12 Days of Xmas – Day 4: Yaoi-Con
Posted on December 17th, 2007 by calaggie in Conventions, Specials
Nummer vier in my series of anime/manga things that affected me in ‘07 is my first visit to Yaoi-Con. I hadn’t gone the three previous years because I either didn’t feel compelled to go (not anything against the content, I was just lazy) or didn’t plan ahead with the other DAC people who are annual attendees. This year, however, I decided to go for it and see what it was about. Unfortunately I forgot to put my memory stick back in my camera after copying photos off from the Ubisoft event I went to the night before so I have no personal pictures to supplement my “late report” of the convention.
First, I also have to mention that I had left my cell phone in someone’s car the previous night so I had to use a pay phone to get in touch with our driver. I also woke up noticably after the planned 6am leave time, which worked out because some of the other carmates weren’t ready. The fact that it took until 9:30 for her and I to find each other in the park while the Farmers’ Market was going on was mostly my fault for not going to the obvious “open space” so that she could see me. Anyway, around 10am, we hit the freeway and were on our way to San Mateo and the Marriott Hotel.
Once our car arrived, we had to register there and so we stood in line and paid our $35 for Saturday only. We then met some friends who were queueing for tickets for the cosplay masquerade and AMV contest and who had been at the con since the day before to attend the Bishounen Auction Friday night. I then kind of split off to go with one girl (who had just qualified to attend Yaoi-Con and is a big Danny Phantom fan) to visit one of her DeviantArt friends and then I wandered around the dealers’ rooms.
I actually bought some stuff to make up for not getting anything from Fanime’s artists alley and also because there were some items that looked attractive. Items like a (non-yaoi) Big O doujinshi, some backpack buttons, and a couple laminated character thingies that I guess I’m supposed to put on my backpack but that likely find a place on my laptop bag. I tried to look through the big boxes of doujin at one dealer for the oddest pairing I could find but I didn’t find anything very unusual although I was surprised to see a sizable amount of D.Gray-man and Gintama stuff available. I also bought for 5 bucks a DVD of the first four Hunter x Hunter Greed Island episodes from some Bay Area group that helps clubs put on events – it was obviously one of those Chinese/English-subbed bootlegs but I guess I could count it as a donation and the DVD as a gift?
Most of the rest of my time at the convention was spent hanging out in the gaming room and going to a panel on animation in general. The games I played included Wario Ware for the Wii, some 4-player Bleach PS2 game that felt like Power Stone (Bleach Blade Battlers 2?), Super Puzzle Fighter, DOA 4, DDR, and Guitar Hero III (which convinced me to buy the game the next week). The panel, put on by an animation student whose older iBook named Duo (yes, she was a Gundam fan) was slow in reacting to “next slide” keypresses, was interesting and entertaining. There was this one panel put on by an attorney about copyrights, fansubs, and fanart that I missed because we got to the con around 12:30. Our group caught the latter half of the masquerade and many of the skits were pretty funny.
I wouldn’t mind going to Yaoi-Con again sometime in the future (maybe next year) because it was kind of fun to go with my friends. I’d probably want to go for the whole weekend considering I paid just over half the weekend door price for just my Saturday membership. I didn’t particularly mind all the shonen-ai/yaoi art and other stuff (I only saw one painted penis the whole time) and I think it was worthwhile to go at least once to add it to my shortlist of cons attended, which will expand soon since I’m planning to attend Sac-Anime again next month and Animation on Display (AOD) in February.
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