look on my works ye mighty, and despair

A good time was had! I cosplayed 4 different things and didn't bother getting any photos in two of those outfits, whoops. The Crystal Chronicles shoot was fun, and Pez and I got a few pictures as Ib and Garry too. The other two (Neil (from To The Moon) and Niou) are both pretty easy costumes to throw on and do mini-shoots with locally some time, though, so I'm not particularly bothered -- and Niou was pretty ideal for running around in to help people at Cosplay HQ, it turned out. I think I spent most of the con in Cosplay HQ; it was a good place to hang out and see most people.

My literature panel went well: people seemed to enjoy me waffling on about books, even when it turned into ten minutes of 'no more questions? I will TALK ABOUT GENJI MORE THEN MUAHAHA'. I actually got some pretty tough questions, about how various historical events impacted trends in Japanese literature and about how much impact westernisation has made on modern Japanese literature and if I preferred the sort of themes in J-lit to western literary themes and so on. I did get asked about the most triggering-for-imposter-syndrome question I could have gotten asked ('what's your background in japanese literature? why did you decide to run this panel?') but that was clearly just curiosity and not a result of me fucking up horribly, and nobody seemed to care that the answer was just 'I like books!'. The person who asked it came up to ask me to write some articles for them about J-lit at the end, which was flattering. We'll see if that goes anywhere interesting.

The wig panel also went well; Pez turned up a little late due to judging responsibilities taking longer than expected, but I held the fort alone for that ten minutes and then we kind of sailed through the rest and covered pretty much everything we wanted to. Sometimes my advice was just 'don't do that' and sometimes it was 'go find some tutorials on youtube' and quite a lot of the time it was 'sew bits of wigs together for everything'.

At the closing ceremony, we sprang our little surprise on kahochan; he got pulled on stage in front of everyone to make a 'final speech' as chairman of Aya. As he took the microphone, a bunch of us ran on stage to wrestle him into a kigurumi of Pchan from Ranma. Mostly this meant that everyone else in the group lifted him up horizontally in the air and Rob and I shoved the thing onto him. He seemed really happy about this; I looked up at one point in the leg-wrangling to see Pete's cheerily grinning face as several people held his legs splayed open either side of me, and that's an image that's going to HAUNT ME FOR YEARS THANKS sigh.

Sunday evening was mostly spent hanging out with friends and winding down, with some horrifying interludes of Jodie barking hypothetical sexual commands at Gemma as the rest of us backed away in fear. And then there was dancing and late-night lingering around socially outside, and then this morning we did more of that as everyone tried to put off leaving until the last moment. D'aww. Adieu, Aya. You were awesome.