AnimeCon
Pictures taken May 26, 2006

I adore strange subcultures. This cannot be construed too broadly - I am not very interested in niches of sexual freakishness like amputee porn, for instance, or soiled underwear - but most enclaves of enthusiasts hold a certain bizarre appeal for me. I particularly like 'nerdy' pursuits: Star Wars and Star Trek, role playing and tabletop gaming, anime... even if I don't know enough about these obsessions to participate, I love the idea that they exist. Part of me will always be a kid in the basement, alone, feverishly designing characters and levels for invented games because his parents wouldn't buy him a Nintendo.

The ultimate statement of subculture is the convention. A convention is an area of relative safety, where a specialized hobby can creep out of garages and back rooms and bask in its own glory for a day. There's a certain assertation at work in a convention hall: this is a legitimate way to waste time, it says, and look at all the people who agree! Part of this declaration involves an expected level of flamboyance and costumery. It's as if the more astutely fanatical backlashed one day, telling the world, "Hell yes I like to pretend I'm a paladin on weekends... I will now proceed to craft myself some chain mail and a gigantic oversized mace so you fuckers will know I'm for real." Ever since, the convention hall has become an intensely fascinating place, a visual portal into the melange of worlds that many people prefer to this one.

One rainy afternoon in Busan, me and Andrea arrived at the Museum of Modern Art, ready to sample some more Korean weirdness. When we met Chad and Jen, they blew my mind: they'd been exploring, waiting for us, and right across the street an AnimeCon was raging! After this news, my interest in abstract blotches of paint waned significantly. Even a large technological horse made out of spark plugs and wires, pulling a plastic woman in a carriage, couldn't keep my attention for long. Or a Tony Hawk skate ramp entitled "Time." Or a huge totem studded with nails. Basically I could've seen a full-scale grease orgy at that point and still been distracted. So we went to the conference! Surprise!

And it was fucking cool, if cool can possibly be the word. The animation and graphic novel scene in Korea is pretty big: many of the middle-schoolers I teach read comics in their spare time. They range from cutesy love stories to hideously violent bloodbaths, some imported from Japan but mostly homegrown. I can't make head or tale of the stories myself, since they're all written in Arabic or Ancient Hebrew or some language that isn't English, but the pictures are sufficiently crazy to keep me interested. Any comic book with a giant robot battle in one panel, a Jester-demon-face eating ligaments in the next, and a passionate man-kiss in a third has gotta have one spry narrative. Yep, I said "man-kiss": alongside the Korean trend of anemic, effeminate boy bands lives a passion in teenaged girls for homosexual love stories:

This dude didn't dig my misplaced display of affection, however, even though he told me he was dressed up as the "little sister" from some undoubtedly bizarre trans-gender tale. Wheee-bang!

There were cute girls as well, clad as avenging angels and exorcist nurses and fan-wielding ninjas. I decline to call them 'hot' because I deeply suspect that most of them were fifteen years old. I also recently watched this mini-documentary about 'Otaku', in which a bunch of American anime geeks go to Japan and pathetically pine over any poor girl in outlandish gear. I felt sorry for them (the girls... I wanted to kick the geeks). It's not really their fault that their favourite anime character wears a leather miniskirt and hooker boots. Pretty much every female anime character has that shit, plus a massive sword or trident or whatever. The girls at the con probably just want to wear their scanty costumes in peace: look, but don't lust. It's pretty hard though. They have swords!

And some of them are pink dice bunnies! The absolute craziest bitches are in casual green!

Anyone in costume was ready and willing to pose for photos. All you had to do was whip out your camera and they would obligingly drop into whatever super-badass stance they had practiced for days. These guys were from Maple Story, a popular Korean PC game that every kid has played at one time. I'm serious, they all have Maple Story pencils and backpacks and shoes and secret decoder rings. In this picture, you can clearly see one character ready to dash off with his dagger and painted baseball, and another ready to hop around like a castrated frog or whatever his special move happens to be. I haven't played the game myself.

I don't know which comic book is about Nazis, but there was certainly a large troupe of fascists in attendance. Me and Chad are certainly not sympathizers: we were beaten with a trench shovel and forced to take a propaganda snapshot. Notice the guys doing the wildly inappropriate Heil Hitler salute. Just after this picture was taken, we attempted to lay waste to the war criminals but their Blood Angel girlfriends showed up with far larger armament than our simple shovel. Although I managed to break Himmler's kneecap, the skeevy bastard, we were finally forced to leave them to mingle: playtime Nazis and vengeful valkyries.

At one point, we wandered down ramshackle alleys of animation trinkets: posters and key chains and cute little buttons. Basically, you can imagine any weapon - a sword, a really big sword, a three-pronged sword with voodoo skulls dangling from each blade, a planet-sized frying pan - and it has already been conceived in Korea and is currently in the possession of a scowling warrior with a cloudy past. Every shade of hair colour is already taken, and has been carefully sketched into a billowing plume atop a cat-girl's head. Any conceivable ratio of head size to body size - no matter how lopsidedly ludicrous - has been appropriated by the Korean anime scene. The limits of creativity in screaming anime combat have been reached. Robots, too. They do robots.

They also do fanfic with Harry Potter's Malfoy, apparently. They do him like he's going to the goddamn prom with a snake.

I found a leader board of all the costumees in attendance, presumably for prize-winning purposes. Who looks the most like their weirdo anime character? Damned if I knew, but I bet the judging for these things is pretty hardcore: "No no... Natsumi's skirt is supposed to be upper-thigh length! Where are your thighs? You clearly aren't very dedicated to this roleplay. And YOU! Everybody knows that Tetsumako's sword is taller than three silverback gorillas! It says so right in Issue 89: A Tetsumako To Remember. People, do your homework. This is an AnimeCon."

Once upon a time Paul Martin and Kim Jong-Il left their mark in this hall, at the APEC conference, and now they are doomed to forever live among anime. I like how Kim's head is much larger than Paul's - it shows that Mr. Martin is far less likely to suddenly go flying over the Pacific like a hot air balloon. Ahhh, the advantages of complacent democracy...

Chad and I even got a chance to play a game with the Korean National soccer team from four years ago! Pay no attention to the perspective issues behind that curtain... my camera tends to bend the fabric of time and space to its twisted, low-resolution designs. We were for sure there, out on the pitch. We're very big.

After we had drank our fill of neon geekery and faux sport (well, the girls: I could've walked around for hours more just going "Uwaaaah" like an idiot) we left. Leaving is what one generally does, following arrival and a certain amount of staying. As we went, I saw the Nazis laughing in the courtyard, probably planning some kind of Beer Hall Thing. Even their vile treachery couldn't dampen my good mood. I had seen people in strange costumes and enjoyed their peculiar company; I had completed an important milestone in my enthusiastic quest to throw myself into nerdom subculture. Sweet Jesus, I met a girl in a kangaroo suit! I don't think I'll ever visit a conference as more than an inquisitive spectator - it takes a lot of time and effort to fuel these kinds of obsessions - but the experience was definitely fucked in the most entertaining way. Next up: Dungeons & Dragons, where the glasses are thick and the hit points are huge.