Friday | Fri/Sat | Saturday | Sat/Sun
We returned from downtown Stevens Point, hunger sated and ready to attack the rest of the con.
The next panel was Travis Willingham's uncensored 18+ Q&A session... which I am forbidden to report on.
Then came the Mystery Show, where Cheesus and Nick I. would... wait, I can't report on that either.
Let's just say they were awesome and move on to stuff I can talk about.
Friday Night/Saturday
Morning
Dark Hour
Okay, fine, I'll give you one pic from the Mystery Show...
If this was the only picture that comes out of the Mystery Show, maybe they'll lift their vow of silence and make valid selling points for it.
After an hour of mystery, I split with Sarah and checked out Yushi's Good Cosplay Gone Wrong panel at midnight.
Now this panel needs some explanation because of its contentious history. The original concept was as a celebration and open mockery of notoriously bad cosplay- your Man Fayes, Sailor Bubbas and all your eyebleach-worthy favorites. The one major problem, of course, is that some samples might not be intentional efforts to create mental trauma and are instead honest attempts to replicate a beloved character. And trashing novices = not cool. So after much politicking and retooling, the panel emerged as an attempt to provide constructive criticism to these pour souls and a lesson in what not to do for the rest of us.
I felt compelled to attend for a couple reasons. First and foremost: Yushi is awesome and if anyone could pull this off it's him. Secondly: my friends were quite divided about whether this is hilarity or disaster in the making. I wanted to see it first-hand and give an honest report. Geek.Kon masquerade judge Sir Catherine felt the same, so I joined her in the back of the room and critiqued the critics.
The consensus between us was that even though the intentions were ultimately good and the attitude quite positive, singling out novices and their rookie mistakes seemed quite unfair and came off as a tad elitist. Despite the efforts at being nice, a cosplay newbie hearing their outfits deconstructed in this fashion probably would have been more discouraged than enlightened, especially since a lot of the mistakes were either extremely plain to see or unnecessarily nit-picky. Worse yet, some of the outfits used as examples weren't all that bad to begin with. To be fair, both Yushi and co-host Erika donned themselves in their own awful cosplays, and included plenty of self-deprecating moments, but it's hard to see an earnest but inexperienced cosplayer welcoming advice this way.
I wasn't able to see the rest of the panel, as Richard's room party had kicked into gear and needed my tunes.
Why yes, that is Nick F. in the corner there! Very observant!
The party was easy-going, chilling for a bit with Nick, Richard and the guy who had the awesome Gargomon outfit at No Brand this year. We also ate more hot dogs and drank more soda. Despite this, we tired at the modest hour of 2 a.m. We found our boarder, TheHerald, who has done tech set-up and maintenance at No Brand, Iowa, Geek.Kon and Daisho and needed crash space (and a bigger role in the recap). He was in the adjacent No Brand room party and was ready to turn in too. So we did.
All three of us woke up early Saturday. Herald so he could check on the early morning panels, Sarah and I because Steam Century was starting at 10:00. After the positive response to America here, I decided to pull it out again. It seemed just slightly more steampunk-ish than my Seibu jersey, which is strange as America is not at all steampunk-ish.
Sarah was Chihiro from Persona 3. For great Justice.
After an excellent continental breakfast from the hotel, one which had actual food and not just cold Belgian waffles and cereal, we called Evan to see where the rest of our team was. He and fellow Geek.Kon staffers Erin and AJ were still on the road and due up in an hour. So we stopped into the bridge to get our briefing.
That spider cult that was responsible for the murder at No Brand had grown more dangerous at Convergence and Geek.Kon, and it was up to us to work the portal to the Realm of Arderath, enter and destroy the spider god. No whodunits or German telegrams this time... enter the portal and get it done. However, in order to enter the portal and expect to survive, we needed certain items...
Sadly, this was not one of them.
We needed to obtain cloaks from various vendors, learn the secret phrase to enter, find the code to work the portal, get the spider ring from the spirit of the dead girl from No Brand and fill out a complex requisition for explosives from someone with the initials DMV.
In other words, a full day of work.
While Sarah headed to the AMV contest to see how her entry fared, I hit up the vendors at the "Silk Emporium" to discover the cloaks they had for sale and attempt to discern what each one did. I didn't find much, although our team reunited early. Evan, AJ and Erin arrived...
Evan dressed as Arcanine... which nowhere near resembled steampunk but was awesome nonetheless.
Sarah also returned from the AMV contest, which for the second straight year forgot to make the crucial connection between having all the entries available to show and having a room with the A/V capable of doing so. The contest was again moved to a viewing room, this time later in the afternoon. So we were all assembled to continue Team 1, 2... 5's habit of pestering Sgt. Dwyer.
At least this year, we know he didn't do it. He had been kidnapped, likely tortured, and did nothing but lie in sick bay and scream nonsensical gibberish about how we were all going to die. Given that he was a captive of the spider cult for so long, he freaked out when he saw my 100% silk tie and we didn't get much out of him.
Next came our cloak shopping. Each of the five cloaks were available for two pounds, but we were only given six at the start. Four of them we got with no problem, thanks to a discount from Eagle Anime. The fifth, at kimono boutique Toadhill Shops, had a special challenge in order to get the cloak for free: dress one of the members in opposite-gender kimono and lead the team in "I'm A Little Teapot."
In other words, a perfect time to break in the Steam Century newbie!
Incidentally, Evan had brought all the money he had left over from Geek.Kon and a special carnival event at a Madison nightclub in October (which, for the record, Sarah and I solved), we actually had plenty of money and didn't need to put Erin through all that. But this is more fun.
Upon retrieving cloaks, the medium from No Brand was still being pestered by poor dead Violet, which somehow materialized into a little spider ring. Which makes perfect sense... since we couldn't pull the rings from the the cat's collar. The hotel changed their mind and decided the cat could not be at the convention if there was food in the room. Which is very annoying. Especially for the cat, who was stuck in the hotel room all weekend.
We also scrounged up the secret portal code and the secret phrase (Sgt. Dwyer's nonsensical gibberish). All that was left was the requisition, which had to be filled out using three colors of ink. Two were easy to get... the third was magenta, a practically heretical color in the Victorian age. No upstanding soldier on the Badger would carry it.
No kidding. Stewing over this puzzle, we decided to take a break and let AJ and Erin actually see what the hell was at this convention while I attended the Hetalia photoshoot. Again, as the only America there this year (A No Brander who cosplayed the USA at Geek.Kon switched to Spain), I was a little more compelled to attend. Evan tagged along to provide photographs.
Erika, who was China at Geek.Kon, was in an... alternate Len Kagamine outfit. Len, incidentally, is a boy. "Double Crossplay" comes to mind, but that implies that Len is cosplaying a different character (like Ashley's double cosplay of Hinata cosplaying Haruhi). "Trap Crossplay" is another possibility, but may be confused with a male-to-convincing female crossplay, or Crossplay (Worse). So I don't know the official term, nor if changing the katakana from Len to Rin would make things more or less complicated. I'm overthinking this.
Anyhoo... the rosters were fairly slim at the photoshoot. Switzerland, America, Hungary, South Italy and Spain. Later that day, an Austria appeared and Erika did sneak into her Hungary cosplay, despite her frying pan posing a serious test of the con's "no live steel" policy.
Shots of certain pairings and allies came next, which was difficult as there was only one Axis Power and one Allied Power present. The only real pairing was South Italy and Spain. So Hungary and I got a little creative...
She had a pan. I had a burger. It's a match made in heaven.
