(It's "Queens of the Round Table" after King Arthur and his round table of knights, and "round stable" because of Marieke's cow - geddit?)
Organizing a convention is something that gets better with practice, from dumping a bunch of people in front of the screen and playing whatever is on hand, to printing program and con booklets from which the actual programming only slightly deviates, to choosing a larger venue with more comfortable video rooms and all sorts of activities on the side, to getting an online ticket booth and special arrangements for nearby hotels, to having the whole con programme up on the website before the con even starts, to announcing in 2018 that as of 2019, the con will be held in a different venue: the Ahoy stadium in Rotterdam. So it was with mixed feelings that I left for this, the last con to be held in the, so hateful to me, World Forum in the Hague. Since I associate Ahoy with football matches and rowdy concerts, I wasn't sure what to think of that, and entertained nostalgic memories of the con's early haunt; only, there would be no way to fit the behemoth that the con has become in Theaterhotel Almelo.
One first joyful announcement is that this con would be travelled to and from, not the horrifying Overschild with its lack of public transport, but the somewhat less backward village of Kantens, reachable on Sunday by exactly two buses, one in the early morning, one close to midnight, so if I wanted to save myself the expense of another hotel room, I would have a lot of time to kill between con's end and my ride home. A second cause for joy is that not only did I score an "Anime Arrangement" in the Marriott Hotel again, but the organizers offered online reservations for lockers, a great alternative to standing in line for hours to dump one's stuff in the Cloak and Bag Room after checking out on Sunday morning, and then standing in line for hours again to collect it all after con's end. (Previous years' overworked-looking Cloak and Bag Room staff would likely have agreed with this statement.) A second joyous event was a mailed reminder, two weeks before the con, that the con would be in two weeks, and here, along with the festival ticket, was a link to book a locker if I so desired - which link did not lead to a locker reservation form, because I'd already booked a large locker for the whole weekend! D'oh! It's amazing, the things one forgets when securing a ticket and hotel room six months in advance.
A last announcement that conjured up a smile was that the much disliked plastic moolah coins would be replaced this year by a new festival currency, the "euro". Unlike the moolah which only had whole and half coins, this new currency had coinage going down to 1/100th of a euro (though good luck finding a eurocent these days, I can tell you) and also unlike the moolah which could only be redeemed at the con's food court, this currency was accepted by banks throughout Europe! Con organizers' sense of humour, may you live forever.
Not so funny, though, was the con staff's apparent unfamiliarity with the video software. Shows ran late or switched time slots, or the same ep was played repeatedly because someone didn't know how to select the next one. I know that the con is staffed with volunteers, but please, make sure you know how Kodi works before the con starts.
(But let us not judge too hastily when it comes to unfamiliarity with modern technology, because when I showed my downloaded ticket - in an effort to reduce paper waste, tickets may now be downloaded to mobile phone and scanned from the screen instead - it turned out that the file I'd downloaded was the locker code instead of the festival ticket, and I had to break out of line, frantically try and log in on the con's wifi network, access my email and open the mailed ticket confirmation's attachment so the necessary barcode could be scanned. At least I spared myself the fumbling with small change on buses and trams while travelling to the con by just buying a day ticket valid on all forms of public transport, which turned out to be a disposable OV-chipcard.)
This year's con booklet detailed which foods would be available at which stalls in the food court, including bento boxes at the maid cafe which would be open at specific hours; still no mention of matcha ice cream, though. The timetable, now folded to a small enough size to fit in a back pocket, was less colourful than in previous years, the background a blue gradient, the video titles (to emphasize the lessening importance of the con's video showings?) all in the same colour, as opposed to different colours for con theme, live-action, 18+ events and other. The online program, which I could access on my tablet, still used the old colours. General impression: Japanese voice actresses must be well-versed in plaintive, tearful, helpless-sounding voices, all voice actors must repeat whatever a character says (eg. "The bomb is in the basement." "The bomb is in the basement??") when helping exposition along, and standards of animation are now so high that there was no show I saw that I didn't like, visually speaking. Of course, what with the video-playing boo-boos, I didn't always see what I would have liked.
Over the years of watching anime, one tends to compare new productions with what went before, and Yona of the Dawn struck me as an inferior remake of Arslaan. The main characters are quite different, and no doubt the shows diverge after a few eps, but their starting point is the same: the heir to the throne (in this case, a feisty red-haired princess) suddenly loses father and kingdom to a hostile takeover by someone who had a bone to pick with the king, flees, and goes on a mission to restore rightful rule with a rag-tag band of adventurers, some with divine-slash-supernatural powers. In this case, dragons are involved, the pretender to the throne is the cousin that Yona had a crush on and wanted to marry, the mission is to reconcile four tribes that are named after the four elements, and the band of adventurers includes a beast-faced man with a disgustingly cute mascot.
After this preamble, I checked in at the hotel, had a small room mixup, and, once this was sorted, returned for 18if, where Haruto, a teenage boy, wakes up in what looks like his room if it was a Salvador Dali painting - in other words, he's still asleep. He meets a wispy white-haired girl called Lily and an anthropomorphic cat who is actually the dream avatar of a scientist called Katsumi Kanzaki, before being homed in on by a "witch" wearing a very silly little hat who transforms the environment into a mobile phone screen, with icons to receive messages and play games. These rather sadistic games involve transforming and maiming Haruto and Kanzami, until Haruto manages to speak to the witch one-on-one and finds out what's bugging her: in real life, she's a shy schoolgirl who agreed when asked by a sneering boy to go out with her, only to be told that he doesn't like her, and had a bet with his mates that she would turn him down. That is why she's hiding in a dream where she rules supreme, and no one dares to snub her! The scientist explains that she suffers from Sleeping Beauty Syndrome, where a sleeping woman can't wake up until her trauma is healed; he has invented a way to enter dreams to study this. After Haruto's soothing words, the "witch" becomes herself again and a blue door materializes to let Haruto out of the dream, but instead of waking up, he's back in his own dream-bedroom.
Every episode, Haruto must go through a red door to enter the dream of a "witch" and leave through the blue door when the problem presented to him is solved, usually with a few consoling words, sometimes more; in the rather gruesome second ep, a woman is killing off the thugs that broke into her home and murdered her family when she was little, by inflicting wounds on their dream selves that also appear on their physical bodies, and it's up to Hotaru to finish off the last one. This is the first time the scientist appears in the waking world as a human, instead of a cat. He is shown in the next ep enjoying the curry at a restaurant, and asking for second helpings; the girl who serves him is bulimic and every night, her problematic relationship with food causes a kind of malicious Food Fairy to burst into Haruto's dreamworld, pelting him with doughnuts and other sweets. The saddest ep is when Haruto convinces a professional ice skater, who hates her career because it was forced on her by her parents, to take pride and pleasure in her talent, and says he want to see her skate when she wakes up; but because she has been asleep for several decades, the person waking up in a hospital bed is not an athletic young female, but an old woman.
When will the portrayal of anything - warships, tanks, guns - as ditzy teenage girls end? In Umamusume: Pretty Derby, it's racehorses, and their girl forms have silly floppy horse ears and wear horseshoes. Their diet is not restricted to grass and hay, judging by the horsegirl pigging out in a restaurant to either celebrate a win or console herself over a loss. Whatever; the sound was glitching badly and I didn't want to watch this anyway, and only caught the tail end before seeing a different kind of horsegirl in A Centaur's Life, which should have started two hours ago and ended before I came in, but the person in charge of playing the videos was too technically challenged to navigate to the right title. This was also not to my liking, so I picked another video room to watch the second half of In This Corner of the World, a film in the same vein as Giovanni's Island (2015): in wartime Japan, civilians are struggling. The newly married Suzu lives with her inlaws, and the struggle is to keep the family fed by cooking rice in a way that puffs up the grains, and scrounging for edible weeds, while avoiding the odd bomb or bullet. Suzu likes to draw, and is briefly arrested on suspicion of espionage when sketching Japan's military pride, the warship Yamato. She is still childless - her husband is in the army and the rare moments when they meet, they barely get as far as kissing - so she babysits the daughter of her prim, bossy single-mother sister-in-law until one fateful day when, walking home together, they pass too close to an unexploded bombshell and it goes off, killing the child and ripping off Suzu's right arm. A double tragedy: the sister-in-law accuses her of murder, and she must adapt to being one-armed, shakily trying to continue drawing with her left hand. She breaks down and wants to go back to her family in Hiroshima, but has not quite arrived when she sees the mushroom cloud in the distance. She later does visit what's left of her family: her sister has spots on her arm, signs of radiation sickness. Returning to the inlaws, she tries to manage with one hand, as when she climbs a ladder to pick apples and almost falls, because she has no spare hand to grasp the ladder while picking. Apart from the moment when Japan's capitulation is announced and she passionately declares that she will not give in, but keep fighting - as if she was ever actively involved in the war to begin with - it's all very humble and down-to-earth and slice-of-life, if you live in what the Chinese call "interesting times".
Last year's The Saga of Tanya the Evil was shown again, but to avoid exposure to all the silly upper lips, I watched Your Name until its sound also began to glitch, then went to the video room that should play Mitsudomoe, only it played Gamers!, a "comedy" about a student gaming club with much annoying hemming and hawing between bashful girls being roped into games together, because this video room was also running an hour late. So I returned to Kimi no Na wa ("Your Name"), by the same maker as Hoshi no Koe (2003), and likewise a work of art.
In a remote village beside a curiously round lake, Mitsuha, a daughter from a shinto priest family (under the tutelage of her grandmother, as her father has forsaken his priestly duties to go into politics) performs a public ritual with her younger sister, in which they dance to appease a god, then chew rice to a paste and spit it into an earthenware flask to ferment to sake as an offering to this god; later, they will place this flask in a small shrine under a rock near this lake. During the rite, she's booed by teenage boys - the rural equivalent of internet trolls - who think she's disgusting. Afterwards, alone, she cries out that she wishes she could be reborn as a boy in Tokyo.
Taki, a teenage boy in Tokyo who works at a snackbar after school and has a requited crush on the snackbar's manager, wakes up one day with long hair (that Mitsuha braids every day) and breasts. As he ponders on what happened to his body and how to get into a girl's school uniform and where the school is and what's even happening, a little girl runs from his bedroom, crying that her big sister is acting weeeeird! Meanwhile, Mitsuha thinks she's dreaming when she wakes up as a boy in Tokyo, spending Taki's allowance on tasty treats until Taki's friends remind her that she should go to work. Discovering that their body swap is no dream, they start communicating through diary and mobile phone messages, and even help each other out: Taki beats up some boys who think they can push Mitsuha around, while Mitsuha brings much-needed patience to Taki's job as waiter, and sewing skills when some pervert customers slit the manager's skirt with a razor. Sensing that "Taki" is no longer interested in her, this manager nevertheless helps the real Taki to find out what's going on when the body swaps stop happening, and the messages on his phone self-erase; Mitsuha's village disappeared a while ago. It seems the two were separated not only by distance, but by time. Taki finds the shrine and a way to, with Mitsuha's help, prevent a tragedy, but although they now exist in the same time and space, they still keep eluding each other.
The other video room was still playing A Centaur's Life (maybe that show was played all night, on repeat) so I watched that. A comparison of anime shows presented itself again, this time with last year's Interviews with Monster Girls: the main character is an ordinary schoolgirl in all respects except having a horse body from the waist down, and two very mulish ears sticking up from her abundant mane. She is joined by other exotic-looking teens, including three tiny cat girls, a devil boy with little bat wings, and a snake-headed, snake-tailed Arcadian who has the good fortune of fitting in both boy and girl clothes. Because what this series does is have freakish characters do normal everyday things like shopping for clothes that fit, which can be hard when you have a literal horse's ass.
Due to all the video program mixups and delays, I dove no earlier than halfway into gagfest Mitsudomoe, centering on three vicious moeblobs that experience surprisingly adult situations. The Marui triplets, as they're called, consist of Mitsuba, who puts on airs and acts tough because she's the eldest; Futaba, the trio's precocious Pippi Longstocking (she's always cheerful, superhumanly strong and has no filter when she talks); and edgy, mysterious Hitoha, the nihilist goth bookworm. They will be the bane of elementary school teacher Satoshi Yabe's life.
Mitsuba is not the tallest, but she is the fattest, taking after her paunchy father who is cursed with the appearance of a criminal, and so gets arrested often; when the trio find an old picture of him where he is young and handsome, they instantly want to know if Mitsuba, having inherited his looks, is dating. They think Yabe has a crush on the school nurse, so they try to kick him in the crotch so that the nurse will have to treat him, and will hopefully like what she sees. At the swimming pool, Mitsuba is so embarrassed by her father's presence that she has him arrested. In an entirely humorous way, it goes downhill from there.
In Garo: Vanishing Line, consecutive eps introduce the knights who fight Horrors - humans who, in their desperation, allow demons to possess them and act through them - while being persecuted for "witchcraft". Its genre is fantasy horror, it likes to show salacious body parts (there is an actual titty monster), and while the animation is beautiful, the fight scenes are too fast for me to follow.
And that concluded Friday for me, as I was both too tired to focus and fed up with the messed-up video schedules.
Saturday was full of video fun, the fun part sometimes being questionable, as in the fluffy acid trip called Hakyu Hoshin Engi, of which I was lucky to see all five eps. Taikobo, who rides a supercute pony-like mascot whose forelimbs end in hands, is a young himbo who is training with superhumans, only for his whole tribe to be tossed in a snake pit in the first ep, leaving him to face literal demons alone. His flying ponyduck mascot is seduced by a beautiful demon, but returned to him later by a cat-faced clown. Two tall men are arguing whether to protect the king of a country, or overthrow him for the good of said country, since he is being possessed by an evil spirit named Dakki. The wife of one of them seems to live under a rock, as she doesn't know about Dakki; she visits the king's castle to see her sister, and together they jump off a balcony to end whatever is binding one of the tall men to the king, so he can break away and join the rebels. A "Lord of the East" tells how he lost his son; a scene of playing the koto (Japanese harp) is followed by a surreal cooking scene on how to prepare burgers with chopped meat. The lord, in prison, eats the burgers presented to him with great relish, pretending this is his favourite dish, but tears up after the guards have left, knowing that he has just consumed his chopped-up son.
Mr Osomatsu, based on a humorous manga, starts out grainy like an old film, the crudely drawn Matsuno brothers saying that they're back to commemorate the 80-year anniversary of their creator. Then, against a shiny new backdrop, they appear as a modern idol group and enact every stereotype in existence, culminating in a Godzilla toddler with tiny penis. Then they have to find work, end up at the black factory due to their teacher, and finally all do the same job, but in six shifts. More shenanigans follow, which didn't do much for me as I felt I was missing the references. So I left and bought something called "chocolate matcha freakshake": matcha tea with milk and ice cubes, although the weather was anything but hot, the milkshake beaker's rim dipped in chocolate.
The video room showed the tag end of Shirobako 2, which has fittingly beautifully drawn backgrounds for an anime series that is about a student club drawing and producing anime, before embarking on high quality children's horror: GeGeGe no Kitaro, the latest of a succession of shows spanning a decade. The main character is Kitaro, a character whose head might as well be a ball with hair painted on, the hair parting just enough to uncover a huge right eye. Though he is formally an orphan, his father has reincarnated into a tiny body topped by an eyeball, and usually sits on his head.
The formula: no one believes in monsters any more, monsters exist, Kitaro is the last descendant of a family that battles these monsters so that no one has to believe in them. Mana, the young teenager who calls on him for help, is happy to believe in monsters and very curious about them. The monsters in this series are yokai, spirits from Japanese folklore, and not all of them are evil; Mana befriends a number of them, Kitaro depends on the help of yokai and half-yokai, and, finally, Kitaro is a yokai himself.
Sadly, the person operating the video equipment started with ep 5, then almost repeated ep 5, then skipped the first ep to play eps 2 to 5, which I had just seen, so when ep 5 was replayed, I nipped out for a snack: a vegan donburi (bowl of rice topped with vegetables and, usually, meat) from the Honkeys food stand. The bowl was paper, the fork made of bamboo, and the donburi itself, extremely spicy.
Magical Girl Ore is the parody that the magical girl genre needs. Evil monsters live in this world, but fortunately it is protected by... magical girls! One of them, the pink-haired Saki Uno, is battling a Godzilla-like monster who can drain colour from its surroundings. Convenient for the colorists, as Saki's cute flying mascot comments, but disastrous for the TV show about to be broadcast: if it's in black and white, there will be sooo many complaints! So, in what is obviously an imitation of Sailor Moon, she conjures up a heart-topped magical staff for a Rainbow Miracle Super Delicious Pretty Hyper Rainbow Attack! Demolishing the demon, this attack leaves her weak with fatigue, so Peach Prince, an obvious Tuxedo Mask clone, swoops down from a lamppost to carry her away in his arms. And starts beeping. Like her alarm. Because it was just a dream.
In real life, she's the less talented half of an idol singer duo, who, to make things worse, has a crush on the largely oblivious half of a rival male idol duo; his partner is anything but oblivious, and loves to insult her. Forced to become an actual magical girl by some Yakuza type who accepts her as a substitute for her mother, she sees her crush abducted by muscular pastel-coloured Care Bear type monsters, and calls on the power of love to transform her and save him.
Anyone who knows that "ore" is an exclusively male pronoun, can see where this is going. Yes, Saki transforms into a tall buff pink-haired boy whose pecs nicely fill the boob-supporting part of the magical girl costume, treating the world to the bulging panty shot that nobody wanted to see. The transformation is witnessed by both her friends and her manager, but fear not: he's wildly enthusiastic about managing a magical girl idol singer.
In subsequent eps, her friend also undergoes a magical boy transformation when a Care Bear tentacle demon gets frisky, and six androids working in an animation studio finish an episode almost in time to pacify a creature called Chizillla, who is killed by the magical boys before it can angriy destroy an important animation industry location. Subtitled statement: "The depiction of the animation industry is HIGHLY INACCURATE. (Probably.)"
There are anime titles that make it clear the creators' first language is not English. The word "scrapped" applies to physical things, like old cars, or slightly less physical things like scripts, shows and lineups. It doesn't apply to royalty; they are dethroned, assassinated, exiled. But maybe the dehumanizing choice of words for Scrapped Princess is deliberate, because she is very human, cheerful and kind, and yet, her father, the king, made her disappear because of a prophecy that she would destroy the world on her sixteenth birthday. Presumed dead, she lives with her two stepsiblings who patiently put up with her entitled demands. Until the Mauser Church, source of this prophecy, gets wind of her survival - because she is stupidly trusting enough to follow a woman into a church - and the hunt is back on. She doesn't get to be an anime bimbette as much as she would like; in one fight, a companion asks her if she's going to join in or just stand there. Still, the real draw of this show is not the princess, but her growing band of companions.
Fatigue was taking hold again, so I scored some taiyaki and left for a nap in the hotel. I'd hoped for the matcha ice cream and omelette bento available at a previous con, but the ice cream wasn't sold at all, and Neko Neko Ni Maid Cafe, which sells bento lunches, was closed when I returned, so it was clear I would get neither this year. Also, now that moolahs were replaced with euros, I noticed how pricey all the food was.
For the rest of the day, I saw mostly snippets. The ending where thugs break all the plates in a mansion before being chased off and a young butler cleans up the mess and the mansion's owner sits on the table, before being summoned to be promoted to admiral and fulfill an impossible quest, before the ending credits roll? That has to be Butlers x Battlers, in which butlers are not just poshly dressed home help, but guardians of the galaxy. It's worth mentioning that the huge, apparently all-male cast shown in these ending credits have similarly triangular, yet individually distinct faces.
The 6-minute episodes of 10 Episodes Per Hour count as snippets in my book, especially since opening and ending credits take up most of their length. But they're funny. A Japanese snackbar has a portal opening to medieval Europe where the customers rave about its food. At a train crossing, teachers and pupils who are forced to wait together until the train has passed, experience awkward social interactions. A girl goes to a new school where she gets in yuri situations. A boy always acts rude and uninterested towards the girl he has a crush on, but fights his sister over a photograph of her. My favourite is Aho Girl ("Idiot Girl") about the stupidest bubblehead imaginable and her eternally angry childhood friend. In a refreshing reversal of the anime trope where the male lead says something stupid and/or lecherous and the female lead hits him with a giant hammer while screaming "bakaaaa!", it's the silent male who punches the airhead girl before she can do something phenomenally stupid. When she tries to play with very young children, he tells them in a deadpan voice: "You should know that she's a complete idiot." To stay with the airhead trope, in the RPG parody where the hero slays the pink-haired girl who is actually a Demon Lord, it turns out the Demon Lord isn't interested in spreading chaos and destruction at all, and just created some monsters by accident while popping corn.
In Shin Koihime Musou - Otome Tairan, the Musou girls are "blood sisters" who came together to bring peace to a disordered world, but who can't retire just yet, because a new evil has popped up. I wouldn't trust them to defeat it, because they are the usual combination of cookie-cutter faces distinguished by ridiculous, gaudy, be-ribboned costumes and hairdos, involved in girly activities while being the most bimbette they can be and showing as much boob as possible without devolving into outright porn. At the first hint of yuri, played for laughs, I left.
In Overlord, something very formulaic happens: players of an online RPG are told to log out; a veteran player called Momongo refuses and stays logged on after midnight. Bam, he's suddenly trapped in this virtual world in the body of his player character, a powerful lich who talks in a booming Skeletor voice and whose literally bare-bones body gains considerable bulk and width from his imposing armour. Finding that the game no longer reacts as expected, he takes stock of his NPC underlings, altering a succubus character called Albedo so she'll be less of a bitch. Squeezing her boob to see if the alteration worked, he finds himself the subject of her undying love, and of all his subjects' admiration. That's all very well, but he's still stuck as a lich. Monologuing (in his own voice) about his fear that this lich persona will take over his character, he decides to build up a reputation, so that any of his friends who are logged in, will contact him. Starting out by saving a village, he becomes the most sinister-looking do-gooder to ever partner with evil-aligned allies to make this virtual world a better place.
Where Saturday was packed with titles, Sunday brought slim pickings. I hadn't even planned to see Manga Girls, a collection of bimbettes including a busty blonde, a professional ecchi mangaka who is skinny and flat-chested, a blue-haired action tomboy who wants more muscles, and an utterly pathetic pink-haired baby. This show is not for people who can't suffer fools. In one ep about body image, where the skinny one, at a signing session, tells female fans to exude confidence, even though she herself was freaking out beforehand, and the pink-haired one is scared of people despite everyone being nice to her.
Magical Circle GuruGuru is a JRPG parody that lacks the usual lustrous backgrounds of fantasy animes, in which the world has to be saved by children. Not the usual angsty teenagers, but actual, round-faced, chubby-cheeked children; a boy with a headband and a girl with long red braids. They collect companions along the way, like the bald old man in a grass skirt who does a witch doctor dance at every opportunity. Specifically, it's a parody of games played on handhelds, which I never had, so I'm afraid most of the humour is lost on me. Still funny, though.
The Card Captor Sakura that I watched was a reboot of the funny, adorable magical girl series I saw in 1999 that faithfully followed the old animation style, including milky background, at least in the first eps; I've read complaints online about inconsistent animation. The show seems to follow the same formula, so there's nothing I can say about it that I haven't said before.
In Alderamin on the Sky, during a war between two countries, the lazy good-for-nothing protagonist accidentally rescues his country's princess, who was captured by the enemy. Here is another princess who is not as much of a bimbette as she would like to be. The focus remains on the protag, however, since as a "reward" he is forced to join the army as a knight. I really can't care about him or his midriff-baring female companions; I'm captivated by the little spirits wearing three-pronged crowns who attach themselves to soldiers.
This year's surprise movie was an oldie, Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie. I haven't seen the series beyond the few eps shown at Famicon III, but have read a bit about it since, and apparently the series plays out and ends differently from the film. I should hope so, as the film's ending is weird and slightly horrifying (spoiler: Utena changes into a racecar to help Anthy escape from the school, which has transformed into a giant prison). Even the beginning is different: Utena is not given her ring by a mystery prince, but finds it on her first day at the Academy, a huge, sprawling campus with a special bedroom-sized rose balcony for "Rose Queen" Anthy, who pulls a sword and other things out of her chest, and who is apparently keeping the corpse of her brother alive. My spoilers don't do this film justice, it must be seen to be believed.
Despite my ongoing con food frustrations, I'll end on a positive note: the fans are behaving better, there wasn't as much littering this year as in the years before.
