LCAC
So here’s me talking about my experience at the Liberty City Anime Con a few weekends back. This write up comes a lot later than I would have preferred due to me being busy and fighting a nasty Summer cold. Well anyway, here goes!
The hotel, the Marriot Marquis was amazing and much bigger than last year’s hotel. The screening room for anime was also gigantic! I know that the con had an issue with the hotel over spacing and the Marriot broke their contract. So some of the events took place in another building, which I didn’t go to. Honestly, I hope the con peeps eat their pride and come back to the same spot next year. It’s a convention in Manhattan! Everyone gets jerked for space. If it happens to New York Comic Con it happens to everybody. Ultimately the only thing you really need is the big screening room for anime and YOU GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!!!
I attended maybe half a panel last year and mostly watched anime. This year, most of the anime they were showing I’ve seen already so I spent a lot more times with the panels. They had over 200 submissions for panels and pretty much allowed anything to get through, related to anime or not. The only times they drew the line was when people requested to do panels on the Alt Right Movement or Black Lives Matter since that stuff is a bit controversial and less fitting with the theme of the con. So this lead to some… interesting panels to say the least! Anyway if you are in the New York area and want to do a panel on, pretty much anything submit your idea next year. Chances are it will get green lit.
The first panel I tried to get into on Friday was for Video Game Jeopardy. That room was filled to capacity and I couldn’t get in. This was the only time this happened at the con. I actually think Friday was the most crowded day for panels. Definitely not New York Comic Con where you have to show up to everything super early. Oh and you could go to the bathroom like whenever you wanted to. No lines! “Yay for smaller cons!” - My bladder; 2017.
Locked out of that room, I was in a panel for the musical Heathers. It’s a musical based on that Wyona Rider movie. You know, the one where Goth Christian Slater goes nuts and kills a bunch of people. Um, no idea what this has to do with anime… but the actors showed up in costume so it was kind of like cosplay? Ah well. They had fun and joked around with the audience. Some people knew what the panel was about and went there on purpose but there were a few “Uuuuuh what’s Heathers” peeps in the crowd.
Entertainlynx did a panel. They’re a podcast that talks about movies. So they, talked about movies. For fun the host asked some anime questions for trivia and prizes but it involved “What year…” questions. Note to, EVERYBODY. NOBODY KNOWS WHAT YEAR ANYTHING CAME OUT ANYMORE BECAUSE WE HAVE WIKIPEDIA ON OUR PHONES MAAAAAANG! So remove those questions from any and all of your BS quizzes M’KAAAAAAAY! So the questions were like “What year did Ninja Scroll come out?” “What year did the Fatal Fury anime come out?” SNK REPRESENT! But… these questions were addressed to peeps that were born in like 2000. GET OUT OF HERE WITH THAT! Yeah pretty much the host was showing his age and didn’t know anything about current anime. GET ON THAT ATTACK ON TITAN YOS!!!
Non anime related but they had an interesting mock debate on which movie was better. Spider-Man Homecoming from TEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAM MARVEL (*Fireworks heard in the background while elephants breakdance) or Wonder Woman from team dc (zzzzzzzzz… oops sorry fell asleep there for a second). Spider-Man Homecoming won the debate! HELL YEAH US MARVEL FANS WON THE LIBERTY CITY ANIME CON YOU BETTA RECOGNIZE FOOL YA FOOLS! Lol but the overall consensus was that Wonder Woman was good too and at least team dc finally had a good movie.
Just for attending this Entertainlynx discussion I got 2 FREE tickets to see the new Ninjago movie before anyone else and another 2 FREE tickets to see the movie It before anyone else! The Ninjago tickets I gave away but I’m going to see It next Tuesday! First come first serve so no guaranty I’ll get in. Oh well it’s something.
This YouTube guy named Cosplay Joe in the next panel showed up and we saw intros of lots of anime shows past and present. Starting with the original Japanese intro to Astro Boy AKA Tetsuwan No Atom and moving onto more current stuff as we went from the 60s to present day. When he played the Pokémon song in English everyone in the room sang along! “I WANT TO BE THE VERY BEST…” And then Cosplay Joe played the song in Japanese but only a few of us could sing along! HA HA I was watching fan subs of Pocket Monsters on VHS way back when before Nintendo hired ninjas and wiped out anyone showing the original Japanese version of the show for free so you betta recognize FOOL YA FOOLS! Lol the guy hosting the show Cosplay Joe was funny throughout and cracked a lot of good jokes! I saw that he was doing a comedy special the next day so I decided to attend that. More on that in Day 2 coverage!
Next panel I attended was about why translations from Japanese to English were so weird when anime is being subtitled or dubbed hosted by Kelly Bergin. This was really interesting!
Then I watched anime in the screen room for the rest of the day. Can’t remember everything saw but I caught a few shows I’ve never seen before and things I’ve seen a bunch of times. At midnight they screened all 6 episodes of an anime called Golden Boy which was new to me! It was a bit on the adult side, about 1980s rated R level. It was about a guy who travelled Japan, learned things from every job he took and every woman fell in love with him but he bounced before he could do anything with them. Kind of like the old Hulk live action TV series if Bruce Banner tripped and fell into a girl’s breasts every episode or something lol! It was cool but not my thing. I was out after 3 episodes.
DAY 2
So remember before when I said that they let anyone host a panel? This one woman had a panel talking about mental illness. WHAT THE… I mean no offense to anyone dealing with mental illness or who has family members dealing with it but I CAME HERE TO TALK ABOUT MOBILE FIGHTER G GUNDAM YOS!!! The strangest part about this panel was when they opened up the Q&A someone asked the panelist a pretty basic question. What were her credentials for speaking on the subject. Fair question right? Her response was “I like to keep that information on the down low.” DOUBLE WHAT THE… That was super odd…
Went to a panel with Heather Walker as the guest! She voices Mary Hughes in the English dub of Fairy Tail!
The mental illness panel lady came back but this time she was talking about how close we are to people controlling robots with their minds! ABOUT TIME BECAUSE I CAME HERE TO TALK ABOUT MOBILE FIGHTER G GUNDAM YOS WHEN CAN I GET MAH GOD GUNDAM ON AND START SHINING FINGER PEOPLE IN THE FACE YOS??? “I like to keep that information on the down low.” What the what? AWWWWWW HELL NAWWWW!!! Nah just messing around she didn’t do much Q&A with this panel LOL! At least this panel seemed to fit the theme of an anime con more.
Soon after that there was a panel called Voice Actor Radio Show Live! Heather Walker was there along with her husband Tyler Walker, Quinton Flynn who voices Raiden in Metal Gear Revengeance and a few more actors! They read old 1935 Flash Gordon scripts back from the radio days. Quinton played Ming and Heather got all of the female roles. If you’ve seen the 80s Flash Gordon movie well it started off close to the same way the movie did, with Flash and his girl piloting a spaceship to an alien world. They even played a bit of theme song from the 80s movie before they read the episodes! You know, “FLASH! OH OOOOOOOH!” Anyway this was really funny hearing them perform those old scripts live! “CAPTURE THOSE WHITE MEN!” ROFL!
Quinton Flynn, who also plays Kon, the stuffed teddy bear in Bleach was there for a Q&A, but he mainly did stand up comedy while he did lots of voices and impersonations. Hysterical!
Some more panel weirdness! Walked into a panel called “Be Excellent To Each Other!” This panel was two women reminding everybody that cosplay is not consent. Everything was cool until a man came in wearing a woman’s maid outfit and said he wanted to put an end to feminism. HUH??? The panelists started yelling at him (um… her? Not sure how he / she identifies) and almost got this person thrown out of the panel! The two women argued about wanting to create a safe space for people to go to if they feel they were treated unfairly for cosplaying, and the dude in the maid outfit was against safe spaces too! They argued for a good 10 minutes and that took up the entire Q&A time. SO BIZARRE ha ha!
Back to Cosplay Joe! Turns out he used to be a comedian who made jokes about anime. Then he dropped out of comedy to be a YouTuber. Well tonight was his grand return to being an anime comedian and… You remembered I told you he was funny right? Well… for this comedy routine HE BOMBED SPECTACULARLY! OMG this was hilarious at how badly he bombed! Again, when you’re doing anime you gotta keep it current. He was referencing Slayers. Come on man, these kids don’t know Slayers. Start talking about Yuri on Ice! NOT SLAYERS GET GAYER!
The next panel was 18 and over so they yelled at everyone to clear the room, regardless of your age. Not in a nice way. Man at this time, people attending panels was really bare bones. I have no idea how their panel did but forcing like the 5 people to get out that sat through Cosplay Joe, three that were obviously adults may not have been the best idea. There’s no reason to yell at strangers at a con for any reason at all. Calm the hell down and watch some hentai man I dunno!
Speaking of, the late night anime viewing was actually hentai! LMAO they didn’t say what it was so I was out. I wouldn’t mind laughing at some Legend of the Overfiend again but there’s worse stuff out there, FAR WORSE and I was scrrrred. PEACE OUT!
DAY 3
Really quiet day but it’s the last day of the con and that usually tends to be the case at cons.
Went to another panel with Carrie Savage. She voices a character on Fairy Tail. Her speaking voice is like that of a little girl so she had a tough time getting acting roles for adult parts, so she became a voice actress. Keep at it Carrie Savage! One day you’ll hit it big and voice something for TEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAM CAPCOM! Oh come on if I don’t mention Capcom once you’ll think this was written by a Skrull. AND YOU KNOW THIS MAAAAAANG!
Watched anime in the morning, another mix of new and old stuff for me. Later I attended a panel that show you how to make a video game yourself. One of the panelists asked if anyone liked Zelda games. He then said that Zelda II The Adventure of Link was his favorite Zelda game. I yelled “ME TOO!” Bonding moment OH SNAP! He created a 3D version of Zelda II and even included the Moon from Majora’s Mask as the actual Moon WORD! That was pretty cool!
The final panel was hosted by Peter Jimenez for Super Mario Maker. He won a contest before for the level he created and he played through the level for us. Then the entire audience participated in creating a level! This panel was a lot of fun and everyone had a good time. Nice way to end the con!
Overall I had a fun time. It was weird here and there but it was a fun experience. I have no idea if I will be back next year since this year there was a video game convention going on at the same time a few blocks away! If both happen at the same time again I’m definitely doing the video game con to see what that’s about. If not and there’s no conflict sure I’ll be back for more weirdness. While piloting a Gundam! " “I don’t like to keep that information on the down low.” Just so you know. SHINING FINGAAAAAH!
NYCC is two months away WHAT WHAAAAAT!
