User blog:LuciaHunter/AFASG 2015

Introduction
What a weekend! It's been a long weekend for Singapore's otakus at Anime Festival Asia Singapore 2015. As a recap from last year for those who are unaware, AFA is the largest anime-related convention in the region that takes place across multiple countries, each once a year. Started in Singapore in 2008, it grew to hold satellite events in Malaysia and Indonesia in 2012, and also featured an event in Thailand in 2015. For those who can't make it to Japan or fear language barriers, this is the definitive anime event to attend each year.

General Love Live! Presence
Quite unfortunately, there was a much lesser focus on Love Live! this year than there was last year officially. My own speculation would be that it was difficult for them to secure many of the seiyuus which are rather busy, but we've been seeing a general downwards trend of official LL! events being pushed to our region, which is rather worrying.

As such, the only LL! seiyuu we had this year was just Mimorin, who was coming here as part of a Pony Canyon team which held their concert on the second night. Quite unfortunately, I didn't feel the need to go for this one, so I won't be able to comment on it.

Amongst the event-goers though, the Love Live! hype is not showing any signs of stopping: Almost a third of the cosplayers I spotted throughout the day were cosplaying various costumes from SIF, and some crowd favourites were the White Day version as well as Angelic Angel costumes, as well as an entire cos-team in the Café Maid Version. There were a lot less dressed simply in the school uniform unlike previous years, it seems there's a lot more sophistication in the costumes these days thanks to SIF.

During one of the periods when I had nothing to do and was simply waiting around, I went to interview a few people and found out that the general Singaporean Love Liver is into LL mostly for SIF. As such, they use the [http://decaf.kouhi.me/lovelive/index.php?title=Main_Page Love Live! School Idol Festival Wiki] far more than they use this site. Meanwhile, quite a few haven't even heard of School Idol Tomodachi, which is a rather useful site so do check it out!

Booths
As usual for every AFA, there were a ton of booths from many merchandise retailers. Here are the reviews for the big names.

Bushiroad
Bushiroad booth has been disappointing this year. I spent a grand total of 3 dollars on a Fanbook. That was it. Their goods are starting to get stale as well as repetitive, and there is hardly any incentive to buy them. As usual, they tried to boost their sales by having a promotion where the first bunch of purchases above $60 in each day gets an autograph session with Mimorin, but it was in highly limited numbers: 15 for Friday, 30 for Saturday and I wasn't sure how many for Sunday. These autograph sessions have been known to be highly rushed, and they won't allow you to get anything autographed other than the official postcard she's handing out to you, so the allure has dropped in recent years. We have termed this session "Speed-dating with Mimorin" and I didn't feel compelled to do it this year unlike the last.

A LLSIF wall. But unlike previous events, the SIF play booth is conspicuously missing. What could this mean? Is SIF EN facing trouble? Are sales not good enough to justify another booth like at last year's AFA and this year's CharaExpo? We may never find out.

Kadokawa
Kadokawa was a new name in this event, if I'm not wrong, but they should have chosen a better set of figurines to bring along other than this First Fanbook set- the quality is known to be absolutely horrible for its price, even worse than normal prize figurines. At least they brought a nice wall along with them though.

Latendo & Co.
Latendo is a typical local anime merch shop in SG along with other similar booths like Candytoyo and Toycoin. That is to say, a lot of their prices are between 1.5x to 2x the actual value in order to cover their rental costs. Thankfully I discovered online shopping at AmiAmi and CDJapan shortly after joining anime fandom and have never fallen prey to their outrageous prices before. Still, they have a good selection here with prices that aren't too inflated, so that was nice. Not that I bought anything of course--

Spotted these figurines at one of these such stores. Quite nice detail work, worth buying I would say. Just perhaps at $7 cheaper. :^)

ODEX
ODEX, the bane of all South-east Asians. They are the primary importer of anime content, including handling movies. The screening of the Love Live! movie in the entire region was handled by them, and it wasn't exactly the best given how little bonus stuff we were given. Still, the fact remains that they are the primary importer for a reason: The Fan Meeting Fun Set and Travel Set cannot be obtained easily through any other method. I bit the bullet and got Lunaries to purchase the Fun Set on the very first day of the event. Went back in myself on the second day and had to suffer through an hour's wait in the queue. ODEX booth has always been this crazy every such event orz.

Banpresto
Everyone loves a good gamble, and Ichiban Kuji was created to answer the need of gambling otakus. This year they brought in a whole ton of sets, including one for [http://www.banpresto.jp/kuji/series/9016591.html Love Live! The School Idol Movie] and one for [http://www.banpresto.jp/kuji/series/9017044.html Love Live! ～Miracle of μ's～].

Good Smile Company
GSC had their usual booth with a ton of displays of figures. Nice stuff.

Parfait
Some genius had the idea of selling overpriced parfaits and giving out coasters and postcards with them. This was a massive hit with long queues throughout the event. Didn't feel the need to though, so I passed. It really did look quite delicious though, from what I saw.

Canon Selphy
So Canon was there promoting their cameras too, and they had this really nice booth where they put up these massive photo walls for people to take photos in front of using their cameras, and they would print it out for you on the spot on good quality photo-paper. Absolutely free! Great service though I wonder if it's really profitable in advertisement terms. Took a photo here with Lunaries but nope, he looks too derp and hence it won't be going up here. :P

Incidentally, the Canon booth staff aren't as strict as the Bushiroad ones, so there have indeed been photos of people kneeling down to their idols again heh.

Loot
And this is the part where I sort all my loot from this event, which was surprisingly little! I would say it's a combination of both growing more stingy with money, as well as there not really being a lot to purchase from. But yeah, these days, I've started to want to save up more to spend in Japan itself instead of these overpriced goods.

The Fan Meeting Tour Fun Set! An official product, this was sold at the Fan Meeting Tour across Japan. Contains a clear tote bag, a large towel, a bandana, and 10 postcard-sized bromides. Valued at 4500 yen, ODEX tried to sell it at 55 SGD earlier this year at the LL Movie Screening- to very little response. At AFA they repackaged it by throwing in more freebies as shown in the brochure earlier, to a total price of 70 SGD.

Freebies: An A2-size poster, 3 clear files, 9 keychains. As well as a paper-bag that's virtually worthless because who uses an otaku paper-bag after the event, really? I have four such Love Live! paper-bags now and no idea what to do with them.

To be honest though, I don't really want any of these things either because I already purchase similar goods online. What does this mean? Stay tuned! :^)

Another freebie B2 size poster. This one is special from the rest in that this wasn't licensed and produced by ODEX, this was an original from Japan, given out at the Love Live! movie during its 5th week of screening.

The only thing I bought from the Bushiroad booth, I guess this counts as the very first official Love Live! publication that's in English? It's really just a way for them to promote their Weiss Schwarz game though, more than half the LL book within is about that. At least the pull-out poster is kinda nice.

There was a booth promoting Bushiroad's new online store (Note: It only ships within Singapore for now!) where you could get these freebies just by signing up. Why not, I thought, and so I did just that.

Now here's the thing. I always have this stupid streak of luck with Kujis dating back to a few years back where I aim for a prize and proceed to win a higher prize. And then any subsequent purchases will just go nowhere. This always happens to me. A few days back I bought two tickets for a brand new set of Love Live! ～Miracle of μ's～, aiming for one of the figurines, and won the T-shirt by mistake orz. I tried again at AFA and yep, ended up with this crap.

Note to self: Never ever buy again from a Kuji I've already won. Quit while I'm ahead.

Total costs for this AFA including ticketed entry of 13 SGD: 121 SGD. Way lesser than I had expected, really.

Omake: Mimorin
It seemed like a waste if Mimorin came all the way to Singapore and I practically missed all her events because I was that lazy to attend the stage, so I decided to at least send her off. I had a reasonably good hunch which were her flights in and out of Singapore, so I went down with my friend who's a die-hard fan-girl of Mimorin. Which was a good thing because 1: my friend has no sense of timing and was planning to reach at 8.30pm when the flight takes off at 10pm, and 2: I have absolutely bad facial recognition.

So there I was, reaching at 7.45pm after rushing my friend to take a taxi down because I knew she would miss it otherwise. Thinking I had some time, I went to order a KFC meal where I knew I would be able to eat at a vantage point overlooking the check-in counters. My food took quite a while, and I finally sat down, unwrapped my burger, and took a bite...

"She's here", came the message.

Welp, there goes my dinner. I literally threw down my burger onto the tray, grabbed my bag and ran out. People all around me must have thought I was crazy orz. Made it down there in a minute, took me a while to find my friend who told me she had already talked to her because she was afraid Mimorin would leave auishdajsndoaw I was so torn because I didn't have the guts to go talk to her alone aahhhhhhh so I asked my friend what did she talk about and stuff.

And then I had to confirm like a few times just who Mimorin was because I swear she looks nothing like she does while on stage. Her hair was down, she had thick black glasses on, and even when I approached, it was hard for me to really identify her as Mimorin until I was a meter away. At that point, she had already noticed that I was approaching- I should have taken the Maki strap off my bag beforehand orz.

So I talked to her for a bit, thanked her for her hard work, said I was happy she came to Singapore, asked her to come again, etc. All photos and signatures were declined (her manager was there too) but my friend actually managed to get a handshake by asking for it. :O

How to put it... her voice is something I have never heard before in any of her videos, and I have watched quite a lot of them. During videos and concerts her voice is a lot lower to project itself. But when she was talking to me, it was really high and light and fluffy- I'm not sure how to describe it but it was certainly a new voice and it made me want to cry.

Meanwhile my friend is currently still going through the I-will-never-wash-this-hand-again phase, but I'm still just pondering over the entire encounter. Was that really her real voice in a relaxed state? Or was it just another stage voice put on for us fans? Odd.

After we wished her well and backed off I dragged my friend away so as not to look like a creep, and I went back to KFC...

Where my meal was still sitting there, the rest of it untouched except for that one bite I took into the burger. Miracles do happen.

We sat there overlooking the check-in counter until her entourage finally got up and started the check-in process. Seemed like there were two of them artistes flying off, each with two staff members. Mimorin was talking animatedly to the other artiste who I couldn't identify, and we tried to snipe some photos while waving but the end result was of course that it turned out horrible orz.

Welp, regardless, it went a lot better than last year where we camped forever and missed her flight (we only managed to send Jolno off last year). And surprisingly there were only two of us fans there too. Which makes it really personal in a way, I guess?

Here's to hoping we didn't freak her out instead and that we'll get to see her again next year!