Before we dive into this, I feel I need to answer one question.
WHY THE BLOOMIN' DEUCE IS THIS SO LONG?
Mainly, this is for my own benefit. I had never before been to a nerd convention, and going to one about a subject of such intense nerdity was an interesting place to start, to say the least. I'm still processing things, and this is to help me do so. If anyone cares about what I say, that's fine. If you skip it and just look at the pictures, that's okay too.
All right, so, here we go...
So, yeah, this year I found myself attending Bronycon 2015. I had never before been to any sort of nerd convention in this past because I'm generally not
that brand of nerd; years ago I turned down an opportunity to attend Otakon because I could easily find myself getting bored. But this time, I went, and I went willingly. Let me tell you about it, all the stupid little details you never asked for...
The whole process started a few years back when my Mom got bit by a quilting bug and started making patchwork quilts for everyone in the family. She started making some custom themed quilts for some personalization, generally Dr. Who and Nintendo stuff - I myself ended up with a Dalek. But for the grandkids, and some of their parents, she decided to make small quilts with the My Little Pony characters on them.
The way the process here worked: my sister would come up with a pattern (
for example), Mom would assemble things, and I'd be the consultant, offering advice as to which fabric patterns and colors to use. The end result
looks something like this, and is about the right size for a six year old child.
After patching together the mane six, plus two others, Sis decided to draw up a pattern for
The Sisters Royal on a lark, not expecting anything to be done about. And Mom wasn't about to have anything to do with it, because the quilt would be roughly four times the size of any of the other eight she's done.
Fast foward to earlier this year, late April-ish, possibly May. We knew for a few years now that Bronycon was practically at our doorstep, and casually joked about going, but never really did anything. Mom and I somehow got back around to discussing those quilts, and when the Sisters got brought up, I issued a challenge to motivate her: if Mom could finish that quilt by convention time, I would go to the convention to get it autographed, as I knew Nicole Oliver would be in attendance.
Now, I need to come clean here: I actually did want to go, primarily because I thought it'd be cool to get this quilt done and get it autographed. I didn't, y'know,
want to go, but the idea of grabbing a signature was too much for me.
Anyway, almost as if to completely
spite me, not only did Mom
finish said quilt, but upon learning that DeLancie would be in attendance, hit Sis up for a Discord pattern
and finished that one too. So yeah, I had been utterly defeated in my challenge, so I was left with little choice but to go. Mom also wanted to go, so I'd end up serving as a sort of cultural liason for her: I haven't toured the rabbit hole very deeply myself, but I have studied the maps quite a bit. I agreed to pay since she worked so hard to put the quilts together. In the meantime, Mom visited my NY brother's family to help out with a new baby, and was able to snag my 11 year old niece's
Fluttershy quilt to be autographed as well.
Fast forward again to this past Thursady, when I went into town after work to pick up our badges. I decided to take the train into town for a few reasons: parking fees are horrendous in Baltimore, I had no one to drive the car around the block while I went inside to take care of business, and I thought taking the train in would be a good way to do a dry run for the coming Saturday (I had been trying to prepare and plan things as best I could for this; being so close to such large amounts of full frontal nerdity may be miserable, but that's no reason to make things harder than they need to be). The dichotomy aboard the train I found funny: being part of public transportation for Baltimore, there were obviously a
lot of ghetto people there, and everyone who
wasn't ghetto... had a pony t-shirt on. The first person I really noticed like this was a kid who looked to be going into high school soon, and looked for all the world like a young Severus Snape - slim face, protruding nose, and long, black, greasy hair - except for the Daring Do t-shirt he had on. Eventually a young couple sat down a few seats behind me, and the girl was very easily exciteable. As we pulled up to Pratt Street, she started rambling, "Oh, there's the convention center! I'm so excited! Oh, here's our stop! Wait, this is our stop isn't it? Why aren't we stopping?!" We did stop; the station was just appeared longer than it needed to be.
Stepping off the train was like stepping into a bizarre, twisted world. Seeing a crowd consist of yuppy office people, impoverished ghetto people, and autistic nerds in pony paraphernalia was surreal, and something that you need to witness for yourself. Entering the convention center was oddly stressful; why am I doing this again?; what is wrong with these people?; is that guy
seriously wearing a Sweetie Bot shirt? There more I was there, the more I felt out of place because I was wearing a t-shirt the HVAC company I work for gave me, while everyone else was wearing pony merch. And listening to some of the conversations around me... holy cow, it was like a symbolic trip through the comments section of a Youtube video! Friday couldn't end late enough.
On my way out, I passed by a convention center worker and wished her good luck on the up and coming weirdness.
But Friday did end, and now we get to the part where I start sharing photos.
Saturday morning came. I put on a generic Star Trek shirt - hey, DeLancie was going to be there - while Mom put on a shirt that Sis made for her using that Ponymaker thing, depicting her as a pony (I have one myself, but I wore it only once; I can't stoop that low myself). Since I was informed that autograph vouchers weren't being sold on Thursday - very possibly a misunderstanding, unfortunately, but I can't tell if it was - and knowing that they had been for sale all Friday, Mom and I decided to get to the train station about about 6:15 Saturday morning in order to get in line early enough to buy whatever vouchers were left before they were sold out. We didn't realize the train wouldn't be coming until almost 7, so we sat in the pavilion and discussed our plans of attack. Train came, and we boarded with the quilts safely tucked away in a carry-on luggage bag in tow.
Train ride was mostly uneventful. Mom claimed she saw one other person clearly heading for the convention, but I never saw him.
We showed up at the convention center some time past 7 AM, and there were maybe 20 others in line already. I was expecting more people than that, but someone in line mentioned that everyone is probably recovering from last night's big rave party (Bronypalooza, as the con calls it, is one of their biggest attractions).
So, we sat and chatted a bit with other people in line. I was sitting there, constantly getting weirded out about what I had just landed myself in. After a while, a convention staffer came out and seperated the line between those who had registered and those who had not. What wasn't fair was that those who hadn't registered ended up next to the wall that they could relax on, while we who had already registered were standing in the middle of the sidewalk with nothing to rest against.
While waiting in line, a group of people in a white convertible drove by, and revved the engined up real loud. I then noticed that they had placed Rarity's symbol on the gas cover.
This was the first phot I took after the line had built up some. There was a guy dressed in full riot gear with toy guns, but he ended up being hidden by the guy closest to me. The chubby guy was reading some generic looking fantasy novel written by M.A. Larson, one of the primary writers for the show. I forget the title of the book.
I meant to include Mr. Flufflepuff here in the previous photo, but people just wouldn't stand still. Note the use of the Color Communication Card adapted from
some autism advocacy groups.
During this time in line, some dude walked by dressed as Princess Big Macintosh. When someone nearby asked for a photo, I think I died a little when he replied with, "Eeyup."
Here's a surpisingly normal look of the line in front of us. The people on the left hadn't bought passes yet; note the wall they could rest on. Mom is featured on the far right with the carry-on. To my immediate left were a couple of 10 year old boys playing with pony toys.
This photo marks the beginning of my trend to take photos of other people taking photos.
Here we have Liam Neeson posing with a generic furry. It was about this time I had to introduce my mom to the concept of "furries".
At some point I had to go across the street to a Days Inn to
use the facilities. The lobby had a sign, "Days Inn welcomes Bronycon!" or something to the effect. I think even the staff had button pins on reflecting the convention.
Kind of an awkward looking Nightmare Moon. Playing on the stairs at this time were a couple of cute little girls no older than 5 dressed as Applebloom and Vinyl Scratch.
After nearly two hours in line, nine o' clock rolled around, and we were allowed inside the convention center. We headed down to the autograph line ASAP because DeLancie. Fortunately the line wasn't bad at all, but they still had the queues set up, requiring a
lot of back and forth. I decided to alternate between walking forwards and backwards for no particular reason, but it did have the bonus of preventing me from getting dizzy. Closely behind Mom were a couple of guys making Pacman noises. They din't look much younger than myself, but clearly had trouble grasping various social norms. They'd fit right in.
We were fairly close to the front when all was said and done. We had to wait a bit for the cash register system to boot up. Did you know that people are starting to use iPads as cash registers? We were also informed that while Delancie autograph vouchers were still available, his photo vouchers were sold out. A small disappointment, since my mom was looking forward to him the most, but instead I bought one for Nicole Oliver. She was the reason we were there anyway.
So, autograph voucers were purchased: one autograph for Libman, two for DeLancie (in addition to the Discord quilt, I decided to bring in
a picture of Dr. Benton Quest from the second season of
The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, one of his smaller roles), and one autograph and photo for Oliver.
This was the voucher line after we purchased ours. Look closely and you can see part of a large Discord doll that seemed to follow us around. I later spotted in that line someone dressed as a Big Macintosh themed boxer. I thought it was fairly clever, and was happy I was able to catch the reference. Big Mac, Little Mac, what begins with Mac? Shame I never took a photo of him.
After purchasing our vouchers, we sat down in some chairs in the registration hall to figure out where we needed to go next.
I then saw this kid wearing a beach towel as a cape.
Andrea Libman was our first signature at 10 AM. The entrance to the autograph section was to the immediate right of the voucher line - just out of view to the right of the one photograph above - but were informed we couldn't start lining up until the autographing sessions had started. Some bullcrap about a fire hazard or something. So, in order to keep our place in line, we'd have to line up in the lobby just outside the registration hall. Yes, we had to get in line for getting in line. "Waiting in line" would be, and has already been, a recurring thing at this convention.
It was about 9:30 AM at this point. I decided to scout the place out for a few minutes while Mom held our place in line. During these wanderings
I encountered the first full fursuit of the day; also featured in the photo is some guy dressed as Lyra doing the hoverhand. Shortly after that
I spotted these two. "Pinkie Pie as Ghostbuster" was a small but noticeable trend at the convention here, presumably because of her very first musical number in the show. You can't see it here, but the Shining Armor had on a saddle. If I had one of my little nieces with me, I would have totally had her go up and politely ask for a pony ride. Then I'd take pictures. Hey, it's not like the guy has much more dignity to lose, right?
As a side note,
I think I found the dA of the Ghostbusters guy.
I forget if this was meant to be of anything in particular. Turned into a decent group shot regardless.
At this point I returned to Mom. The Lyra fursuiter had gotten in line behind us at this point. Shortly enough, the doors to get in line opened up, and soon enough we found ourselves in line to get Andrea's signature. (wait, we lined up to get in line for waiting in line? how recursive does this get?)
The whole morning Mom had been nervous about something she couldn't quite place. I wasn't nervous, I was just weirded out about what it was I was doing. It was early in the morning, and most of the attendees hadn't shown up yet, so the lines themselves weren't terrible. Shortly it would be our turn to approach our first voice actress.
It was at this point I started to get nervous, because I had a request I wanted to make of Ms. Libman and was afraid I'd either gaff the request or she'd say no, which would be greatly disappointing. But before I could get to the request, we had to present her with the Fluttershy quilt.
At this point, I should make mention of some of the preparation I did for this convention. I folded up the quilts in a certain way, and place a small paperclip in a certain spot, so we could easily unfurl the quilts before the actors with minimal fuss. Mom remarked that this indicated that I have a thing for theatricality. Regardless of whatever it meant about me, I have to say it worked out beautifully.
We approached her, said good morning, and opened up the Fluttershy quilt. The first words out of her mouth were, "Oh wow, that's so cool! Can I take a picture?" Mom was extremely honored to have that said about her work. We approached someone who has millions of eyes watching her, and for one small moment she noticed her instead. It meant a lot to her.
We instructed her to make it out to my niece, and while she was signing, I got bold enough to ask if at some point she'd be willing to speak with said niece and her siblings over the phone as Fluttershy. She said she'd love to, and that she does things like that at smaller conventions, but since this was the biggest convention in the community, the words, "free time," were the problem. So, I was sadly rejected - it would have been awesome if she did so - but the fact that she wanted to was good enough to me.
But my request seemed to inspire her to put a small "yay" on there. Niece is going to love it.
So, one quilt down. DeLancie's autograph session wasn't going to be until 1 PM, and there was one event my mom wanted to go to: The John Delancie Q&A at 11 AM. Since it was a DeLancie event, we needed to get in line ASAP. It was about 10:30 AM at this point, and the line for this event was still very long: it went all the way down to one side of the convention center, wrapped all the way back
past the hall it would be taking place in, and almost to the other side of the center. We were stuck somewhere in the middle between "past event hall" and "other side." Well, time to take some pictures while Mom holds the fort.
I was trying to get a picture that included the random Vinyl Scratch head lying on the ground, but at this point I was feeling like President business from
The Lego Movie: Why can't you people
just stay still?!
I needed a drink of water, and was informed that there was a water cooler in the arcade near where we were waiting. That's where I saw the most interesting thing in the world:
a DDR pad made almost entirely of wood. I kind of want one myself.
This picture was taken in the direction of the event hall we were waiting for. The line went all the way down to the windows in the background before wrapping back. Also includes a glimpse of the most revealing outfit at the venue.
This was easily the best costume on display at the convention center. The guy dressed as Q was a pretty close second, though. The Funko Discord topping the staff was a neat touch.
I meant to take a picture of the girl in front here, but she ducked at the last second, and instead I took a picture of this needlessly elaborate Luna's Royal Guard.
Look at this dapper gentleman. LOOK AT HIM
Eventually we were ushered into the hall where the Q&A would take place. The place was packed, so we ended up sitting near the back. DeLancie was too far away for a flash photo to be effective, so I turned the flash off and tried hold the camera still.
I failed. You can see the head of the large Discord doll that I mentioned previously. Sitting right behind us was the Shining Armor featured earlier. Mom took a silly selfie with his ears and horn behind her head.
Another aside: another missed photo were of two people standing in the back, dressed in Daft Punk style, pony themed outfits. Their badges identified them as "Rainbow Daft" and "Pinkie Punk." Google is turning up nothing about this duo.
The Q&A was... interesting. Opening questions up to anyone in the audience who lines up is a dangerous thing to do. Some questions were good and insightful, some fun, some boring, and some were flat out cringeworthy. He seemed to enjoy questions that pertained to himself and his experiences as an actor; his insights in the business; what it's like working in the industry; things like that.
This was the first question asked. Watching him tripping over the word "narcissistic" was fun, but his referencing of the wrong event was indicative of something he later said: he doesn't really keep track of the shows he's in. He admitted he doesn't watch the show itself very much - and the ones starring himself he's seen once, maybe twice at the most - so it's easy for him to lose track of what's going on. He even admitted he wasn't aware what season the show was currently on!
Another good question was why Q was featured so much more in TNG than in DS9. He said that the tones of the two shows was vastly different, and the production process reflected this. Q was a much better fit for the cavalier tone of TNG than of the somber mood of DS9. My personal favorite, though, was when a little girl asked him why Discord was so mean to Angel Bunny. I leaned over to Mom and whispered, "Because he deserved it!" and two seconds later DeLancie said
the exact same thing. Everyone erupted in laughter, but no one more than I did. But then he encouraged everyone to calm down because he could tell the girl was visibly upset by this response. I don't know how the rest played out because he went onto the next question. Must have been a very interesting discussion her parents had with her.
He also mentioned that while most viewers thing of Q and Discord as being essentially the same character, he did not intentionally do it that way. In his mind, they are two seperate characters. It was the writers who made the connection, and thus any questions about the two being put together would be better aimed at the creators.
He seemed rather annoyed at the questions that were more like requests. "Recite a line from
Star Trek," was met with, "Mon Capitan!" and "Picard..." before moving on. "Will you speak to my friend who I have on the phone right now?" was flat out turned down until the crowd yelled, "Do it!" and even then, he said maybe two things.
Cringeworthy questions included, "Which
Star Trek vessel would Discord send Cheese Sandwich to because he felt they needed him the most?" (he responded by pretending to mishear and said, "I'd give you a cheese sandwich because you seem to be asking for one!") and some badly mangled question about Thomas the Tank Engine. Something about which character Discord would most likely be or something, I don't know. Delancie didn't even bother with that one.
About 10-15 minutes before he was finished, Mom decided to leave to get a place in line for the DeLancie signature. There wasn't anything really interesting said, but when a staffer informed him, "Mr. DeLancie, we're out of time, " (he was already 15 minutes over at this point) he told the guy, "I want you to come up here and tell them yourself. That way they'll stone you and not me!"
The thing I found most interesting about the Q&A was that he speaks and acts very differently unscripted than when he's acting. I'm guessing it's to give his brain time to formulate the words so his mouth doesn't do something stupid, whereas when he's acting, the script is already memorized, allowing him to be much more energetic and rapid-fire about it.
So, with the Q&A done, I went back to join Mom at the lineup lobby. Little did we know the real nightmare was to begin...
But before I got to the line, there were a couple of more photos to take!
Here we have a dude in a light green dress, while
here we have a biker/beatnik Vinyl Scratch.
(you'll notice by now that none of my photos are expressly posed for me; although you were supposed to ask before taking photos, I never did; I either took a photo while they were posing for someone else, or just went up and snapped a photo without saying anything; I'm the jerk who prefers candid photos; sue me)
So... The line for the autograph session with John DeLancie is where things started to fall apart. The line was extremely long, which was understandable: he's a big name actor playing one of the most popular characters on the show the convention was all about. I don't know if it was mismanagement, miscommunication, poor planning, or what. But after all was said and done, we were in line for almost four hours before we snagged our signatures.
I met Mom down in the lobby by the registration area. The line for the autograph session hadn't opened up yet, and already, 45 minutes before the session started, the line had wrapped around itself several times in the lobby before going back up the stairs leading to the main floor. It was at this point I decided to check out the vendor's market.
Now, the vendor's market was extremely annoying. The most convenient door leading to it - which was right in the same lobby we were lining up in - was the designated
exit, which they enforced. To get to the
entrance, you had to go two floors up, haul all the way across the convention center, across two skywalks, where very little was actually happening, and then go down two floors. Why? I felt that trip was very unnecessary. And the market didn't include much that caught my interest: loads of fanart that, while of good quality, wasn't anything I felt comfortable with hanging on my wall.
But I got distracted by a small deli selling overpriced food. I picked up a turkey wrap for myself and a small salad for Mom at around $15 total. I returned back to Mom so we could eat lunch together. One o' clock rolled around, and after about twenty more minutes of waiting
I took this picture. Here you can clearly see the entrance to the autograph area (it's marked by what appears to be a monolith in the photo), so you can see how close we were. I then turned to the left
and snapped this picture to give an idea of how far back the line had stretched. Not pictured: The rather lengthy corner to my left, nor how the line goes back out into the lobby, still wrapped around itself, and still going up the stairs to the main level! The line slowly moved until we were about 15 feet away from the entrance to the autograph area. It took us until around 1:45 PM to notice that the line hadn't moved for some time past that. No one told the line what was going on until someone approached a staffer and asked; only then were we informed by word of mouth that DeLancie was gone and wouldn't be back until the next autograph session at 3 PM.
Okay, what? By the timing of things, I figure he had ducked out about thirty minutes into his autograph session for some reason, and the only thing the staff did in response to this was have people not in line for him start a new line. No announcement or apology that he had to step out for some unplanned reason, no explanations as to why; he was just gone before he was scheduled to leave, no one told anyone else, and there we were stuck and the front of the line. At one point the people right next to us started recording a video, and they put it very well: "So here we are, stuck in line, too close to the front to leave."
So, yeah, because of this, people were being forced to miss out on events they wanted to go to. Fortunately, there was nothing there I wanted to do - I was just there for signatures - but others did, and more irratating than the wait was having no excuses given for it.
But it get's worse. About 2:45 PM, someone mentions that a staffer told them that DeLancie will be back at 3:15, not 3:00. At around 3:10, word gets passed down that he won't be around until 3:45. They just kept pushing it back and back and back.
So, what is there to do? Just sit there and just take pictures.
This corpulent fellow I felt was special. I first spotted him on the other side of the registration hall. At that distance I couldn't quite tell what he was; the crest and vaguely dragon shaped head made me think that maybe he was Toothless from
How to Train Your Dragon, but it didn't look quite right. I wanted a picture then, but he was too far away for the flash to capture, so I let him go.
About 20 minutes after I spotted him, he came wandering out of the autograph area (I suppose he went for one of the smaller stars) and when I saw what he had written on that magnadoodle, everything clicked: he was supposed to be a changeling. The face was too friendly, and he could stand to lose a few pounds before he could pull it off, but hey, who am I to judge how others have fun?
While waiting, we were discussing what we were in line for. At that point, I pulled out the Discord quilt to show off to others in line, and before I knew it I was trapped behind it against a wall for a few minutes as people took photos of it. A real head turner.
Another picture of a furry, plus someone with Derpy on his shoulder. Shoulder ponies weren't as popular as they were last year.
Around this point, Mom decided to go check out the vendors herself, but couldn't find anything. Slowly, everyone in line started to sit down, but thirty minutes later we were told to stand up for no given reason. Initially I thought DeLancie must've finally come, but nope. I guess they wanted us to be ready to run in the event of an emergency.
During this time,
I snapped what has to be my personal favorite photo because of others' reactions to getting it. I first saw this guy waiting to buy some vouchers, but could only see him from the back, leading me to think of Mork of Ork until he turned his face to the side, letting me see his blue makeup. Immediately understanding who he was, I whipped out my camera and yelled, "Hey, Freakazoid!" to get his attention before snapping. People in line, Mom included, thought I was being rude to someone until they realized who I was talking to.
It was around 3:30 PM that we started to get nervous. Still no sign of John, and the line for Nicole was getting almost as long (but at least it was moving). And you could tell it was the Nicole Oliver line: lots of Celestia merch, plus someone with a Principal Celestia cardboard cutout. Around 3:40 Mom decided to take the Sisters quilt over to that line... and of course five minutes later, our line *finally* was allowed into the Autographs section, after which Mom left the other line and rejoined me.
I should mention by this point that I can understand what the holdup may have been about. Earlier that day, I heard someone make mention that Delancie had spent at least six straight hours doing nothing but autographs, well past midnight. I also had a chance to witness the sort of fans he has to put up with during that Q&A session. He's an older gentlemen, it's an extremely busy convention, I can understand having to catnap in the middle of the day.
But this is all speculation. Everyone seemed less irritated at having to wait, and more at not knowing
why they had to wait.
That also doesn't ameliorate what happened next. After being ushered into Autographs, we had to wait an additional 10-ish minutes before DeLancie
finally showed up. And when he did, he slowly sauntered over to break table to grab a bottle of water - instead of, y'know, sending a staffer to get one - and then spent about another five minutes chatting with Cathy Weseluck. It's like, dude, you're late, you know you're late, and even though we can see you, you're still not going to sit down?
To everybody's credit, even though everyone's patience had run dry, no one started yelling or screaming. Lesser fandoms probably would've turned violent by now.
When we finally got to his table, something he mentioned in the Q&A rang true: he really doesn't keep track of his roles. After handing him my picture of Dr. Quest, he look at it and asked me, "That's from Jonny Quest, wasn't it? How long was that on the air?" Slightly disappointing, but I can understand. It was a fairly small for such a big name actor. And when we showed him the quilt, he didn't say much beyond, "Oh cool, where am I signing it?" The man was clearly exhausted, like we thought, and wasn't up for much chitchatting or getting excited.
And that's how we lined up at 12:15 to get two autographs at 4:00 from a very tired man.
Of course, now we get to go back in line for our last signature. Which really wasn't that bad: a staffer informed us that since we were already in Autographs, we could into whatever line we had vouchers for without having to join the line out in Registration. I had to hug the guy for telling us that.
It would be about another hour or so before we got to Nicole's table. The guy in front of us had a high-quality stuffed Luna doll who told us, "You don't want to know how much I spent on this," while the guys behind us were looking at a print of Celestia fanart while saying, "I should get her to sign it right on the plot." I facepalmed internally so hard at that...
The guy with the Luna doll wondered if it'd be rude to get Nicole to autograph it. I suggested that it probably would be.
Nicole was just as awesome as Andrea was. Upon unfurling it before her, her jaw dropped and she got up for a closer look while talking about how cool this was. She then spun it around for everyone in line to look at; this drew quite a few cheers from the crowd. I then asked her to sign it in character before we went
to take this picture (Mom's a little short, and Nicole practially dared her to hold the quilt to her chin like that). She liked the quilt so much that, like Ms. Libman, she wanted a picture of it for herself, so she had her aide give us his email address so we could send her this photograph through him. She was a delight and easily made up for the long wait.
After getting the email address, on the way out, I suggested to her that she talk Tabitha St. Germain into coming next year so we could get her signature on the quilt as well. But she was too busy signing something to do more than acknowledge I said something.
So now that we had accomplished what we came to do, I suggested that perhaps we check out the vendors together. On the way there, I snapped another
"Pinkie Pie as Ghostbuster" photo. I know there was a third outfit along those lines floating around the convention, but I never took a photo of it.
And, again, I didn't see a whole lot from the vendors that I wanted. Just lots and lots of fanart. One vendor had a sound system that was loudly playing the OST version of
One Winged Angel for some ill fitting reason. Also wandering around here was
Pyramid Head with a Rarity t-shirt (Mom doesn't understand what was up with all the mashups she saw), and also
there was this chap dressed in an scarily accurate outfit seen for all of five seconds on the show. I kinda feel bad for how brazen I was in taking that one.
But yeah, there wasn't much there. I did manage to pick up a glass with
Amaterasu etched into it. I also decided to pick up some shirts that said "Brony Grandma" and "20% Cooler Uncle" to wear when I'm with family. Time will tell if I'll regret that purchase.
At this point, there really wasn't a whole lot else to do. I spent a little time with that wooden DDR pad, but that was it. Virtually all the costumes had been seen, there weren't any panels or events either of us wanted to attend. There really wasn't much else to but to go home at this point.
And maybe snag one last photo of Flufflepuff.
We ordered Papa John's pizza upon returning hom.
TLDR: Andrea and Nicole were awesome, John was a bit of a letdown, and lots of weird things were seen while standing in line for about ten hours.
Followup post with further thoughts possibly coming in the future!
This made me laugh far more than it should. >.<
