Schoolgirls and Mobile Suits

A couple weeks ago I went to MCAD's Schoolgirls and Mobile suits anime conference for the first time. Since this is put on by the school and students can get academic credit for attending, I had high expectations. Those were met and exceeded.

The event ran two and a half days: Friday started late and only had the fashion show and a talk by fan-parody group VerrsenWerks. Saturday and Sunday both had morning art workshops (“Creating a Page From Start to Finish” and Tips and Tricks: Creating Comics”) as well as portfolio critiques and presentations in the afternoon. Since I have no artistic inclinations or aspirations, I skipped the morning sessions and went straight to the afternoon stuff. Hey, getting up before noon on a Saturday is pretty rough no matter how early I get to bed!

Friday night's "Fruits Basket Fashion Show" was a complete surprised. Since it's named after an anime and they mentioned cosplay in the description, I expected at least some people dressed up in poor imitations of anime characters. I couldn't have been more wrong. The show was conducted as a regular fashion show featuring each designer separately, and they were designers. Mostly local but there were a couple that traveled to attend, and most were professionals. There was no cosplay, instead the show featured Goth, Loli and Steampunk fashions. I didn't even know that steampunk was a fashion genre, but it seems a natural progression from Goth: Take corsets and fancy dresses, hats and bloomers then make them cool for today with a lot of earth tones, leather, straps and buckles. Think of how Hollywood would dress characters in a Cthuthlu movie and you probably have it. It was cool.

VerrsenWerks' presentation on parody dubs was what I would expect from a a normal anime convention, fans doing what they enjoy and presenters who have connections and a good understanding of their field. Parody dubs, where fans have overdubbed an anime themselves to parody the anime, the genre or fandom in general have never been much of an interest to me but the VerrsenWerks made a very interesting presentation of the phenomenon. They finished with a screening of their parody dub of Vampire Hunter D, which did make me laugh out loud at points.

The next two days contained the meat of the event and what probably sets it apart from cons like Otakon or Acen, the presentations.