This weekend is Anime Expo!! And I’m not going so I don’t know why that warranted two exclamation points.
We went to Anime Expo once, in 2003. The way Ash and I managed that was that we talked our parents into doing it as a family vacation. We flew out to LA on… Wednesday I think? And on Thursday we went to Universal Studios. Why didn’t we do Disneyland? Friends on a forum told “nah don’t do Disneyland go do Universal instead” so that’s what we did and now I kick myself, I knew better. (besides I’d actually already been to Universal Hollywood once! And never Disneyland! WTF!)
Then ash and I did the con while our parents went sight-seeing. It was a really fun weekend… you know what? I never actually did an Anime Expo “report” so I’m going to do it now. The whole point of this post was that I finally scanned in some of the film photos from the trip last night — mom found them a few months ago and gave them to me to scan but I kept putting it off. They’re not con photos, they’re sight-seeing photos from my mom’s camera, but there’s still some fun stuff.
So here we go. We stayed at the Marriott right by the convention center and Ash and I had our own room – for some reason we had booked the rooms together but we were wayyyyy apart from our parents’ rooms – they were up the tower, and Ash and I had a room at the very back, short part of the hotel. The short part was only 3 or so floors high and encircled the pool area, and every room had a balcony overlooking the pool. It was AWESOME.
So Universal…
I met Storm!!!
She gave me a hug!!
Ash in a phone booth
Me in a phone booth — I actually had scanned this in ages ago thinking it was an old Disney photo so it’s in the wrong place, but now I know:
The moms climbing with Spiderman:
And me and Ash:
We also met Harpo:
In line for something wearing 3d glasses:
The only things I remember that day were:
1. We saw the Spider-man show and in the preshow they were looking for a “cool dad” or something and I pointed at dad. They had him get up and dance in front of everybody, it was so funny.
2. We went to ride the Backdraft ride and we were all in the preshow room and they came in told us that it was malfunctioning and we would all have to leave. We laughed and thought it was part of the show but then they actually made us leave LOL It really was malfunctioning.
3. LA traffic on the way back made me miss a Sailor Moon photoshoot I wanted to go to.
Then later that night I put on Ash’s Alucard costume and we wandered around but couldn’t find anything to do.
I was carrying a lunchbox as a bag and some people who were doing a scavenger hunt found us and were looking for a lunchbox. We had to go somewhere with them, I don’t remember, it was weird.
The rest of the con was mostly just me and Ash hanging out, shopping, and being lazy. We mostly just took photos of each other. We took one photo of somebody else – that’s it.
My Asuka backpack malfunctioned. My parents had to come over the convention center so dad could try to repair it before they left for sight-seeing for the day. I remember standing in a corner, with dad trying to get the straps fixed, and people were coming up asking for a photo of me… like can’t you see I’m busy??
We ended up just having to take it off, he couldn’t fix it — they took it back to the hotel for me and I went backpack-less for the rest of the day. (He was able to get the straps to stay on after that tho)
See, no backpack:
But Al caught me before it broke, I can still see the straps:
Hey is that my portable DVD player I spy? It is!
Since our awesome room was visible from the pool area we felt it necessary to “decorate” the balcony:
I wore Belldandy a LONG time one of these days and got a lot of great photos…
Cos.com photoshoot:
Ash in the background. We used to play a game where I’d see how many photos I could find of myself with Ash lurking in the background.
Meanwhile the parents were “meeting” astronauts:
Seeing some beautiful vistas:
Riding golf carts:
Back in lala land I wore my new SeraMyu Jupiter:
But the boots were so dang big, I gave up on it after a couple of hours and went and put Eternal on instead:
But, weirdly, I found way more pics of my SeraMyu Jupiter than Eternal, even though I wore Eternal longer. Strange.
Fun fact: I took my Padme lake dress from 2002 with me to wear, but never did.
Fourth of July night, I wore She-Ra (because patriotic I guess?)
And we sat on the roof of the convention center with a bunch of other people and watched Disneyland’s fireworks. So I got that at least. Haha.
I wore my Yuffie for a long time one of the days because it was the most comfortable thing I brought. That little orange doo-dad on the front of the shoulder armor kept falling off.
At one point a guy dressed like Vash chased me down to hand it back when it fell off and I didn’t notice. Somehow it survived the trip.
Also there was something about “Chunky Pringles” but I don’t remember what the deal with that was.
One night I wore Ruby Heart for a while…
And late that night going back to the room, I stopped and got a coke and then ran to catch the (empty) elevator. It was starting to close so I stuck my foot out thinking the sensor would catch it make the doors open back up. It didn’t and the doors closed on my foot (not hard). Out of nowhere this little dude runs up, pries the doors open, and frees my foot. I said “THANK YOU” and he just nodded and ran off again. I will never know who my Elevator Savior Dude was.
Anyway, we entered the masquerade kinda blindly because back then that’s what I did. I’d had to preregister us months in advance and I’d picked Morrigan and BBhood, but by the time it came to actually make the costumes we were kinda blah on the idea. But we went through with it.
Ash HATED the BBHood costume, the petticoat kept flipping up… but I thought it was cute!
We went in for pre-judging and discovered we had to have music for our walk-on entry, and of course we hadn’t brought anything. We had to flip through some random CDs and pick something out, LOL.
Then during the actual masquerade, we just quickly did our walk-on and got back off. We weren’t very invested at that point! LOL.
The head wings in my wig got to be so painful I had to leave the backstage area, go to the public restroom and take the wig off for a while. UGH
Pretty sure that once we got out of the convention center, away from people, I took it off completely and carried it back to the hotel. I have a memory of being in front of the con center, in the dark, trying to run my fingers through my hair to make it look less “wig hair.”
And finally, there was a fountain in front the hotel and for whatever reason we were very intrigued by it. It did make a nice backdrop for a pretty Belldandy photo:
Then I told Ash, ok, now Alucard has to sit in front of the fountain and be pretty:
Then while we were waiting on our taxi to take us back to the airport the last day, we did some kind of back-to-back spy pose in front of it:
And I have no idea…
Then our parents did one, too:
Then it was back home. Like I said, Ash had a cold throughout a lot of it. I got a cold on our way back and apparently never did a proper report of the trip.
If AX were still in the Anaheim Convention Center I’d love to go back. But it’s not so it’s not the same! Maybe D23 one of these years.
(Photo Credits for this post — Eurobeat King, Lionel Lum, Suzaku, Sana-chan, Kyle, HelloKenney… I think that’s everything….)