remember pokemon? they're still alive!

Today I semi-attended Boston's Anime Convention. No seriously, this convention was going on in Boston. Who knew, right? My friends and I certainly had no idea what we were getting ourselves into when we decided to do a bit of shopping in Copley and the Prudential. As we crossed the bridge over to the Pru, we slowly began noticing people in strange costumes. And as we neared the center of the Pru, there were suddenly people dressed in costumes ALL around us. "Is it some sort of Halloween thing?" my friend asked. "Umm it's April," we replied. "Well then, it has to be some sort of video game convention," she determined. We finally asked the employee at a nearby watch kiosk and he informed us it was an anime convention that was lasting all weekend.

So, we did what any other normal human beings would do: we went and got lunch at Au Bon Pain and sat in front of the entrance to Hyne's Convention Center for over an hour, just watching all of the action. You would not believe the costumes that these people were wearing; I'm not even going to try to explain them because I could do them no justice. I don't know much about anime but I do know we saw some characters from Pokemon, a few Sailor Moons (remember her??), some Yu-Gi-Oh characters, and even a couple Marios (a la Mario Brothers) and Princess Toads. We also ran across a Jesus Christ, a Hello Kitty, the green Power Ranger (Tommy), and a Jack Sparrow; and we heard through the grapevine that there was a Waldo wandering around. Not quite sure how they fit in, but they were there.

The highlight of the event was when two people dressed in giant brown boxes realized they were both dressed as the same character. "Look!! Turn around!! There's two of you!!" one of the brown box's friends yelled to him. He turned around, both of the brown boxes began running toward each other, and they embraced (as well as they could dressed in boxes). The crowd in front of the convention center erupted in applause and cheers.

Apparently Anime Boston is the biggest anime convention in New England and last year they had 9,000+ attendees. My friends and I spent a lot of time discussing the kinds of people who are obsessed with anime, how you become interested in it, the amount of artistic skills it must take to make some of the costumes, etc. There were little kids there and grown adults, but the majority of attendees were probably in their teens and twenties. I, for one, never knew such conventions existed nor did I have a clue about the extent of them.

Check out the website http://www.animeboston.com/ to learn more. All kinds of events were going on, including 24 hour video gaming and an Anime dating game. One of the best parts of the website is the dating games FAQs. One atendee asks "My costume has moving parts/large weapons/gets in other people's way. Is this a problem?" which renders a long explanation about costume restrictions. And let me tell you, some of these costumes were NOT "street-legal" (hello, excuse to dress skankily and excuse for men to wear dresses!) and I have no idea how these people were allowed to walk around a mall with all sorts of fake guns, swords, and huge knife-like weapons. But they did.

We didn't even enter the conference center (it was $30), but we learned oh so much about a whole subculture of New England we didn't even know existed.