Almost a trip to the dentist's

Shopping with my mother is like pulling teeth. It's long, arduous, and full of much pain and headbanging. But in the end, if I behave myself and maybe act sufficiently miserable (which is no act at all, I am really as miserable as I look when I shop with Mom), I might get nice presents, because Mom likes to see me happy. ^_^

Nice treats like the Final Fantasy Advent Children Play Arts Sephiroth figure. And all I had to do was go, "Holy shit, I want this SO bad." And Mom gave in, and I was nice to her the rest of the trip. ^_^v Buying my patience is so easy. :D

It's also very unusual that the figure of Sephiroth actually looks better than he does in the AC movie, wherein I think whoever made his CG self turned him from one hot motherfucker into the one archetype that everybody points at when they say, "That looks like ass." Sephiroth, in Advent Children, looks like ass. :/ I'll never forgive SQUARE ENIX for that. :/ The bastards. *sniffles* But that's okay. ._. I have the figure. That doesn't look like ass, so I'm vaguely happy.

Anyways, here's my Comiket report of Thursday and Friday:

Left home on Thursday afternoon (my mom insisted on taking me to the station although I could've made it myself) to haul myself over to Lindy's place. I was halfway to her station (Kokubunji) on the train when I realized that I'd forgotten my comiket sketchbook. You cannot imagine the look of "OH SHIT" that I had on my face. O_O;; My comiket sketchbook! *cries* Which I have taken faithfully to all (of the two) doujinshi markets I've been to! I was seriously in a state of panic. I think the first thing I told Lindy when I got there was that I needed to find a place that had a sketchbook. ^^;;

Managed to find one at a 100 Yen Shop, which was hilarious because it was EXACTLY the same ghetto sketchbook (with cute animals on it) that I'd given Mel a hard time about last year. What goes around comes around, I supposed, until on the way to dinner we found a stationery store, one that thankfully sold real sketchbooks and I was saved from t3h ghetto. XD So now all the sketches I got in that book have been cut out and carefully taped into my original sketchbook, thus preserving the integrity of my comiket sukebu. :D

Woke up around 5:45am on Friday morning in order to haul ourselves out to Comiket. Met up with Ari and Pong at the Starbucks in Shimbashi, got myself some caffeine, and then we headed out. We got there around 8:30ish or slightly before, the first people in the press line. It was a fun time gaijin smashing our way around pretending not to speak Japanese so they'd take pity on us or at least be frustrated at our lack of Japanese-ness to let us in at foreign press for the MIT Anime Club. You could totally tell that nobody believed us, but because of three very nice letters put together, they let us through. Those three letters really get you far.

Friday was games, anime, and manga day, and while I actually spent more money on Saturday, I think I had more fun on Friday. ^_^ I was rather disappointed by the complete and total lack of Final Fantasy VII doujinshi (I'm sure there will be tons at Winter Comiket and the summer one of 2006), even from well known Sephiroth/Cloud circles like No Reset Club. :/ Come on, guys. I think I only ended up buying 8 doujinshi for myself that day, all of which amounted to either Ancestor Slash (Three Kingdoms! *heart*) or Guilty Gear. O_o;; The first Guilty Gear circle I found I dropped off my sketchbook, and got the most squeeful full color-pencil Sol/Ky I have ever seen in my life. I was so full of squee, you have no idea.

Originally Ari, Lindy, and I were supposed to hang around together, but Lindy got distracted by some Aerith shiny right as we were walking in, and she wandered off by herself and we never saw her until our appointed meeting place at the International Desk at 3pm. o_o;;

Didn't end up having time to go to the Cosplay Place that day, which actually makes me sad because later in the west wing of the con center I saw a whole buttload of kickass Dynasty Warriors/Shin Sangoku Musou cosplayers that I wanted to hug and squee and fangirl over. But alas, given that you're not allowed to take pictures of cosplayers inside the convention halls, I was forced to squee from afar.

The Ancestor Slash I got amounted to three absolutely cute and adorable Zhuge Liang/Jiang Wei drawn by Akira Hayase (incidentally, this person also did the very first doujinshi I ever owned and bought, a cool Zephel/Marcel I got off Ebay. Whoa, talk about coming full circle in doujinshi, eh?), which was so full of the cuteness that I could not resist and sprang for all three. The other two I sprang for and pretty much glomped/tackled as soon as I saw them were two Xiahou Dun/Cao Cao. I'd already been toying with them in my head as a couple, and just seeing it in print made it that much better. Notice I'm not fucking around with any characters from Wu, because yeah...I'm too afraid that if I slash Gan Ning/Lu Xun or Zhou Yu/Sun Ce they'll disown me. *coughs* Right.

Friday culminated in a very interesting discussion about Japanese law regarding doujinshi, pornography, and obscenity from Comiket's legal advisor. Apparently Japan works opposite the way the American court system does, namely that in the States the Courts set the precedence and interpret the law, whereas in Japan the police choose where the line between 'okay' and 'arresting you now, bitch' is, and it's the courts job to uphold that. Very interesting.

I also learned that in Japan, what determines obscenity is the sexual arousal of normal people. We brought up child pornography in question, and apparently kiddie porn is not considered obscene in Japan, because a normal person wouldn't be aroused by it. Therefore, loli and shota are considered all right.

WHOA, back up there, Japan. I think they missed something in that thought logic of what 'obscene' means, but hey. They don't have an absolute moral standard like religion, you gotta make do with something.

Once again, very interesting and after we started discussing some of the social bits of Japan I think the guys at the international office were more convinced we really were going to write an article and were at least semi-press-ish. *cough* Of course, the obvious lack of note-taking might've destroyed any chance of that at all. *sweatdrops*

Anyways, I'm off to play with my new, shiny, non-ass-looking Sephiroth figure, because I just can't wait anymore. o_o Mom will hate it and think it's savage and violent looking (must be the 3 million foot long sword that Sephiroth compensates with), but it'll be too late! *cackles* It's mine now! ALL MINE!