I attended Nan Desu Kan in September 2023, presenting a slightly updated version of my VTubers panel together with my co-panelist Cody (who managed to show up this time). We were placed in a prime-time Saturday night slot! Here’s a full recording of our panel:
The convention schedule slightly modified my title to “VTubers: The Culture and the Business!” The description in the full program booklet was:
Who are all these avatars showing up on your Twitch feed?! Learn about VTubers (virtual YouTubers), a growing online media format bringing live interaction to anime characters. Explore how this industry got its start, check out the major players to watch, and deep-dive into the technology, fandom, and revenue models that make it possible.
This was the second time I’d presented this panel, following its debut at Colorado Anime Fest earlier that year. The audience was definitely more rambunctious at NDK than during my CoAF morning panel, and the room was packed. Thankfully, I had Cody to help handle the crowd, and I also had my girlfriend Amber along to help carry our equipment in and out of the room.
The audience helpfully pointed out a few places where we’d missed updating our slideshow from the previous iteration– Holostars had lost a couple of members in the intervening months between cons, and Hololive had debuted a new generation of talents just weeks before the convention, which we did cover explicitly but forgot to reflect in numerous smaller notes throughout the slideshow. Still, we managed to land a few laughs with references Cody suggested adding as late as the morning of our presentation.
One interesting, pedantic quirk about adjusting the panel materials for NDK was that the short link I’d used for the CoAF slideshow, coaf23-vtuber-panel.nots.co, wouldn’t have been clear for NDK since NDK numbers their conventions (the 2023 convention was technically “NDK #26”). I had to expand the short link to ndk2023-vtuber-panel.nots.co to make clear it was using the year and not the convention number.
Also at NDK 2023, I dressed up in a new cosplay of Hoshino Aqua from Oshi no Ko (押しの子), a very popular anime that started airing that year:
The above photo was with a Hatsune Miku cosplayer who came up to me and started playing the Oshi no Ko opening theme song on her flute. I also got a photo with a cosplayer dressed up as Hoshino Ruby (Aqua’s sister), but my girlfriend took it with the other cosplayer’s phone, and I wasn’t able to find anywhere to contact her to get a copy of it after she walked away from us.
The Aqua cosplay was way easier to handle than the GGO Kirito cosplay I’d done in the past. Even though masks were no longer required at the convention, I still wore one (with the best-matching color I could find) to cover up my beard, which seemed to work well. I did end up ditching the wig just before the closing ceremonies.
In other news, NDK had a kimono exhibit in what I believe was a first for the convention (click or tap to view the gallery):
Aside from that, it was a pretty standard con. Over in the vendor hall, I picked up an art print of Hoshino Ai (Aqua and Ruby’s mother, and the “oshi” in “Oshi no Ko”)– it was being sold by a Canadian artist named Sakimi-chan in the 18+ corner, despite not being 18+ itself. I also got a figure of Keke Tang (the Chinese transfer student) from Love Live! Superstar!!:
In terms of attending panels, I saw one on the first day by Lauren Scanlan, an employee of a manga localization and publishing company called Kodansha USA. I asked a question about the economic and cultural relationship between official translation companies and fan translation efforts; Lauren’s answer was basically “there is no relationship, and fan translations are piracy,” which I don’t think really considered or addressed my question. For my troubles, though, I got a free copy of a manga called O Maidens in Your Savage Season, which is apparently a girl’s coming-of-age story with themes around sexual development. (I haven’t read it yet; it seems like the kind of thing that could be done really well, or could piss me off a lot.)
I also attended a panel about otome, which is the female-targeted equivalent of eroge– a.k.a., visual novels with a woman as the protagonist and men as love interests. This was basically a let’s play panel; the presenters took a poll from the audience for which of three games to play (Seduce Me the Otome won), then voice acted the characters while letting the audience decide on any choices that came up in the game.
This panel was super nostalgic for me because it felt just like watching the Mikecast Experience play visual novels on their Twitch stream. When the electronic polling system failed and they started taking a rough show of hands for choices instead, it felt like when the Mikecast gave up on real polls and did a rough gauge of their text chat. We were barely able to get into the plot of the game at all in the 2-hour time slot, but it was still a great time, and it piqued my interest about the game.
Other returning staples of NDK included Amelie Belcher doing live art; Dr. Alisa Freedman giving a college lecture-style presentation about the role of mascots in Japanese society; an itasha car show near the food trucks outside; and a video game room, where I tried Mario Kart 64 for the first time with my girlfriend and some other attendees. While walking around, I caught one game cabinet booting up Windows XP after it presumably crashed.
As always, it was a long weekend, but a good time. I’ll be looking forward to NDK 2024 in just under a week from publishing this post, where I’ll be giving another rendition of the VTubers panel as well as a new addition to NDK’s lineup.