gen's daily life - gensou's boston adventure

hoo boy, saturday was a HUGE day for me. last week, i attended Anime Boston for the first time ever in my life. i registered back in February, but i never actually attended a convention of any sort in my life till now. plus it marked the first time in a while i ever went to Boston. sometimes i forget what the big city looked like.

am i still tired? yes. did i nearly run my wallet broke? yes. did i nearly exhaust myself walking around for around 10 hours? yes. did i have a blast? hell yes.

shot of the full outfit. iiiiii did not have the wig on (yet)

i went as Almaz von Almandine Adamant from Disgaea 3. scarf, jacket, belt, and gloves were done with my dad's help, and i managed to find a use for my leg warmers as well. might not be a 100% accurate cosplay, but it was comfy enough and inexpensive to make. thrift shopping and my dad being a tailor helps wonders for cosplay.

i was the only Disgaea cosplayer at the con that day, aaaaand subsequently that meant that not a lot of people recognized who i was. despite that, i got to see quite a few neato booths, saw some rad cosplayers (and even snapped pictures of them!), played some games in the game hall, and even ended off the con by attending their JoJo panel.

so yeah, as you can imagine, there's quite a bit i can say about my first ever con experience! as much as there were only so much photos i could snap with me in them, aaaaaand the fact that i only attended one panel, quite a bit went on that day!

photos and a brief overlay of what went on under the cut, of course!


i live around the southern coast of Massachusetts. with boston around 50 miles up north, it was a bit of a drive up there: i think around one or two hours at the most?

thankfully actually entering the convention building didn't take too long. dad got the truck parked in the garage, we entered the hall and got our badges, and we got settled in amongst the probably-over-a-thousand people attending the con. of course we hit the merchant booths first to check out what stuff people were selling. there were so many!

angel attack! (Sahaquiel from Neon Genesis Evangelion)

mostly i went around browsing the booths for anything that'd be worth buying as a souvenir. preferably something like a shirt or at least something that was practical enough to spend twenty bucks on. didn't want to get a figure or the like since i already had so much crap on my computer desk already. was looking for Disgaea merchandise in particular, though i'd be also good with any merch of JoJo's Bizzare Adventure (if you don't know what that is, i'm working on a little article related to it that'll be up in the future. sit tight for it.).

me and dad came across various cosplayers while we were boothhopping. most of them were from more popular series like Kuroshitsuji and Attack on Titan (on a related note, my dad thought the AoT uniforms were from Battlestar Galactica at first glance), though there were some folk dressed as blokes from lesser-known games and anime. i asked some of the passerby i liked if i could take a photo of them; most of them were solo shots of themselves, but i did snap some photos of myself with some of the cosplayers. the solo shots will be uploaded in a separate article soon.

god damn was this guy in character (Excalibur from Soul Eater)

at some point while i was traveling from booth to booth, i lost track of my dad in one half of the merchant hall and ended up wandering by myself for a good while. luckily i still had my camera on hand so i was still able to take shots, though i had to have the help of some people to take the photos of me with people. i don't think a good fraction of the people i saw were too familiar with Canon cameras.

there were some video game booths in one half of the hall. while i didn't have too much luck at scoring myself a copy of say, Crash Team Racing, there were still a lot of interesting stuff on sale like imported games from Japan and rare Dreamcast games. was hoping to maybe score a Playstation Portable, but i hadn't had much luck with that either. ah well. not like a trip to Ebay or Amazon can't solve that.

plus i don't think i want to shell out fifty bucks for a copy of Pokemon Emerald.

posin' with some ladies at the Funimation booth.

for the first hour or so at the con, i was hoping to run into some JoJo cosplayers so i could pose with them, seeing as JoJo's pretty well-known for it's doofy poses. i even wanted to attend the JoJo panel at night before i left Boston. hadn't had any luck with finding any until later, but i did get a chance to pose with some girls at Funimation's booth and get a photo of it. they were having a little promotion contest thing: take a photo and share it on twitter/facebook, and you get a chance of scoring a thousand bucks worth of anime.

didn't personally care about the contest myself considering i'd forget about what hashtag i needed to put on the shared photo, but it was still a fun shoot. i asked the ladies if they could do some Jojo posing with me, and they were more than happy to join in on it. they didn't seem to see any Jojo cosplayers at the time, but at least i got at least one chance to pose, though many more came later.

nope, haven't seen him (Komaru Naegi and Toko Fukawa from Dangan Ronpa)

i wandered around a bit more and took photos of outfits i found neat. as for the whole situation with finding my dad, i was planning on heading back around one of the entrances so hopefully he could find me easier. luckily i did manage to bump into him again eventually; he wasn't angry, but we did make a plan to stick together and meet up in the middle of the hall if we splitted up again.

after zipping through the merchant booths with no set mind on what to buy, i decided to head up a floor to check out the artist's alley. first time around it was just a quick lookthrough, and i didn't see any artists i was familiar with or actively followed. would see it again later, but i wanted to find some other things Anime Boston had to offer.

posing with some ripple bros (Joseph Joestar and Caesar Zeppeli from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure)

on the upper floors were some hallways with windows to let in the sunlight. didn't get too many shots here, but we saw some more pretty rad cosplays, and the natural light really helped with the shots.

some of the more notable things we saw on the upper floors were a huge group of Touhou cosplayers and the karaoke room, where i got to see two fantastic JoJo cosplayers (the Joseph and Caesar above, there) sing the fourth opening for the JoJo anime. they weren't the first Jojo cosplayers i saw: that honor goes to a Polnareff i saw at the artists' alley. after their fantastic performance, i asked to get a shot of them. so glad i did.

fake heroes unite! (Luka from Monster Girl Quest)

we took a short look at the game hall before we decided to get something to eat at the cafe. i wasn't too hungry, but my dad was. we saw a few cosplayers outside the cafe and lining up to get food as well. took some pictures with a small Jojo cosplay group and even caught sight of Jin Kisaragi from BlazBlue getting a bottle of soda. idk, there's something kind of adorable about that.

after getting an energy refill, we had a couple more hours to burn before the Jojo panel started. i wanted to do a more thorough look through the merchant booths. hadn't bought anything practical, and i wanted to see if there was any Disgaea merchandise i might've overlooked.

can i really be the hero?

turns out there was a couple stuff i did overlook on my first walk through the hall. first thing i bought was an adorable prinny hat by Athena's Wink, and the second was a semi-matching tshirt from the Sanshee booth. i let dad carry the tshirt with him, but the hat i donned immediately. considering how popular of a mascot the prinnies were, quite a pinch more people recognized me when they saw it. well, they recognized the prinny more, but i'm pretty sure i remember at least two or three people knowing me as Almaz.

muda muda (Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure)

as much as i still didn't catch sight of any Disgaea cosplayers, we did start running into more Jojo folk. the panel was still a couple hours or so away, so that might've explained why we started seeing more of the fancy-posing fighters.

as much as i surprisingly had been going for quite some few hours, my endurance was starting to kinda fall on me, so we took a bit of a sitting break at the upper halls. soon we hit the game room to burn a bit of time before the panel.

playing some Touhou. keyboarding with gloves on is hard.

hoo boy, was the game hall packed. people at the tables were playing various console games (mostly fighters and first-person shooter games), and there were even arcade cabinets for musical games and beat-em-ups, though the main attraction displayed on the far end of the hall were the Touhou series of games. i'll likely do an article on Touhou here eventually, but suffice to say it's basically a series of super-hard shoot-em-up games with a huge cast of female characters.

some Touhou cosplayers were sitting at the computers playing the games, and internet radio station Gensokyo Radio was playing some remixed tracks from the games. i sat down and played one of the games for a short while. with my bad bullet-dodging skills, i did not get too far in.

despite that, i did get to talk to some of the GR folk for a short while, and they even gave me a couple of promo cards and a cute Chen sticker. also managed to get a few shots of the Touhou cosplayers there, as well as some other rad folk in the game hall. also played a few of the other featured games as well, namely the TMNT arcade game and Power Stone 2 on the Dreamcast.

WRYYYYYYYY! (Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure)

with the panel drawing near, me and dad took one final look at the merchant and artists' halls before heading up to the upper floor. on a second lookthrough of the artists' alley, i tried seeing if there was anyone i recognized that i just overlooked. i managed to spot the booth of Tea Fox Illustrations, who does some lovely artwork inspired by Japanese folklore. i follow them on twitter and various other sites, so i bought a couple of bookmarks from Sarah herself to show my support. i highly encourage you to check out her art if you have the time! she does some really gorgeous works!

me and dad went upstairs towards the room where the Jojo panel was to be held. dad just assumed it was a rather obscure series (probably because he never heard of it, but the guy's kinda stuck in the 60s-70s), but the amount of people flocking outside the room proved otherwise.

even gensou is intrigued

the wait for the panel wasn't too long; we waited a half hour to head into the room, and around another fifteen minutes for the room to fill and the panel to actually start. basically it was a rundown of what JoJo's Bizarre Adventure was about, the various spinoffs of the series such as video games and the recent anime adaptation, and its influence on various media and how it got so popular in the english-speaking anime community as of lately.

do you even pose? (no seriously, one dude was wearing a shirt with that phrase on it.)

i knew about JoJo for quite a while prior to registering for the con, but i thought it'd be a fun thing to end the trip on, especially since they had people ask silly questions and participate in imitating poses from the series. participated in some pose-ery myself, though my dad didn't get too much decent shots of them. though, he took some pictures of the older!Joseph cosplayers that went up on stage, which i found kinda funny since Joseph kinda looks like my dad. just without a hat. or a prosthetic hand. or a stand. er, getting kinda tangental there.

OH! MY! GOD!

as soon as the panel ended, me and dad made our way back to the truck. sky was dark, moon was up, and the two of us were tired as heck. took us another hour or so to return home, with the clock reading 11:00 pm by the time i got home, went downstairs, and immediately flopped into bed. was absolutely exhausted, my feet were sore, i was warm from staying in the outfit for so long, and i fell asleep with the most content thoughts in my mind.

i was tired at the end of the whole thing, but by god did i have a huge blast for my first con experience.

as much as i didn't do too much like attending multiple panels or splurging my savings on a lot of figures and games and the like, i had a good time and found some things i wanted, as well as got a lot of rad cosplay photos in the process. also got to play on an actual Dreamcast, which is always cool as hell.

as for people not recognizing me, i'm not too bothered by that. considering how obscure Disgaea is, i didn't expect too many people to know who i was.

so, that all aside, will i be coming again next year? ehhhh, i wouldn't really hold my breath on it since i pretty much exhausted myself both physically and wallet-ally, but who knows? not me, i sure don't know.

but i got a prinny hat and rad photos and that's what matters to me.

i am the fake hero. it is me.

while that's the end of my tale of Anime Boston, it sure isn't the end of the photos. expect another post tomorrow with a lot of shots of some fabulous cosplays! and me. because i missed out on slapping a few of my other shots featuring me on here.

so yeah, stick around, tell your friends. and by the way, if you're in one of these photos, contact me and i'll credit you properly!