My Anime-Expo Itinerary

For those of you who’ve been following me on my twitter account, you should have gotten a feel for my thoughts regarding Anime Expo this year and will know that none of the available concerts have piqued my interest. I’m not a fan of Morning Musume by any stretch and visual-kei holds very little interest to me, which means the Moi dix Mois concert is completely out of the question since there are better things for me to waste time on. Since most of the value I derive from AX comes from the concerts, the lack of quality showings left me with little incentive to go, except I think I’ve found enough interesting stuff to warrant the trip. Read on after the jump to see what I will (and won’t) be doing:

First of all, I’ll only be attending on Friday, which means there’s a lot of stuff I won’t be doing, and that is a shame since they sound pretty awesome and deserve a shoutout and well wishes from me regardless (not that they’ll need it since I’m sure they’ll do great!). Animediet, AnimeGenesis, and Dancing Queen seem all set to run the Indecent Otaku Comedy Hour which they’ve been pushing pretty hard online. As if the content isn’t enough, the giveaways are just another icing on the cake, so I’d definitely encourage you all to check it out if you’re going. And of course, there’s the AX blogger meetup that’s been organized by IcyStorm and will provide an excellent opportunity to match names to faces so that you all can find out who’s behind all the mysterious posts that come up so often on all those blogs you read from time to time. Getting a chance to interface with the community is always enjoyable, but alas, I’ll have to give it a pass. Next year!

So no concerts and no community interfacing. Whatever shall I do? Turns out a lot actually. Here’s what my schedule is looking like:

Bandai Entertainment Industry Panel – 9:00am to 9:50am
Some announcements perhaps? That’d be nice to go and see what they’re up to and it’ll give me something to do instead of waiting forever for the Exhibit Hall to open while people are lining up to walk into there.

Daisuke Ishiwatari – 10:30am to 11:20am
Again, should be interesting to listen in on since I do like the Guilty Gear series of games. Not that I’m any good, mind you since I mostly play it for the music. Plus, BlazBlue got a release fairly recently and I’m wondering how they’ve done there, both from the gameplay standpoint and the music standpoint. A shame they don’t have a concert of Ishiwatari’s music though. That would have been awesome to hear “Holy Orders” live.

Anime Trivia Show – 1:00pm to 2:50pm
This is mostly to test what I don’t know because surprisingly, I don’t actually know a whole lot. My lack of knowledge about the popular stuff and mecha anime is absolutely going to crush me here. I’ve always wanted to participate in this in previous years, but somehow, I always seem to miss the day they’re holding it. Hopefully this one turns out to be enjoyable for those with limited knowledge like myself.

VIZ Media Anime & Manga Panel – 3:30pm to 4:20pm
This is actually a “maybe” since I’m not really all that into Viz’s properties. Except for maybe Monster.

Without Watching the Anime: Opening & Ending Themes – 6:00pm to 6:50pm
This is hosted by a group/person that calls itself Department of Alchemy and given the content of this blog, you can definitely bet that I’ll be showing up to this one. Not only am I interested in seeing what sorts of topics the panel runner will take us through, I’d like to be able to compare notes since I do have an article written on OP/ED themes that has yet to be published on a different website that I’ve been working on. In any case, I do look forwards to an insightful discussion here.

And that should be it! Not exactly planning to stick around for the AMV contest, but that’s effectively my tentative schedule. If there are any interesting going-ons that I’m completely missing on this list for Friday, drop me a line so I can plan appropriately!