There are a lot of potentially interesting stories hidden beneath the fact that we would just rather talk about an anime instead of talking about a moment where you got together with a long time friend or friends you haven’t seen a while and watched a terribly poor anime, or would rather go read a manga instead of going to Free Comic Book Day and finding that one manga series that you never expected to be there. (Chances of that happening are 1%). Those can be interesting moments. I’d like to hear them, or something like them. But before I poison your mind with inaccurate stories, take a gander at some stories that are pretty cool.
Name: Kai
Who You Are: Blogger at Deluscar, anime, visual novel fan.
Country: Brunei
My Fandom Story (was offered to use this as his example, you’ll have to read the rest there): …One of my favorite parts of the event is definitely this however: the chance to wear yukata. Two workers will help out whoever wanted to wear it. I think it’s pretty much impossible to wear it by yourself after all, especially the tying of the obi. As you can see, the dressing area is “open”, so obviously, the girls don’t strip (will be a sight to see however). Instead, the yukata were worn over the clothes they were wearing at that moment, probably not the proper way since from what I know, yukata are meant to be worn directly on the skin. Not much to be done, since I can’t expect the girls to strip in public anyway.
The process of wearing it takes quite a while to complete, and had to be worn step by step to be able to don on it properly. It was pretty amazing, how a seemingly piece of cloth can be wrapped around and tied, and then be worn with such elegance. They don’t even need sizes as well, from the ones with a more shorter height to the ones with a taller height, the same piece of clothing can fit just fine – I guess the secret trick is the still the tying of the obi, tying huge bundles of cloth to suit a person’s shorter height, or perhaps loosing a few bundles for taller people.
Who You Are: The penguin who secretly rules the world from the shadows… and possibly blogs music at Tsukiyo no Hikari as a part-time job.
Country: Australia
My Fandom Story: Last semester at uni, one of my friends and I sometimes met up in a computer room during our free time. Usually, we’d just chat a bit while doing our tutorial questions or homework. Anyway, one day I got there and lo and behold, he was watching Attack on Titan! I knew he was an occasional anime guy who watched some of the big shounens, but I didn’t know that he watched anything outside that. He said he was really enjoying it, and when I grilled him *ahem* politely asked what other anime he watched, it turned out he’d also marathoned Death Note and Black Lagoon recently. I was thrilled, as most of my friends are totally not into anime. Although he’s not as much of an anime nut as I am, it’s still good to have someone with which you can chat to about anime.
My friend ended up failing quite a few of his subjects.
…I guess the moral of the story is “don’t watch addicting anime when you’re meant to be studying”.
Who I Am: Blogger over at The Geek Clinic.
Country: New Zealand
My Fandom Story: New Zealand is a small country that doesn’t see a whole lot of fandom stuff, or at least I’m not into the scene deep enough to have seen any. We have a single anime/manga convention that travels the country each year but even that is reasonably small. What did come to us a few years ago was an amazing performance called Video Games Live (and it hasn’t returned since…go figure), where well-known music from video games is played live by an orchestra. The entire night was amazing and it was great to see people enjoying themselves listening to the music from games they’ve grown up with. The highlight of the evening, however, was when the show started to play One Winged Angel, the iconic final boss battle music from Final Fantasy VII. Nearly everyone in attendance immediately knew what was coming and the entire audience stood for the performance and gave a lengthy standing ovation at the end. In a country where you really don’t hear anything about anime, manga or video game fandoms, it was really quite spectacular.
