Nova’s Desucon Report – Saturday

The best thing about anime isn’t attending the cons… pic (c) Darkki

Desucon has concluded so I suppose it’s time to write up a report while I still remember what happened aside from the party van.

The weather was rainy, cold and over all shitty when I left for Desucon in a hellish hurry on Saturday – a perfect day to spend crammed into a convention center with a couple thousand other people. After finding my way inside I hurried to the main auditorium where the opening session was starting. The convention’s head organizer niidel gave a concise speech and then gave the stage over for the introduction of the two guests of honor – Momoi Halko and Fukumoto Nobuyuki. Halko immediately stole the show by performing Romantic Summer Kujibiki Unbalance and I was surprised by how damn good it sounded, because last year Furuya Tohru’s performance was undermined by a bit shaky sound reinforcement configuration. Might have been just me though, but this year I was sitting at the exact same spot as before and Halko’s song sounded pretty much perfect to my ears. A bunch of teenage kigurumi kids sitting behind me were misbehaving, giggling and screaming almost constantly. This also happened later on during Fukumoto’s panel, though that time it was a bunch of more mature attendees. They kept chatting, laughing, talking on their phones and banging their chairs without even trying to pay attention to the panel itself. Come on people, I know it’s cold outside and loud and crowded in the convention hall but don’t use the main auditorium as your personal hangout place during panels. Because it happens to piss a lot of people off, even if you pick the most remote corner on the second floor balcony.

Anyway, the program continued with Halko’s interview panel where hosts asked her various questions about her past and present as a singer/seiyuu/idol/otaku. Very interesting stuff and I was quite impressed by how much variance she has in the music she makes. The on-the-fly English subtitles were sort of a disappointment though as they were often greatly delayed and riddled with typos and grammatical mistakes. The translator reported that he had a hard time hearing the dialogue so it might have been mostly a technical difficulty. Anyway, that’s one point where improvement is certainly needed. In b4 “If you think it’s easy, why don’t you try it yourself!?“: Sure, why not? Bring it on! During the panel I noticed that a bunch of people were chatting on IRC from the auditorium and we had an entertaining game of hide-and-seek, trying to spot each other from the crowd. Halko concluded her panel accompanied by thunderous applauds and asked everyone to make sure they’re coming to her concert scheduled later that evening. All in all she gave an excellent performance with her cheery, energetic manner and I could tell the audience was captivated by her charm. As expected of the Queen of Akihabara, I suppose.

Next on stage was Fukumoto Nobuyuki, the mangaka behind the famous gambling series Kaiji and Akagi. The striking thing about Fukumoto was how ordinary he looked and acted like, when compared to Halko or last years performing guests, the rockstar-ish Furuya Tohru and the nerd-ish Imai Ryuusuke (who was also attending this year but only as a VIP guest). Dunno about Fujimoto Kiyokazu though, didn’t check him out in ’09. That wasn’t left a mystery as we went through his story so far over the rather lengthy interview – after all Fukumoto is a carpenter’s son and was originally a construction worker with a vocational degree. I must say that his story greatly inspired me because it somewhat relates to my own current situation. Close to his graduation Fukumoto still didn’t really know what he wanted to do with his life and eventually hit trouble in working life because he couldn’t find any joy in the construction supervising work he ended up with. Deciding to take a shot at drawing manga that had been his dream since high school, Fukomoto gradually forged his way to where he is now.

Right after Fukumoto’s interview Halko’s autograph session was held at the small stage in the main convention hall. Doing a favor for hikago, I got her signature on a Seto no Hanayome artbook/TV anime guide he had ordered from Amazon. Halko’s expression when she was handed a Seto no Hanayome artbook by a guy from head to toe in military gear was quite worth seeing too.

There was still quite a bit of time til Halko’s concert and nothing interesting was scheduled, so I headed over to the dealer’s room. And boy was I glad to find two booths dealing doujins acquired directly from Comiket. One of the booths was ran by a couple guys who appeared to be American and I had an interesting chat with one while browsing through their selection. I secured a couple decent-looking Touhou doujins and raced through the boxes with some other Finnfag in search of something truly worth while. For once Lady Luck was working for me and much to the dismay of my competitor I pulled out an AIR illustration doujin by Afterschool of the 5th Year, my absolute favorite circle. Best 10 euros I’ve ever used. I went to celebrate my diminished budget by grabbing some lunch at the cafeteria. I must raise my hat to the organizers for the buffet table – it was so much better and more convenient than all the crowded trash food places close by. Anyway, here’s the loot (I got the CD signed on Sunday):

Finally it was time for Halko’s concert, so I headed out for the main auditorium. The audience got free glowsticks and I dare say much of the concert’s excellent atmosphere was thanks to the sea of glowsticks waving around along the music. The performance was nothing less expected of Halko and it was pretty surprising that she managed to draw so much enthusiasm out of the primarily Finnish (read: reserved) audience. I’m no expert in music so I’ll just leave you with this: I thought was pretty awesome.

Originally I had planned to make a run for the Desubar as soon as the concert ended but a photographer friend who was providing me with a place to crash was still occupied, so I went to check out Moe vs. GAR vol.2 – continuation to possibly the craziest panel of Desucon ’09. Most of the panel was dedicated to a tournament of moe and GAR characters. In the moe series newfaggotry was running strong (Mugi defeating Rei? What the fuck?) but GAR got pretty close to a good end with TTGL’s Simon versus Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin’s Gohei. Come on fags, so what about some fucking drills? Gohei tore his god damn leg off to feed it to his dog. Now that’s fucking GAR right there. In the end the audience vote was pretty much a stalemate so the most GAR character was decided by the least GAR way of flipping a coin. Yes, Simon won. Now get the fuck out of my face. But at least Balsa lost, hahahaha!

In the end Desubar was sort of a failure as the bar was tiny, they ran out of orange juice for Desudrinks before we even got there and soon the place was flooded with middle aged Estonian dickwads who proceeded with telling us drunken TL;DL stories about their miserable life in the Russian military service. After a couple beers and gin&tonics I was done, gave niidel my regards and made a quick escape.

Sunday’s report coming up ASAP, hopefully tomorrow. All in all this year’s Desucon was bigger, badder and better in every regard and definitely one of the better ways to spend a rainy weekend. Remember, all panels have been videoed and will be available at the con’s website. For foreign fans of Halko and Fukumoto, let me quote one of the organizers:

Both the Fukumoto and Momoi talkshow videos will be accompanied by english subtitles. They are about two hours each so it’ll take some time to time & translate, but rest assured the first ever public appearance of Fukumoto outside of Japan will be released “soonish”.

P.S. As someone pointed out, Halko performed Kujibiki Unbalance’s OP at the opening ceremony, not Romantic Summer (which was performed during the concert though). Guess I’m getting old. Brb Alzheimer’s.

P.S.S. No pictures for now. I didn’t take any myself and the official photos will take some time to be released. Since each assigned photographer took around 600-1000 photos, it’ll take a while to go through all of them. They have lives too, in case you weren’t sure. For now here are a few albums:
Odbeari’s album
Denartle’s album