Listen to the Rain

This is the first con I've ever gone to alone.

I mean, I'm not really alone. I was considering not going at all, but ACEN is the one time a year that I see a big chunk of my friends. Skipping it would mean not seeing them, and I think that's a pretty high price to pay. So I stuck with it, didn't cancel the hotel room, packed everything up, wrote down all the events I wanted to see, took the day off, and otherwise made all the preparations.

Friday

I was prepared for a lazy Friday morning and then heading over to the con around 2:30 to coincide with the hotel room being available, but thanks to modern technology I got a notification that the room was ready around 10:45 a.m., so I scarfed down lunch, packed, showered, and called a Lyft. Just like last year, though, the digital key I requested didn't process and I had to go to the front desk anyway. The process was painless, though I felt bad for the young man one attendant over who hadn't booked in advance and couldn't rent a room due to being under 21, and after taking the elevator and getting a compliment on my hair, I stopped off in my room briefly to drop off my luggage and eat some salted koiwashi. Then, it was off to the dealer's room.

Polygonal Sephiroth was back once again, but I did not get a picture.

After a bit of wandering, I found redpikachu's booth and stopped in for a chat. I stayed for about an hour while some other people also drifted in, talking about how old we were and why we still kept coming to ACEN--to see all the other people who keep coming, mostly--and when it seemed that the crowds were getting thicker and some of the people visiting drifted away, I said by goodbyes with them.

On the way to Artist's Alley, now stuck off in an alcove to the side of the dealer's room, I ran into two mages:


Artist's Alley isn't usually a big draw for me, because I already have a ton of knickknacks and because most of the art is from series that I've never even heard of, much less seen. But it's nice to look at, and sometimes there's neat things there, like reminders that webcomics I haven't read in years still exist. I looked for Kirby paraphernalia, found little that I didn't already have, and then did the same thing with the rest of the dealer's room. There was one very cute fat Kirby that's similar to one I already own, but no sword Kirbys or chef Kirbys and no Waddle Dees at all. Thus defeated, I decided I'd try again later and left. On the way back, I noticed that the crowds were extremely sparse and figured I'd try the video games room, which just like last year was all set to free play and stuffed full, though not of people. All the rhythm games were crowded, but there were plenty of open seats. I played a couple rounds of vector-graphics Asteroids, which I was terrible at, and then a danmaku game called Raiden Fighters, which I was also terrible at but managed to make some progress due to it being on free play. After ten minutes or so, I realized I'd need way more practice to be anything close to good, so I gave up and left.

On the way out, I saw a small booth with someone playing a game where they were wandering around an open field as a cat. It's called Cattails and looks like exactly the kind of game that people would be demanding the Switch version of, but as a primarily PC gamer, I'm happy it's on Steam. I grabbed a promo card for a special fur coat and left.

It was about time for the "Religion in Japan" panel but I figured I'd pull the "I lived in Japan" card and skip it, so after a quick trip to the room to get some snacks and water, and a brief distraction of looking at the internet while on WiFi, I went back out and walked to the Hyatt.

I walked behind this guy the whole way there. I don't know what his cosplay was (edit: sabinae_saga tells me it was Fiddlesticks from League of Legends), but it was impressive.


I sat in the Hyatt for a bit and people-watched. The squad of Kiyoshi Warriors and the cabbage vendor, the Junkrats, the Marios, the scores of people I didn't recognize, and the very confused Emirates flight attendants staying in the hotel, and after a bit went downstairs where I found a Kirby!


After a brief stint in the AMV room, I left when the dubstep started and went back upstairs where DJ Stalkid was playing a set, where I wait for twenty minutes or so. I saw redpikachu go by in a hurry from across the room, but otherwise the Hyatt was nearly empty (compared to Saturday). After that, it was time for the first panel of the weekend on Kingdom Hearts bullshit.

I played Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II right when they came out, which started a decade and a half ago what the hell, but haven't played anything else. There are over a dozen other games, and now that Kingdom Hearts III might actually come out, I'm curious what I missed.

The answer is basically everything. There was a prophecy, something called the "Keyblade War," a group called the Foretellers whose job it is to prevent the war (they fail), a warning about a traitor,

...he is given a keyblade with an eye, that's actually MoM's ("Master of Masters") eye, that transmits information back to MoM in the past...

and eventually one of them tries to summon Kingdom Hearts (the place) and a war starts. Oops.

...because it turns out that keyblade wielders have the power to move through time...

Also, apparently the original keyblade looked like this, based on the Greek letter χ ("chi").

...Sora decides that I just won so easily that I'm going to commit Disney seppuku and release the princess's heart anyway...

Eraqus, an old friend of Xehanort, had apprentices--Ventus, Terra, and Aqua--that he trained to use the keyblade. Aqua passes the test of mastery, but Terra doesn't because he relies too much on the power of darkness. Xehanort jumps on him and tells him how great darkness is and Terra signs on with him, later meeting Malificent and working with her too. The three apprentices jump from world to world and eventually meet in Radiant Garden, quarrel over Terra's use of darkness, and break their friendship. But Aqua meets Kairi and puts a blessing on her, and then consults with King Mickey about the danger to the worlds.

...King Mickey leaves a note with his dog, who gives it to his other dog, who's the captain of the guard...

And so on. Note that none of this is in the games I've played. They had to use little character models in the corner as footnotes to go back to.

...So Roxas is a bit dull, since he was literally born yesterday...

And this was just part one of two! Ninety minutes!

...So we've created "Riku's Darkness Edgelord Counter"...

Maybe I won't be playing Kingdom Hearts III after all.

I walked back to the room, past the kids going to their prom, and ate a quick dinner as well as changed into a long-sleeved shirt. While I was eating, I got a message from klenkers telling me that he was all set up in his room and, as is tradition, had some tea to give to me. After I finished eating, I left to go back to the Hyatt again.

After a brief detour to the games room, where I played more Asteroids and a couple games of Missile Command, and I found the Street Fighter crew:



I heard from smtemp that everyone was watching an Anime Power Hour in AliceTheAllStar's room, so I caught the last fifteen minutes of that. When I entered, timothy.beier thanked me for the time he had come to visit us in Japan, which he said was the best time of his life, and I spent a while talking to purenell about life and video games. When Hyatt staff showed up in response to a noise complaint, we all left and went separate ways, but purenell and I went on to klenkers's room.

It was lovely. The three of us talked about what's been happening in our lives, klenkers gave me some green tea, eventually redpikachu, smtemp, pharlik, AliceTheAllStar, and others all showed up and we chatted until ten o'clock rolled around and I had to leave right in the middle of a conversation about Castlevania to make it to the Lovecraft and Japan panel.

After a primer on who Lovecraft was and what his writing was about, it got into Japan. Lovecraft's stories first showed up in the 40s in pulp magazines, but Ken Asamatsu did a lot to encourage new authors to publish more stories set in the Mythos. Then there was a whole section on Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, the anime series where Nyarlathotep is a cute schoolgirl. I've seen a couple episodes of it, and I was not super impressed. After that was Moe Moe Cthulhu Mythos Dictionary, a bunch of artwork of Mythos creatures as cute girls. You may notice a theme here.

After that, the presenter finally got to the part I was interested about--authors influenced by Lovecraft. Junji Ito was first and an author that I've actually read, though only The Enigma of Amigara Fault. The presenter also mentioned The Thing That Drifted Ashore, Gyō, and The Dread Planet. Second was Kaoru Kurimoto and her work Makai Suikōden, about the Great Old Ones fighting the Shintō kami.

Also, apparently Digimon has Lovecraftian references? Dagomon? An organization called "Hypnos"? And there were a lot more, like Song of Saya, the MegaTen and Persona games (Persona 2: Eternal Punishment even has a resolution for the story Through the Gates of the Silver Key), Princess Resurrection, an eroani called Mystery of the Necronomicon, and some postcards with kawaii Deep Ones and Cthulhu on them. And maybe more tentacle eroge than I would have liked.

I messaged klenkers to see if the party was still going on only to learn that it had been forcibly shut down by the hotel management and the police! The Hyatt seems to really be cracking down on room parties this year, but he invited me up anyway, so I went up and we quietly chatted while I ate some ramen he offered. When the ramen was done, I bid him goodnight and possibly goodbye for this year and went down to the game room, where smtemp had told me that she and some other people were waiting in line for the Battletech pods!



I didn't get in on the first game, but I did get in on the second, and while I didn't score well at all--6 out of 7--I had the satisfaction that one of the other players cheerfully called me a dick when she overheard my callsign ("Storm") because I immediately enabled torso twisting and spent a bunch of time strafing around other players.

After a few games of Smash WiiU, it was 2:45 a.m. and we were all tired. So, having stayed up the latest I have at any con in a while, I said goodnight, went back to the room, and went to bed.

Saturday

I woke up at 7:30, maybe due to the light coming in through a crack in the curtains, but I managed to go back to sleep until 9 and then went down to breakfast in the hotel. It was okay, not worth anywhere near $25 but they did make omelets to order, and on my way back I found Red from Transistor.


After a shower and accidentally ripping a nail while shaving, I got dressed and went over to the games room again, figuring that in the morning it'd be less crowded. And it was, at least for the games I wanted to play. Asteroids, Columns, and another danmaku game that I didn't catch the name of, with a techno-fantasy theme. Dragons in armor covered with machine guns, that kind of thing. I did okay, but this time I left after one continue. I also grabbed another card for a game called Batbarian that I saw someone playing.

I took a trip to the dealer's room looking for more kirbys, and I didn't find much, though I did find the squishy Metroid amiibo and some Bananya plushies for reasonable prices. I also stopped by redpikachu's booth when I saw that stephen_poon was there, so we chatted for a bit. But the booth was very busy and we only had a few minutes before he had to return to work, so I moved on.

I happened to pass by two people running a booth dressed as Ganondorf and Zelda. Ganon had a music box hidden in his armor that played a techno remix of the fairy fountain theme:


Then it was panel time. I skipped the Final Fantasy panel because it turns out that I got to it last year, but I wanted to go to "The Simulated Camera," about imitating camera techniques in animation.

After mentioning another panel about "sakuga" (maybe 作画, "making pictures", but he used it to refer to auteur animation choices) that inspired him, the panel started. The panelist suggested that anime is more about shot framing and looking cool, whereas Western animation is more about the character action, as a rule of thumb. He pointed out a lot of animation tropes, like talking heads, reused animation, heads moving without moving the body at all, and so on. Then he went on to imitated techniques, like putting in lens flares, fish-eye lens, blurring areas that are "out of focus," vertigo zoom, shaky-cam, and so on. He also showed a bunch of clips from Zankyō no Terror, which came up a lot in last year's panel about portrayal of light in anime. I don't actually know much about filmmaking, but it was interesting!

Further info at the the panelist's website

I wasn't originally thinking about going to the second half of the Kingdom Hearts panel, but after that first one I couldn't skip out on it. After paperclipping through the line and talking to a woman standing in line with me, we got in and the panel began. It opened with a quick recap of the previous day's panel and then they moved on to Kingdom Hearts II. Roxas, Sora's Nobody, is trapped in a computer simulation of Twilight Town in order to assist in the process of restoring Sora's memories. Sora wakes up, is attacked by Nobodies, and is rescued by King Mickey and goes to see Yen Cid and learns about Organization XIII. Again, since he knew about it before but his memories were erased. Later, he learns from Axel that Organization XIII has been collecting the hearts from the Heartless that Sora has been destroying, using them to build the World That Never Was.

...and Riku decides to pull an Oprah and give Kairi a keyblade too...

Sora fights his way through Disney worlds to Organization XIII's headquarters; beats up the organization; defeats Xemnas, the Nobody of Ansem the Wise; gets sent to the realm of Darkness; and escapes. Happy ending!

...but he is now "data Sora," a completely different character...

Meanwhile, King Mickey uses Ansem's machinery to turn Jiminy's journal into a virtual world to determine why it has entries that Jiminy didn't write. In the data world, Sora learns about pain, and that experiencing pain is a necessary part of healing. And also about Ventus, Aqua, and Terra, Eraqus's old apprentices. Mickey decides to tell Sora this by writing a letter, sticking it a bottle, and sending it to Destiny Island, which is the ending cutscene in Kingdom Hearts II.

...this one is the rapper known as "Young Xehanort"...

Sora and Riku now have to take the Test of Mastery and awaken worlds lost to darkness, and they do thus by going back in time. Things are going well until Xehanort also time travels to mess with the test, Riku jumps into Sora's dream, and they end up separated with Sora in Traverse Town. Meanwhile, it turns out that if someone's Heartless and their Nobody are both destroyed, they are resurrected, and most of Organization XIII is now alive again. Xehanort's tormenting of Sora drives him into a dream inside his existing dream, the "Chasm of Dreams," at which point Riku returns to reality. Double meanwhile, Xehanort and Braig, the mercenary who is the resurrected Xigbar, fight Sora and defeat him. This leads to a big brawl where everyone shows up to save Sora's heart.

...after ten years, Mickey remembers that Aqua exists...

Riku passes the exam but Sora does not, but Sora is a good person and is happy for his friend. Riku goes to fetch Kairi and train her to use the keyblade, and they all train under Merlin, who apparently knows how to use keyblades. Sora eventually wakes up and is told he lost all his powers, and thus Kingdom Hearts III.

...when I say "Cloud storage," I mean Cloud has been included from the beginning...

There was also a section about Kingdom Hearts Key/Union X, the mobile games, but they're very different in structure since they have character creation and might take place in manufactured dream worlds? It's not entirely clear.

After the panel ended, I went back to the room, getting a compliment on my Renn Faire Magen David necklace on the way, and snagged some raisins before changing in my boots. Then I took the long walk to the Hyatt, hoping I would find someone I knew. I saw a few great cosplays from people who seemed to be in a hurry to the masquerade, and then I noticed timothy.beier across the way and walked over to everyone, and we retired to a room to chat. We listened to saiyukisiren tell us about her job as an animal wrangler in partnership with the DNR for a while, and then I had to go. As I walked out on the ground floor, I saw a companion for jolly cooperation:


I went to the dealer's room looking for more Kirbys, but the shop I specifically asked was out of everything other than the ice Kirby nendroid that I already own. I looked elsewhere, but I didn't find anything, though I did get to talk to a booth set up by the University of Michigan about programs in Japan. Then, it was time for the Japanese fashion panel.

The panel started with members of the シカゴ和風倶楽部 (Shikago Wafū Kurabu, "Chicago Japanese-style Club") talking about wearing kimono and the different styles. I learned that Shōwa kimono were often made of wool, which made them popular since they were easy to take care of. They showed a bunch of kimono styles and patterns, furisode and tomisode, and explained their own clothes, of varying colors and styles.

I just want to quickly talk about how I got into kimono...it's actually from anime. Do you guys know Sayōnara Zetsubō-sensei?

One of the women presenting also mentioned that she felt like at her age she should be wearing kimono and started frantically asking around about it to learn as much as she could. Another mentioned that her kimono had arrows on it as a prayer that, like an arrow shot from a bow, a bride should not return to her parents' house.

Also, one of the women in kimono’s son was there, dressed as Captain America.

The second half of the presentation was more kawaii, about lolita fashion. Baby the Stars Shine Bright, Angelic Pretty, that sort of thing. It's a look I like--I really like cute things--but, like kimono, it's not super applicable to anything I can wear. This part had fewer explanations and more picture examples. One of the presenters was dressed in decora fashion, which I had never heard of before. Sadly, the panel ran out of time before the last person could present and before I could take any pictures.

I went back to the Hyatt and ate dinner alone in the restaurant before answering redpikachu's call and joining her, ping816, AliceTheAllStar, and others at Red Bar. I showed up at the end of the meal, so we chatted for a bit and then dispersed. ping816 was going back to his room to sleep, so I split off to go back to Red Bar with saiyukisiren, smtemp, pharlik, and some others. The meal was slow, considering that we just got a few things and were trying to be quick, but it was really nice to talk to people!

On the way out, I saw Master Splinter(?) and Alakazam:


Afterwards we went back to a room. strippervash and MoreVoltz were there, fresh from MCing the masquerade, and I stayed and talked until smtemp and pharlik had to leave, then I went down to the game room where ping816 had gone. I was held up for a bit when some people sitting out in the hallway asked me about my boots, but I found my way to game took before too long. They had swapped out the Battletech machines for another game, but we played Smash Brothers again until people got tired and then we left. And on the way back, I got catcalled:

“Oh my G-d, your hair! Your boots! Your everything! I want to have his babies!”
“Oh my G-d, Rebecca, stop talking about wanting to have his babies!”
-The women walking behind me

This continued for like a minute, until we outpaced them and they got distracted. I think I heard one of them telling the other than I was shy, which is true, but that's not entirely why I didn't respond. It was...hmm. Flattering for a moment, and then unnerving.

ping816 was sleepy and so was basically everyone else in the room, so after a bit I said my goodbyes and went downstairs. I sat and people-watched for maybe twenty minutes until I got a text from klenkers saying that people were gathering in his room again, so I went up there. I talked to klenkers about tea and privilege, got to see KeppyChan, heard the tale of the jail jolly ranchers, and left in a hurry at 3 a.m. when Hyatt staff were patrolling again. I made a quick stop in the video games room and played some Centipede and another danmaku game and then, at 3:40 a.m., made it back to my room and went to sleep.

Sunday

​I woke up at 7:30, but managed to sleep fitfully until 9:30 and then got up. After packing up my things, I walked out of the hotel to the convention center, thankful for the skyway as the rain fell in lashing sheets outside. I went back down to the dealer's room one last time to see if there was anything that I really wanted. I still couldn't really find anything Kirby-related, but I did buy two pieces of modern ukiyo-e art--one of Princess Zelda leading a squad of soldiers, and one of the Warriors of Light fighting Chaos. The Zelda one is printed on metal and I think it'll go great with The Hero Rests.

I stopped by redpikachu's booth to say goodbye and saw that she had sold all of her forest friends. KeppyChan was there too, so we all talked briefly and then I did a final sweep, wrote down the names of a few booths that I wanted to check out later (Amy Nagi, False Delusion Studio, Charity Santiago, and Studio de Sade), and then left. On the way out, I found Zant from Twilight Princess.


After that, all that was left to do was get my luggage, go down to the front desk, and check out.


So ends ACEN 2018.

I just realized that this is the tenth ACEN I've been to. 05, 06, 07, 08, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, and this year. From 2009 to 2011 I was in Japan, and in 2013 we didn't have the money. Those gaps are why I didn't realize it previously.

People kept asking me if I had a good time, and I really did. It was enough to convince me that whatever, happens, I should come back next year. ACEN is the one time a year that I see some of my friends, which has value that's definitely worth more than the cost of going. And even if I don't watch that much anime anymore and have no idea what series most of the people cosplaying were from, there's still plenty for me to see and do. I was telling klenkers that there are whole sections of the con I don't go to, and that I could spend the weekend in the board games and tabletop section and have a fantastic time. I haven't gone to a con masquerade in a decade now, or to any of the dances in almost as long.

And I'm glad I could get the full con experience of staying up late and waking up early. Even at 35, I haven't lost my edge when it counts!

See you next year, ACEN.
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