Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Spent most of today at the Excel Centre in East London. Another Expo rolls around. Apparantly it was three times the size of the last one, but I’m not really sure I got that impression. It was still decent, though, and while it doesn’t have as many merchants as something like Memorabilia, it was still quite the experience. I totally betrayed my bank accuont by spending £20 on t-shirts, but with good reason. I’ll get to that later.

First there’s the journey. We thought we were being smart, having figured out that with parts of the DLR closed, we would be getting a silverlink train from Canning Town. Hilariously, the silver link trains were also closed and we ended up on a bus replacement service, with no idea where we were or where we’d end up, as is the style with these mockeries of transport. Though I’m exaggerating a little, because in this case at least it was about 3 minutes up the road. But, it could’ve been far worse.

Being sunday, and still quite early, the queue was mercifully short, though we weren’t early enough to get any of the free letraset bags they were handing out. I can only dream as to what they contained. I’m sure it was nothing I wanted, but when it’s free, I actually do want it. Next time I’m going to insist we go on the saturday, when the queues are longer and the free stuff flows like wine.

Once we were inside, we did a quick circuit of the place and I began the battle of wills with a stall from RetroGT which ended when I bought the Dizzy and Elite t-shirts. I mean, it’s technically not “Elite” but rather, “1337″ - but we all know that’s just because David Braben is a litigious bastard, or rather, allegedly is, so they’re taking as few chances as possible with the graphics. Even now, though, I think back to the Ryu vs Ken t-shirt and wonder when I didn’t try and haggle things down for a deal on three shirts. That one’s always going to be the one that got away.

Next to the t-shirt stand there was a robot wars arena. Where they actually let you control the robots. Everyone is a big fan of robot wars, or rather, they would be if it remotely lived up to its promise. As it was, Robot Wars tends to involve two underpowered metal lumps wheel-spinning at each other, and the arena they had there lived up to the property’s reputation when the person controlling the robot couldn’t figure out how to move it off the side wall an instead kept knocking into it. The guy later offered Ian a go but in he said “No thanks..” in what was probably the most contemptuous way possible.

While wandering around, we met up with a couple of Josh and Al’s students, one of whom was dressed up as some guy from Naruto. It was somewhat awkward, because you could tell he was obviously unprepared to be defending the nerd aspect of his life to the educational aspect. He was almost afforded some dignity, but later they took a photo of him when he was in the cosplay competition that’ll probably be his undoing.

The less said about the Cosplay competition, though, the better. It’s a difficult subculture to understand, because it mostly involves (especially where manga is concerned) fat and ugly people dressing up as thin and pretty people in a clear case of psychological meltdown. I don’t care how cool you think Cardcaptor Sakura is, dressing up like a character from it will just make you look like a freak. It’s a lot like goth fashion in many ways in fact, as a bizarre mix of fetishism and, er… actually, I guess it’s just fetishism. The problem is that costumes from anime weren’t designed to exist in three dimensions and that the people wearing them are taking fandom to horrifying new levels of devotion. It can look good, but again, like with goth fashion if you look good, it can make you look better, but if you don’t look good, encasing yourself in makeup, leather and rubber is going to make you look far worse. Doubly so for cosplay, because it usually involves crepe paper and cardboard in the mix. Having said all that about the wierdoes, the temptation to enter the competition as Genshiken characters is almost too much, Genshiken being an anime/manga about anime/manga nerds who dress in jeans and hoodies.

There was, admittedly, some better organisation of the cosplay competition this time around, though, it’s fair to say. At least half of the announcers could pronounce the names, and the judges were people who knew what they were doing, as opposed to the first weirdo celebrity the organised could buy off backstage.

After we were done, we stopped at the Montagu Pyke in central london for some food, then made our way back home. We’d planned to go to the carvery in snaresbrook but the train works scuppered that idea. Still, I can’t complain because what I ate was still more than adequate. As if this nerdism wasn’t enough, next weekend we’re planning to go meet Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright at forbidden planet, which will probably be a deeply shambolic affair given what i’ve seen of other signings at FP. But at least it’s free.