Arrival | NTAO/AMV Contest | Dance/Sunday
Back at the hotel after the AMV contest, Sarah took a quick nap while I pondered the situation clouding over the cosplay contest. Yes, the AMV contest itself was great, but the crowd control before and after wasn't.
One of the stranger quirks about Detour is that the staff has some strange aversion to the concept of organized lines. While viewed as a necessary evil at Anime Iowa and a torment-worthy evil at ACen ("Torment!"), Detour sticks to the rugged individualistic approach- hover around the doors long enough and eventually you'll get in first. Congoers are often left to form their own lines (or mobs, more often) outside key events. It's not necessarily a good thing.
The aftermath was also troublesome, as the largest three programming rooms are all downstairs, where the only access is one escalator, guarded vigorously by a zealous badge checker (actually, all the badge checkers were uncomfortably zealous, but after the lax security at Milwaukee I'll let it slide). Thus, when all three programming rooms morph into one to form the Main Programming Megazord, when such an event ends it's a madhouse to get out.
The former made me want to arrive at the contest early. The latter made me dread leaving it. These two manifested themselves immediately as Sarah was apparently content in dreamland, where the cosplay contests didn't involve Caramelldansen or L or "you just lost the game." The more my efforts to wake her went fruitless, the later it got and the more the revulsion kicked in and made me want to just forget the whole thing. That way we could avoid the Darwinist line creation and the escalator bottlenecks. When Sarah finally woke up, she was pretty pissed at my conclusion. Then I reminded her that Detour's masquerade likely would have Caramelldansen and L. Plus there was alternate programming and room parties and, best of all, fewer people to share them with. The decision was made: we were skipping the masquerade.
On our way back, we encountered scalpers trying to sell us $10 tickets the Swarm game. The team that had their mascot give us free tickets to the same game. They're doing it wrong.
Saturday
Bypass
First thing on our list of alternate programming... Snoopy.
Bunch of Peanuts characters were outside the hotel to be auctioned off by the city. They were very pretty.
Next thing on our list was getting up to the video game room, which we had not seen yet. Taking a page from Iowa '06, it was up on the 22nd floor and there were only three elevators serving the entire hotel. Given the size of some of the lines, I was at times glad we weren't staying at the con hotel. Thankfully with everybody distracted at the shiny things in the cosplay contest, we got on an elevator easily and rode on up.
Guilmon greeted us! He's alive!!
(Wow, lame reference to my fanfiction. It's been a while.)
The video game room was solid, but not remarkable. There were no open machines, so we just spent the time wandering and realizing we were on the 22nd floor of a building in downtown St. Paul.
Looking straight down on the river...
And at the cathedral, with a faint glimpse of distant Minneapolis. Yes, these are through the window.
With the sightseeing done, we headed back down to find a particularly enticing room party offering board games. When we arrived, they were playing a rousing round of We Didn't Play Test This Game, a strange little game that finds different random ways to make players lose. We lost early and often, as the game uses very minimal strategy- most of which revolves around figuring out a way to take as many players down as you can once you are doomed to fail. It was fun, but got monotonous quickly.
We followed Roku and Drazz into a couple other room parties, almost all of which are arranged very nicely on the first two floors and publicized in the program book- a neat little innovation. Sarah and I found ourselves on the 7th floor at one point, scoping out Eagle Anime's room party. Inside, we found a large group watching the end of the cosplay on closed circuit TV. That meant we couldn't stay: if the cosplay was ending, we needed to hop an elevator back to the ground floor or we would be stuck upstairs forever!
Back downstairs, we loafed around poolside for a while with Harley. Although we missed the masquerade and the wonderful costumes within, naturally at some point the costumes would come to us.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say these guys won something.
While wandering aimlessly, the board game folks announced a massive game of Apples to Apples. Oh we were so in.
Now this was a more substantial card game, one that could Sarah and Harley and I engaged for some time. There was nothing that could tear us away.
Okay, one thing. But once we got its picture, we were right back in the middle of it.
Apples was awesome, of course. Once the Trigun DVD ran out of episodes, our hosts reloaded with Repo: The Genetic Opera. This new musical had recently captured my interest for several reasons. For starters, it was a deliberate attempt to replicate the success of movies like Rocky Horror Picture Show, it featured a cast ranging from Sarah Brightman to Paris Hilton, and even among the hippest of geeks ranged its quality from "awesome and brilliant" to "plug your ears awful." So, just as I did with Anime Detour as a whole, I was able to watch for myself and form an opinion.
I'm going with plug your ears awful. There are reasons few have tried to combine pulp, horror and operatic recitative. A standard musical, absolutely, but the attempts at opera motif and melodrama failed horribly.
For (hopefully) better music, we turned to the dance. When we walked in, they were playing Caramelldansen. Despite being Caramelldansen, this was okay as it proved that they were at least playing geek-oriented selections and not just a stream of techno or tired 80's hits. I mean, they did mix in the occasional techno or tired 80's hit, but the important thing was balance. Well, that and the lights were flashy without being nauseating. That's important too.
Of course, by this point in the day, I'm so tired that I can barely move, so I rested a lot, drank water, and just had fun listening to the selections and watching the scantily-clad ladies do their wriggling. Every so often, something like Time Warp would come up that was worth rocking to, but for the most part we played it cool. Best of all, they played Haruka Kanata, fulfilling the J-Rock requirement. So to summarize- actual good music along with the occasional quirk, J-Rock, and minimal nasty lights. Like the AMV Contest related to Iowa, rather than focus on how well Detour performed, I could only dwell on how awful Daisho looked by comparison.
There were a couple more J-Rock songs played, including Super Shooter, Rip Slyme's opening to Gantz. Like I'd do for most Rip Slyme songs, I went nuts for that one. That pretty much cost me the rest of my MP and there was no sense trying to stick around. Time to hit the bed and recover.
Only problem was the weather. Suddenly, it was snowing. We trudged six blocks back to the hotel, with nothing to protect me as I didn't bring my magic bag. Sarah also assumed that since it was two in the morning, everybody else would be asleep.
You'll have to forgive her; she's new at this. Everybody was still up of course, and thankfully the hotel staff didn't ask questions when they dropped off the towels we would need to dry off.
The coolest thing that came about Saturday night was finding out that Ashley had read through MST, and offered some very good takes on many of the characters, to the point where she and Sarah actually got into an argument about whether Troy should be with Renee or Marie.
Yes, you read that correctly: there was a shipping debate over characters from my novel. It was quite possibly the highlight of the convention.
Still nobody advocating Donovan/Kendrick yaoi, thankfully.
Eventually, we did go to sleep. I forced everybody up early enough so we'd have plenty of time to clean up and freshen up before returning to the con for Sunday's entertainment.
During a discussion on bad cosplay, Nick got out of the bathroom looking like an L cosplayer. With just as little effort!
The checking out process could best be described as professional. There's always something of a teamwork effort, where everybody has to do their part to wake up, get themselves ready, get their belongings together and get them out of the room. Everybody did their part efficiently and we got out of there in time to enjoy the convention starting with the 11:30 panels, including my selection- sports in anime.
Picture of the panelist included solely because I wore my Hanshin Tigers jersey Saturday, one of a pair of jerseys I picked up at Ragstock in February. The other will debut at No Brand.
The panel was very fun, discussing some of the better sports anime and manga out there- Eyeshield, Hajime no Ippo, Major. Princess Nine got some love too. Hikaru no Go didn't: it's about a game, not a sport.
A trip to Subway (now much more vacant) and the dealers room (still kinda crowded) followed, where I picked up another Pillows CD and some orange-flavored Pocky.
Despite the trouble she was having with her balls, this is a Sakura cosplayer I can get behind. Makes you truly appreciate just how disturbed Tomoyo really is.
At Sarah's request, we went to a Yu-Gi-Oh panel. It was interesting enough, particularly watching fans celebrate and get behind a series by simply ignoring a show's overarching flaw (namely the life and death situations revolving around a children's card game). It ate up enough time to let us get downstairs to join the de facto line for Closing Ceremonies.
Simply not believing in lines does not mean they don't exist.
Sarah, Harley and I went to a little alcove. Harley and I killed time by assigning No Brand staffers and forum members to a deck of playing cards- figuring out who gets what card and such. Starting with Vinnk, Trae, Peso and Topher (the original Green Boy) as the Aces, we got down to about the 9s before we realized we needed a members list to be more objective. Neil was a 2.
The main reason for attending Closing Ceremonies was to get the results of the AMV contest. For the second straight convention, Sarah lost to a Haruhi drama video, and Best in Show went to a remarkable Beck video to Tenacious D's Tribute. Not only did Mongolian Chop Squad write the best song ever written, Ryuk from Death Note made a cameo appearance as the demon... complete with his own guitar solo. He shreds quite effectively, and it was a clear winner in a very good contest.
The other big announcement was just as significant: Detour was moving to a new hotel in 2010. By all accounts, this location was awful. The chokepoints, the attendance cap, the lack of parking, the elevator issues... it was all less than ideal. For that reason, it was very difficult to develop an informed opinion of the convention. A better location fixes half their problems, but not all of them- the stigma of bad staff/congoer relations remains. While my experiences with security weren't particularly bad, they weren't great either. From those and the reports from my colleagues, their negative reputation is fairly justified- at least to the point where Detour needs to focus in on it.
At the same time, they did many things extremely well, especially compared to other cons. Their registration earns it points over ACen. Their AMV contest puts Iowa and No Brand to shame. Their support for room parties and the wonderful dance made Daisho's major failings look easy. And I can't say enough about their tech staff, which every convention normally has a problem with. So it gets an incomplete. Since scheduling and funding force me to choose between Detour and ACen, and Sarah really wants to try ACen, there's no telling when I'll be back. So as much as I want to say "wonderful, misunderstood con" or "deserves all the trash spoken of it," it's a little of both, which doesn't get us anywhere, now does it?
Still, for spinning wheels for a weekend, there are few options more exciting, aren't there?