Otaku Dan: The Life of an Anime Fan

I'm finally back from Metrocon. I will say it off the bat, this year was not that great compared to previous years I have attended. However, something memorable happened to me this year.

I normally take a lot of pictures of the convention, but I forgot to pack my camera. I thought that I placed my camera inside the camera bag, I should have double checked. At least there was not that many well done cosplayers that I missed out on. Also, a tropical storm was pasting by Tampa. There was so much rain.

I will say it right now, I will never ever buy anything at an anime convention. The vendor's room was crap because almost everything was marked up by around 20% to 50%. Hell, I saw some guy trying to sell a Black Rock Shooter figure for $275 U.S. dollars. There were a lot more bootleg vendors this year. There was this old lady trying to sell me a bootleg Reimu plushy. Another vendor was selling anime wallets, the one wallet that stood out the most was a Bleach wallet with Luffy from One Piece on it. Metrocon needs to fix that bootleg issue.

There where a few okay panels this year but most were more targeted to female anime fans. I am a little disappointed that I missed the one panel I was waiting for, it was a Maid Cafe. It sucks that it was going to be opened for only 2 hours and the line was nuts.

I did managed to meet the author of the Cosplay in America book. Ejen is a really cool guy to have a great conversation with. You should buy his book, its really good.

As for the memorable thing, when I got to hotel with my girlfriend, I asked her to marry me. She said yes.

At the end of it all, the convention was okay, but it has a lot of room for improvement.

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By the time you are reading this post, I have already left to attend Metrocon. I normally leave on the morning of the convention, but I want to avoid arriving on the day of the convention already exhausted due to the drive. Another thing that I will avoid is driving because I'm taking a Greyhound bus.

Since I'm going to have a few days to relax before Metrocon, I'm going to check out the city of Tampa. It's funny that I have only gone to Tampa for Metrocon in previous years and never really explored the city. I will be taking my laptop with me and I will try to make posts if I can get an internet signal at the hotel.

There is some bad news. The two panels I was going to be a part of have been canceled. My panel "How to build an Arcade Stick" was canceled because I needed to bring my own tools for the panel. I know that the convention has a weapons policy and asked different staff members if it was ok to bring my tools. I never got an answer. So, to avoid getting in trouble, I had to cancel. As for the Anime 3000 panel, it was canceled due to some circumstances. If you still want to meet me, I will be in the AnimeBelle's Trivia Challenge on Friday at 4:00 pm in Ballroom A or just look for the guy wearing that backpack in the picture above.

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We have now reached the middle of July and its time to check out all the new figures that are up for preorder. Come on in and check out these new figures.

Figma Akiyama Nozomi School Uniform version by Max Factory. This figure will be coming out in October for the price of 2,429 Yen.

Hachikuji Mayoi by Kotobukiya. This figure will be coming out in November for the price of 5,780 Yen.

Fate Testarossa -Phantom Minds- by Alter. This figure will be coming out in November for the price of 9,440 Yen.

Aisaka Taiga -The Last Episode- version by Kotobukiya. This figure will be coming out in October for the price of 5,780 Yen.

Yamaguchi Kisaragi by Chara-Ani. This figure will be coming in early November for the price of 5,650 Yen.

Shimada Minami by Chara-Ani. This figure will be coming out in November for the price of 5,650 Yen.

A few of these figures are pretty nice. It looks like Alter did a fantastic job with Fate. The Iwasaki figure looks really cute but is too expensive at the moment for me. At the moment I'm thinking of preordering either Taiga or Hachikuji. So, what are you planning to preorder?

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For the debut post of Dissecting Fandom, I will cover the Moe fan. This is a psychological understanding of this type of fan.


To understand this fan, we must first look at his adolescence. There was one point in this person's life where something traumatic happened involving a person of a strong character. It could be rejection or humiliation of some form permanently hurting his ego. Now, if we go even deeper when psychosexual development(see Sigmund Freud) was at the Latency stage, this person's oedipus complex never dissolved and ended up in the unconscious mind. With these 2 factors, the Moe fan goes for anime characters who are sexually non-threatening to them.

I will have to say that there are 2 types of Moe fans. I will label them as type A and type B. Type A is devoted to a single character. This person loves this character and shows it by buying and collecting any form of merchandise with this characters image. All sexual desire will be focused on this single character as if they were in a relationship.

Type B is the more common of Moe fan. Type B will have the same habits as type A except, they view the character as an object of sex and once bored with said character, they will move on to another. The interesting thing, while they are satisfying unconscious sexual desires, they are psychologically evolving. However they regress back to how they once were when they move on to a new character.

So, what are your opinions or theories on this post?

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Well, This is the final part on my thoughts on the new summer anime season. In today's post, I will cover Strike Witches 2, Occult academy, and Asobi ni Iku Yo!

The horror comedy Occult Academy is a little odd. The story is about Maya Kamashiro, she become the principal of a school that focuses around the occult after the death of her father. The thing is, she hates the occult with a passion and wants to shut down the school. The animation looks great, the plot interesting, and the characters are kind of cool. However, most of the humor comes from Maya's hated for the occult and her facial expressions to absurd things. I hope that there is more development with the plot in future episodes.

So, what are you opinions on these three anime series?



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