My first brush with Derpycon lore—and by lore I imply its legally enforced code of conduct—was a scroll by its in depth weapons coverage.
“LIVE STEEL,” the web site went, “is outlined as bayonets, shuriken, star knives, metallic armor—together with chain mail.” Studs on clothes constituted a fringe case, topic to approval by conference workers. This precaution was not as a result of worry of terrorist assaults however to the preponderance of weapon-wielding anime characters, a well-liked costume alternative amongst attendees. The foundations, I imagined, had been set in response to years of disastrous horseplay, yaoi paddle hazing rituals, and airsoft-gun-as-ray-gun mishaps. Fortunately everybody on the registration line forward of me had gotten the memo, and their cardboard scythes buckled innocuously.
Derpycon was billed as a three-day, all-ages, “multi-genre” anime, gaming, sci-fi, and comics conference for nerds of all stripes. It boasted “panels, live shows, video gaming, cosplay, distributors, dances, LARPs, artists, and a lot extra.” The branding this 12 months aligned the conference with the traditional definition of derpyness, meme-speak for bumbling or awkwardness, moderately than the extra controversial Derpy, a cross-eyed background character from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Any catering to the controversial “brony” (grownup male followers of My Little Pony) set would have shocked me. As a substitute, pictures proliferated of mishaps: somebody operating late for the practice with a slice of toast of their mouth and “below development” imagery (the conference’s mascot is the Derpycone). The provisional or half-baked points of the con would due to this fact really feel on-brand. The press move I obtained contained a captivating illustration of a blushing man struggling to cease a practice with a big picket beam in his arms.
Whereas Derpycon serves many followers, its clear focus is the otaku, or zealous customers of Japanese well-liked media. I’d rely myself amongst them, though my very own relationship with J-pop turned difficult throughout artwork faculty. Like most younger illustrators—probably together with various teenagers right here in attendance—I first realized to attract in an anime-influenced fashion that my professors, contemplating it juvenile, forbade. I adopted it each to spite them and hedge my bets commercially, with blended success. Now some illustration purchasers request the anime/manga aesthetic whereas para-academic establishments nonetheless shun it, and AI does it exponentially higher than I ever might.
When these conventions began, a lot of Japanese animation might solely attain the U.S. by way of a distinct segment VHS pipeline, however in the present day the look is arguably the preferred figurative aesthetic worldwide. The informal fanbase is far bigger, and the convergence with nice artwork and excessive style is pervasive, but the otaku world retains some vestige of insularity and self-consciousness. (Therefore the pejorative weeaboo or weeb for its extra devoted constituents—the sorts of hardcore followers lining up sheepishly beside me for weapons inspection.)
Utilizing NijiJourney to recreate the Derpycon press move in an anime fashion.
Having made it previous registration, I gazed across the tasteful nonspace of New Brunswick, New Jersey’s Hyatt Regency resort, the place Derpycon has been held for 3 of the final 9 years it has taken place. The mob of attendees was distributed all through the foyer, gently clustering in enclaves over the variegated marble flooring and taking group pictures alongside a glass-sided staircase connecting to the higher mezzanine. Within the snack café part to my left, I might select a couple of folks dressed as characters from Western media: a Nurse Joker (from The Darkish Knight), a Lord Farquaad drag king (from Shrek), and a household of Sims with inexperienced plumbob temper indicators above their heads. Regardless of the heft of its haunch-thighs, a heavyset blue furry had squeezed itself onto a folding chair to choose at a faculty lunch–fashion pizza alongside its pals. There have been nonetheless no bronies, so far as I might discern.
Although I used to be a lone wolf, I didn’t really feel misplaced. My very own (self-invented) costume transposed cat ears onto a black-and-white laplander hat—which I sought out for the bootleg Vivienne Westwood brand on the facet—worn by Shinichi from the manga Nana. I might simply have been a lesser-known character from a kind of manga franchises who loses their cat ears after they lose their virginity.
My hat on Aliexpress.
I killed a while ingesting a four-dollar Weight loss plan Coke and looking out over Friday’s schedule on my telephone. Quite a lot of panels have been being held in convention rooms within the mezzanine all through the day, with names like “Win, Place, Waifu?? Horse Racing in Japan” and “What’s With the Masks? A Historical past of Kigurumi.” At 2 P.M., the “Artist’s Alley” and “Vendor’s Room” of distributors would open to supply a shopaholic diversion. The basement degree would maintain retro gaming contests into the wee hours. Based mostly on what number of attendees have been loitering, I doubted it will take lengthy to run the gamut of this programming. I wanted a educated good friend to observe round, however a chasmic awkwardness saved pushing me away from my fellow con-goers, just like the repellant finish of a magnet.
Worksheet I created for my college students once I taught a manga/anime-adjacent artwork class.
It was then that I spied a lone lady laying a hand-painted signal subsequent to one of many resort’s teetering ornamental cairns that learn “Let’s be SCHOOL IDOLS.” Resisting my derpyness, I approached to ask her about it.
“Final 12 months,” she confided, “we utterly overran the masquerade competitors with Idols”—an idol being a Japanese type of industrial entertainer with a fawning parasocial fan base—“so this 12 months they made a separate occasion for us.” The signal can be a part of her good friend group’s Love Dwell! choreographed dance routine at 8 P.M. Like most individuals in my speedy purview, she was sporting mass-market cosplay garb and a candy-colored wig. These polyester garments—color-blocked because of the constraints of animation—often exist stylistically someplace between faculty uniform, maid, and babydoll. Essentially the most uncanny factor of a cosplay ensemble is all the time the human face, which seems shrunken in distinction to the superstimulus of anime proportions. (E-trailers for cosplay apparel now use face filters on fashions to mitigate this impact.)
Desperate to catch the idolatrous vibe, I headed to the following space. On the opposite facet of the foyer’s central hub, one might buy the signatures of voice actors from English dubs of anime. A voice actor’s signature appeared irrelevant to me—maybe they need to have been recording a customized voice memo? However a very good variety of Derpinas have been queuing up, wallets in hand. To the left of the Corellia Temple Lightsaber Guild sign-up desk, I noticed a determine clothed in a babushka, a fake ceramic rabbit masks, a matronly skirt, a leather-based apron with hatches hooked up (paying homage to a utility kilt), and a henley finely misted with blood—they have been clearly dressed as Huntress, one of many killers within the multiplayer horror recreation Lifeless By Daylight, which I’d developed an off-the-cuff fascination with throughout quarantine. I walked as much as them excitedly.
Huntress’s look within the recreation is signaled by her eerie Russian folks lullaby; this IRL Huntress instructed me they’d been utilizing the lullaby recording to scare folks in CVS. Determined to increase our dialog and cement our pop-cultural bond, I attempted to explain one in all my favourite new DbD killers—the tumorous one with the vagina dentata that embodies the repressed doubts of a utopian group. Have you learnt it? … However Huntress reached the entrance of the signature line, so I slithered away.
Rounding the nook, I handed by the station known as Cosplay Restore Smith, which was marketed by a styrofoam model head on a PVC pipe affixed to a battered wheeled trunk. Pop-out compartments overflowed with a disorganized array of glues, tapes, hairdryers, hairsprays, barrettes, make-up brushes, screwdrivers, and scrap materials, all of which might ostensibly get your One Piece look again in a single piece.
My hat hadn’t taken a lot injury, so I headed as much as the mezzanine degree to take a look at the convention room shows—I had significantly excessive hopes for “MECHA or Mechanically Engineered Chassis Occur (to be) Superior.” The mecha subgenre, by which people put on big robotic fits, is all the time ripe for transhumanist interpretation—there’s even a journal known as Mechademia. One among its writers recognized the allegory implied by teen pilots eager for company and secure identities within the type of sturdy mechanized fits, whereas one other likened mecha to the postwar funding in tech that extends seamlessly from the physique. Throughout lockdown, I might generally fake the home I used to be caught inside was my robotic exoskeleton, therefore my curiosity within the speak.
Sadly, once I walked in, Derpycon’s mechademic was launching right into a lore dump of greater than 100 Battletech novels. “600 years is an absurd quantity of historical past to familiarize your self with, so simply give attention to the Period that matches you greatest. Star League Period 2571–2780. Succession Wars 2780–3049. Clan Invasion 3050–3061 …”
The opposite presentation room was holding a seminar on grooming cosplay wigs. I discover the concept of combing hair disagreeable, even on lime inexperienced pigtail wigs, so I left shortly.
Close by, a room labeled Meme Central appeared empty, regardless of their web site promising a slideshow displaying every little thing “from Steamed Hams to these whacky (sic) G.I. Joe ‘historic’ commercials.” I requested a number of workers members when it will open, giving them the incorrect impression that I used to be meme-starved. They have been going to ask round.
The subsequent stops on my itinerary have been the Artist’s Alley and the Vendor’s Room: within the former, folks might promote authentic fan artwork, with a strict prohibition on merchandise; within the latter, they might promote merchandise, with a strict prohibition on unlicensed reproductions. Confusingly, these two teams have been in the identical room, the most important the Hyatt Regency needed to supply. However regardless of the plethora of stalls, many of the Vendor’s Room distributors weren’t providing something greater than the mangas and plushies you may get within the otaku part of Barnes and Noble. Extra compelling have been a number of partitions of gacha capsule machines. They’re much like the coin-operated bubblegum dispensers outdoors of barbershops and greenback shops, solely the capsules are bigger and the toys larger high quality. I used to be caught deciding between the figurine collection of the reptile YouTuber @WANIVSPBAO, tempura-fried yōkai (conventional Japanese demons), and plastic cups of multicolored replica popcorn. Like many otaku collectors, I’ve all the time loved the antisublimity inherent in miniaturization. Nothing overwhelms; every little thing could be understood, patiently recreated, and added to the dollhouse.
Just like the Vendor’s Room, the Artist’s Alley catered primarily to followers of mainstream Japanese franchises. These digital prints and tchotchkes featured the identical characters and franchises because the merch, simply produced in small batches, with spit glue. There have been little Pokemon in succulent backyard dioramas that spilled out of Gameboy shells, laser-cut Pokemon earrings, and customized plushes of much less well-liked Pokemon. The prosaic digital work of backlit Pokemon impressed a well-known heaviness in my coronary heart—wasn’t this precisely the form of temper lighting that AI picture mills would excel at?
The perfect use of Pokemon mental property was a taxidermist promoting shadowboxes of Pokemon playing cards with actual bugs glued within them, standing in because the creatures. A “Leavanny” featured a strolling leaf bug, one of the immaculately camouflaged species on this planet. A cicada shell from a poorly-timed breeding cycle benefited from the rebrand as a “Shedinja.” Its last type was the green-and-yellow winged “Ninjask,” fanned out in its fearful symmetry.
“What most individuals don’t notice,” the seller commented, sagely, “is that Pokemon are bugs.”
The seller, who had a heat, avuncular method, turned to take care of a buyer shopping for a cluster of skunk tails. “My nephew and I obtained these from the swamps,” he added—displaying us metropolis slickers simply how rural Jersey can get. I moved on.
On my manner out of Artist’s Alley, I requested the girl promoting pride-flag crochet hats what the peach checkered one was, hoping it represented a sexuality I hadn’t heard of (a kind of gastrogender?), however no. All the things adult-oriented can be outsourced to the twenty-one-plus Shenanicon.
My vitality had begun to flag. I needed to speak to the Mario Kart banana peel, however she slipped away. In an try to recharge, I took inappropriately massive handfuls from the Puffin promotional sweet bowl whereas the well-to-do suburban furries round me scoffed.
My final huge cease was the Gaming Room, the place no less than thirty CRT TVs from the not-so-recent previous have been lined up on lengthy, black-clothed tables, hooked as much as gaming consoles within wireframe animal cages (as an anti-theft measure for uncommon older video games, an attendant instructed me). This space had been subcontracted to a different gaming conference, “A Videogame Con.” They have been holding off-the-books tournaments of multiplayer classics (Mortal Kombat; Mario Kart; Tremendous Smash Bros) over the course of the weekend. I’m reminded of a time once I inexplicably needed to hitch my faculty’s Sport Design Membership, and watched a lot of shows by recreation builders. I realized that the frenetic visible aptitude of many of those titles is influenced by a “cursed drawback in recreation design,” specifically that weaker gamers in multiplayer preventing video games might all the time gang up on stronger gamers, requiring the video games to include components of randomized chaos to discourage such methods.
There was additionally a stunning array of maximalist Japanese arcade rhythm video games and pinball machines in direction of the again of the room, schlepped from Maryland by a corporation known as Save Level. I discover rhythm video games (most famously, Dance Dance Revolution) to be among the many most dazzling interactive design objects ever made. Like opera, they’re an try at Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthesis of all artwork kinds. At their handiest, these video games calibrate the eyes, ears, and reflexes right into a 999-b.p.m. move state of ordered chaos. Most observe the identical components—the participant hits buttons as notes float in sequence throughout the display screen—however the rhythm video games right here had novel modes of interplay, every offering satisfying haptic suggestions whenever you hit or maintain a observe appropriately. Loveliest of all on this room was Taiko no Tatsujin, a ceremonial drum rhythm recreation. This cupboard featured two chubby taiko drums mounted on ornamental stands. An impatient Chainsaw Man requested to play alongside me. We confidently lifted our mallets collectively, and the lovely drum-dog mascot goaded us on because the Vocaloid music I’d chosen launched into its frantic groove.
Museca cupboard throughout play.
Round six thirty, again within the foyer, the mob vitality was starting to wane. I had deserted any pretense of creating pals by this level. I used to be kicking again for some time within the lounge space to test my electronic mail when a person with a working TV as a head and a blue pinstripe swimsuit requested me to take his image. He instructed me he was screening The Wonderful Digital Circus, which turned out to be a YouTube collection by which a denture-headed AI ringmaster tortures a bunch of individuals trapped in wacky-PoMo avatar our bodies. I remembered a good friend who’d been fired from Netflix telling me that the one platform Netflix fears is YouTube, which made sense—Circus was the one new Western collection I noticed con-goers stanning. Biting again my illustrator’s hatred for AI of all types, I took his picture, earlier than operating away.
Returning to the taxidermist’s desk, I used to be shocked to search out that nobody had purchased any of the Pokemon “playing cards.” I favored their insinuation that nature actually is a magical world of pocket monsters (and that the world, by extension, is a large multiplayer recreation). The seller hadn’t offered the bats signed by well-known actors who performed vampires both. However one merchandise was lacking from earlier this afternoon: the creepish little leech and syringe, mounted on a blood-splattered piece of card inventory.
“Sure, the leech. Each con we promote a couple of leeches. I don’t know the explanation,” he mentioned. Possibly it was as a result of they weren’t Pokemon, or possibly it was as a result of deep down, they have been.
After some extra dawdling, it was lastly time for the day’s culminating occasion: the Derpy Idol Showcase, which the lady with the signal had instructed me about earlier. At 8 P.M., the gang filed into the Regency’s ballroom in an orderly style, and I used to be reunited with all zero of my new pals. The lights dimmed, the lip-syncing monitor got here on at 999 b.p.m., and right away, faux idols turned actual.
The idols take to the stage.
The efficiency was an imitation of the poised Japanese superstars, lip-synching to their songs and donning their matching outfits. I didn’t suppose the dances have been too completely different from TikTok dances, of their strikes or have an effect on. I needed to see one thing stranger than a suburban teen expertise present. However evaluating issues on a barometer of obscurity is my very own tic, and I admit: the present was well-done. The women’ poise and charisma was spectacular and the choreography they’d practiced within the parking zone well-rehearsed. That is New Jersey excellence! I, Montclair-born-and-raised, instructed myself. The high-pitched polyphonic vocals bubbled with girlish exuberance over a raging beat. (Grimes was as soon as a cosplayer too, if that isn’t apparent.)
After the efficiency, I made a decision to depart Derpycon, forgoing the “Methods to Rizz (For the Lonely Weeb)” seminar at 10 P.M. This can be a crowd the place DM stands for Dungeon Grasp, I assumed to myself, pithily. However I’m a nerd, too. My excuse is that it’s in my blood: one in all my ancestors, Commodore Mayo, was credited with inventing the character of Uncle Sam as a determine of speech in one in all his naval logs. I simply want my grand-uncle had the foresight to make him cuter, have completely different coloured eyes (one blue, one purple), and carry a scythe.
Generated with NijiJourney.
Liby Hays is a author and artist dwelling in New York. She is the writer of Geniacs, a graphic novel a few poet who enters a hackathon, and a codesigner of Conspecifics, a research-practice kawaii streetwear model.
