Friday Sept. 14: Night

School was off of my shoulders, yet the stress was just beginning. I rushed to finish my costume for an event more important than trigonometry homework and more exciting than Halloween. Nan DesuKan, also known as NDK, was merely hours away, and getting a great costume is essential.

                If you have never been to an anime convention, comic convention, or anything of the sort, you have not seen true dedication to costuming, or cosplaying as it is more commonly known. The cosplays are excessively over the top, often extending from the body a good foot or two or excessively animated, obviously invested with dozens, if not hundreds, of dollars. There is always the pressure to come in amazing cosplay, and I will always remember the horrible awkwardness I felt the first time I arrived at NDK a few years ago with nothing to my name but a Kingdom Hearts t-shirt and an overzealous attitude. That first day was the worst, as I felt the shame of not spending weeks on a costume as every dedicated anime enthusiast—or otaku, as we like to call ourselves—should.

                This thought scraping my mind, I tried to frantically finish the kitsune mask I had been working on for the past week. The papier-mâché was finally dry and sanded, and all I had to do was paint, paint, and paint to make it look as amazing as it could. Covering the newspaper articles and pictures with layer after layer of white was hard enough, but now as I sketched with watered down red and blue, I realized how much mind numbing, tedious work these costumes took. And besides the mask, I was pressured to gather all the other accessories of my cosplay—the Deviantart superstar Fox Mask Man—before I got to bed. Not to mention take a shower and put my hair up in socks to make up for the fact that I was going to keep my own gender rather than take up FMM’s. I was wound up until around 11 p.m. when I felt completely satisfied with my mask, costume, and socked up hair, at which point I promptly collapsed on my bed and fidgeted the night away as if it were Christmas Eve.

Saturday Sept.15: Morning

The morning felt like my first day of Kindergarten; my hair was all beautiful from the socks, my body was shaking from the pent up excitement, and I was still trying to make the inside of my mask not smell like paint fumes. My efforts resulted in me smelling a mixture of paint fumes, pear body spray, and sweat for the rest of the adventure, but I was content. After all, once my mother took a dozen pictures of me looking awesome, and after my friend Lisa showed up cosplaying as Riza Hawkeye, I would be off to Denver.

                There was no issue getting toDenver, as any traffic was ignored promptly by the two happy girls watching Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame in the back seat. As 9 a.m. approached, however, the contents of the car got jittery. We began to see weird people out on the streets, our attention pulled away from Quasimodo, and they began to gather in bulk. I felt myself giggle uncontrollably as I recognized cosplay from Hetalia: Axis Powers, Ouran High School Host Club, Bleach, and other such extremely popular anime and manga series. This was the only time when I could openly show excitement for these exotic shows, and I was intent on making it last.

                Of course, my day inevitably had to start off with an hour and a half in line. Saturday is the only full day of NDK, so it was expected that hundreds of people would wait in the long line for single day passes. Regardless, waiting in the line was most likely the most fun I had; starting off with going to the end of the line, which stretched all the way to the other side of the Marriott hotel which it was in, I was humored by how long the line was actually was.

                Near the last line break, there were three large framed paintings which nearly fully covered the wall that many of us had to stand against. As I followed the line break to the other side of the passage way, I saw a few attendees begin to lean against the wall and, inadvertently, against the picture frames as well. The center of the three suddenly slipped off one of its hinges, swinging to the right and hitting the adjacent picture frame, causing it to completely drop off the wall. The bottom of the frame slammed onto the ground and its glass casing completely shattered, leaving the people in front of it stunned and frozen as they were unexpectedly coated in glass shards.  The two directly in front of the frame, who were practically standing in glass coats, quickly jumped out of the mess and let the rest of the glass fall to the floor in a heap. The mess was avoided and the people redirected, but not without a few chuckles from the surrounding attendees and pleas of innocence from the victims. Once the drama was over, I worried that nothing else could compare to this moment.

                 I, however, had something else to do for the next 90 minutes; you see, Fox Mask Man is infamous for backrubs. Yes, I stood in line for a great while, holding a sign which declared “Free Backrubs” for people, most of whom I’ve never met. This being NDK, a good half dozen people accepted my request, turning around in front of me and squatting ever so slightly for me to reach their shoulders. I would promptly then set the sign behind me and give them a 20 second shoulder massage. One of my massages was complimented with the observation that my hands have “magical properties”. This was one of my favorite moments of NDK, and I was disappointed to see that my moment of joy only lasted a half an hour; I was informed by one of the staff members that no signs were allowed. I saw signs last year, I noted to myself in my head, and dozens of other staff members had passed me without a second thought to my sign. I assumed this was a mistake on the single staff member’s part and quickly put my sign back up once out of her view.

                 Once out of the line an hour later, $30 day pass and all, I stood just beside the indoor Starbucks to wait for Lisa and my sister to get situated with the schedule we were given, and I held the sign up again. Not 30 seconds passed until a huge man in a bright orange shirt which read “SECURITY” approached me and yelled that there were no signs allowed. I was frightened into putting the sign away, though not understanding the harm of backrubs, and was only to give one more backrub for the remainder of the day.

Saturday Sept. 15: Noon

Many more people have gone to comic conventions than anime conventions, and it is easy to see them as completely synonymous. There’s not much a difference, right? For all you who have only gone to comic conventions, or even those who have gone to only an anime convention, you are very, very wrong. The Denver Comic Con was huge, awesome, and full of similarly costumed people. It, however, held a bigger area, a more diverse group of people, and of course, a wide variety of merchandise. They also have food vendors. Nan DesuKandoes not have this luxury. Nan DesuKanhas Starbucks and a Wendy’s.

                At around noon, Lisa and I were feeling faint, nearly sickeningly hungry. We had planned everything but meals and were now stuck with an undying hunger and a Wendy’s to walk to down the road. So we thought, why not? We got the answer when we got there: because every single attendee of NDK had been in the same exact predicament and came to the same exact solution. The Wendy’s line wrapped around the entire inside of the facility and out the door when we arrived—when we got all the way through the line a half an hour later, the line had doubled and wrapped around the outside of the facility in addition. Our order was big enough, and we decided to sit in a high booth for two which sat just beside the huge windows; thus, we had the line on either side of us, hungry cosplayers with half an hour to go staring at us as we ate. As I filled my painfully small stomach—for which I have painfully large eyes—it soon became obvious that I wouldn’t finish my food. I was ready to pack everything up, throw out the leftovers, and be on my merry way. Of course, this being NDK, things don’t work the way they do in the real world. As I watched yet another person compliment Lisa on her outfit—which was brilliant, by the way—I was suddenly addressed by the same man, and he noticed me ready to throw out half a container of fries.

“You better not be throwing that away,” he warned me, and I smiled sheepishly. “Well I was going to”, I informed him, “I’m full. Do you want it?” He looked at me worriedly, glancing at the fries with uncertainty. I understood completely; taking food from a stranger = big no-no. I assured him I hadn’t spit in it. He joked that it was a shame that I hadn’t, but still continued to ponder over the fries. I finally was fully ready to go and warned him that if he didn’t take them, they’d be in the trash in ten seconds. He gave up, shrugging, and took the fries happily; he had certainly been in line for a good half an hour. I left that Wendy’s satisfied with my stomach as well as my experience. Indeed, this was the only place and time anything like this would ever happen; I felt undying trust from the people around me, and I similarly felt as if I knew them as well. The fact was, we were all the same.

Saturday Sept. 15: Afternoon

Returning to the con, Lisa and I were still ready for excitement, and shopping in Artist’s Alley–a collection of small attendee owned booths which held homemade items and art in the center of the hotel–just didn’t seem like enough. We wanted the famed dealer room. The dealer room, a private room which held booths of legitimate businesses holding high quality merchandise and art, is on the list of any NDK attendee, whether brand new or veteran. And it was most definitely on our list. As we trekked towards the dealer room, we noticed the hallways getting more and more crowded, as well as an increase of shouting from various security and staff members. The con had gotten stricter, it seemed. The true authoritarian nature the con had taken up truly showed, however, in the dealer room rules. Particularly, it’s attendee limit.

                The line stretched further than every other line, save the initial pass line. What was more brutal about this line, however, was that it stretched across half the hotel, out two sets of glass doors and down the outside sidewalk. All day. This line was never getting shorter. Lisa and I nearly recalled our desire to go, and had it not been for the fact that we had nearly two hours until our next panel, we would have skipped. Turned out, the line was moving constantly and took five minutes to get through. Luckily, people were constantly exiting the dealer room, so despite the strict capacity it was relatively quick. Inside the dealer room, we found mostly giant posters of freaky, exposed anime girls, lots of huge plush animals, and comics and kimonos of every kind. We happily left with a few bottles of Ramuné and a packet of mochi, fully convinced that we had gotten our share of expensive happiness.

                After visiting a Q&A in which the audience was pelted with clementines by Chuck Huber, as well as attending an hour long session on which are the ten best streaming anime series, something that actually sounds extremely boring in retrospect, Lisa and I headed back outside. We were suddenly swept with relaxation, realizing that there was nothing more that we wanted to do, and that all that was left was an hour and a half down the road. As we sat on the curb and watched hoards of cosplayers smoke, show off skateboard tricks, and eat all the stuff they bought from the dealer’s room, we realized that there was a pair of girls not too far behind us. One was dressed like Alice from Alice In Wonderland and the other had black ears and a tail, apparently taking the appearance of Alice’s cat, Dinah. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I saw the two hanging out under a tree, but soon enough they began to pretend they were kissing; otakus, unfortunately, love yaoi and yuri, or boyxboy and girlxgirl, respectively. Lisa and I were forced to avoid that third of our vision for the remainder of our rest.

                Despite the picture frames and signs, the line and Wendy’s and the over-fervent security, the lines, the traffic, and the strange company, my experience was by far the best this year. My first year was a shock, me being totally unprepared and undereducated, and my second year was nearly completely lit with the aspect of meeting my role model Vic Mignogna, a famous voice actor. This year, however, was both calming and stressful, both stricter and more liberating, and certainly the first which held so much drama and excitement. Stranger than Halloween and stricter than school, I didn’t once have to worry about my behavior. I, after all, am only a mild otaku.