Metrocon 2006

THURSDAY

I got in around meh 2:30 or so, did the checks on the costumes to make sure nothing needed to be replaced - the worst was that I had to do a little rescue work on the foot claws because some were loose. I made up the last of the buttons I printed the night before, went out to dinner with my family and then saw X-Men 3 with my sister... well, it was okay. I am someone who has read the comics and I have the Dark Phoenix saga in trade paperback (or whatever it's called) form, so of course I'm going 'OMG THAT'S NOT THE WAY IT'S SUPPOSED TO BEEEEEEE' in my head throughout. I'm also still trying to figure out who the fuck Magneto's new lackeys - the girl who could do the superspeed thing and her 2 buddies - were supposed to be. Lots of killing off of major characters, but you know comics, nobody ever stays dead. They did look like they're setting up for another sequel at the end, though. It was nice that they included Shadowcat and Colossus this go-round, although I'm getting pissy about Rogue and wondering when the hell they're going to have her steal Ms. Marvel's powers already. She was only cool after that, now she's just angsty. Oh yeah, and Bullet-Tooth Tony as the Juggernaut, although I think I'm the only one who doesn't get why 'I'm the juggernaut, bitch' is funny.

FRIDAY

My parents' dog does not like the seek costume. Hee. Got to the convention center... errr... sometime between 10 and 11? Wasn't wearing my watch cause, you know, costume. Had half a dozen people wanting to take pics while I was in line for registration, but I kept telling them to wait because I didn't have the hands and feet on and to ask me later.

Got my registration, put on the rest of the costume (I found that one of the gloves I sew into the hands has come partially off, actually making it easier to put that glove on, except it means I end up coming in direct contact with the fiberfill inside the hand, making my hand sweat), and while waiting for the dealer room to open at 12 had many people take pics, and some guy ask me to 'kill his friend' for some photo project online. I did even though I protested that I was a friendly monster, dammit. And I saw a Yume Kazaguruma Lida cosplayer too, which made me happy.

Got into the dealer room and hrm... uh, WTF, Metrocon? Your dealer room was not bad, but why was there NOBODY selling pocky/other japanese candies and foods? I WANTED TO BUY WEIRDLY FLAVORED POCKY. But I found the Rock Lee plushie, got PLC's Epilogue CD, and went down to opening ceremonies. At the end of that, they were setting up the story line for human chess, which was on saturday. The basic story: Tooru from Fruits Basket gets a book mailed to her only to find out it's a death note book. The guys from YuYu Hakusho and Read or Die (OVA, since it was Ms. Deep and The Paper) show up and start fighting over who gets to take the book and then set up a date for the chess match.

Let's see... after that I went to the japanese music panel... well, it was supposed to be an intro to lesser known bands in Japan, but it was, as I said before, almost all Undercode bands, and I can't stand Undercode. The stuff shown that wasn't undercode was a PLC video, hide's Rocket Dive video, 2 D'EspairsRay videos, and some live footage of MUCC and Kagerou. Oh, and Yura-sama's Gekiai Merry-go-round parapara instructions.

After that I think I wandered a bit and sold a few buttons waiting for them to let us in for the seek and Yura-sama panel. They started off the panel with the footage of their last live in early May.

Oh, man. I swear, it's hard to even just think about it. The clip was maybe 30-45 minutes long. Behind the stage, they had 8 different sets of costumes set up in display cases. It started with a 'dance medley' - all the songs with parapara. I can remember off the top of my head (although probably I have the order wrong) them doing bits of Gekiai Merry-go-round, Prism, Megatron, what I think was Broker, Aquaria (I think) and I don't remember if Yume Kazaguruma was in there or not. It's kind of hard to remember. They also showed the lives of Michi no Sora, Excalibur, and a long extended version of Murder Death Kill in which Lida, seek, Daishi and Aya all took turns leading the last chorus (you know, the one right before the guitar duet at the end of the song), so they stretched that song out probably to 10 minutes. I remember thinking at some point that 'if they show them playing Remembrance, I'm gonna start crying like a bitch', because I've seen a setlist of the last live songs, and their final encore was Remembrance.

Well, yeah, they showed them playing Remembrance. For the other songs they showed on the DVD, they were wearing the Ai no Uta costumes, but when they were doing Remembrance, they were all wearing white suits. Well, Daishi couldn't even make it through the first verse without starting sobbing so bad he couldn't even sing. There were a couple points where he broke down and couldn't sing through the song, and by the end of the song everyone on stage was/had been crying. At one point you see Lida leaning over his guitar with his head down just looking absolutely miserable and like he could barely play. At points you could see Aya and Yura-sama with tears on their face, and one of the shots of seek, he had his head leaning down and he was crying so hard that his face was just dripping. As you can imagine, after the clip ended, you could just hear almost everyone in the audience at the con crying and sniffling. Everyone was just real torn up.

After that, they had messages from the 3 band members who weren't there - looked like they must have filmed it right before the last live because they were in costume. I really can't remember what all everyone said in the messages except for thinking at one point that it was probably the first time I could understand Aya well, heh. He always sounds like he has a cold. But you know, thanking the fans and stuff like that.

Then they announced seek and Yura-sama and out they came onto the stage, wearing the Roman Hikou costumes, except seek didn't have his hat. And let me tell you, seek needs to keep his hair long like it was cause it looks real good on him. Jhouse McPoprocks was (for once) allowing people to take photos and video, so the room turned into an epileptic's nightmare for a while. I got quite a few photos and video of Yura-sama doing his introduction (although I didn't get seek's, T_T). When they were at Akon, they didn't have a very good translator, but the girl doing it this time was a lot better. The Q&A went very well - they had everyone who had a question line up at the front of the stage and ask their question, so it went fairly quickly and a lot of questions were asked.

I can't remember all the questions, but of what I can remember:

One guy asked Yura-sama at the end of lives if he preferred to stand since he spent most of them sitting behind the drum-set, and if it was kind of weird since everyone else wanted to sit down. Yura-sama said that he liked to stand because after sitting for all that time he gets horrible ass sweat. I can't even type that without laughing because it's so against the whole 'lookit me ain't I pretty!' Yura-sama character image (but then again, he's got that thing about poop, too).
Another girl asked seek if she could have one of his geta because she forgot to bring something for them to sign, and his answer was 'but how will I get home with only one shoe'.
Someone else asked, of course, 'boxers or briefs' and Yura-sama said boxers, and seek said that normally in costume he has to wear briefs but he didn't want to say what he normally wears (which leads me to believe he doesn't like to wear any, or something like that).
I didn't ask any questions or get in line because someone already asked the one I had, which was are Lida and Yura-sama going to continue Dacco, and since PLC and Isabelle are suspending activities, what were seek and Aya's plans. For the time being, Dacco will continue, and seek says he doesn't know what he's going to do... a related question was what was everybody doing now that they were suspending activities, and I can't remember who answered, but the gist was 'laying around eating a lot and doing nothing'.
OH. Someone asked WTF Dacco was supposed to mean, and Yura-sama said that they took it from the word for hug. So. No, it's not anal prolapse, like some people were speculating. Even though that would be funnier.
Another girl had a message to the band to tell them that even though what Daishi did was wrong that fans in the US still supported him and she started crying when telling them. They said they'd pass the message along.
Someone else asked if they enjoyed doing karaoke with MUCC (yesh the silly video clip with the Star Ocean costumes) and they looked confused for a minute, since that was back in 2002, but seek said that he sometimes meets Tatsurou for dinner/lunch. Aaaand I think that's all the ones I can remember. Oh, no, wait. Someone else asked Yura-sama to do the parapara for Yume Kazaguruma, and he did the chorus part while seek sang the words. Which just made it amusing cause when seek sings, it's like, DEEP EVIL SCARY SATAN VOICE.

The most important question, to me at least, was 'Do you think PLC will ever get back together?' seek said one word: 'Kitto' ('Surely') and Yura-sama said that as long as the fans keep supporting the band like they have been then, yes.

They stopped the Q&A to have a game of charades and asked for volunteers from the audience. So, of course, probably 3/4ths of the audience have hands raised going 'OH PICK ME! ME! PICK ME!' while I'm going 'oh crap, charades' and trying to hide behind the people who were sitting in front of me. Which is fucking impossible when you're dressed up like a goddamn yeticorn and over 7 feet tall when you include the horn. And it didn't work, because seek goes to the translator and says in Japanese 'They don't have their hand raised but the big white thing' (meaning me) and I'm like 'AUGH NO BUT I SUCK AT CHARADES butokayfine >_>' and went up, resigned to doing what I usually end up doing which is making an ass of myself in public. I didn't really want to because I thought we were going to be doing the charades, but it turns out the teams (4 ppl each) were going to be guessing.

Yura-sama's team went first - he had picked a guy, a girl who was maybe about 10 who had asked a question at the Q&A, a girl who was wearing bunny ears, and [info]kaohotplate (maybe since she was wearing a Yura-sama shirt or maybe cause he recognized her from backstage at other cons...). Anyway, each team had 3 minutes and he had to act out the words seek had written down before the panel. I don't remember all of them, but I do remember Mt. Fuji, fish, Son Goku, samurai... The most amusing one was 'Tampa' and he kept pointing down. The little girl went 'pants?' and when he indicated the whole room, she asked 'All of our pants?' which got most of the audience laughing. Anyway, the Yura-sama team got 6 right.

Next up was the seek team - he had picked me (duh), the Yume Kazaguruma Lida cosplayer I'd seen earlier, a Frontiers Aya cosplayer - actually, she and I recognized each other from Akon 04 (I get recognized as 'the button lady' at every frigging con now), although I can't remember her name, and another girl. Let em tell you, Yura-sama gave seek some weird-ass words. The Statue of Libery which was easy. Jesus, which most of us didn't get until someone in the audience yelled 'DO IT!' and seek kind of reluctantly mimed handing on the cross (that just makes me snicker. so. fucking. hard). Others were 'toilet paper', 'crap' (SEE, YURASAMA LOVES POO), ninja (which none of us got) Yura-sama, and the last one which I got was 'Ichiro'. And I will tell you right now: The ONLY reason I guessed that was because of the psycho balls sketch thing at Akon where he says 'I want to be a baseball player like Ichiro or Matsui' and I was taking a total shot in the dark, there.

So we won by 1 point, yay, and we got... er, I think I already said in the post when I was talking about conswag. Star Ocean tour glowstick, stickers, autographed folder thing. *coff* not to mention hi-5ing/shaking hands with seek. And I told him I forgot my yeticorn hands and apologized since I'd left them on the seat (I had them off since I was taking pictures). Yura-sama told his team that he was sorry and then gave them the pages with the charades words on them.

And that was the end of the panel, with lots of people going 'OMG YOU'RE SO LUCKY' or 'OMG I'M SO JEALOUS' to the people who got to go do the charades thing.

So, yeah, I know the seek charades bit is up on youtube somewhere, and you can see me in them. Or at least, the back of me.

And after that it was already almost 7, so I called up for my ride and my sister was out at the mall nearby doing work stuff so she came and picked me up... but not before I was standing outside in DOWNTOWN TAMPA at a busy intersection and people looking at me from their cars like 'OMGWTF weirdo' and some guy rolled down his window and took pictures.

And then my sister took me to the mall because she was like 'OMG MY FRIEND HAS TO SEE YOU IN THIS COSTUME' so I ended up putting my hands and feet back on and walking into the back entrance of International Mall and going into a Trade Secret in costume and asking them what shampoo the could reccommend for the fur. And, uh, there were like, 8 people in the store, some employees, some customers. Hee. And waving to all the people at the other stores who came out going 'wtf is that person in costume' and stuff.

And then home and shower because I was so fucking ready to get that damn makeup off. Luckily I didn't have the problem I did at Megacon where I ended up swallowing enough of it to make my tongue get all blistery, but the fake piercings did leave cuts on the insides and outsides of my mouth and after sweating in that makeup for close to 10 hours my face is still currently in the process of reenacting puberty.

SATURDAY

Got up, got into the Chouji costume, got over to the convention center (after getting lost in Tampa and ending up circling the damn building because I had vague directions AND THEY'RE ALWAYS DOING CONSTRUCTION) and got in line for the anime chess around 11:30. I'd say the Chouji costume looked better than at Megacon because I actually put my hair up in messy sorta buns and I actually had something to strap my tits down and because sports tape stays on eleventy billion times better than gauze, but also causes its own problems.

Anime chess was pretty amusing, although parts of it were hard to hear because you had YuYuHakusho, Final Fantasy, and Ed Elric (not FMA, just Ed) fangirls who would get all screamy. Oh and lots of people booing Ms. Deep when she got all gun-happy (LAY OFF, YO, NANCY'S COOL!). Rrrrgh. Add to that that some of the microphones kept cutting out, too, so unless you were fairly close you missed dialogue. Some of the fighting was pretty impressive though. Random crazy shit like every time Kyo from Fruits Basket would have to fight Yuki (who was on the same side) would end up jumping in and trying to kick his ass, people changing sides, robots going crazy, lots of changing into things, and then everybody dies, but they don't die because Belldandy comes and brings em all back to life and stuff.

After that... I think I did some wandering, came back and watched the Monkey Punch panel, which was mostly him talking about how the manga industry works, his new project called Musashi (samurais with guns? I'll watch it >_>) and of course, LUPIN III.

After that, I got me some food cause I was hungry. Had to go through the dealer room to get it and all the people lining up for autographs/pictures from seek and Yura-sama were in this roped off area near the Jhouse McPoprocks booth and I couldn't help but having a bit of a mad cackle to myself because the guy who was MCing the opening ceremonies referred to that area as a 'fangirl holding pen' during the opening ceremonies and it's so fucking true. Anyway, after I had my foooooood I myself entered the fangirl holding pen so I could get autographs, since I missed getting them at Megacon thanks to me leaving my copy of Beautiful World in the hotel room, con staff not being able to tell me where the fucking hotel shuttle was supposed to pick people up, and the fucking hotel shuttle being late (all and all, as an aside, Megacon did not have their shit together in 2005... we didn't even find out that there WAS a PLC panel until the weekend was almost over because they never announced it/put it in the con book and we were fairly pissed about that). I'm digressing. Yura-sama was in that white Dacco outfit that looks really damn good on him and seek was in his ISABELLE getup. I got them both to sign the Epilogue CD book and thanked them and then joined the wad of people with cameras taking pictures. >_> WHAT? I got several good ones atwixt the ones that are blurry (no flash, the pictures look better without the flash thanks to the dealer room lighting) and the ones that have various and assorted bits of Other People In The Way MOVE I DON'T NEED A PICTURE OF YOUR ASS. *coff*

They got done with the autographs and got up to leave the dealer room and I can say I was not the only one following them with a camera but I can say that I was the only ninja, but a ninja from Naruto, so I was conspicuous anyway. >_> Well, followed them outside, took some pictures, but I wasn't going to follow them back to their hotel because that would make me feel like a total stalker.

There was also 2 girls there doing Dacco cosplay - this is mostly funny because the Yura-sama cosplayer was SO GOOD from behind that the only way you could tell which was which was by height. It was kind of amusing cause a couple people kept going 'OMG IS THAT YU-... no, wait, that's just the cosplayer again, dammit.' I actually got to talking with her friend who was doing Lida, and frigging LEAVE IT TO ME to find a big Farscape fan completely accidentally at a con I come for because of PLC. I forget her name but she did say she was a big fan of Braca, but that she never got heavily involved in the fandom online (and I told her that was probably a good thing, but gee, it may be my bitter experience with some people in the fandom that's coloring my perceptions). Which is cool, because I love the people who don't obsess over the major characters *coff* andtheoneswhodon'thateStark.

Afterwards, I hung out at the 'anime idol' which is just their version of 'talent contest' (I missed the costume contest cause I was in the dealer room for autographs and whatnot). Well, mostly I was there because they were still waiting on the judges so they were playing silly music to dance to. Like the chicken dance, the time warp, etc etc. The first guy got up and he was going to sing Gackt so I was like 'whee and now I flee the room'. Came back, some girl did Miyavi... uhhhhhh. Yeah. Apparently she did not get the message, because this was a talent contest, not an impersonation 'sing half the chorus to Jibun Kakumei 2003 (a song I like) and lip synch the rest' contest. Basically I was in and out of this room a lot, and also fled when someone got up to sing Ayumi Hamasaki. Well, almost all the contestants were girls and I could say most of the songs were probably themes to shoujo anime, meaning my interest level drops a bunch.

After that, it was probably around 7, and I had had enough of the tape on my arms and legs because it was really starting to hurt. I made a really bad mistake in accidentally taping my legs too tight and let me tell you, I am still feeling the pain from it. I sat down on the floor near a garbage can and started peeling it off and OH, THE PAIN. If anybody ever tells you that taking a bandaid off is less painful if you do it quickly, SLAP THEM BECAUSE THEY ARE A LIAR. Hurt bad enough that by the time I was done with one leg, my hands were shaking. My legs were friggin red and purple, and now I think what happened is that I pulled off a couple layers of skin, because I've still got this red bands around my legs between my knees and ankles, and you can even see the marks on my arms, too. Yeah, after I got out of the shower on Saturday night I took a picture of my legs, because I like taking pictures of weird shit like that because I'm morbid.

Ended up talking with various groups of people about jrock stuff and watching PLC clips (like the Magical Parties DVD and some Honmake DVD clips - yah, thanks, now I've seen Aya's ass, even if it was masked out) and Arashi clips... uh, all because it involved shoving an alarm clock down Matsumoto Jun's pants and a game of 'smell the food that's been bad for 3 months'. Ah, Japanese variety shows. And I totally admit to watching it just for Matsumoto Jun because it seems like everyone who watches a dorama with him suddenly becomes mildly obsessed with him (cause, yeah. Arashi as a band sucks. They'd all probably be better off just sticking to acting).

I left the convention center probably sometime around 12:30-1 AM because my voice was definitely going and I was getting tired and my contact in my right eye was starting to bother me, so I came back to my parents house, got hassled by the elderly guard at the gate - dude. I've been here since thursday. Yes, I know it's 1 AM, and don't you frigging call my parents' house to ask them if they have a visitor cause then they'll be pissed at me and if you really think I'm a criminal element ask me for FUCKING ID, YOU OLD FART. This is all made a little funnier by how I work for FDLE (and therefore cannot have a criminal record seeing as I wouldn't have the job if I did) and my parents live right across the street from a Tampa cop. I also got hassled by a different guard on Sunday after I left and had to come back because I forgot something - guy took my plates down. Yes, because I'm really coming to break into houses with my back seat full of traveling stuff and a twinkie on stilts in the front seat next to me. I don't like where my parents live for a variety of reasons, and the whole 'gated community' bullshit is part of it.

And that's con, except for me trying not to fall asleep in the car on the way home and passing out once I got home and I'm pretty sure people called me when I was out-cold dead asleep but I can't remember who and what we talked about.

A short video of Yura-sama's introduction at the panel (Sorry for crappy camera work, it was taken using a digital camera and I have shaky hands).

Psycho le Cemu cosplayers, before the panel. I'm (obviously) the Frontiers version seek.

Not taken by me, obviously, but this was the only picture of me in my Chouji costume from Saturday I could find.

And the aftermath of the Chouji costume. Kids, if you're cosplay involves wrapping some part of your body in medical tape, make sure you wrap it LOOSELY or you'll end up with legs like this. I'm writing this as of late August, 2 1/2 months after the con and these lines haven't faded.

Below here, we have various and assorted seek and Yura-sama panel pictures. Unfortunately, due to the lighting I couldn't take pictures with the flash on (they would turn out too dark), so quite a few are blurry. I completely and totally apologize for that, and I tried to weed out the worst of the pictures - I probably took close to a hundred at their panel because I figured this would be the case.