Atelier Kurotsuki

Otakuthon 2014

Convention, Otakuthon

As per Kurotsuki tradition, here is a belated post on Otakuthon 2014, a convention I attended two months ago.

This year, it was the 9th edition of this Montreal Anime Convention “otakuthon”

Lucky for me this is my local convention, so minimal traveling was required, but in order to avoid public transportation pain I took a room downtown with a couple of friends,

This year, otakuthon received a couple of big name guests: relevant of my interest  Ishikawa Yui, Neko, Masayuki Ozaki, Nobuo Uematsu, Arnie Roth, Benjamin Nuss and Raj Ramaya.

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Day 0

For the first time since I’ve attended this I went to pick up my badge on day 0 because I was told there was nobody then.  I ended up being in line for 1h30 .

Day 1

 

Totally skipped setting foot at the con center on day 1. Went to meet @andrea_chii and her friends at imadake instead, and when I got back we started watching Love Live 4th in the hotel’s room

 

Day 2

Ishikawa Yui autograph

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By now we are expert at this, the key to victory is camping out. So with clearly a serious lack of sleep due to watching lots of lives the previous night, we went to camp in the con center 2hs before Yui’s autograph.  I got her to sign my Heroic Age BD, which appeared to make her and her manager very happy that someone knew about this role of hers.

 A New World concert.

I somehow ended up buying ticket for this during the pre-reg so after the autograph session, I went to queue up for that.

I’m not the biggest Final Fantasy Music fan, and by that I mean that I only know “One Wing angel” and “Those who fight”.

But, the concert was nonetheless enjoyable…. for all the parts that I wasn’t sleeping in.

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It’s a huge shame that the concert ticket were integrated IN the con badge (I am going to assume to avoid scalping?) , because if it wasn’t, I would have given my ticket to someone else.

I really loved Nyuss reedition of “Those who fight” and Arnie Roth is a cool MC, I just wish the music talked more to me. But you know what they say : Shikatanai

Sunrise Industry Panel.

After the concert , i went to take a look in the dealers room, and then headed back to catch the Sunrise Panel.

Masayuki Ozaki was showcasing Sunrise properties for the most part than then had a Q&A during which he would have giveaways for the 10 first questions.

Gundam giveaway, so of course I lined up.

I asked him why, Sunrise being a subdivision of Namco Bandai , allowed A-1 take iM@S away from them and animate it.

I May or may not have taken him by surprised. No, actually I definitely took him by surprise, iM@S question was the last thing he expected to hit him.

Ozaki’s response was basically that because of the failure of Xenoglossia, Bandai didn’t want Sunrise to handle the 765 idols anymore and offered the task to Rival/friendly company A-1

@KeionKirby asked another funny question.

His question went as such “ With all the money you are making with Love Live, I buy all the Blu-ray, the Lives and Such, I really like this show. Will you animate Kyoukai Senjo no horizon season 3”

Short answer was “no” ww

Afternoon Autograph

After the Sunrise panel, I went to line up for Neko’s autograph…which got cancelled because Otakuthon staff could not locate Neko, who in turn was in the mountains because he had no idea that he had an autograph session. Turns out there was some unwarranted bypassing in during the schedule.

Hilarity ensued. After which, we line up for Ozaki’s autograph.

Ozaki was awesome enough to sketch for us.

Robert asked for Nishibros, Karageaz got Colonel Sanders, and Kirby got an evil looking Kotori.

Yui Ishikawa Q&A

We went to her panel after. This is more or less my only regret of Otakuthon.

For some reasons, her management decided to filter all questions and we had to ask pre-selected questions that came from CrunchyRoll.

While that much is already a shame, but the actual process of this happening was kind of a mess of mass confusion by most in part because of a lack of director by the staff

Out of this whole thing, I feel bad for Ishikawa the most.

But, can’t be helped.

After that, we pretty much ended the day with food overdose at the Milsa

And then we went back to do P stuff in our hotel room.

 

 

Day 3

Ishikawa Yui autograph

like day 2, the day started (albeit an hour later this time) by queuing up for Ishikawa’s autograph.

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Unfortunately I missed my change to attend the brunch with the guests on Sunday and I am being told that she was wearing a sort of maid looking cosplay for that. Hnnnnng.

This time I got her to sign the classic SnK

 

Sunrise: Anime Production Panel.

Went back for another round of Masayuki Ozaki goodness. This time he was hosting a panel that he’d never done before, a panel about producing anime and the role of a producer at sunrise.

It was a generally informative panel for those not in the known. I hope other producers for other studios do more stuff like that at cons in the future, this is really great.

I asked him about time slots for anime, how and who determines it (in reality the deeper meaning of my question would have been to find out the reason they thought it would be a great idea to change Code Geass’s time slot, which is one of major attribution to why season 2 is a trainwreck compared to season 1, but…I settled for simplicity)

The answer I got was sort of vague, but I can conjecture a couple of things from that.

 

Moving on, I quickly dropped by the second Ishikawa Q&A and pleasantly noticed that things proceeded much more smoothly than the previous one. Didn’t stay long however.

Briefly attended the Otakuthon Idol event near the end of the con.

Had the cut short the time there because we had been informed that Crunchyroll was willing to give us the WUG Shikishi my group and I desperately tried to win during the whole week-end.

Rob and I dashed to the dealers room and finally obtained the Holy grail.

 

Also while  roaming the dealers room waiting for our prize, we found some 765 Cosplayers.

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Otakuthon was send off rather gloriously by  Neko and the staff performances during the closing ceremonies.

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Overall, Otakuthon 2014 was a pretty great hangout con with added guests bonus.

Sure not everything was perfect, but I’d like to think that unlike certain WC convention, Otakuthon does learn and improves over the years.

Definitely looking forward to what they have in store for us next year since it’ll be the 10th anniversary.

Bonus :

Me and ShiroP :

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