I’ve been busy since my return from Montreal, so the post is a bit delayed. July 31st to August 2nd was Otakuthon in Montreal. This year sees me visiting not one Canadian con for the first time but two. I got to experience the French side of otaku-ism here in our region. Since I favor viewing and reading my anime and manga in English, I don’t often get exposed to french Otaku culture.
I was asked there on behest of Hendane, you readers that followed by blog before the big pause know them as good friends of mine, as not only have I been a multi-year customer of the gang since Sakuracon 2006. Since Quebec as a province is vastly French, and the backwards laws they have here prevent students from being functionally bilingual for the most part, unlike New Brunswick, the amount of people that talk English enough to get a good grasp of what we are telling them is pretty low. So they employed me as a salesman and translator, and named me “Gabe de Los Angeles” – well not really but they put something on the badge because they didn’t know how to tell them how to spell my name. XD
Shinikenshi (not seen in the photo) is the man to talk to for Touhou, Eroge, OST, Games, Collectibles, Artworks, and Fabric Products. We split his portion of the table up and I worked mainly the fabrics with a bit of everything else on the side. These guys have some pretty serious swag each time I see them, their collection of doujinshi, yaoi, and everything else is stuff that you simply do not see often in conventions. These guys have exceptional knowledge of their inventory, the artists involved and circles and just about everything else you’d expect some sort of encyclopedia dedicated to ecchi otakuism might have. Well not /ALL/ ecchi, but you get the idea.
The fabric section started with 21 items of various sizes and images, mostly bedsheets larger than 1.7mx1.8m, really nice things at that (will have pictures of the ones I was given as a thank-you). We sold most of the items in a single day, and the last two on Sunday. It was I didn’t get much chance to walk around and see much of the venue, because I was there to work. I did get a few chances to snap some nice pictures, you guys may have seen the pictures up above, too, those are some of the ones I snapped at the event.
Not only can you see the Pockybox Cosplayer, but you can see the storefront in the picture above. This was late in the weekend, we had sold a lot of the material and spread out some Touhou doujinshi.
This guy’s suit was amazing, pretty goddamn accurate at that, too.
I have a bunch more photos of him in the Flickr set listed here.
As a usual tradition, I must at least find one good C.C. cosplayer per convention!
And one more cosplayer before moving on to other things:
⑨is STRONGEST!!!!!1!
About The Convention
The venue was Le Palais de Congress in Montreal, well situated and generally easy to get to. Lots of places to eat and there are four high-volume hotels nearby, it makes for a very stress free stay. The convention itself was well organized though they had a shortage of materials for the booth. The staff were pleasant when we had to deal with them, and the otaku crowd that attended were pretty cool and polite.
My exposure to the venue and guests was very limited, so I can’t speak about the panels in this case. Given the amount of complaining one can generally hear simply walking the halls of a larger con, the fact I heard only one particular string of complaints means that overall they had a satisfied crowd. The only complaint people really had was ‘long’ registration lines. The average time I heard was about one and half hours over a sampling of about ten people.
Overall Otakuthon is a convention I’d like to see more of, the general atmosphere was happy and upbeat, staff was attentive and pleasant. The fact that it’s almost a French exclusive convention may make it difficult to reach the more Anglophone otaku crowd, so caveat emptor if you intend to attend the show.
You can find more pictures of cosplay I managed to take down below:
Otakuthon 2009 Photo Set
