Arrival | Friday | Saturday | Sunday
I had been up for about five minutes Sunday morning when several of the girls knocked on our door and barged into our room. Thankfully, we were dressed.
"Let's go, hurry up! Come on!" they shouted.
The occasion? Why, we had to hurry or we'd miss the 10:00 am screening of Digimon: The Movie!
From Tai to Bye
Sunday: We All Do A Run-Run-Run Around
We checked out in a hurry, stopping only to play Car Trunk Tetris with our stuff (Matt had a tub full of cosplay stuff and Richard had a full-sized suitcase). With that done, we set the ground rules- meet up after the Digimon panel and we were off.
Sunday morning, and the stairs are empty and hollow now. I'll give you a hint- we're not all at church.
After a makeshift breakfast of whatever I had left in my survival bag, I joined the girls for the Digimon movie. I'm not sure why they scheduled it, or two Pokémon movies and the (unabridged) Yu-Gi-Oh movie, but we knew why we were going to see it!
Well done. Now you're thinking with Portals.
Okay... fine... *now* you're thinking with Portals.
Oh, there are few things sadder than revisiting the hack job that was the Digimon movie. Okay, there's lots of things, but let's remove all pretense that it was a good movie. It was three okay movies combined into one piece of WTF? But damned if it isn't fun to watch in a group of people that have come solely to mock it... and hail the absolute awesomeness of Izzy. I mean, not only does he hack into military programs and forwards bandwidth-poisoning e-mails to the bad guys with nothing more than a John McClane style one-liner ("You've Got Mail, Motherf**ker!"), but he does it all on a homegrown set-up that features a PC desktop and his Apple laptop in perfect synch! No wonder Cassie has a crush on him.
The Digimon panel that would have been soon afterwards if not for another bout of bi-polar scheduling, was not quite the dessert we had hoped for. The panelists came in thinking it would be a nice introductory panel for all the kiddies who didn't get a chance to see the original run. Instead, they got a room full of older kiddies who wanted to wax nostalgic about the series and, more importantly, argue over popular characters, pairings, and which season was the best. This divide never did get bridged to my satisfaction. I even had to explain the whole Konaka thing to the panelists.
There was cosplay, but the Rika seemed half-asleep and I've seen better Karis elsewhere. Little did everybody know that the best Digimon cosplay wasn't even there:
Ahem... Ikuto from season five. He was just happy someone recognized him.
Since we already got a head start with the random cosplay pictures, let's get going then before we leave this fine convention.
Easing the divide from Digimon to cosplay gradually for you...
Haruhi is getting a bit overdone. Daikon bunny girl is passe. ENOZ bunny girl Haruhi... hell yeah.
I'm glad that I've actually seen FMA now so I can appreciate these guys. Normally such mainstream series don't get onto my camera, but I'll make an exception for these two.
Thwomp! And now it's time for this commercial break...
This is one of those "why the hell not?" cosplays. The only person he can't steal from is the Burger King.
But why have burgers when you can have a...
FEAST!
It's hard to explain why this is so great. It just is.
Okay, I'm done. Now back to your regularly-scheduled programming.
Not only is this an incredible Knight Saber (the tube on the back lights up and everything), it also demonstrates my affinity for older series.
Which lets me take pictures of...
Original Dirty Pair Kei and El Hazard's Shayla Shayla. Shayla was happy I actually knew who she was and not just taking her picture because she's wearing a short skirt. On that note...
...one more of Yoko for good measure.
We left the Digimon panel, ran into the rest of our group and got out quickly, Cassie still determined to drive the whole way back. Eric was determined to at least keep up, slip-sliding his way through Ohio and all the way out of Indianapolis before Aurus needed refueling and we needed dinner. While Matt made the short and boring pop up to Chicago, I finished my latest MST session and even read through a couple chapters of Reanna's fun fantasy story Jigsaw, a series I really need to find time for. Our second stop was fast; popping into the nearest establishment (which happened to be a Hooter's), using the bathroom and leaving.
I cleared the Chicago stage for everybody, this time with a slightly higher difficulty setting based on the time of day. For our third stop outside Kenosha, I parked the car so all Richard had to do was turn right onto the street and then get back on the interstate. He did... running a red light in the process. He also asked if he could save his parents a trip and stop at his house on the way. Given how his suitcase was at the bottom of our Trunk Tetris pile, the answer was a no. We arrived safely back in Wisconsin, although I didn't get to play that Jesus Christ Superstar. So I put it in for my solo trek back to Beaver Dam.
The final leg was noteworthy because warmer weather over the weekend resulted in crazy-ass fog, slowing my trip down (and mixing with the CD to create a very surreal experience) and creating a massive pile-up on an interstate south of Madison. If that wasn't enough, Monday brought thunderstorms and tornadoes. Yes, tornadoes in January. But don't worry, by Thursday we were back to getting several inches of snow.
Welcome back to Wisconsin. Next convention's No Brand, so after all that I'm still stuck here. Oyasumi-nasai.