Hooray! Otakon was totally great. Alison and I sold a ton of buttons in the art room, which allowed me to justify purchases such as this adorable Teto plushie:
I also got to meet people whom I'd only heard of online, such as the greatest AMV editor ever, Vlad G. Pohnert. It turns out he's also made Dr. Who music videos! I'm going to have to see those at some point.
Although I didn't take pictures at the con, lots of other people did. For a ton of cosplay pictures, look at the extended entry:
This year's most popular costume, by far, was any/every character ever from Naruto:
Naruto is unlicensed at this time, but the manga is in Shonen Jump, and the anime series, available all over the net, is pushing 70+ episodes. Here's a huge group of Naruto cosplayers:
If I see another Naruto cosplayer anytime soon I swear I'm going to puke. In case you don't know, Naruto is some show about ninjas. It looks like it turns into fighting tournaments after a while, but I've only seen the first epsiode, so what do I know?
Fortunately people also dressed as other characters. Here's the Baron from Whispers of the Heart and The Cat Returns:
This is Mama-chan from Kodocha No Omacha (a.k.a. Child's Toy):
I didn't actually see these Samurai Champloo cosplayers, but they clearly existed:
There were many fanatical Full Metal Alchemist cosplayers, most of them girls:
Alison dressed as Winry, and participated in this NewType Japan photo shoot of FMA cosplayers:
Winry was a very popular outfit.
At this year's Otakon, the tide of Vash's and Wolfwood's and Kenshin's Bebop characters seemed to have died down a bit, although the number of InuYasha characters was way up. People started to do costumes of more obscure characters from very popular shows, like some guy was the OVA version of Kenshin, one girl played Gendo's wife (Evangelion) and there was a little kid (spaceship) version of Vash. Here we can see some variations on Wolfwood:
Standard Wolfwood
Baby Wolfwood
Jewish Wolfwood
There were a lot of video game characters, and not just FFX this year. Here's someone from a game called "Fatal Frame 2":
It also seemed no longer enough to simply wear a chocobo outfit; this girl's costume is of herself riding a chocobo:
I don't know who this green fellow is from Final Fantasy, but many people were very excited to see him:
Finally, the cutest cosplayers I saw were these two five year old boys, dressed as ham-hams from Hamtaro:
Adorable!!
