Nerdtacular Nan Desu Kan

Oh lord in heaven. NDK was ridiculous.

I arrived Saturday morning terrified, stoked, and completely not knowing what to expect. Apparently, all one does at cons is walk around and talk to people. Oh, and get stopped like every five feet for photos. Seriously. That was 90% of the weekend right there.

One thing that I didn't expect was to be one of the only legitimately attractive people there. I mean, some people had amazing cosplays and looked absolutely phenomenal, but there weren't that many people there who were attractive underneath the detailed costuming and make up. Not to like, toot my own horn or anything, but I was one of the only girls I saw with a body that was appropriate for their costume. There was much judgment on my part of the numerous fat people running around in tiny/weird/ill-fitting clothing.

For every sensational costume I saw, there were ten "ehh" costumes and about twenty "oh dear fucking God" costumes. My eyes will not recover from a few of those.

There were like eight thousand people in attendance. The venue was super packed and loud. I didn't go to any panels or signings because every time I would go to get in line, the lines would be ridiculously long already, like, hours in advance. I have to hand it to anime nerds, they are really fucking committed.

There was one room where people could just sit and play video games for hours (though why anyone would want to do that instead of meeting people is beyond me) and there was one room playing obscure anime around the clock. I liked the artist's room, where local, super talented people could peddle there wares farmer's market-style. There was a huge dealers room full of all the craziest Japanese shit you could think of, tons of independent manga, candy, gothic lolita stuff, and lots of hentai. For those who don't know, hentai is Japanese animated porn. I think my favorite item were the huge hentai pillow cases for body pillows. You stay classy, Japan.

On Saturday night, there was the con's version of a rave, which was essentially a bunch of nerds wearing glowsticks and jumping around to techno. I suppose it was a rave only in the most technical sense, and is probably the only rave that many of the people in attendance will ever go to. The crew that I was hanging out with were all real ravers who brought actual lights and wore kandi. We raged pretty hard.

It should be stated that when I go to raves, I prefer to dance at the edge of the crowd, where I have room to move and throw my arms around and stuff. I don't like being in the center because it's hot, stifling, and all you can do is jump. One annoying thing about the rave was that every time I would get into my little jam zone, a long ass conga line of awkward kids would totally cut me off. That was pretty obnoxious. As the night went on and the crowd thinned out a little, I was able to find a space and jam to my heart's content. 

There ended up being a lot of dance battle circles. There was this on big circle where everyone was just taking turns shuffling and doing poi and I thought it was getting boring, so I jacked my friend's glowsticks and stepped in. When I dance, I do a sort of cocktail of techtonic, gogo, belly dance, and ass shakery. Add in the half light show that I had going with the glow sticks, and you've got a bunch of nerds creaming their britches and picking their jaws up off of the floor by the time I had finished.

Maybe it was because I was dressed like this:

I was doing a sexified version of this character from Bleach named Hiyori:

The white face paint was my abstract take on the mask that she sometimes wears. It's a full-face mask with a horn, but I think I like the painted-on version a lot. Also, though you can't really tell in the picture, if you've seen any of the other pictures on Facebook, the sword I was carry around was huge and had a big serrated edge, which is what the her katana transforms into late in the series. Hiyori is a vice-captain/lieutenant under Kisuke Urahara, who was the character that Technicolor Boy was cosplaying for half the time (he switched off that one with a Shizuo from Durarara periodically) and has a tendency of beating the shit out of him even though he's about twice her size. Technicolor Boy looks exactly like Kisuke, height and all, and had a fantastic costume for him.

I was pretty lucky to be able to cosplay with the sexiest guy on the premises. We got photographed  together quite a bit, and there were a lot of adorable shots, but I won't post any of those on here because he deserves his privacy.

I actually ended up getting photographed a lot, which wasn't surprising, because I was one of very few people to dress sexually. There was one girl who was also dressed up as Hiyori, but despite the fact that her costume was more accurate, it was shoddy-looking and the girl was chunky. Funnily enough, she was staying at the same hotel where we all were, and we first spotted each other in the lobby. Oh, the looks she gave me.

At an anime convention where most of the females were either unattractive, fat, dressed in really large costumes, or worse, fat, but dressed in a tiny costume, the fact that I was a scantily clad, giant sword-toting skinny girl made me pretty popular with anyone who had a camera. 

Besides getting photographed a ton, I was also asked for a lot of hugs and high fives. I think I can assume that hugs are about as far as these guys were ever going to get with a girl, period.

It must be noted that nerds need to shower. There were some people whom I just wanted to tackle and spray from head to toe with industrial-strength Febreeze. I mean, damn. The BO on some of the people, both male and female, was just gnarly. There was this one guy wearing an ammo belt of Axe body spray and a tutu walking around and ambushing people, so I thought he was a bit of a hero.

My final pet peeve for the con was the amount of Homestuck and My Little Pony cosplayers that I saw. I find both fandoms to be incredibly obnoxious in their own little ways, and neither counts as an anime. The characters for both can't really be cosplayed very well. I saw about twenty billion Rainbow Dashes and Daves. What really bothered me about the Homestuck kids was how they wouldn't talk to anyone who wasn't wearing grey face paint and orange horns. Seriously? Go make your own con, don't sit around being annoying at mine.

Aside from inevitably getting annoyed by anime nerds who were way over committed, I basically had a great time cosplaying and partying and spending time with Technicolor Boy. I'd definitely be up for doing this sort of thing again with a new (still sexy) costume. Possibly more pictures to follow...



Julia