ACEN 2026

[dorchadas]

Last year I wrote a lot about how a bunch of things initially went wrong and I had to work around them, but that didn't happen this year. This year basically everything went well in the prep leading up to the con. We got the hotel room we wanted, we got our badges on time, and everything was ready.

The only hiccup this year was Laila. While we'd be perfectly willing to pull Laila out of a school for one day to go on a family trip (so to speak), we were not willing to do that when she had already missed almost a month and a half of school between all of her days in the hospital and just general sickness. So, this year the plan was put her on the bus on Friday morning, leave after that, and my parents would pick her up from the school when she got back Friday afternoon. I know last year the people running the kids fun room recognized us, but they'll have to wait until next year to see us again.


Thursday
Why am I writing anything about Thursday when we didn't go until Friday? Well, for one reason and one reason alone--sashagee spent a chunk of the day prepping. She went to the grocery store, got a bunch of food, and then set out to prep the basis of plenty of meals for us so we won't have to eat out too much:

Beef summer sausage, cucumbers, peppers, smoked salmon, grapes.

Jalapeño chedder, regular chedder, regular gouda, black olives, green olives.

This isn't counting the crackers, the hard-boiled eggs, the mochi, the bottled milk tea, the bottled green tea, the pastries...we were ready. And the hotel we stayed at--the Hilton Express, the same as last year--offers free breakfast in the morning as well so we were fully prepared to not have to spend any money on food. Well, almost no money on food, since sashagee loves boba and there was a boba stand that got a chunk of money out her last year. But other than that, we were set.

We packed our bags and went to bed early. Tomorrow would be a big day.



Friday

Laila, not knowing anything about how busy our schedule was going to be, woke us up at 5:45 a.m. by jumping into bed. She was not interested in snuggling and falling asleep, and so we reluctantly got up at 6:15 a.m. and began our normal morning routine. Once we were actually up--Laila is now old enough to be annoyed when abba and mama aren't already awake when she is--the morning passed without incident, and we got her out the door and onto the bus at 7:30 a.m. Then it was time for us to get ready, so I hopped in the shower while sashagee packed and assembled all of our food. By 9:25 a.m. we were ready to leave and we headed out the door, arriving just before 10 a.m. That did mean that we missed the first panel we were interested in, about the switch-over Japan made from traditional clothing to Western-style clothing, but that's what happens when you have to fill the full suite of panel times. Like all the opening acts to bands we've been missing.

After parking, we left our stuff in the car and walked down to the front desk to ask them how parking worked. They completed the check-in--they told us we had started the check-in process but they needed to finalize it--and when they saw our room they offered us the choice of a couple others, so we were moved to a corner room on the third floor, the same floor most of our friends were staying at. And what's more, it was ready now instead of having to wait until the nominal check-in time for 3 p.m. Room keys in hand, we took a look at the room, dropped off the handbags we had, then walked downstairs where we saw D3adend, already in cosplay:

Bonus wild hair.

We chatted for a little bit but we all had places to be, so we went to the car, hauled up all of our luggage, ate a brief snack from our stored food and then prepared to head to the con. Back in 2024 the security situation was terrible but it was much better last year and the same was true this year too--it only took us less than a minute to get through the security checkpoint and after that we were in the convention center...where they had totally changed the layout! For years and years, the main lobby has been an open area where people would give solo concerts, cosplay groups would stand around waiting for people to take their picture, etc. This year they put the actual badge pickup in the lobby, so there were huge lines everywhere and it was much more crowded than it usually is. We stopped to pick up our 18+ proof wristbands and then I followed sashagee to her first destination: the gachapon station. Just after we got our tokens, we saw jeremy.podczerwinski! We chatted about the place of video rooms in modern anime cons--I used to use them to check out anime I hadn't seen all the time, twenty years ago before basically any series you could possibly want to see was online--but I haven't been to a video room that's not about AMVs in probably fifteen years. As we parted, he gave us AnimeChicago badge ribbons:

sashagee spent her gacha tokens on cute things for herself, though she did win me a "Kirby has swallowed someone and is a sphere" collectible, and then we walked over to the Artist's Alley. She bought Hatsune Miku stickers from one and cute bunny stickers from another, and when we arrived at Shishido Creative she made an off-hand comment about Laila that the owner, who had just recently become a mother herself, seized on. They spent a while chatting about motherhood and worries and how it changes your life forever--the shop running mentioned her mother-in-law was always calling to ask how the baby was, since her husband is older (she said 41) and also from Japan so the grandmother is on a different continent than the baby--before sashagee bought some stickers and a Sailor Moon pin from her, as well as a taking a business card and leaving a promise to go check out all the rest of her work. We wandered through the rest of the alley while she looked for a specific artist (Mako House), but didn't find them, so eventually we gave up and went to go get boba from a local Chicago boba shop. While there, I spotted the Hollow Knight and Hornet and had to go get a picture:

"No cost too great. No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering...".

Me: "You remember where they're from?"
sashagee: "Yeah, the bug game I don’t like."

The first place we went was S2 Heart where sashagee has been going every year we've come here. She immediately bought a t-shirt version of this shirt and another sweater, as well as (of course) a sticker. They chatted about health problems—the owner has sadly had to get an office job in order to receive health insurance—thank you American health care for being the single greatest drain on small business formation—and had greatly scaled back her creative work but she was still here with things to sell (and for sashagee to buy). After that we continued through part of the dealer’s hall, getting a Sakura Miku doll for Laila—she’s always asking me to get down mama’s “cherry little girl” figure—and a Flower Fairy Miku for sashagee. We had been wandering for a while, though, and it wasn’t long before she wanted a bit of a rest, so we left the dealer’s room for now and started walking back through the skyway to our room. On the way, though, sashagee just had to stop and take a picture of a Yor and Anya mother-daughter duo.

She even did the pose!

When we got back to our room, we broke out all the food and eat our fill of vegetables, fruit, and cheese--fresh food, all those things that when I was younger I was willing to go mostly without for the few days at a con but nowadays I feel the lack of almost immediately--and just after we were done, become_unglu3d arrived! She had to go work a charity game for her son later on, but she was coming for a bit this afternoon. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay--I was planning to go to the Kajiura Yuki/FictionJunction panel and, since they're major industry guests, I wanted to get there with plenty of time to wait in line.

I needn't have worried, though i was very worried when i got into a line wrapping around the building only to hear that it was actually the Idolmaster concert line and the Kajiura line was inside the building--still a long line but not hours of wait long. And despite how long the line was the room was half-empty and I could have easily walked at the start time and gotten a seat, or at least I could have if the panel actually started on time (listed time was 2:30 p.m., it actually started at 2:50 p.m.).

If you don't know, Kajiura Yuki is a composer who was the best part of garbage anime like Sword Art Online, good anime like Sora no Woto, and up-and-down anime like Noir. FictionJunction is a musical group put together to perform her music, so the panel was done as a...well, panel. The four singers + Kajiura-san came out and say down, gave their self-introductions, and then the panel moderator played a brief medley of songs from one of their concerts on the big screen.while we listened, though I did notice one of the singers (the one with the most kawaii voice during the self-introduction) bopping along to the beat on the stage.Then the panel questions began, for example:

1. Why did you (Kajiura) start FictionJunction? Because I can't sing at all and needed singers to bring my songs to life.
2. Why did you (KAORI) join FictionJunction? I worked at the same agency as Kajiura-san did, so that's how she heard of me...and also I was a huge fan of Noir's soundtrack so I was very happy to be able to contribute to her projects.
3. How do you (Joelle) build chemistry with other members? During practice, I imagine myself on stage performing, and we only have a few days to practice as a group, so really all the chemistry has to come from individual practice.
4. Is there a project that really stood out to you (Kajiura)? Well, no, not really, but it's because I give my all to every song I work on so it's very hard to pick a single song as particularly special or meaningful.
5. Which concert or song really sticks out to you (Yuriko Kaida) I've been a member for a long time so that's a very difficult question to answer, but Canta Per Me from Noir really stands out., as well as the songs from "FictionJunctionYUUKA" featuring YUUKA. I've also had the opportunity to sing a lot of songs in made-up languages [she kept using the word 梶浦語 (kajiurago, "Kajiura Language") ].
   
   Her answer was also so long when she was done she turned to the interpreter and asked, "Is that okay?" and when he was done translating, Kajiura-san broke in here to say she specifically picked Kaeda to sing non-Japanese songs.
6. Which concert or song really sticks out to you (Lino Leia)? When you hear her songs, they sound so beautiful and flowing, but they're extremely difficult to actually sing. There's a song called Organ of August that stands out to me specifically because of how difficulty it was.

There were also some audience questions, pre-selected from social media--the first was asking Kajiura-san why she selected each member of FictionJunction, and what it's been like working with Kajiura and what they learned? The panel ended with a final message from each panelist, mostly about how happy they are to be here and how they're excited to be performing tomorrow.

Except Kajiura, who started her message in English by saying, "I really didn't know my songs were difficult. Are they? Are they??" and then followed it up by saying that she usually doesn't get an opportunity to really work with the singers on the actual performance, mostly she works with them during the actual creation of the songs.

Just as we entered late, we got out late, and by the time I got out sashagee had gone back to the room to take a nap, so I checked the schedule to see what was happening around the con. I went down to the tabletop area in the basement of the Hyatt only to be greeted by a lot of closed doors. Hopefully they had people behind them having a good time, because several rooms I peeked into were basically empty. The Battletech room had tables covered in terrain all set up and then people just sitting on their phones nearby--hopefully they had people show up to play. The room with the most people in it was the Riichi mahjong room, and I did think that that was the variant played in FFXIV and this would be a perfect chance to finally learn what the hell a yaku is or why people are saying pon. However, I didn't want to commit to anything that would have taken too long, so I went upstairs and looked into the video rooms. We had been talking earlier with gmarchan about how the video rooms at cons were mostly vestigial now because of how accessible most anime is--back in the day I'd almost always go to at least a couple video rooms to check out a series I had only heard about before I decided whether buying the DVD was worth it--and my trip through the video programming bore that out, since basically every single room was almost totally empty with maybe one person in it. At least the con staff running the video rooms have an easy job. The only room I was really interested in was, of course, the AMV contest and by the time I arrived they had just finished showing all the entries and the room was closed. With nothing to really do in the Hyatt, I left to go to the convention center.

I had just wanted into the 痛車 (itasha, "car with pictures of anime characters on it") section:

Took this to show to sashagee.

...when I got a text from sashagee, who had not managed to fall asleep at all. She asked me to come back to the hotel room to see if me being there would help, so I did. It did not, but closing her eyes for a while helped her feel a little more well-rested, and at around 5 p.m. we got up and went to the dealer's room again so she could stop on her on weakness--Hatsune Miku figures. She picked up a couple cute ones (like this Flower Fairy) one), and we did another sweep of the dealer's room before what I thought was the closing time at 6 p.m...except it didn't actually close. They didn't make the fifteen minute closing announcement and 6 p.m. came and went, but we had somewhere else to be anyway. On the way out, though, I found this Esquie:

"Men trip not on mountains; they stumble upon stones".

We walked back to the hotel to actually use our free drinks at the drink reception, which we also had available last year and did not once actually take advantage of. I got a "Dragonball" (gin and blue curaçao) and we sat down in the corner to drink our drinks but it was only a few moments until snagengast and her husband spotted us from the third floor and came down, followed a few minutes later by heyfromdiana and then afterwards by mm55134 and jayyydienne! Unfortunately, I couldn't stay very long since I had a panel to get to, so I finished my drink, said my see you laters, and rushed back to the convention center.

I went into Horrible Heian Histories and came about three-quarters through during a story about Emperor Yōzei being deposed after crimes like "deliberately trampling people with his horse" and "strangling women with musical instrument strings nd throwing their bodies into the lake" and replaced by another guy named Mototsune.

The first full story I got was about Emperor Kazan, who assumed the thrown without any drama (or, more importantly, usurpation). He was a little eccentric, having ridden his horse through the palace dining room and otherwise a bit odd, but no torturing. His favorite consort died and he fell into depression, but his friend Michikane suggested that he study Buddhist sutras for comfort. Kazan found so much comfort in this that he decided he wanted to become a priest, and Michikane said if the emperor became a priest, he would follow him into the priesthood. At this time, Fujiwara no Kaneie, a powerful minister at court trying to politic his way into a higher rank, received a message to seize the imperial regalia (the sword, the mirror, and the magatama) and bright them to a son of the previous emperor who just happens to be a grandson of Fujiwara no Kaneie.

There was a brief aside here about how the Imperial Regalia of Japan, given to the first emperor 2500 years ago by the gods as a sign of the imperial family's divine right to rule, were declared tax-exempt in 2019 during the new emperor's ascension.

So, summer 986 CE, the emperor makes his escape...in the official imperial carriage in the middle of the night. During the escape, Kazan starts having second thoughts, but Michikane assures him that it is the right action and also tells him that Fujiwara no Kaneie has the imperial regalia so it's not like he can keep being emperor anyway. And after Kazan had his head shaved, he saw that Michikane didn't and asked why, and Michikane says oh, I have to go say goodbye to my parents, don't worry, I'll be right back, and you can probably see where this going. Michikane was later appointed Minister of the Right under Fujiwara no Kaneie's imperial regency.

The presenter briefly mentioned an RPG scenario she had written here called Only the Dead Face North based on all of this.

Kazan--or Nyūkaku as his Buddhist name was--was not a very good monk, as the stories say, evidenced by being shot by an arrow from a rival jealous that Kazan was sleeping with his mistress. Oops.

She also covered the rivalry between Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagan, who were each patronized by rival empresses (at the time the emperor was allowed two official wives) and each of which attracted very high-ranking lovers from imperial, or at least related-to-imperial (read: Fujiwara) clans. They waged battle in the classic method that all good Heian aristocrats did--poetry,

We ended with bird conspiracies, or, why birds hated the Taira Clan (from the infamous Tale of the Heike). Minamoto no Yoritomo is on the run with a small band of supporters who go hide out in a cave, after his previous success hiding in a hollow tree. The Taira are near the cave, ready to enter, when a burning bird flies out. The Taira, reasoning that no humans could be in the cave if birds lived there, just leave. Later, after the Minamoto raise more troops, the Taira are looking for them in the evening when a gigantic flock of birds is spooked and takes flight. The Taira assumed that this was an ambush and fled without ever making contact with the Minamoto forces. This was called the Battle of Fujigawa.

The third bird incident was during the run up to 壇ノ浦 (Dan no Ura), when both sides were seeking the favor of a particularly nautical priest named Betto Tanzō. At the urging of his son Benkei (that Benkei), he conducted a augury cockfight between fourteen birds, seven representing the Taira and seven representing the Minamoto. The Minamoto birds won, and so Tanzō threw his support behind the Minamoto.

That was the last story, so I ran back to the hotel to make it in time for the room crawl:

jeremy.podczerwinski and erendira.morales once again winning with their decor.

There were four rooms this year:

1. Hotaku Hotel: Since I was gone for the initial part of the party I had no idea what to expect, but when I showed up staina.x opened the door, looked at me with no expression, said, "Wait here," and closed the door. When it opened again, it was her and gracielizabeth who told me I could either do a Malört shot or five pushups to get in. I chose pushups, and when I got in, I saw that the room was Frat themed. All the alcohol was in those small one-shot bottles, there were red solo cup shotglasses attached to wristbands, and people had their baseball caps on sideways. In my button-down and dress pants I was definitely not dressed for the party:

   mooshu1x2: "You look like you just came form work."
   Me: "I'm a boring dad now."

   Since I had been at a panel I was only there for about fifteen minutes, but I had a Malört shot before I left.
2. BubbleRoom: This was right next door but it took a bit to get ready. When the door opened, we were greeted by RGB lighting, psychedelic picture on the walls, and glow stick bracelets, as well as a bracelet-making station right in the center of the room. The cocktails were sake-based and there were also bowls of starbursts around the room (just candy, no additives). On the wall was a sign that said "Welcome to Wooks and Weebs."
3. d3adend's room: This room was, like many popular shows lately, Death Game themed. There were all kinds of games of chance around the room, from dreidels to Uno to dice, and a series of rules on the wall. The person with the most stickers at the end of the night would win the Death Game, and Jujutsu Kaisen stickers were worth double. I was doing pretty well, since I went around and grabbed a bunch right at the beginning, but then I got absorbed in talking to a woman who sat next to me on the couch because it turned out she was Jewish and also a parent (so we had a lot in common) so when spacedragon walked over and just grabbed my stickers out of my hand I did not retaliate. spacedragon won despite not playing a single one of the games.
4. Spirited Away OnsenThis was jeremy.podczerwinski and erendira.morales's room, and they're always the one who put the most effort into their room. erendira.morales was dressed as Sen and explained how the room worked, and jeremy.podczerwinski lurked behind a "wall" and dispensed our orders, except for the brief time that he came out dressed as No Face. I ordered one of everything--it was delicious.

Just after midnight, we called an end to the room crawl and all walked over the rave, which was...fine? It had no line so we got right in, but the DJ there was just okay. The musical style kept changing from song to song and with no flow we couldn't really get a rhythm going. We stayed for about an hour, after which we were so tired that we didn't want to really do anything else other than go back to the hotel and go to bed.



Saturday
We rolled out of bed at around 8:30 a.m., got ready, and walked down to breakfast just after 9 a.m. There was a nearly-full table of the others there, so we sat down with hour food and ate. The people at the table rotated while we were sitting there as more people woke up and others left to shower and change, but at around 9:50 a.m. sashagee sent me up to get a canned coffee and with that in hand, we took our leave. We walked through the tunnels, basically walking straight through security, and into the first panel of the day: "But He’s Just So Hot!" - An Exploration and Critique of Bad Boys.

The panel began with a definition of bad boys: confidence/self-reliance (it can be exciting to convince someone who seems to not need anyone else that they need you), high risk (but a possible high reward as well), thrill of the chase (self-explanatory), or being a project (the classic "I can fix him"), and then mentioned the classic push-pull of love bombing: the bad boy loves you obsessively to the point of breaking boundaries constantly, but of course, it's only in service of how much he loves you! His feelings are just so strong. But then he pulls away and you want that high from being wanted again, so you chase after him trying to get his interest. Anyone who's read romance novels knows the pattern.

This is around when sashagee told me "This is why more serious than I thought it would be."

With a last amateur categorization of types bad guys--Rule Breaker, Moneybags, Intellectual, Literal Monsters (like Beast from Beauty and the Beast), and quote "it's Fate and he can't turn back"--the panel turned into an audience participation tier listing. This was slightly dampened by the small audience (it was first thing in the morning, after all), but sashagee shouted out the answer that became the ranking criteria: how long would it take to get over the trauma with them, with S being "it's irreparable." Some of them I had never heard of, but others like Light Yagami from Death Note or Griffith from Berzerk (or Vegeta from Dragon Ball in the other direction) were easy to rank. I didn't vote for any show I hadn't seen, but sashagee went based on the provided list of characteristics next to each example. I hadn't seen most of the shows but I did appreciate the audience reaction when certain characters (like Eren Jaeger from Attack on Titan) showed up.

sashagee: "[Eren Jaeger] must be from season 2 or something, I don't remember him."
Me: "...he's literally the main character."

Also Shadow the Hedgehog was on there?

When the panel ended, we went out to the dealer's hall to look around a bit before our next panel. sashagee bought more stickers (of course), and kept pointing out things she thought were cute, like a little stand-up of the campers from Yuru Kyan. She got another coffee (and me a concha, which I thought were filled with cream but apparently I was thinking of something completely different? Shows how many breaded desserts I eat), and I saw an original Mega Man:

The blue bomber! His megabuster even lit up.

...and after that it was time for our next panel: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Anime Openings.

Soon after we walked in, they put the intro for Cowboy Bebop on the screen. Have to start with a bang.

Before the panel, they passed out raffle tickets, which they said they'd use to call on people to choose which intro (from a list) that we would watch. And that was how they started, without any real introductions--they called out a number (a woman two rows in front of us), the recipient walked up and say in the hot seat, and she picked Nyaight of the Living Cat. Partway through, sashagee said, "I think I want to watch this."

They showed Baki, Fairy Tail (much to sashagee's delight), Call of the Night (literally everyone voted this one was good), the new Samurai Troopers, Burn the Witch, Brand New Animal (the one with quote "hot Bluey" unquote), Skull-Face Honda the Bookseller (this was the one the audience was most ambivalent on), Oshi no Ko (the one with words all over it was the only video I could find), and Chainsaw Man.

Then they did a showdown--the old and new intros to Ranma 1/2--and asked the audience to compare them. It was pretty close, about half and half between liking the new vs the old intro, and both were voted Good by the audience. A fun panel but a little let down by the face that random selection meant we had no bad openings to be appalled about.

When the panel was done, we ran back to the room to eat lunch--I had some of our stored food, sashagee had tacos from the stand outside--rest for a bit, and then went to the AnimeChicago meetup on the second floor of the panel area. We chatted a bit with someone who we hadn't seen for over half a year and then when our time was almost up, left to go look at the Artist's Alley again. sashagee didn't have a particular goal in mind, so we just wandered around. We found an artist with a bunch of OCs, working toward his goal of making a webcomic named "Cross of Corinthia," and a little later we ran into mhhilker! He was dressed as a pokéfarmer:

'Taint much but it's honest work.

We talked for a bit and said we'd see them later, but they said probably not since they had a movie night planned. So we said our goodbyes and then we had to go wait in line for the Kajiura Yuki / FictionJunction concert.

When we got to the end of the line, sashagee audibly groaned because it was around the building and she saw people waiting in the sun. It turned out she needn't have worried, though, since we were only standing in line for a couple minutes before the line started moving. And not just that, it was moving all the way through until we were sitting inside the Hyatt ballroom waiting for the concert to start. The only hiccup was the guy sitting next to us, who...well, let's say was not the best in picking up on social cues, but I replied when he chatted with me and eventually I was surprised by a tap on the shoulder because spacedragon had read my post about how there were plenty of chairs and you could just walk in! We only had a brief chance to chat, though, before the lights dimmed and FictionJunction took the stage.

They started, of course, with Swordland.

Say what you will about Sword Art Online, the music is great.

Partway through the second song, sashagee turned to me and mentioned how technically difficult the singing that FictionJunction was doing. I replied with the story about how surprised Kajiura had been that all of her singers said her songs were hard.

The concert was great! She did not play any of her really old stuff--no Canta Per Me, sadly--but in addition to Swordland they played Lighthouse and some other songs that sounded familiar but which I don't remember the titles of (I'm mostly a far of Kajiura through her older work). sashagee really liked the concert, though, and that's what's important.

When it was over spacedragon had already disappeared, so we left and went to the dealer's hall to check on an order I placed. Koval Distillery had put out a special edition raspberry gin in an ACEN bottle so I had to get one, but when we went to the booth at the actual hall the Koval staff member (obviously a little sick of having to repeat this explanation) told me that the order pick up was not actually in the hall, it was down the street behind the Hyatt where all the floor trucks were and suggested I run down there to get it because their partner also had not placed any limit on the number of orders. So I left sashagee in the Artist's Alley, ran down to the truck area, picked up the bottle with no problems, and ran back to the dealer's hall.

Image taken later.

The security guard laughed and gave me two thumbs up when he was inspecting the wrapped bottle in my bag and I told him what it was.

I find sashagee--she's bought a cardigan--and we buy a Kuromi plush for Laila, then go since it's almost time for the yearly Hentai and Waffles party. We first go to back to the hotel reception area, and on the way overhear this as we're walking through the tunnels:

"I’m obsessed with everybody crossing. It’s like Shibuya, but for freaks."

I got my two complimentary drinks:

Right one was a 'Dragonball' with gin, left one was a 'Poketrainer' with...something I don't remember.

...and some cheese to pad my stomach, while sashagee waited around for the tortilla chips to be refilled.

At 6:30 p.m. we took our food and drinks up to the party, which had a bunch more subdued mood this year--usually people are standing around, but this time nearly everyone was sitting. People were actually watching the TV, albeit it in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of way. We stayed for an hour and then sashagee said she needed a rest, so we went back to the room and laid down. Her intention was to take a nap but she didn't actually get to sleep, and at 9 p.m. we got up to head to the next panel of the day: "Everyone In Your Party Has Died: Let’s Play Oregon Trail."

The panel began with a lively chant of:

"Ford that shit!

and then an explanation of the rules, including that only two teams had won in the entire fifteen-year-history of the game. The leaders picked a name, AssClapius, and an occupation, saddlemaker. The participants picked CrispySock, FngrBngr, Ena-Lbr (this was overridden to "PoopButt"), and ElmersGlue (the woman with this was cosplaying a character from Uma Musume). They received one minute to buy supplies (10 oxen, 10 sets of clothing, 30 boxes of bullets, 3 wheels, 3 axels, 3 tongues, and 1800 pounds of food). Then, they embarked!

Two of them were bitten by snakes before they even got to the first river.

When they got to the river, they had to guess a clip from an anime, which they did successfully. Then they had the choice of what to do at the river. "Pay the ferry" seemed to be gaining traction until the audience started chanting "Ford that shit!"

Right before disaster.

ElmersGlue drowned.

The game continued with a further minigame--guessing the original source an extremely-blurred erotic fanart--and a successful fording of the river. They skipped the first town because they had tons of food and made it to Chimney Rock, where the hosts called for a challenge. The players would have to win to keep a Steady pace, otherwise they'd be upped to Grueling. They were shown a clip in an anime and had to guess what happened next, which they did (it was the first episode of Nukitashi--ask your parents). There was another game involving guessing based on two gifs which anime series had the highest MyAnimeList rating (Nichijō vs Gintama, the answer was the latter, which let them successfully hunt. Unfortunately, soon afterward FngrBngr died of typhoid fever.

The next minigame was supposed to be increasingly-long sections of an anime OP...but they had picked Gurren no Yamiya and the contestant guessed it immediately after one second of audio.

After an error on the host's part--they left the fort without allowing the contestants to buy supplies--the contestants lost another gif guess game--they reached another river. This guessing game the audience spoiler guessed the extremely-pixelated fanart on the first guess when it was just a blue and pink blue. This meant that they had to ford the Colorado River, which ended poorly (all oxen and people died). And that's game!

They ran through a second game, all the same rules but with new contestants, but partway through we left because I got a text from redpikachu! So we left and went to the Hyatt to meet up. When we got there, she was with alicetheallstar, of course, and some other people I hadn't met before. We chatted a bit about family and how the world seems to be constantly getting worse--redpikachu hasn't gotten a raise in years and is the only one of her siblings with a job, even though one of her sisters has an MBA--when another cosplayer showed up. He, like redpikachu, was in a Squid Game cosplay and he wanted to play a game.

He'd obviously been practicing, so he won--and there were no fatal consequences. When it was all done, he thanked us and left, and we left no much longer after too, since we had to get back to the room to get ready to go to the rave. We walked out into the cool night air, passed some cops complaining about a co-worker:

“You’re the same title as everyone else! You should feel lucky you get to sit in the van 99% of the time…”

and walked into our room to do rave prep. I was basically ready right away, but sashagee took a bit because she needed bandaids for her heels. Her calls to the Discord resulted in snagengast diverting from going to the rave and coming with bandaids, so the two of us chatted about healthcare and how the American healthcare system is bad (she also works in healthcare) until sashagee was ready.

We walked through the cool night air to the rave, where we were unpleasantly confronted with lines--the rave was at capacity so we would have to wait to get in. There had been some rumblings on the Anime Central discord about how one of the DJs was using AI slop for their videos--it was repeatedly described as "robot sumo"--but the DJs had switched since then and apparently everyone was trying to get back in. We caught the tail end of Kenmochi Hidefumi's set and then the DJ we had all been waiting for, Taku Takahashi, took the stage.

"This is the national anthem of Japan. Everyone please sing along."

cues up Cruel Angel’s Thesis

The mood was 180° from the previous complaints, and Takahashi got roars from the crowd whenever he'd sample the Tetris theme or the Bonus Stage theme from Super Mario World. We danced for forty-five minutes and then the heat started to get to us, so we went over for water and then decided to get some air. The line meant that was it--we weren't waiting in it again--so we walked back to the hotel and said our good nights.



Sunday
My alarm was set for 8:55 a.m. but sashagee was awake around 8 a.m. and asked me if I wanted to get up. I didn't want to, but I did anyway, and we went down to breakfast around 8:40 a.m. where there was already a table of our friends eating. Since there was no one in line we got omelets, and we sat and chatted while everyone ate. After about an hour we got up to pack, load everything into the car, and spend a last few hours at ACEN.

Our luggage packed, we went back to the convention center and to the dealer's hall, where sashagee went straight to a booth she had been eyeing to buy a Yuru Kyan standup and an apple-themed present for werepez. She also bought two Kirby blind-boxes for me, and then we went back toward the entrance to check out the artwork that had been worked on for the entire weekend:

Based on this show which isn't out yet.

Then we had to leave to go to the next panel: "Shojo Manga's Lost Generation."

The panel started with a mention of Princess Knight and how a lot of people, once again, credit Tezuka Osamu with inventing everything. The presenter went much further back, however, to Meiji-era magazines designed to promote literacy and good morals in young women--良妻賢母 (ryōsai kenbo, "good wives and wise mothers"), as the saying went. There were actual comics in these magazines, but they were very rudimentary until a man named Matsumoto Katsuji (a children's book illustrator) started submitting his own comics. The Mysterious Clover (1934) was one of the first manga that would be recognizable to modern readers, but World War II led to a heavy crackdown on the "decadent", Westernized shōjo magazines (not to mention the paper and ink rationing) that eventually led to most of their demise.

After the war, there was a big boom in book rental shops that led to the rebirth of shōjo manga magazines, enough of one that people would write specifically for the rental market. Most of the artist were still men, though: Tezuka Osamu, Ishinomori Shōtarō (Dragon Pond), Matsumoto Leiji (Green Angel), Chiba Tetsuya (Mama's Violin).

Here with the examples, sashagee turned to me and said the examples all had recognizable Shōjo Manga Face.

One of the first female shōjo mangaka was Ueda Toshiko, who wrote a manga called Fuichin-san inspired by her childhood growing up in Imperial-occupied Japan (a later manga called Fuichin Tsaichen was written about the real Ueda's childhood). She was followed by Miyako Maki (Ano Takara To Oku) and Watanabe Masako (Hana no Yado), who specialized in mother-daughter melodramas, and became a prolific illustrator, and is still alive, having just started a new manga in the last few years.

As shōjo manga magazines grew popular enough to be printed weekly, they started printing tutorials for drawing manga and also encouraging reader submissions, further increasing the pool of female mangaka. Frustrations were growing with the type of stories, though:

"In those days, heroines in shōjo manga were of the irritating type. Whenever something happens, they would cry...but I wanted to tell those heroines, 'Why don't you do something if you have the time to cry?' "
-Satonaka, Machiko, International Perspectives on Shōjo and Shōjo Manga: The Influence of Girl Culture

The 1964 Tōkyō Olympics and the gold medalist women's volleyball team also led to a big boom in sports manga, like Urano Chikako's Attack No. 1. The move away from moralizing and commensurate switch from elementary-age characters to older ones also allowed romance manga to finally start to gain popularity, to the point that nowadays that's the thing everyone thinks about when it comes to shōjo manga.

Mizuno Hideko became a professional manga artist at 15 (while finishing school) and at 18 became an assistant to Tezuka, collaborating with famous mangaka, but she eventually became a horse girl--or at least, her manga like Run, Chess! were often Westerns. Her biggest manga, Fire!, however, was about an American man in America who meets a delinquent rock star and decides to become a musician in the late 1960s, with everything that goes with it.

At this point, the actual panel name came up--why was this a "lost generation"? The biggest problem is apparently that a lot of early shōjo manga only ran once in their magazines, which often had small prints, and weren't collected afterwards. Publishers did not value manuscripts, so once mangaka submitted them they just vanished into the system. Most original shōjo manga were quickly printed on cheap paper and have no survived the decades intact. And since it was for girls, academics mostly ignored them.

The panelist said this was usually the end of the panel, but just within the last month a company announced that they were localizing Fire! sashagee immediately took down the link for this and sent it to me, so I guess we're getting it.

You can find the panelist's blog here.

I asked sashagee if she had anything else in mind but after a whole weekend of running around and partying she was very tired, so she suggested just getting lunch and then going home. We went back to the dealer's room and through to the area with the food stalls in the back, and while there was a stall serving poke that I would normally have loved to order from, there was a giant line that probably would have taken 20 minutes to get through and the poke was almost $20 for a small, so I said I wasn't interested. sashagee did get some tacos, though, and we got to see a cagematch between Pikachu and Squirtle at the nearby Gangnam Market booth:

Insert animal cruelty discourse here.

On the way out, I got a picture of the Space Battleship Yamato cosplay:

The theme song played from speakers on the ship assembly!

Picture taken, we went back to the car, piled in, and drove home.


Every year I say the same thing--that there's too much to do and not enough time to do it--and that remains true. We didn't manage to get to the game room at all this year, and I don't think we covered all of the dealer's hall. There were several panels that we weren't able to get to, and as I mentioned, I missed portions of the parties because I had other things I wanted to go to. But we both had a great time and despite being totally exhausted, managed to spend almost all of our time at the con. Already looking forward to next year!

Next year we'll have Laila for part of it too, now that she doesn't need naps anymore. We'll see how that goes.

Bonus photo of all the goods that sashagee bought: