapped all the way back to the front where we had started), but it moved at a decent pace. The staffers kept holding up the lines by the doors on the sides of the building (they said to avoid a fire hazard) and the people around us in line were entertaining to watch. When the line moved enough for them to pass in front of each door they would sneak like they were in Metal Gear Solid to get past it. I brought my BJD, Shuichi, with us again this year and my mom made him an adorable cosplay outfit that matched a disguise he wore in the Gravitation manga. We took pictures of him and my other doll, Yuki, before we left on Friday morning. We also attended another doll meetup this year and it was really fun to see all the different dolls that everyone brought, especially to see the ones that we saw last year again.

This year it was nice to spend a good amount of time in the Artist's Alley. We completely missed going through it the first year, and only spent a few minutes in it last year, so it was fun to actually spend time looking through all the tables. We were really excited this year for Crispin Freeman's panel, as he is one of our favorite voice actors, and we ended up getting seats in the second row! He was a really good speaker and kept the audience entertained for the entire panel with his answers to the attendees questions, and his stories about working at Disney, voiceover outtakes, and awkward fan encounters. Love his voice! On Sunday, as we were waiting at the station for the light rail, we thought that we heard bagpipes coming from the convention center, and sure enough we did. We could barely see him from our vantage point, but later found some great videos of the event on YouTube (although the security guards escorting him out didn't seem that enthused). It seemed like a nice way to bring another wonderful convention to a close.

Memorable Moments

• Shuichi and Yuki's cosplay outfits
• Thursday pre-reg super long line
• Cosplayers from Crisis Core, Princess Bride, Where's Waldo, Power Rangers
• Kikuko Inoue panel (she calls herself the 17 year old voice actress, had an adorable Japanese Mickey Mouse impression, and asked the audience for song suggestions for her band Wild Strawberry)
• Getting Cloud (the one we wanted) in a Dissidia trading figure blind box
• BJD doll meetup
• Second row seats for Crispin Freeman's panel
• Watching karaoke (especially a One Winged Angel performance)
• Purchases - Gravitation manga, Koizumi figure (from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya), Makoto Tateno art book, pins, character goods from Love Control, Kyo Kara Maoh, and Junjo Romantica, a Cloud Kingdom Hearts figure (can one ever have too many Cloud action figures?)
• Finding Dr. Horrible art in the Artist's Alley
• Travis Willingham panel
• Watching Genshiken 2 episodes 3 and 4 in the video room
• Made origami in our first visit to Ota-chan
• Fan playing bag pipes at the con close

Photos