Moon Prism Poptarts

Sunday kicked off with the Moon Prism Poptarts panel. Unfortunately, setting up the panel delayed the panel start time by 10 minutes. I do appreciate AAC’s staff trying to help, yet I adapted with the technical issues. This was the debut for Moon Prism Poptarts in the East Coast. The audience was fairly small and expressed that they got into Sailor Moon during the Toonami era. Very few audience members recall the frosted strawberry Pop Tarts procott by Save Our Sailors. Otherwise, the panel was a success and I hope to run this panel again with a team comprised of the Death Busters at Anime Boston.

Fandom Abridged

I actually decided to stick around for the next panel. I thought based on the panel namesake, it would be how to make an abridged series. However, Fandom Abridged is about the history of anime fandom in the United States. I thought this was an interesting transition from the Moon Prism Poptarts panel. The panelists consisted of Martin Selzner (NonDE Productions), a Leet Street Boy, and the director of Kawaii Films. Martin moderated this interesting history. I was pretty hooked on every word. It was fascinating hearing about how fans in the 80s started up the first anime conventions. Usually everyone thinks that Anime Con 91 is the first one. Yamato Con in Dallas TX happened in August of 1983, just one year before the term “cosplay” was invited at World Con 1984.

Martin begun to compare otaku fandom in the past and in the present. The panel covered history up to the early 2000’s when anime started broadcasting on Toonami. Following the history lesson, there was an engaging discussion on where fandom was headed and what the future of anime conventions could look like. One topic of discussion I brought up was the influx of My Little Pony, Homestuck, Adventure Time, and other non-anime type programming at major anime conventions such as Anime Expo. “It depends on the con’s charter,” says Martin.

At the end of the panel, I also learned about other East Coast anime conventions to check out. Otakon and Animaine already look like promising conventions to do panels and presentations at.

Memoirs of a Cosplayer

Cosplay Guest, Darcy Dillon, hosted a panel on cosplay then and now. Darcy started cosplaying in the 90s – around the time when tape trading was at its height. The panel was very nostalgic. The veteran cosplayer started discussing about the lack of wig retails back in the day. She talked about using hairspray that dyes your hair temporarily, though nowadays it’s considered taboo to use in costuming. I also recall using cheap party wigs for anime characters. It was the only way to pull off anime characters with multi colored hair back then. Darcy also talked about how much the cosplay scene has changed – for better and for worse. She discussed how Cosplay Chess and Cosplay Death Match are now as popular as Saturday night masquerade. The panel brought back a ton of memories. Most of the cosplayers who attended were fairly new to the scene, so it was also nice seeing newcomers interested learning about what cosplay past was like.

The convention was winding down to an end. I grabbed a few last minute deals in the dealers hall as it was closing down. One of my favorite things about the dealers hall is that it had an announcer that sang the Another Anime Convention drinking song to officially close down the dealers hall. For the most part, some people stuck around for closing ceremonies and others straggled in the lobby. The lobby turned into Homestuck shanty town.

I decided to grab my things from concierge and make a dash to the bus terminal back to Boston. From there, I ran into Brentalfloss and a handful of Hetalia cosplayers. All of the otaku decided to just hang out at the back of the bus. I pretty much dozed off on the ride from Manchester to Boston. I proceeded to take the Orange Line back to the apartment and called it a night dreaming of what will be the next East Coast conventions on the list.

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