The Background!
I'm actually a very new yaoifan, and I don't really even know if I really fit the description yet. Back in the beginning of this year, I was talking to a writer-friend[1], who asked me why I'd never written any gay couplings in my stories. I said that I didn't really feel capable of handling it well, but he said that romantic relationships work in more or less the same ways, regardless of the dangly bits involved or lack thereof, simply because people feel the same affections and desires no matter the targets. I disagreed, and after some arguing we put a bet on it. So I wound up writing The Tears of Anael for YaoiCon's fiction anthology and sent it off. She liked it and sent me nice messages asking about it and eventually accepting it, so I lost the bet and off I went, dressed as the Lost Catboy.
[1]He wishes to remain nameless so as not to be beaten by all the people who have to put up with my antics. Sorry.
Also, there may be some confusion caused by the way I've written this con-report. I am me; I use the first person. The Lost Catboy (sometimes just Wandering Catboy) is also me, but this is my con-persona and he has his own little quirks that I like to mess with. So if I talk about the Lost Catboy doing something, it means I was in-costume and in-character. Outtakes are in italics.
The Chronicle!
Day the First: 29 October, 2004
The first day is spent hammering out a ten-page paper on combinatorial math and password theory, aided largely by caffeine and Dayquil. After this is finished, there is not enough energy to BART the hour and a half each way with a costume in tow and become the Lost Catboy, so I stay home and sleep like the dead.
Next year I will have to rethink this idea of dragging a costume through an hour and a half of BART on two consecutive days to go to the con. Particularly, I am thinking of going next year as Bob-Omb (the walking explosive from Super Mario Brothers). I don't know if that's what I'll wind up doing (pardon the pun), but either way, hauling a backpack crammed with costume and other supplies is a fast way to get really tired. Either that or I have to get a costume that is vaguely acceptable streetwear. By the time I got back Sunday night it was like I'd been beaten with a two-by-four.
Day the Second: 30 October, 2004
The second day begins as I jam everything into my backpack and head off to the con. It's my first real interaction with the yaoi fandom, so I'm not sure whether I'll be back the next day, so I put in my $30, endure some strange looks and have to explain my lost bet, and suit up. At this point I realize my stupidity in locking up my hands in Big Clumsy Paws; I can't zip my costume up all the way. That is okay, though! The Lost Catboy has the power of looking dejected on his side, so he wanders out and finds someone to help him out. A big whiteboard sign saying "Need zip. Please help. Thank you!" makes communicating this need a lot easier. The sign changes to "First con. Very lost. Please help. Thank you!" and con exploration began in earnest.
Thusly armed, the Lost Catboy wandered into the con, hoping to meet new friends and learn things. He made it about a dozen steps before someone tried to feed him. Kitties will love you forever for nice food, but lunch was only about twenty minutes finished, so she got a kittyhug instead. Lots of people got kittyhugs and headpats as he attached himself to them for small amounts of time. Soon he found a table in the fan corridor with a really big jinglybell on it. It would be highly not-right to be without a big jinglybell, so that was added to the costume with all due speed.
It's amazing how hard it is to do things with only paws. I wound up having to add a notch in the wrists of the costume so I could slide my hands out and do anything that even remotely involved manual dexterity. I did that after the Lost Catboy had to spend fifteen minutes trying to rummage through his backpack for a wallet. Life got a lot easier after that, but except for paying and writing they stayed on mostly, because it's nicer to headpat people through a big fuzzy paw.
Somewhere between the jinglybell and the Kitty Carpal Tunnel Surgery, the Lost Catboy became the Wandering Catboy as Sparky the Naruto (I think I got the badgename right... sorry if I didn't) adopted him and walked all over introducing him to people. Sparky is fun! I think as much as anyone Sparky made the convention approachable for me, sort of nudged me into being comfortable enough to "talk" to people and things. Eventually the Wandering Catboy got passed off to some friends, and he followed them for a while, and eventually became the Lost Catboy again. The dealer's room is really, really amazing... crates and crates and crates of stunningly cool stuff. My only disappointment is that for someone like me, brand new to the whole idea, it's stupefying. I had no idea where to begin going in, and I still have no idea coming out. =/ The Fan Corridor is much more approachable, but I don't know that there's very much to learn there, so it's a bit of a Catch-22 situation.
After a few minutes of jingling around the Dealer's Room, a Please Adopt Me sign to one girl found someone else to follow. They went over to watch AMVs, which are very good, and look like staggering amounts of work. When I write, I write - I have a word I want, and I write it down - but these people have to scour through hours and hours of anime to find the images they want. It would be like me writing something by noting each phrase I used by its position in Moby Dick, the King James Bible, something from Alexandre Dumas, or whatever - anything but the dictionary, which is neat and ordered and made for easy word-finding. I feel bad for voting the way I did in the Action category, now that I know that the Action winner was a multi-con troll and everything, but I plead ignorance.
After this we went to get coffee and milk (I had milk at least) and talked a little bit, then Sparky the Naruto brought me a little catboy plush for which I have yet to really thank properly. I still was not sure whether I would come back, and then Sunday when I came back I got highly preoccupied and totally forgot my plan to return the favor. Must correct that, very soon. =( So, if you are or know who I'm talking about, please email me! Also I got very many 'awww, poor neko' reactions to my various degrees of dejected-sign-carrying. And many hugs. I don't think I've been hugged that many times since... wow, a long time. Felt really good.
The people really made the day for me. I'm really new (I think I mentioned that I hadn't even considered it until the now-infamous bet, so I know almost exactly jack. I've watched Lesson XX and the first episode of Gravitation, and that's it (anime goes to most of Inuyasha, big chunks of Excel Saga, and really old stuff - Speed Racer and things), so really I feel intimidated by people who watch seven or eight series and can discuss them all, but everyone was very friendly and thought I was amusing and I felt good enough to come back a second day. Probably I'll come back next year, too, because of that friendliness. I made a couple friends, but I was really stupid and forgot to get contact information for them. If you are one of these people, email me! I promise to correct my oversight.
Anyhow, I went home shortly afterwards, singing every step of the way. That was embarassing (I'm really bad, though nowhere near as bad as the infamous William Hung), but I was too happy not to.
Day the Third: 31 October, 2004
Walking over to the Clarion for AMV-showing left the feet of my kittyjamas kind of dirty, so I got up and did laundry. After that dried, I booked it over to the con, just in time to just barely eek in again. Whew!
I couldn't find anyone from the night before, so the Lost Catboy took the opportunity to make an appropriate sign ("Lost catboy! Looking for a T****! Please help. Thank you!") and race around posing the question to everyone he could find. Apparently Victor Valentine lost his clothes, and someone added an appropriate message to the bottom of my sign, to kill two birds with one stone. Some people thought maybe I was Victor (my conbadge was not so visible), so of course a "Not me!" tag had to be added.
[2] - Names blurred to protect the innocent. She didn't encourage that; I did it on my own. I think I embarassed her a little too. Sorry!
After a little while, the Lost Catboy was reunited with the T*** and changed his sign to a very happy "Found the T****! Thank you!" but Victor Valentine was still clothes-less and that stayed (to date I have no idea whether they were ever found. If you know, please let me know!). They made another run-around the dealer's room and Artist's alley and spent entirely too long trying to get an artist to draw in my book. It was made a lot harder by the fact that the Lost Catboy is mute, and I was in costume, so the whole thing was much, much harder than it had to be. A warning to other cosplay types... serious in-character handicaps are a lot of fun to roleplay, but get really frustrating for other people. Be more ready to drop the LARP than I am.
That made me miss something else I wanted to do very much, which saddens me a little bit. Really the con hotel is out in the middle of almost nowhere, I think, as far as foot-traffic goes, and that makes life a little difficult. Half an hour is not time enough to go get anything from there by foot, even fastfood, or at least that's what T**** said. But I changed out of costume afterwards, letting me use the first-person again. Somewhere around here I found out about the Get up and Die con-trolling, and promptly felt really bad about it. Then we went off to closing ceremonies, which were pretty interesting. People found out about the Get up and Die problem, too, and the organizers promised to send its author a highly interesting victory-package, and there were many thank-yous delivered, including one to the much-appreciated editor Anne Blue, who is unfortunately in Germany and therefore did not hear our applause, no matter how much we tried to compensate for distance. Such is the drawback of decreasing-to-the-square power curves.
Anyhow, it was now 5-ish, and I have a 7:00 gaming session back here in Berkeley for Sundays, so I took the opportunity to run out, find that my sketchbook wasn't done, leave money for its mailing and safe return, and run out to the shuttle. Shortly afterwards I was trying to say something important and critically fumbled yon savoir-faire skill check, but that's the story behind How do you Tell a Girl? and I'm going to send you up to my homepage if you want to hear it. After that I crashed out, a bittersweet end to a really, genuinely beautiful weekend.
I don't know that I'd have it any other way.