Adventures at Zenkaikon V

As I've mentioned in recent posts, on Saturday March 19th I attended Zenkaikon V in King of Prussia Pennsylvania with my mom and two super awesome friends Brandon (who's now my boyfriend but wasn't at the time) and Megg. In short it was completely awesome! Met Vic Mignogna, had a hillarious awesome hyper day and it was just all around a lot of fun, yeah it had its bad parts, but they were minor compared to everything else. So for anyone who cares to know, here's my recount of how the day went, far less confusing than Comic Con as well. 

First off, Megg slept over the night b4 since we had to leave at around 7ish in the morning but we didn't get to have our Pre-Con Vic-Orgy due to lack of time. For anyone whom I just scared, a Vic-Ogry entails simply watching a ton of anime with Vic or listening to his music or watching videos involving him and fangirling over it, not an actual orgy. Anywho tho, I used my Team Magma Grunt cosplay again tho the belt fell off about 1/2 way through the con -.- Megg just wore my old Akatsuki cloak and another friend of mine lent her a hidden mist hitai-ate so we just said she was a new recruit into the Akatsuki. Brandon was Ichigo of Bleach in his Bankai form...tho I don't think I ever got a good pic of him w/ the wig on lol. And my mom was a "Bewildered Con Mother" as per Vic and Steve Blum's video about that. I actually think she got the most picture requests out of any of us. And yeah I made that shirt using transfer paper and fabric dye and the 

symbol there is the kanji for 'mom' minus the honorifics. Thankfully she had a lot of fun along with the rest of us as she (to quote her) "lost [her] con virginity". So yeah when we got there we kind of wandered around aimlessly for a while given that the layout of the place was a bit weird and there was really nothing on the schedule at that moment worth seeing, some Ouran Highschool Host Club which even if I didn't find it completely creepy, it was pretty much full. So yeah for the first while we just sorta wandered and looked at all the cosplays, honestly there were only a handful all day that I thought were really AMAZING. An annoyingly large amount of men in dresses too -.- Gross. Funny actually because that was Brandon's fear about going to this, Megg and I reassured him that there were none at Comic Con so there probably wouldn't be any here, boy how wrong we were. And worse yet we kept running into the sick bastards! 

So anyway after that we went into the Artist Alley and Dealer Room (which oddly enough were in the same room) which had some really awesome stuff, as expected, some fairly cheap anime and a manga library. Probably one of the things that impressed me the most was the Kimono vendor, they were selling several different types of Kimono, both male and female, yukatas as well, for actually really cheap, like somewhere between $25-$60. Which when you put it into perspective is really cheap cuz I got my Kimono 2 years ago from a Japanese marketplace and it was upwards of $100. Kimonos aside I suppose I should explain that picture with the Star Wars plushies there. I'm not into Star Wars one little bit,

however my little brother is, so I was told to photograph anything Star Wars related. I must admit though, I'm a sucker for chibis and those really are quite adorable.

This is just a random "landscape" picture in part of the dealers room, noticed after I took the picture that there was a girl cosplaying as Lucy Heartfelia of Fairy Tail which is pretty damn awesome. There weren't too many Fairy Tail cosplays there, only one or two.

Around this same point we ran into another best friend of mine, Ginookami-chan (the one who was featured in my Comic Con post as Namine) who was now cosplaying L, and her friend Mikayla who was apparently the manga version of Allen from D.Gray-Man, I couldn'ta guessed that though given that I only watch the anime. There's a picture my mom took of us
all in basically the same area that the last photo was taken. In order from left to right it's me as Team Magma from Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, Ginookami-chan as L, Megg as a new Akatsuki recruit and Mikayla as Allen...no idea where exactly Brandon was when this picture was taken O.o I think buying his Tensa Zangetsu...that would probably be a good guess.

Speaking of swords, after we were done with this picture we wandered some more...now that I think of it there was a lot of wandering going on right up until lunch and then all the events we attended afterwards. But anyway speaking of swords in our wanderings we came to a stand selling real swords, daggers, throwing stars/knives and the like. Most of them were in fact really elaborate and cool, my mom actually took a somewhat creepy liking to them and spent a good 5 minutes looking at them, and for anybody who's been in a Dealer Room at a con, you probably know that spending 5 minutes in one spot is quite a feat. Excuse my absolute shit picture of the swords on the rack but it was lots of different light all around a dark area with a dark background where the swords were and my flash was off because otherwise it focused on the lamps. Not exactly an easy picture but you get the point, real swords, really cool...even if my picture completely disproves that. EDIT: You'll have to click the link at the end to see all my pictures in order to see my crappy sword picture, because it's being evil and doesn't want to position itself correctly.

One thing that greatly surprised me in the Dealer Room was how expensive anime was compared to at Comic Con, I mean there it was dirt cheap, like several episodes for $5. At Zenkaikon a large majority were the same amount of episodes for $20, the same price you'd usually get them at any other store, so it was slightly disappointing. The merchandise was cheaper at Comic Con however the food was cheaper at Zenkaikon so take your pick. So yeah that picture was taken in a random empty hallway (like I said, it had a weird layout) and thats Megg, Brandon and my mom...Brandon's wig seems to be conveniently covering his eyes strangely O.o However at that point since we were getting kinda tired despite not really doing anything we had decided that at that point Brandon was Ichigo being defeated, just cuz it fit the look of the situation quite well. So yeah at this point, looking at the schedule we thought it'd be a good idea to go eat lunch because after this point we had quite a lot of events we wanted to go see.

Eating lunch I managed to get a picture of Megg being a creeper, decided to leave the red-eye effect cuz we all figured that enhanced the creepy factor which is kind of what we were going for. So anyway during lunch we saw another friend Megan and...aquatance Sara who had a really awesome Toph cosplay that I didn't get a picture of, but as they were walking away I kind of did a double-take at Sara and saw she didn't have shoes on. As I pointed that out we all sort of looked at each other like O.o and wondered why in the hell she was crazy enough to walk around all day at a con barefoot, but whatever, sounds like foot-suicide if you ask me. Anyway, we figured that while we had a place to sit it would be a good idea to plan out where we were gonna go the rest of the time so we looked through the schedule and noticed a few odd things. Later during the night there was a strange amount of hentai panels which we noted were pretty weird. Namely one called "Hentai: A History" which we noted is a tad strange because honestly, if you're into hentai, I'm pretty positive you're not interested in the history of it, you just want the sex. Quite an interesting conversation about that actually.

So anyway we decided after lunch to go wait in line for a password game-show with Vic Mignogna and Todd Haberkorn which I must say was well worth the long wait. While in line we talked amongst ourselves and saw the guys in dresses...again...several more times -.- It was really quite disturbing, especially cuz one of them really looked like a girl from behind, gross. While in line I got a decent candid shot that you see to the left...I'm going to assume she's a Vaporeon maybe? There were actually a lot of human-Pokemon there. Plus if you look in the back right of the pic there's a semi-decent Kamina there from Tengen Toppa Gurren Laggan which made me pretty happy to see, despite not really liking that anime I do like Kamina. There were a handful of Yokos there but most of them were fat -.- My mom kept asking questions about all the characters and costumes at this point actually, it was quite funny. Oh! And in line near us there was also a fabulously done Mello of Death Note that I got a picture of, the scar is done like perfectly . Anyway though, waiting in
this line was totally completely worth it because the game-show was sooooo funny, though frustrating at the same time too...but awesome just cuz Vic was in it.

I guess I should probably explain the game-show huh? Basically is along w/ Todd and Vic there were 2 regular attendees that played on a team with any one of the voice actors. The object of the game was to give your team mate a one word hint as to what a given password was. Only the audience and the person giving the hints knew the password obviously, and the hints could only be one word and not a word form of the password.

Quite possibly the funniest part of that show was when one of the passwords came up as 'hentai'. Kinda caught a lot of people off guard, including me, Megg and Brandon, we thought it was pretty funny. Then, my mom, fitting the description on her shirt asked me what was so funny about 'hentai' being a password, to which I told her that hentai is in fact anime porn, which she then thought was quite funny. One of the passwords given to hint to that one was 'porn' and I thought Wow O.o And there are small children in this room. So instead of me talking about the game-show I should probably just show you the video I took of it, don't think the hentai bit is in the video tho...it might be.

So yeah that's that, it was a middle round I got there and by the way, at the beginning he's not saying "The N Word" like we originally thought he's saying "The Yen Word", just to clear things up a bit. So yeah this was the first time seeing Vic for the day and it was totally amazing...like Vic himself. After that we met up with some other friends, Ginookami and Mikayla again, and this time Sano and Ashley which was pretty neat, Sano was cosplaying Maka of Soul Eater and shortly after this point we actually ran into two other Makas, it was really weird actually. And if you notice in the picture each one of them has one or two technical
inaccuracies.  You'd think with 3 Makas one of them would be 100% accurate, but Sano on the right has a screwed up wig and no gloves, the middle one has a blue tie and the one on the left doesn't have a plaid skirt.

So yeah that's the Maka trio, actually a bit after this point Sano had gone upstairs to go do Karaoke to 'Blue Bird' from Naruto, gotta see if I can find the video of that, ah yes ok click here to see the video of Sano singing karaoke. Honestly I've heard her do it soooooooooo much better in the past, but as you see in the video she got people really into it and I've gotta give her credit for getting up there, I personally could never do it, so much credit goes to my little sis (she's like my younger sister, she isn't actually though) for being able to pull that off, wish I was there to see it but I was doing other things at the time.

After this point we walked around in the Artist Alley/Dealer Room a bit more where I got a Zenkaikon V T-Shirt. I'm glad I got that cuz honestly I could kick myself for not getting a New York Anime Festival T-shirt. There were these cute little chibi Inuyasha plushies that we saw too, I got a picture of them but I'm not gonna put it here right now, they're adorable though. Once we killed some time in there we figured it'd b a good idea to get lined up for Vic's autograph session given that it was an hour and a half early and people were already lining up...or lining up to line up, since you weren't technically allowed to line up at this point which was really

quite weird. While doing that we ran into this one Team Aqua girl and her friend who was Winry from FullMetal Alchemist in her black skirt outfit. Naturally I had to get a picture with the Team Aqua girl cuz that was just awesome to run into her given that even at Comic Con I didn't see any Team Aquas.

Wish I'd actually gotten her or her friends name because they were both really cool, we were also in line together for an hour and a half to see Vic so we all talked quite a lot and got along pretty well. It's interesting to make friends at a con, especially since every other time I'm not exactly a social butterfly, but anime conventions are generally somewhere that I'm not too afraid to talk to people and in this case it payed off cuz we got to meet two really cool fellow anime fans.

Now that I think of it, while talking about waiting in line I should probably mention how hilarious some Vic fangirls were, cuz he had a panel going on at the time when we were in line and every single time there was massive fangirl screaming we were all just like "Vic must have said something". Megg added to the whole fangirl bit at one point when Todd Haberkorn passed her, she said hi and almost fainted, which I really wish I coulda seen because it sounds quite funny. Oh and I know that picture there is pretty random, but I just figured I should throw in the
picture of this one Altair we saw, which strangely was the same Altair Megg saw at Comic Con, go figure. Anyway though, back to the whole fangirling waiting in line bit. In sharp contrast to the awesome Team Aqua girl and Winry that we were talking to in front of us, behind us in line there was this one girl who...basically was the definition of "creepy raving fangirl". She kept freaking out and talking about how she was going to faint and screaming and...oh my God she was just downright creepy, and she had the creepiest fangirl giggle whenever somebody mentioned Vic or whenever he spoke, God it was terrible, funny, but terrible. Her, and the men in dresses are exactly the archetypes that give con-goers bad reputations and make people think all of us are like that.

So anyway, after the line started to move we were all extremely excited about getting to meet Vic, Megg did a couple fangirl screams...I'll admit I had to do it once too just for the effect, meanwhile Brandon and my mom both sort of did a mental facepalm over all the fangirling. My mom got another picture request from another con-mother who said she loved her shirt and that would be her "costume" next year. Gotta say I felt pretty proud for coming up with the idea, lots of Vic fans really liked it as well. So yeah after waiting in line for an hour and a half, we finally got to meet Vic! The pictures I have of that aren't so great and taken at inopportune moments given that my mom was being sort of inept with my camera, but here's the one (crappy) picture I have of me with Vic. My mom took it b4 we were both smiling, but either way, I got to meet Vic! I
bought one of his CDs that I had autographed as well as the inside of the game case for FullMetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy which I'll put a picture of at the end of this post. Megg got a CD also and had that autographed along with a FullMetal Alchemist movie DVD case and Brandon got his Ichigo sword autographed.

One thing for anybody skeptical about meeting voice actors, unlike regular celebrities they're very real and genuine and honestly care about their fans. The reason for this mentality is probably that when you like a voice actor, you hear their work before knowing anything about them, so you like them for a genuine reason, because you like their work. The way Vic talked to all of us was very real and down-to-earth, not "worship me because I'm famous" like other celebrities. And both he ad Todd (if I'm not mistaken) donated a large amount of money to the Japan relief fund. They're very genuine people. And Vic thought my moms shirt was funny as well which my mom seemed very proud of, even she enjoyed meeting him. Great experience, most definitely the highlight of my day, Megg
and I were shaking and fangirling a lot after meeting him, to the point where Megg had problems texting her
mom to tell her about it her hands were shaking that much. We were both like "OMG I can't believe we met Vic!", it was completely amazing.

After this point we were all pretty much dead on our feet given we got there at about 9:30am and it was now about 4:30pm, cons are a lot more tiring than one would think. Especially since we were all up at 5-6am as well, but it was so worth it. So after this we went home, all of us really excited about having met Vic, even Brandon was more excited than he thought even though he only knows two characters Vic voices, but still. Naturally once we got in the car we were all like "Thank god for seats!" and we played the Vic CD (titled Remix) that I had gotten...to which Megg and I were fangirling a bit more, but not too much. The weirdest thing about that fangirling though was that Megg was like "...He smelled good" which caught me off guard a little bit, I thought it was pretty hilarious, however Brandon and my mom didn't hear the comment so I was like "Megg said that Vic smelled good" and after a little pause Brandon was just like "Ya know he kinda did O.o" which we all thought was absolutely hillarious. My mom concluded that Vics cologne apparently attracts both men ad women since we had accused Brandon of being gay...which I am now very aware that he's not.

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So yeah that was basically our day, minus the hilarious, overly perverted conversations on the way home and lots of other weirdness on the way there, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the con itself so it's not in here. And here's the part where I sincerely apologize for this post being so late, I've had soooooo much stuff going on between tons of homework as of late and lots of drama because my boyfriend of almost 2 years and I broke up just a couple days after this con and then as of just the other day Brandon and I are now dating and I'm very happy with him, but either way, I've had a lot of stuff going on so this post just kept getting pushed back. Sorry about that, but better late than never and I should have at least one or two other posts I'm doing this month. To see all the pictures I took that day, including the crappy ones look here. So yeah thats really about it. Sorry if this wasn't the most entertaining post ever, but cut me some slack, my life just took like a 180 turn in a matter of two weeks. Better posts will be coming I promise!

FullMetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy case autographed by Vic Mignogna himself!

Oh! And thanks so much to all my readers and people who comment. It really means a lot, and there are now several popular searches in which my blog is on the first page of Google and I'm getting so many pageviews as of late. So thanks a lot guys! Comments are always loved and appreciated, and I do respond if you leave a name to respond to instead of being anonymous. 

Vic's CD "Remix" that I had him autograph when I met him! You all know you're jealous