During the time of August 12-14, 2011, I had attended the Otakuthon 2011 event at the Palais des Congres and since I have been going to Otakuthon since 2006 (when the convention came into establishment), this year marks my sixth year of going to Otakuthon. Like everyother year, this year has quite a variety of activities and panels to check out.
Panels
The first workshop panel I attended at Otakuthon 2011 was "Working in Photoshop or Manga Studio", which was at 2:00 PM ET on the Saturday part. Though I was amazed to see some interesteing techniques in working with Manga studio, the disappointing part was that it was not as I long as I hoped and there were no basic pampthlets for attendees to pick in case they're missing something. Plus, the speaking went at some points too fast for me to jot down notes so I tell myself "I'll just stick with my Gimp to color and trace my hand-drawn images"
On the Sunday of the convention, I checked out the "Digimon" discussion panel, where anime fans have a chance to discuss topics about previously release "Digimon" anime as well as to what to expect from newer ones. Although "Digimon" is an anime intended for a youth audience like "Pocket Monsters", it was ironic that no kids showed up while adults (including myself) were attending. What made the event more fun was when some particpants showed up in Digimon cosplay, and including the two Digimon cosplayers I took pictures of (as some you may have seen in my Otakuthon 2011 photos posts).
On the same day as the "Digimon" panel, I checked out the "Gundam University", a panel where participants have the chance to ask and discuss about the "Gundam" franchise so far as well to discuss their thoughts and feelings about the upcoming anime "Mobile Suit Gundam AGE". What was disappointing was that due to timing restrictions, there eneded up being no time to discuss about "Mobile Suit Gundam 00" or "Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn", not even about which version of "Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny" is now canon for "Gundam SEED" continuity. Therefore, I felt the panel should have benn given a chance to go longer, but what can I say, there was a schedule to be kept by the Otakuthon staff. The odd part was when I mentioned that the premise of "Mobile Suit Gundam AGE" is somewhat similar to the 3-generation concept of the U.S. T.V. series "Robotech", another participant attending the same forum ended up refering to it as "Macross", and although I made it clear that I was refering to Robotech's continuity and not that of the original Japanese edited version of "The Superdimension Fortress Macross" (from which Robotech's first storyarc was a re-dub and re-write), he still called "Robotech" "Macross", which was enough for me to speculate that he might be a purist trying his hardest to ignore the existence of Americanized re-dubbings of anime series. Another participant in the same forum appeared in a XXXG-01SR Gundam Sandrock cosplay, and although soem of us got to take pictures, I had to delete my picture of the cosplayer because the quality looked terrible.
