Cuddly moral support team. Many people asked where I’d gotten these guys from, and the answer is “Japan”.

I’m still recovering from my trip to Desucon 2012 which was held June 8-10 in Lahti, Finland. I don’t think I’d be so tired if I didn’t have to travel there from practically the other end of the country, 12 hours on the train wears me out even if it’s a night train and I can sleep. Anyways, a quick con report before I forget everything.

This was my 3rd time going to Desucon. My loyal side-kick for the weekend was Mineko who also took most of the photos because I had my hands full carrying around my moral support team (Kotetsu & Bunny plush dolls) on Saturday. I cosplayed on Friday and Sunday, Mineko spent the entire weekend getting into trouble as Scarf-tan.

To everyone who wondered where the plushie heroes were from: I ordered them from Japan, you couldn’t find these guys at the dealers’ room although there was some Tiger & Bunny stuff this time.

My Desucon experience in short

Friday:

I arrived to Lahti already in the morning, but since I was providing a program they let me in to Sibeliustalo early, and I spent some time helping around while waiting for the doors to open at 5 PM.

• Sugiyama Noriaki’s guest of honor panel: Sugiyama is incredibly adorable. I’ve been his fan for years, so I was pretty excited about seeing him live.

That was the only program we attended on Friday, I was really beat after traveling all night to Lahti and they day felt longer than it was so we went to the hotel pretty early.

Saturday:

We were handing out Friend Rice vouchers and surprises to Tiger & Bunny cosplayers, sadly there weren’t that many we could see on Saturday (maybe because we went to see so many of the programs) but on Sunday we found more. I wanted to go see the Mawaru Penguindrum thing after the big hits lecture, too, but I needed some coffee and food into my system so we sat it out.

• BL drama CDs vs BL anime: entertaining and to the point.
• What are big hits made of?: pretty good stuff, gave me a few points for my own presentation.
• Steins;Gate – Revenge of the Nerds: the presenter was cosplaying Okabe with appropriate Dr. Pepper, banana and microwave oven props, and he put on a good show. The presentation itself was a bit tl;dr and since it was clearly aimed at people who’d already seen the anime he could have spent less time on the characters and more on the nerdy bits. Still, enjoyable.
• Mononoke – Form, Truth, Reason: started 10 minutes early for reasons I don’t know. Clearly a very well thought and composed presentation but the presenter seemed a bit insecure and stiff which affected the whole thing. (Hope Mineko watches the Bakeneko arc from Ayakashi now, tsk.)
• Japanese Spirit World: was totally not what it was supposed to be, we ended up just watching short horror movies but it was very late and everyone was tired and it was actually pretty fun to scream together with a conference room full of people.

I had my own Tiger & Bunny presentation between the Mononoke and Spirit World ones. I think it went well, thanks to everyone who’s given me feedback on my first ever lecture at a con! I know I could have done some things better, but the audience had fun and that’s the main thing. The presentation was recorded and the official version will be available later on Desucon’s YouTube channel. The Spirit World thing took so long that we missed the evening party, we were back at the hotel at midnight and decided to just call it quits for the day. Maybe next year I get a chance to try those QB drinks.

Sunday:

We started the day off by lugging our suitcases to the railway station and put them into lockers for later so we wouldn’t have to drag them back and forth to Sibeliustalo. I also gave in to the lure of the dealers’ room, although I didn’t buy anything Tiger & Bunny related. (For some reason, I already have about everything I could want… *cough*) Instead, I bought a P3 Akihiko figure by Kotobukiya (I thought I’d never find it anywhere!) and some Japanese sweets. We spent more time looking around and trying to spot the elusive T&B cosplayers instead of going to see all the programs.

• Shiki – Journey to the Dark Side of the Night: a fun, interactive presentation. Didn’t quite stay that tightly on the subject but taking the audience into the discussion was nice.
• Ending Ceremony: Visual Gay’s show was awesome, but as a whole the ending ceremony took a bit too long.

Then we headed back to the train station (with a pit stop at Hesburger to get some chow). All in all, the most fun I’ve had at a con so far. Thank you Mineko for hanging out with me!

You can find some Tiger & Bunny cosplay photos from the con at the Facebook album.

(And if you happened to see two girls walking around singing “GANBAREEE GANBAREEE” from Morita’s album at the top of their lungs, well… that was me and Mineko.)