No convention pictures, so chibi Hikage reading and happily walking seems to fit the mood.

Which is/will be the only day I’ll go. Anyways, I went to my first anime convention and I have to say, it was pretty fun~ Except, I didn’t bring any friends so I felt a little lonely going with just my parents. Anyways, I had a fun, but I felt like an idiot walking around my first time…since I had no idea what to do. -_-

(Monthly Mania post will come next week, sorry for the delay >.<)

EDIT: Just found a picture of the Suu keychain on the internet, and added it~

But the convention was fun. I didn’t get to go to any panels I had planned to go to. I spent all my time in the Exhibition Hall xD. I was late going and so I missed the early ones I wanted to go to. I missed the Shugo Chara Party too, because I was late.

Besides going to the Exhibition Hall though, I got to go to the Morning Musume concert (which was free!~). It was my first concert too…so it was fun.

Okay, now to elaborate on my day~

Starting Off

Well, since it was my first convention, I had lots of chaos in the beginning. Hm…I was over 40 minutes off schedule just by waiting up. What’s worse was that after we had to run errands before the convention, suddenly we wanted to try out online registration. -_-;; And that…failed. After wasting 30 minutes, my parents decided not to do it. Over an hour off schedule. So because of that, I ended up missing the Shugo Chara gathering and the Photoshop Coloring 101. Anyways, starting off was rocky, and navigating my way was pretty tough. Luckily, I ran into a friend from school who helped me out. xD Then…we decided to get tickets for the main event…

Morning Musume Concert

Well, getting tickets, that was…long. But Morning Musume is pretty famous so I’m not surprised. I just got mad that I almost had to pay $20 because help wasn’t…”helpful”. But after waiting under the beating sun, we finally got in. Some people are so prepared though, setting up chairs in line. xD But overall, the concert was probably the best part of the day.

The concert was pretty fun for a first. The audience was pretty energetic in the front, even though the back…wasn’t as much. A couple people in the back were though, just…not the general crowd. They performed the full 3, 2. 1 Breaking Out! which I thought was a catchy song. Hm…my favorite part of the concert was during the break when one of the members shouted, “I had a cheesecake this morning…and it was…exciting!” I started to lol. It was nice to see them try to speak English though, nonetheless. I was actually surprised and happy when they mentioned concern about global warming later on in the concert.

Personal rant: I had terrible luck though at viewing the concert. I’ve mentioned before that I’m pretty short…at least I think I have. I guess everyone has this happen once before though. But I always had to have someone tall in front of me. -_- And then when the tall person left, I was glad that I could see again! Until…another tall person came. xD

They also announced the winners of the OPV Myspace Contest for 3, 2, 1 Breakin’ Out! Hangry from Hangry&Angry appeared at the concert as well as Tsunku? (that extra sign is bothersome >_>). There were three categories, even though I lol’ed at the factors in choosing the Morning Musume Prize (“Whichever made us look the cutest!”). I have to say, the OPVs were pretty amazing, and it’s no wonder why they won. Here’s a video with all of the winners:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh7331HZg1c

The concert was pretty fun, despite going through some obstacles. At the end the audience was cheering for an encore xD but I left too see if anything happened.

Exhibit Hall/Stuff I Got

We decided to check out the Exhibit Hall after the concert. It was pretty big, so I spent the rest of my time at the convention looking around. Since the items are pretty expensive, I only bought two items. xD

I ended up buying a Suu keychain, with her face going: oAo…or something like that. She has an egg tag attached to the keychain as well…similar to FuyuMaiden’s Eru one (which I saw at the same booth). Anyways, I really love the keychain~ It’s so cute and makes me smile and laugh whenever I look at it. I wish I could’ve attached a picture, but I having problems transferring all of my pictures onto my laptop. xD Maybe in the future… Suu costs $8, which I thought was pretty expensive, but then again, most merchandise is pretty expensive. But I think this keychain is my first real anime merchandise (like figure, keychain, etc.). Wow, lots of firsts. Anyways, I don’t really want to attach her to anything since a lot of my keychains have broken off and I don’t want that to happen to Suu (especially since she was $8 compared to 25 cents keychains…jk, it’s not just the money). I don’t want to lose my first ever anime merchandise! D:< EDIT: Found a picture of the keychain on the internet!~

I also got a tote bag. Not much to say about it. It’s super cute though~ Ah I love it. It’s a yellow bag with a bear in the front. Cute~ $25 if I remember right. But it was all worth it. Actually, I think both of these items were worth it in the long run. Can’t wait to put my stuff in this bag~

I ended up getting lots and lots of postcards, autograph of Brina Palencia from the Funimation booth, and a sticker. xD There were lots of great artwork there, and artists as well. There was a booth with posters and pictures, and omg! I saw an England x America picture! xD If I remember correctly, I don’t think it was yaoi. I think they were just together. I didn’t catch a good enough glimpse TT^TT. Crunchyroll had a booth, and so did Copic. I got so tempted to buy the markers. >.< I saw some examples with them before, and it was amazing how well they colored. Ah well.

Cosplays

Well, I didn’t cosplay, but I was on the look-out for cosplayers everywhere. We didn’t get lots of pictures, and I can’t transfer them anyways, so no pictures. :( Unfortunately my dad (who I decided would take the majority of the pictures, since he’s way better than me in photography) took pictures of cosplays I couldn’t recognize anyways. However, I finally got to see good cosplays in my life, and so now I think I have more respect for cosplay now and I’m more open-minded about it. So I’ve got to thank Anime Expo for that. But let’s see, the first cosplay I saw when I arrived was a Hatsune Miku cosplay, which wasn’t that bad (hair and outfit was down). Surprisingly, I saw a Mio cosplay there too (but I only got to see the back). There were some great Spirited Away cosplays as well. I was a little surprised to see some Avatar: The Last Airbender cosplays. Lots of Naruto and Pokemon cosplays, as expected. Unfortunately, I only got to see one Shugo Chara cosplay, of Nadeshiko (*coughtrapcough*). I saw a cute Sakura from CCS cosplay. It was pretty close outfit-wise, with a staff and everything. There were Chobits cosplays as well (yay for CLAMP love~). Um, however, I did see some guys cosplays as girls. Um…yeah. >_> Now on another note…my favorite cosplay. Well, it was a Final Fantasy cosplay X). My favorite cosplay was a of Yuna from FFX-2. The hair color, eye color, outfit, it was pretty close. Overall, I now have more respect for cosplays, since I saw some great ones that obviously took time and effort.

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Anyways, the convention was a fun experience despite not experiencing as much as I wanted. It was my first time, so navigating everywhere was harder. I still had fun at the places I went nonetheless. I hope to attend next year, hopefully with friends though. ^^ It was a new experience, and was pretty refreshing to me. I had other things to say, but I totally forgot xD, so that’s it for now.

Well, honestly, I got sick of doing nothing but Shugo Chara, but I found myself thinking to hard on what to write, when it suddenly came back. I had a tweet awhile ago about how I wanted to re-marathon Shugo Chara (funny how I just mentioned it…) during my spring break, and I accidentally misread something that gave me an idea on what to write! Re-thinking my history with anime, whatever sparked my interest in anime. Btw, this is a really sloppy post, just warning you, since it’s my first real rambling.

Early Years…Before I Realized I Actually Watched Anime

I think the first anime I’ve ever watched was Pokemon, when I was just a little kid. Honestly, I think almost every little kid has watched Pokemon once in their lives. I watched it a lot, with my whole family, and I totally loved the show. I watched all of the movies, and watched with my friends. There really isn’t much to say about this time, since I barely remembered it, but oh well. Around this time, I also began watching Sailor Moon, which I thought was so totally cool as well, and I got tons of items, showing it off, etc. I began watching Yu-Gi-Oh! and a bunch of other stuff on TV that I didn’t know was an anime adaptation (Rurouni Kenshin), and I also watched Cardcaptor Sakura…English Dubbed. =_=

Anime Came to America…Manga

Now it’s a time jump and the one anime that really sparked it for me was, Naruto. I hate to admit it, but Naruto was one of the reasons I got into anime. When I first saw the commercial I was like, “Lolwut?” but my brother said it was a pretty cool looking show. Me, being the gullible, always following my brother kind of person, I decided to watch it. I watched the show, and I totally fell in love with it. I thought it was the best thing in the world, and became one of those obsessed fans who have to be home at exactly 4 to watch a show. I jumped to the couch, and would ignore everything except for the show, and yell at it when it was done (creepy me). I even got a couple Naruto gifts for my birthday, which I went crazy for. And I found out about mangas as well. I guess I had opened my eyes to something new and was lavishing it. It was new, I was crazy over it. My uncle downloaded it everyday for us to watch, and around now I knew it was an anime. xD And from Naruto, I got introduced to YouTube so I could watch it whenever I wanted. I soon learned that Japanese dubs pwned English dubs. :D Also, unfortunately I got introduced to Wikipedia. Erm, I was wiki-happy (4+ hours reading Wikipedia =.=)? Naruto also had an influence on my username…>.> Haha, but I have an extreme short attention span~

I forgot how, but I began watching Cardcaptor Sakura. I sort of started losing interest in Naruto, and shifted it all to CCS. I watched some episodes here and there on YouTube, but I couldn’t find all of the episodes, and I guess I realized that Naruto wasn’t all that great, compared to the wonderful CCS. I got DVDs, stayed up late watching non-stop CCS, and found out my favorite types of anime. Romance~! I started learning Japanese here and there too! :D I found out how much I loved the show, and I could re-watch it without getting tired of it. And for the heck of it, I watched the English dub. That time, I learned that most English dubs are terrible. Too bad I started out with a classic though, so it’s hard to top it. This all happened over the summer, so when school came back around, I had to stop…

Shugo Chara…Otaku Summer

Up until around this time I had always only focused on one of those really long animes, and I didn’t know that an average anime was 26 episodes long. I could safely say that I wasn’t that interested in anime anymore and I focused more on web designing and forums. So it was a big time gap when I got interested in anime again, but this time, I fell hard for anime. I could vividly remember it, haha. I was just at a restaurant when suddenly, my friend calls me up and gives me some great news. Excited, I ask what it is, and she tells me to go watch an anime. And I’m just asking for the name, and she tells me it’s called Shugo Chara. I go “Wth is with the title?” and I keep getting an image of Skip Beat in my head (but this is when I was an ignorant fool who didn’t want to read it) and think of it as some weird too-girly show. They convinced me to watch it and I was like, “Holy snap this is nothing like what I thought! It’s awesome!” and soon I was further than them. Ikuto was my favorite character (but before I watched the show I wiki-ed the show and thought that Ikuto was some other dude who was an old silly man, because of the way they described him), and I immediately felt the chemistry between him and Amu. I loved the show, and had to watch more and more of it. Reruns were fine, and episode 33 was the episode in which I got introduced to anime blogging, starting with Simplicity.

It was over the summer, and I had to fill the time on my hands with something that I hoped would be as good as Shugo Chara. That’s when I began watching other animes and opening up my horizons, and I also realized that Naruto can’t compare to most of these animes (no offense to any Naruto fans). I went crazy over all of these new animes, and found sites like MAL and CR for my anime needs. So then I started marathoning animes and the time for me to usually finish an anime was an average of two days for an average length anime. I fell in love with Full Moon, Fruits Basket, OHSHC, and Special A the most. By then I realized that I just loved anime in general, and it wasn’t all about Shugo Chara anymore. I watched these anime for fun, if I could finish them so quickly. Not just to fill up my time waiting for another episode to come out. But since this was only last year, I still have a small list of completed anime, compared to most people. I called this my otaku summer, and I had to watch anime every day. It was a force of habit. But unfortunately that period ended too, since school started and I started singing a lot (my voice sucks for anyone who wants to know).

Skip Beat!…Blogging

I had started watching some ToraDora, Shugo Chara, and Skip Beat! but I started losing hope for many good anime. I felt as if I watched all of the good ones already, so I stopped looking for new anime. It seemed like a hopeless cause. I had gotten into blogging, but when I finally had the chance to catch up to Skip Beat!, my love for anime was revived. Obviously my first impression of Skip Beat was wrong as well, although I still can’t convince anyone else that Skip Beat is great. I had to watch the next episode, and it felt like the summer again. ToraDora also became better and better. I found more and more anime blogs, and since I was so stuck on what I wanted to blog, I decided to have an anime blog (actually, a blog on any form of entertainment, so if I got bored of anime, I could blog something else, but I doubt that’ll happen). And it has been a blog I’ve enjoyed the most. So here it is! Also, Maria+Holic somewhat revived this love as well. I can’t marathon though, since I have school, but I still enjoy it, even now.

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Bleach was also an anime I went crazy for, but I forgot which period it was in, so I decided not to put it in there. I had to yell at the TV every midnight, but oh well, yay for YouTube.

I can seriously say that my love for anime went up and down, but I never permanently got rid of it. It’s stuck on, unlike some other things. Despite my short attention span, anime just seems to never get old with me. I also began to enjoy mangas along the way. So anyways, here we are. I have a feeling that I won’t be getting tired of anime anytime soon. :D