Animethon 2024

Animethon is Edmonton’s local anime festival, and Animethon 28 (though I don’t think the event branding actually used that term) took place from August 09-11 2024. I visited the vendor halls on August 09 and attended the evening concerts on August 09-10 as well. It is supposedly Canada’s longest-running anime convention, but I’ve only been to it one previous time, back in 2019.

This year, I planned on visiting again, and bought my tickets a couple of weeks ago, along with a CD for one of the attendees to sign. I mentioned that the autographs this year were free, as opposed to the last time I visited in 2019 (I think), and provided a link to the rules (local) in last week’s blog, but it got updated again just before the start of the convention, so here’s an updated list (local) with a list of available merchandise instead.

Still, I think that the whole autographs thing was handled very messily, and the reason for this is that many of the guests above had specific lists of what was eligible for signing and what was not, and unlike in 2019, when ChouCho, Sayaka Sasaki, and Yoko Ishida all had CDs for sale, none of the major Japanese seiyuu/anison guests this year (MYTH & ROID, Konomi Suzuki, Sally Amaki, Aika Kobayashi, Yuka Nakashima) that I knew of, cared about, or would have considered getting autographs for, sold CDs at the convention *and* allowed those CDs to be brought in for signing. Only Sally from that group had CDs for sale, and she didn’t accept any personal items for signing.

It was ridiculous that we had to go through a lottery system to get autographs though, and before knowing what merchandise was available, I joined the lotteries for all five of those guests on Saturday, and promptly failed the round 1 selection for all of them except Aika Kobayashi and Yuka Nakashima, and then realized that for the “popular” guests, MYTH & ROID and Konomi Suzuki, I should probably have joined the lottery for all three days since I had a 3-day pass, and then see if I had won any of them afterwards, despite that meaning that I would be taking away lottery spots from other people.

This issue was exacerbated because the event sold shikiski boards, or blank autograph boards for signing, but they barely had any of those boards — the opening ceremony was at 11 am on Friday, and by the time I reached the Animethon merchandise booth a little after 1:30 pm, those were already sold out for the duration of the entire convention. So put together, what this meant was that not only was I not qualified to get autographs for three of the five, including the one I had a CD for, but I didn’t have anything for the two that I had qualified for to sign anyway. Not that I wanted anything but CDs for them to sign.

But the whole system was so bad. However, I quickly realized that this meant that others would be in the same boat as well. Obviously some people had their own stuff to bring, and others would actually bring along the Animethon branded shirts or something for them to sign (but who actually wants to autograph a shirt?), but a lot of people would probably be in the same situation as me, so I dumped my Saturday autograph session “wins”, and all the other standby lists that I was on, and banked on being able to get into the one I wanted, Konomi Suzuki’s, in the second or third round on Friday or Saturday instead.

Anyway, with that plan in mind, I left my apartment at 11:30 am or so on Friday, and arrived in time for an interesting-looking fan panel that went from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm, which was billed as an “Anime Geoguessr”. It was one of only two panel events that I attended, and what this turned out to be was a segment where a host would show a random (usually somewhat iconic) screenshot from an episode of a show, and people would need to guess what shot it was from.

All the shows picked were very very “normie”, popular shows, both old and new, but even considering all that, people were really, really good at identifying shows based on a blurred portion of one part of a screenshot. Even when they were running low on pin rewards to give away and insisted that people had to also guess what the location in a show they were guessing was, to prevent random “popular” guesses, most of the screenshots were still guessed on the first try just from a small portion of a screenshot, like a spire tower or a statue or a courtyard or the side of a bridge or something ridiculous like that.

I didn’t take any pictures of this or win anything, but it was neat watching the chaos unfold, and they had extra stickers at the end that they invited attendees to take on their way out. I took two. No idea who these characters are though, or who the maker was, or whether they’re an original creation.

After this, I went up to the level with the vendor halls and went to check out the various booths. My first stop was the Animethon official booth, where I saw that those signature boards were already sold out, but where I picked up an art book anyway. Someday I’ll get around to scanning and posting these.

The vendors were divided into two groups, Artist Alley where people sold their personally crafted items, and Vendor Alley where booths sold stuff they imported from elsewhere. Even though Animethon bills themselves as the oldest anime convention in Canada and thus important in that regard, it fails at attracting big-name vendors for whatever reason, like how major conventions actually have big-name companies like Hoyoverse or Kinokuniya or Hololive showing up, we have nothing of the sort here and pretty much all our vendors are smaller local or travelling vendors instead. We do typically attract a good selection of singers/guests though, I’ll give them that much, but that’s about it, likely because the hall and Edmonton Convention Centre simply isn’t big enough to host a proper anime convention. I mean, this is the vendor lineup that came in 2024. To use a mall terminology, there’s no big “anchor store” at all among these names.

I went around the vendor section to start, because I wanted to look for CD stores before they ran out of stock and also because the vendors were closer to the autograph section than the artists were, in case I had to run over to the autograph section for a last-minute lottery win. Besides the official booth, it turned out that there was only one store that sold boxes of assorted CDs — the store name was The Paper Canvas and they had six boxes or so for people to rifle through, along with an assortment of other random merchandise.

The Konomi Suzuki autograph session was at 2 pm to 3 pm, and I had received an email at 1:42 pm saying that I had not qualified for the second round of the Konomi Suzuki autograph session, which was supposed to be drawn an hour before the session (at 1 pm), and was entered into the third round which was supposed to take place at 2:40 pm in case she had extra slots. Ignoring that that draw was 40 minutes late, at least they sent a notification about it — one of the things about the first round that annoyed me was that they never sent a failure notification so people were left ghosted and guessing as to whether they had made it or not, and left to “figure it out for themselves”, sort of like applying for a job and then not hearing back. The two draws that I had qualified for (and subsequently cancelled) had confirmations that came in at 12:11 am and 1:25 am on the day after the draw, so it was pretty obvious by the next morning that I hadn’t qualified for all the others, but communication was poor and the website had no indication on whether I was still on the Stage 1 drawing or Stage 2 drawing by that point.

But I digress. That email that I received at 1:42 pm, 40 minutes late and 20 minutes before the autograph session started, said that I was automatically placed into the 3rd round of drawings (the “standby lottery”) and “In the event Konomi Suzuki is able to accommodate additional patrons, you will be notified via this email address around 2:40 PM on Friday, August 9th.”

So back to the current timeline. While rifling through the CDs at The Paper Canvas, I got a beep on my phone at 2:19 pm, less than 20 minutes into the autograph session, and checked it to see that I had received a follow up email from Animethon saying that I had received a spot for the autograph session and to “Please come immediately.” in bold text. I dumped the CDs that I was looking at back into the box and went over to the autograph booth to see, as I had expected, a very short queue of people waiting for autographs remaining. I joined the queue and had the CD that I had bought signed by her:

Very cute, and not personalized at all (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the ones in 2019 had them take our names while we were in queue and then have the guest sign the autograph with the person’s name to prevent resale or anything funky like that). I was happy and appreciated it a lot either way and even got to speak a bit of Japanese to Konomi. But the two biggest guests at the convention were her and MYTH & ROID, who had an autograph session next to her that started 30 minutes after hers, and neither one had a long queue due to the draconian rules about what could be signed and the utter lack of support from the convention at providing things that could be reasonably signed. And both of them had three days of autographs to do. I think I was right in suspecting that pretty much tons of people signed up for all the available autograph sessions because of a poor lottery implementation and lack of communication, then dropped out due to not having anything to sign.

After getting my autographs, i also took pictures of the two autograph lines (or lack thereof) from the outside. This was the Konomi Suzuki one around the end of her session (but also pretty much the same near-empty line for the last 30 minutes, these were stragglers who had gotten the standby lottery email late):

And from a little bit later, this was MYTH & ROID 26 minutes into her 1 hour session:

Those long lines, amirite?

Whatever. I went back to the CD store and picked up my CDs from the box that I had stuffed them into, and gathered a few more CDs before purchasing them all, and thanking the staff for being the only store in the hall that actually sold music CDs. My best CD find from there was the Forever Friends single CD from AiRBLUE. That’s my favourite song from the group, and one of the handful of CD singles of theirs that I was still missing. I then went for lunch. The food place in the convention itself was pretty terrible:

So I crossed the street to the Canada Place building next door and went to the Canada Place Food Court in the basement there instead. For lunch, I bought some chicken biryani:

I found an underground pedway that led back to the Convention Centre from there, so I took that to get back to the event afterwards.

I walked around for a couple of hours after lunch to work it off, though all these are pictures of the convention from before lunch:

My post-lunch walking session found me going back to the vendor hall and starting on the artist side of the hall, giving a close look at each booth and what they were selling and seeing if anything caught my eye. There was stuff that I wanted, in particular a poster of an original anime girl sitting on a glowing swing, a couple of witchy notebook with mushroom designs and stuff on the outside and fancy gilding on the inside, a T-shirt with two cats holding hands with a walking thing that said “You — Me — Our braincell”, a small enamel pin featuring a bag of Neopoints from Neopets, a pair of flared leg warmers, a magical girl wand head that acted as a rechargeable fan that hung around the neck, and a custom weighted plushie, but everything was too expensive (the tiny pin itself cost $15, for example, and everything else was $20-$40 each except the plushie which was $80), so I left everything on hold and told myself that I would sleep on it and see if there was anything that I still wanted the next day. I didn’t buy any of it in the end though.

I also picked up a neckache from this from tilting my neck to one side too much. Also who knew 8 CDs and an artbook were that heavy to carry around in a shoulder sling bag?

I eventually finished walking through the entire hall, but still had over an hour to spare before the evening concert at that point. This did mean that I didn’t have to come back the following days though except for the concert, or unless I decided that I wanted any of those items from the vendor hall, which I could then have purchased just before Saturday’s concert. The second round of autograph sessions were in the early afternoon on Saturday but I had already gotten the one I had a CD for and had nothing for any of the others to sign anyway, so I had cancelled them all by that point. The vendor hall wasn’t that big and was easily finished within three or four hours even at the slow pace that I walk. And the panels didn’t interest me much except as time-fillers between things. (There are actually some interesting-to-me panels, but for some reason they all overlap with the evening concerts!)

This was one such time though, so I looked at what was going on at the moment, and ended up attending a mini-concert being put on by a group called the Windrise Band, who played a bunch of Genshin Impact game songs, and then went on to play random opening songs from other anime and asking people to guess them for prizes (again, largely from super popular action shounen normie stuff), so I left after an hour or so. They were definitely more of a casual band than a stage band — they were awkward at introductions, regularly off-key (though these were arrangements rather than faithful renditions), and just kind of wishy-washy in general, but they and everyone else seemed to be having fun and cracking self-depreciating jokes with the audience and I did enjoy my time there. Plus it was nice to be able to sit down and just vibe out to music. There were a lot of people in this double-hall that they had been assigned to, and I did take a picture of this one from the back of the room.

I left about 2/3 of the way through to get in line for the evening concert, which was scheduled to start at 7:30 pm with the doors opening at 7 pm. Lots of people were queued up there, and on the way there I bumped into Aurora from the RSJP trip, who was a volunteer there managing the translators that were helping out the convention guests from Japan. That was cool! We exchanged a few friendly words before she had to run off to tend to duties. It was nice and nostalgic seeing her again. She was the only person I recognized while I was there on Friday.

I got in line about 10 minutes or so before the doors were scheduled to open, but in another sign of the volunteer and staff struggles, even though the halls were uncomfortably packed with everyone waiting to be let in, they dilly dallied and didn’t start letting people in until 7:10 pm, and a bunch of people were not through the door yet even at 7:30 pm, so the start got pushed back a little.

The concert hall was familiar to me since I had been here back in 2019 for the concert then. I took more pictures this time though:

Tigey was with me for both days but never left his carry bag (except when I briefly took him out to see Konomi Suzuki at the end of day 2):

And this was the original schedule for the night, though by the time it got to MYTH & ROID, they were running about 10 minutes behind. That wasn’t too bad all things considered though.

I stayed for the first guest, who was Sally Amaki, from an idol group called 22/7 that I liked. She sung a mix of cover songs from her Youtube channel, and a few solo renditions of songs from the 22/7 discography, which was nice. She also spoke clear English, and went back and forth between English and Japanese while chatting the audience up on stage.

Her playlist was:

Zankoku na Tenshi no Thesis (from Shinseiki Evangelion)
Renai Saiban
Dried Flower
Nani mo Shitegerarenai
YES to NO no Aida ni (from Atri: My Dear Moments)
Kumorizora no Mukou wa Hareteiru
Zankyou Sanka (from Kimetsu no Yaiba: Yuukaku-hen)

I didn’t care for the second artist, Miura Ayme, so I went out to grab some dinner during that segment of the concert. I went back to Canada Place via that underground pedway and picked up some chicken yakisoba to stay on theme for the convention.

I came back about halfway through Miura’s segment, and watched him perform his songs. He’s a Visual Kei style of artist, adn there were apparently actually a lot of people who knew and loved his music and were jamming out enthusiastically to it, and while it all felt very screamy to me, I could tell that he was quite charismatic even though he spoke very little broken English at most when he did speak. He even finished and then threw two empty plastic water bottles into the crowd of screaming fans that then tried to catch them.

I only caught a partial playlist of his songs at the end, including (but missing at least one in between, which I believe was a song from the Obey Me! anime):

HELLO WORLD
Loveless
Suicide Selfie

Then he left, and MYTH & ROID came on. Or rather, the lead vocalist of the group, KIHOW. She seemed a bit hesitant but spoke decent English between her songs, though not as good as Sally Amaki’s. Definitely easily and fully passable though. By this time, I had secured a spot on the left side of the stage, where I could kind of see her a little and was also in front of one of the two large TVs in the concert hall. More importantly, due to one of the large cameras being there, there was no one in front of me, and in addition, I had realized that there unlike 2019, there was no stated restriction on video recording the concert, and plenty of people were actually doing openly doing so. (This is a good change overall, because as a chronicler/archivist, a non-recordable event disturbs me greatly, or worse, like the 2019 Animethon organizers did, they recorded it and then never released the recording anywhere.)

So even though my phone was down to 25% at this time and my charging cable was giving me issues, I plugged the phone into my portable battery and took that opportunity to record the entire concert.

That hurt my hand a lot, holding my heavy Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra up for an hour and change, and I also had a bad case of pins and needles in my feet by the end of it since I didn’t want to move, but it was probably worth it in the end. The sound in the video is a lot more muted and tempered than it was in person, which was very loud and echoey and reverby as concerts tend to be, and made me have to put on earphones in order to not go even more deaf than I already am. I wondered if I was partially obscuring the speakers on the phone or something due to how I was holding it, but maybe that’s just how the speakers are, since the videos using the other camera the following day sounded the same and did not have that loud reverb either. Whatever, we do the best with what we have on hand, right? Her playlist was:

theater D (from Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu)
shadowgraph (from Boogiepop wa Warawanai)
HYDRA (from Overlord II)
Reminiscence Reincarnation
ACHE in PULSE (from Arknights: Touin Kiro)
JINGO JUNGLE (from Youjo Senki)
RAISON D’ETRE
Paradisus-Paradoxum (from Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu)
STYX HELIX (from Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu)
Endless Embrace (from Made in Abyss: Retsujitsu no Ougonkyou)
VORACITY (from Overlord III)
L.L.L. (from Overlord)
TIT FOR TAT (from Shinchou Yuusha: Kono Yuusha ga Ore Tueee Kuse ni Shinchou Sugiru)

And then for an encore, JINGO JUNGLE (from Youjo Senki) again.

It was around 11 pm by the time the MYTH & ROID concert finished, and I skipped the last artist and made my way home via train without any notable incidents after that.

I came back the next day and attended the second evening concert as well.

Regarding that “special guest” at the start, I had noticed that the original schedule for Saturday (at least the 2024-07-28 version) was this:

But at some point, it got changed to this (2024-08-07 version) on the digital version of the schedule:

Although the paper versions of the schedule were apparently already printed so they couldn’t change those of course. What changed though was that the concert had the Yuki Nakashima part shortened and an extra “surprise guest” shoved in at the start. This surprise guest turned out to be Sally Amaki again, who had performed in the previous day’s concert, and according to the story she told at the start of the stream, she had not realized that she was a “surprise” guest and had been telling people who came to her autograph session earlier in the day that she was going to be performing tonight, hah.

I had made my way back to pretty much the same spot that I occupied the previous evening, and recorded her segment of the concert from there:

Sally’s setlist tonight was:

Gotta Catch ’em All! (from Pokemon)
YES to NO no Aida ni (from Atri: My Dear Moments)
God knows… (from Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu)

After Sally left, the next person on the stage was Yuki Nakashima. To my surprise, they flashed a sign saying that video recordings and photos were not allowed for this part of the concert. What nonsense was this? She was not the last artist who refused to allow video recordings, so I’ll rant a bit about this later, but I did end up not recording her portion of the concert.

She was also the only artist that I watched that not only could not speak English but did not try, though I could more or less understand her anyway now that I’ve done so much Japanese study, and I followed along just fine as she talked about how it was still so bright out in Canada at times of the day when it would already be dark in Japan, for example. She also kept having her earpiece drop out of her right ear and was fighting through a lot of her segment to try to put it back in and hold it there. Poor thing.

Her songlist was as follows:

Day of Bright Sunshine (from Shikkakumon no Saikyou Kenja)
A NEW DAY (from Seija Musou: Salaryman, Isekai de Ikinokoru Tame ni Ayumu Michi)
Route BLUE (from Kawaii dake ja Nai Shikimori-san)
Kasumi no Mukou e (from Goblin Slayer II)
Nesshoku Starmine (from BanG Dream! Asonjatta!)

The last song in particular, Nesshoku Starmine, was a big surprise to me — I knew she was part of Roselia so I had expected a cover or two of their songs anyway, but that is not anywhere close to their most popular song. It was the song from them that I liked the most though, so it was a very pleasant surprise. Despite the no photography rule, I snapped a picture at the end of the TV screen recording when she took a picture with the crowd behind her:

After that, it was Aika Kobayashi, and she was by far the most energetic performer and the performer with the most left to right (across the stage) movement with the possible exception of Miura Ayme the day before. I liked her a lot, she was very exuberant and was having a lot of fun and it shows. She sung a few solo songs and then a few songs from Aquors in Love Live! Sunshine, which she was a part of. Her recording is here:

And her set list was as follows:

No Life Code
Gummy Chew
Yura Yurara
Sunset Bicycle
AMBITIOUS GOAL (from Sayonara Watashi no Cramer)
Aozora Jumping Heart (from Love Live! Sunshine!!)
Guilty Night, Guilty Kiss!
Lonely Flight
Crazy Easy Mode
Lorem Ipsum

She had many nice and cute moments, like when she got the audience to do a wave from one side of the concert hall to the other and back for her.

Lastly, it was time for the highlight of the night for me, Konomi Suzuki, whose autograph I had gotten the previous night. To my ongoing horror, they again flashed up a no video recording message for this one, and I silently fumed at this, for two reasons. Firstly, all this was not stated anywhere on the website, so you’re defrauding people who come here and whose primary interest and means of enjoying a concert is to record it. Make it clear up front, like JAPAN JAM (the concert I attended earlier this year) did, and set expectations, or don’t allow singers to do this sort of nonsense at all. Singers are performing on stage in public, there is no such thing as “protecting their brand” or “not wanting a video where people are waving cellphones instead of glowsticks” or whatever nonsense (I’m extrapolating on what possible reasons for not allowing videos is, I don’t know that those are the actual reasons). If you don’t want to be recorded then don’t perform on stage. I flat out do not believe singers should have the right to request their performances not be recorded. I think that chronicling and archiving is an important and necessary part of preserving human culture and passing on stories. And people make memories in different ways. Don’t be a tryhard that thinks you’re too important or special to be recorded.

Secondly, and arguably more important, some people were STILL recording nonetheless — ESPECIALLY the Animethon staff members that were wandering around! I don’t mean the people staffing the official cameras either, which are obviously a necessity — in the Yuki Nakashima concert I saw multiple people in staff uniforms walking around with their personal phone cameras, some on selfie sticks, openly and very visibly taking personal videos of her concert anyway. So why is there a double standard between the staff and the paying audience? Sure, maybe some singer really has a good reason to not want to be recorded that I hadn’t considered, but somehow that only applies to the audience and not the privileged staff members/volunteers?

Due to this, I clandestinely recorded the first part of the concert nonetheless, though I had stuffed the camera in my bag by this point and gone off to the side to be less conspicuous, so the video recording isn’t anywhere near “good” and it was more recording the large TV screen broadcasting the concert than recording Konomi herself. Plus, my camera actually ran out of battery and died halfway anyway, but I couldn’t really fix it and reattach it to the external battery in time since that would have probably blown my cover. I’m just going to leave this one as a link here rather than as a featured video embed, since it’s “incomplete”, but at points in the video you’ll see staff members as well as random people bring out their personal phones to record a favourite song or two anyway, with absolutely no repercussion. And those are just the ones that happened to do so in range of my camera.

Anyway, stepping off the soapbox, I backed out of the central area to the side of the room so that I could enjoy both the concert and do some crowd-watching without feeling too crowded and risking too many germs.

I also recorded her set list, and it was:

Nice to Me CHU!!!
Damage Shoudeshita
Redo (from Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu)
Inochi no Tomoshibi (from Deep Insanity: The Lost Child)
Hakka (from Ishura)
DAYS of DASH (from Sakura-sou no Pet na Kanojo)
This game (from No Game No Life)
Realize (from Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu 2nd Season)
Sparking light
Resurrection

And then as an encore, Bursty Greedy Spider (from Kumo desu ga, Nani ka?).

A lot of people had started to trickle out before the encore, and she was the second singer who actually did come out for an encore, but after seeing MYTH & ROID set up the staged early exit and encore the day before, it was pretty obvious to me that they were going to allow an encore for her too, whereas other artists also got an encore chant but did not return. The key though, that most of the leavers didn’t seem to realize, is that the signage on the stage was different — the screens still showed a Konomi Suzuki logo instead of the generic Animethon one in the couple minutes that she was gone, and you aren’t supposed to leave the hall until the Animethon logo flashed on the board to signal the intermission. All the previous singers, even those without an encore, were this way too, and astute watchers would have noticed that the encore chants for previous artists all stopped when the Animethon intermission logo came up pretty quickly after the singer left the stage. Whereas it never came up for Konomi, so she was obviously coming out for an encore. I captured this phenomemon at the end of all of my videos above.

I also took a walk to the back of the room and enjoyed the last few songs of the concert from the chairs there instead, experiencing a different point of view of the concert hall, before also photographing the fancy tables that were at the back of the hall.

Very neat. Since I was near the door, I left after the Konomi segment ended, skipping the last unknown-to-me DJ act, and caught the train home about the same time as the previous night, and reached home without incident again.

The concerts were neat enough, but unlike the 2019 one, because they were split up over two days, the Japanese singers did not collaborate with each other. I don’t know what sort of arrangement is usually needed to coordinate something like that, but that was a cool part of the 2019 concert. Here, MYTH & ROID and Konomi Suzuki have collectively done songs for a number of anime shows together, and the opportunity was ripe for them to perform back to back and perhaps partake in some shenanigans, but since the organizers decided to bring in smaller artists too and intersperse them and split up their two big acts across two separate days, none of that happened instead. Oh well. Despite my misgivings about certain parts of the whole event, those were only small slivers of the entire event, and it was still quite fun overall. I complain because I truly do think Animethon can do better and can strive to be a bigger and better anime event than the minor footnote on the annual North American anime convention trail that it is currently.

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