Nishicon's Bizarre Adventure took place on a weekend roughly a month after the previous con, and at least included a full video program, even if most of it was Dutch dubs (brrr..). The ticket bought for 2020 was still valid, the original Theaterhotel reservation had been automatically moved up to the new date, and as always in Theaterhotel Almelo, there would be a dinner buffet.
During the trip to Almelo, where I encountered roughly the same amount of Ukrainian refugees as on the trip to De Broodfabriek, and ZERO masks, I wondered if the hotel and the city centre had changed in the decade since I attended the last anime con held there, in 2012. The Theaterhotel had changed very little if at all, but the walk from the station, along the canal into a shopping centre and back out again to the shaded lane where a right turn led to the hotel’s familiar entrance, took me past a dramatically changed canal, lined with floating weed gardens (barges filled with soil) growing loosestrife, hairy willowherb, water mint and dock. At the end of the canal stood three colourful plastic kingfisher statues, one preening, one with spread wings, one with its beak pointed down at the water as if preparing to dive. To help contain the pandemic, "Please give each other space" had been painted on random bricks in the square at the heart of the shopping centre. (The Dutch, give each other space? Surely you jest.)
The hotel was also still affected by the pandemic; arriving an hour before check-in time, I saw notices had been put up to warn of staff shortage, and apologize for any delays. I checked in and waited in the lobby for the room’s keycard to be made. An hour later, any guests for floors 2 and 3 waiting in the lobby (that would have included me, if I’d had a keycard) were called forward to be escorted to their rooms. I cut across the line of waiting guests to the hotel desk to ask if my key was ready yet. Apparently it took so long because the keycard-making machine was malfunctioning, and instead of being given a keycard, guests were being brought to their rooms and having their doors opened for them. I had to wait hours for the next room-escorting round.
My room was close to the dining and breakfast hall - nice! - but also only accessible via this hall, so I had to trudge through it several times a day. The room had a balcony, which, because the hotel is snugly inserted between regular housing, overlooked other people’s attic windows and roof garden, so while I used its exposure to glaring sunlight to sun-dry hand-washed masks and T-shirts, I didn’t sit there myself. In the evening, I opened the balcony door for fresh air, but only at a crack, due to loudly talking guests and screaming children. Even that crack was enough to let in a mosquito that haunted the room and stung me in the face. Still, I kept it open, because climate change has upgraded Dutch summers from “mild” to “at least one heatwave per year”, and the current heatwave was the second or third one this year. As a courtesy, the hotel room offered not only the usual tea-making facilities, fridge and internet access, but also a large standing fan, which I moved right next to the bed, and made frequent use of.
The previous con had e-lockers; Nishicon offered no lockers whatsoever, as the hotel had nowhere to put them. I asked at the hotel desk for a late checkout on Sunday, to avoid the cloakroom line by keeping all bags in my room, and was told that late checkout was subject to availability, and to come back later. So I had a lie-down and checked the downloaded PDF of the con program. The game room would be open from 10:00 to midnight. The cinema room would open at 11:00 and show Dutch dubs in the afternoon - a good time to nip off to the buffet - followed by proper anime in the evening.
On Saturday, after breakfast, I arranged a late check-out at 19:00 (plenty of time to gather up my things after the con’s end) and dawdled in the lobby until 10:00, the official start of the con, where I received a visitor wristband that was thicker and sturdier than last con’s wristband; I couldn’t ease it off over my hand, but it survived showering. Then I dawdled some more in the game room (much smaller than at De Broodfabriek, no VR area), trying out Soul Calibur and Mortal Kombat. The first is a succession of fighting matches loosely tied together by a plot, and though I was cluelessly mashing buttons, I did score a few wins, deriving a very real sense of satisfaction from punching an opponent out of the ring, which I assume is what makes these games popular. The second is nothing but fighting matches, and requires a better mastery of the controller, so I couldn’t even make it past the tutorial; the button combos were too complicated to remember.
Annoyingly, the video program started half an hour before the timetable said it would, so I missed the first two eps of Gintama, a title I vaguely remembered from the con of 2013. Seated in an almost empty video room, I tried to discover any kind of continuity between what I remembered and the episodes I saw, as:
I got my first taste of JoJo's Bizarre Adventures at the con of 2014, and was disgusted by all the shouting, brawling and grandstanding. But that's not how this generation-spanning epic starts. As old-fashioned as the starry-eyes animation style, the first "JoJo", young Jonathan Joestar, is born into a rich, respectable family in 19th-century England. He and his father are "saved" after a coach accident, by a tramp who just wants to steal his father's ring, due to the intervention of the tramp's kindly wife, who gets slapped for her trouble. In a suitcase on the coach is a stone mask that will play an important part in the future. Some time later, the tramp, now wifeless, is shown dying of illness, begrudgingly taken care of by his son Dio who spends most of his time in the streets, hustling to survive. The tramp dies, and Dio, who is roughly the same age as Jonathan, goes to Joestar mansion to be adopted; the first thing he does there is kick the dog. Daddy Joestar favours Dio over Jonathan, who Dio schemes against, alienating him from his friends and even getting in the first kiss with his crush, Elina/Erina Pendleton. Skip seven years: Dio now pretends to be friends with Jonathan, and they are about to graduate. Dio wants to grab the Joestar family fortune; JoJo wants to become archaeologist, like a true Indiana Jones, and figure out the mask. Up to this point, the story is bearable as the main characters, still teens, haven't bulked out yet (all Joestar men are ridiculously tall and bulky) and nobody is shouting.
Old man Joestar falls ill; Dio brings him his medicine, since their butler is too old to climb the stairs; JoJo discovers a letter from Dio's father, describing the same symptoms, accuses Dio of trying to kill his foster father as he did his father, and says he wants to go to the police, but instead goes to find an antidote in a bad neighbourhood, and here the shouting begins: accosted by thugs, he gives them such a beating that one of them, deeply impressed, becomes his friend. Remember the stone mask? When it touches blood, hooks emerge from its edge. Dio, who's chugging alcohol because he's depressed that he seems to be turning into his own father, plans to use this mask to kill JoJo; he takes a walk, is accosted by other thugs, and slaps the mask on one of them as a test run. The thug turns into a vampire, sucks his blood, then falls apart as the sun comes up.
Back home, JoJo and the police confront Dio with proof of his attempted murder by poisoning, and daddy Joestar finally sees the light. Dio pretends to repent, then tries to stab JoJo, instead killing his father who jumped between them. Dio dons the mask, giving him vampire superpowers, and kills the poicemen. The fight starts a fire, JoJo runs to the roof of the mansion to lure Dio to a spot where they will both die in the flames; he somehow survives, but can't find the mask among the rubble of his burned-out estate.
The discoverer of the mask, a Baron Zeppeli, fixes JoJo's broken arm with the "Hamon breathing technique" and teaches it to him to help fight Dio, who has also survived, and destroy the mask. Dio is now a criminal boss who has pressed Jack the Ripper into service. To find and confront Dio, JoJo and Zeppeli go by coach to "Windknights Lot", through a brick tunnel with what looks like a carving of a British moustache at top, only to be attacked by a zombie Jack the Ripper, who was, ick, "hiding inside the horses".
After that ep, no one bothered to play the next scheduled anime, so I went to the hotel room for a nap. It was great to have a room so close to the video room, but the hotel guests were so noisy. Especially the ones going karaoke. Here's a tip, fellows: try singing instead of yelling drunkenly.
Of the Dutch dubs playing from mid to late afternoon, I only wanted to see Hamtaro, about hamsters who act like innocent pets by day, but, by night, leave their cages to congregate at their secret hideout. Where they behave in simplistic and annoying ways; for instance, they make so much noise that the leader flies into a rage and kicks them out, said leader then feels lonely without them but is to proud to ask them to come back, then there's a hammed-up rescue action and bam, they're all friends again. It's even dumber than Crayon Shin-chan, or, the story of a crudely drawn elementary-school brat and his long-suffering parents that I had to sit through first; that, at least, tries to be funny.
But the low point, after the buffet where, to my delight, salmon teriyaki was back on the menu, was Digimon. The timetable had promised more of JoJo's bizarre adventures, but was clearly optional, as there was no one present to man the room, until after a while someone came along and asked for help with the video player, which was an X-Box, and slapped on another Dutch dub. I was initially interested just to see this "classic" and lesser version of the Pokemon series; it was worse. So much worse. The premise: alongside our own dimension exists an alternate, digital dimension with its own version of evolving life. A bunch of kids are somehow dumped in this dimension, where the nerd of the bunch keeps trying to call home from non-functional phone booths that dot the landscape: hurr funny. As are the introductions done by the boy who sounds like the kind to break people's windows just because "friends" dared him to: "This is SomeTranslatedName. She's all right - for a girl." Yeah, fuck you too buddy. Anyway, a baby digital monster attaches itself to each of them, and has to fight battles which the babies lose pitifully until their infant human owners command them to "digivolve!" This series was clearly translated from the American translation, since in was dubbed in Dutch with English opening credits and battle cries. Hearing bratty Dutch kids (dubbed by adults) switch to badly pronounced English buzzwords for an already boring and nonsensical fight scene is cringe. So cringe.
But after that, they got back to the program and played JoJo's? Oh no, now was the time for Dutch-dubbed Yugi-Oh, guaranteed to suck the mystery out of playing cards that are actually magical forces from Ancient Egypt, the dignity out of Pegasus, the man with hair curtains and a light, menacing voice who invites all card game champions to a big tournament on his yacht, and the humour out of the cocky kid who agrees to play a match with the slutty young woman, the prize being the luxury cabin assigned to him, and then appears on deck grouchily, shouldering his rucksack, because Miss Too Pretty was a much better player than she let on.
Dispirited, I went to my room to have a nap before the evening's serious anime shows, only to have to listen to the karaoke contestants murder Papercut by Linkin Park.
Not wanting to sit through more dubs before getting to see what I came for, I arrived in the video room exactly on time for Spy x Family, which had of course started half an hour early. This show, I can wholeheartedly recommend: it's sappy, full of action and blessed with an absurd, Monty-Pythonesque humour. A spy has to infiltrate a rich kids' school, for which he needs to adopt an orphan to send there: his choice being a girl who tries to hide the fact that she can read minds. To be a proper family, he also needs a "wife", so he proposes to someone he thinks must be desperate: a girl working as hostess, and who lets people think she's also a prostitute, to hide that she's actually a killer for hire. While supposedly their family is one big act, they do all develop a certain fondness for each other. But then the next step: getting the "daughter" accepted at the snobbish school! One of the professors there is obsessed with "elegance", and, to get to his office, applicants have to run a gauntlet of dirtying and disheveling traps, including an unplanned stampede of farm animals led by a cow with an eyepatch. It's fortunate that the spy and his family somehow managed to bring along three changes of clothes.
Finally, JoJo is back, several generations down, in Jojo's Bizarre Adventures: Diamond is Unbreakable. The present JoJos are Jotaro Kujo, the Stand guy from that shouty anime I saw way back when, and Josuke, not a legitimate member of the Joestar family, but the result of an affair. They both look extremely seventies; Josuke wears a very open-chested trenchcoat with a heart on one lapel and an anarchy sign on the other. Stands are a mix of an autonomous but obedient spirit, and a special power; Josuke's Stand has the power of healing, a refreshing change. The two bond over Josuke saving a tortoise that was hurt in a fight with school bullies (why is Josuke being bullied? Surely not for his ridiculous outfit!) then they fight a villain who is absolutely demolished by Jotaro, then they go after a bow and arrow used by a local Stand-owner (his Stand is a mini-army) and his also Stand-possessing younger brother (whose stand is just a hand) to infect more people with Stands and use them to kill his father, who has turned green and blobby after being infected with something by vampire archvillain Dio, who is now also a vulture capitalist. Although the rooms had been full for the horrid Dutch dubs, I found myself alone in the video room while watching this. It ran late, until an hour past midnight, after which I retired to bed, kept awake by more loud, tuneless karaoke.
Sunday promised some real anime in the morning, concurrent with "papercraft" should I find it disappointing, more JoJo at noon (the con wasn't named "Nishicon's Bizarre Adventures" for nothing!), Dutch dubs in the early afternoon, a lecture about 3D printing which I ended up skipping, and then the last part of JoJo until the con's end. Having some tooth trouble to go with my post-karaoke morning headache, I chewed slowly through my breakfast while the dining room filled up with people who don't believe in distancing, and was miraculously on time - ie. as out of synch with the timetable as the video room itself - for Demon Slayer.
This series is neither as serious as the title suggests, nor as goofy as it could be. It's run-of-the-mill fantasy anime, done well. In a crisp snowy forest landscape, a boy in feodal-era Japanese peasant clothes, carries his bleeding sister while begging her not to die. Flashback: as eldest son of a poor family living in a remote cabin, who took on the role of his missing father, this boy regularly makes the trek to town to sell charcoal for a living. His younger siblings beg to go with him, but he says it's too dangerous. He is well-known and popular in town, often asked to do odd jobs. One day in town, running late, he is offered a stay for the night by an old man, as to return home at this hour, when man-eating demons are on the prowl, would be suicidal. He also possesses a keen sense of smell, so on returning home the next morning, he smells the blood of his family before he sees their slaughtered corpses.
Only his sister is - barely - alive, so he shoulders her and sets off for town. She wakes, growls, bares fangs and attacks him; they tumble down a ledge, she attacks him again. A passing demon slayer, seeing only a demon pouncing on a victim, tries to dispatch her by hurling a hatchet. Her brother saves her life by throwing a stone to draw her out of the hatchet's path, but is knocked out himself; the scene the demon slayer arrives at is the boy lying on the ground, unconscious, while the demon/sister stands over his body, snarling protectively. Being wounded by a demon is like being bitten by a werewolf; the victim becomes one. But the boy is convinced his sister is still partly her old self, so the demon hunter puts a bamboo gag on her to stop her biting anyone, and refers both to an old man living at the foot of the mountain. And tells the boy to never expose her to sunlight, so for the rest of the journey, the boy carries his now mute and wide-eyed sister in a basket.
On their way to said old man, they pass a temple and are attacked by the demon who has killed everyone inside; the sister, hulking out, kicks its head off, but the head just grows arms and continues the fight. Managing to pin it to a tree, the boy wonders how to kill it, until the rising sun solves his quandary by burning it to a crisp. The old man, wearing a goblin mask, subjects him to a year of grueling training while his sister lies unconscious in bed; he completes his training with the help of two children his own age wearing fox masks (who are in fact ghosts, but he doesn't know that), and is sent off to the Final Selection with his own fox mask, and the request to please not die.
Die of what? He passes a wisteria bush, in full bloom despite it not being the season, and is told, by twins in kimono who speak in unison, that this bush blooms year-round in order to ward off demons, who hate the smell. It keeps them trapped at the top of the mountain, where he has been sent. Sure enough, a hideous bloated demon, after catching and devouring a screaming boy, which bloats it a bit further, demands to know the year, and is furious to have been trapped here so long, but pleased to reveal that he was the one to eat all the old man's previous apprentices, who he always recognized by the fox masks they wore. Angrily, the boy kills the demon, ending the fourth episode. Each episode is followed by a humorous short called "Touha's Secrets" where the siblings, drawn in super-deformed style, answer questions from the audience.
The room was unmanned again as the last episode played, so I nipped off for a breather on the balcony, where it was now raining; the air was fresh, the current heatwave seemingly over. Half an hour later, I returned to find Jojo's Bizarre Adventures: Golden Wind ("more men with boob windows") already playing. Entering the scene: Giorno Giovanna (should be Giovanni, but oh well), child, somehow, of defeated vampire crimelord Dio, never knew his father but was "adopted" by local mafia don after helping him escape the police; wide-breasted jacket, golden hair and a fringe that looks like three cannon mouths; not a hardcore criminal, but hustles to get by; so he steals the luggage of Jotaro's friend Koichi, who was sent to that location to find Dio's offspring. A real criminal, with an even more chest-revealing coat and an actual heart tattoo on his chest, accosts Giorno and demands to know who killed Leaky Eye Luca. They both have Stands; that of Heart Tattoo can unzip bodies like sleeping bags, while Giorno's is a "golden Stand" that can turn spirits berserk. Flashback to Giorno's past as unloved, abandoned child until the mafia don takes him in, a drug dealer being killed for selling "even to woman and children", Hearty and Giorno getting in a fight which turns to friendship when Giorno sees that Hearty also feels bad about selling drugs to children, and their decision to work their way up in the mob so they can kill its drug-peddling boss. Sadly, after two eps, Dutch dubs were back on. I ran off to my room, but could not escape the ghastly sound of Dutch karaoke; they were now singing Rick Astley. That's right, I was being rickrolled.
Leaving the rapidly filling video room, I caught a remark from a congoer: "This is my childhood", that explained the popularity of these gadawful Dutch dubs contrasted with the virtual non-attendance of actual watch-worthy stuff, including the con's theme anime: shared nostalgia. These dubbed shows, running in a period when I had long stopped watching TV, had produced a whole generation of not-even-weeaboos who were apparently delighted to find their favourite shows originally came from Japan, but not delighted enough to enjoy anything genuinely Japanese. I briefly considered giving papercraft a try, saw papercrafters huddled together too close for my liking, underwent more Dutch-dubbedness, watched a con staff member who looked exactly like the comic book guy from The Simpsons replacing an overheating beamer with his own that shrunk the subtitles to near-illegibility, saw another one try and fail to operate the replacement beamer, and so, rather than getting to see the promised last part of JoJo's, watched the remaining adventures of Giorno the anti-hero who finally gets access to the mob boss, Polpo (Italian for "octopus"): he enters what seems an empty bedroom with a fruit stand, then the bedclothes contract into a blobby person, who orders him to carry a lit lighter and stop it from going out (this involves another Stand). He finally manages to kill Blobbo, sorry, Polpo, by disguising a gun as one of the bananas on the fruit stand, so Polpo basically shoots himself. Because bizarre adventures are bizarre.
Conclusion: I didn't enjoy this con, which is less about anime and more about, well, weeb-ness. And karaoke. Gods, the karaoke. To really end on a sour note: despite getting a good night's sleep before the homeward journey, I was so tired that I left my bag on the bus, and had to wait an hour at the bus stop for that same bus to drop that bag off again. Many thanks to the bus drivers for coordinating the bag rescue action.
