The week before, I had lunch with Yuri, a friend I made when I went to Liverpool for a Rocketworld volunteer session last month. At a moment of sudden inspiration, I asked her if she might be interested to attend an anime con with me at Sugden the following week, and to be honest, I was really pleasantly surprised when she said yes because after all, it involved seeing white people dressing up in costumes of a popular culture that originated from her home country. That had to be some degree of weirdness. But she said yes and we bought tickets for the first day of the con on the 2nd of April.
This wasn’t my first time at a con in Manchester; I’d attended Doki Doki last November but the company this time was definitely way better. We went there at 10AM and already there was a huge line full of cosplayers and we attempted to point out characters that we recognise as we waited in the queue.
One of my absolute favourite things about cons is visiting the artists’ booths themselves. After so many years of following fan artists on the Internet, it was so incredible to see them in actual print and just so cool to see artists so passionate about creating art for, say, an anime that they like and putting them on display for everyone to see and purchase at a convention. I got some art prints for my wall too, of course.
After walking around in general for a few hours, Yuri and I ended up playing Super Smash Bros on these actual ancient televisions and Nintendo game consoles for an hour or so.
Later on, I found out that Lara, a Twitter friend, was also at the con cosplaying as Kotori so we started to search for her. I loved the fact that both Yuri and my favourite Love Live girl is Kotori.
By the time we got relatively tired and had pretty much scouted the entire area, it was already 5PM. So I went back to Weston and Yuri to Dalton Ellis but not before she gave me a lemon cake her mother had sent to her all the way from Japan! ╰(*´︶`*)╯♡
And below, my haul for the day:
michelle teoh 
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