Ah, the AX dance.

how i remember it.

how i remember it?

i tried desperately to get a group of my friends, also at the con, to come to the dance with me. they refused. they had rooms at the hilton, and were in no way willing to head to the disneyland hotel when they would have to walk back at about midnight, or even later. i suppose this demonstrates the overlarge size of anime expo and poor choice of location. regardless, all i knew at the time was that i would have to brave the dance alone.

with my trusty camera in tow, i headed to the main conference room. let me clarify something here. . . this is my second year at AX, but only my first year at the dance.

(and why is that? last year, no one bothered to tell me about the dance. . .)

at the hall, there is already a large group waiting for the room to open, a healthy mix of cosplayers, ravers, and normalish people. i see that a couple of people have their light sticks, ready to do some impromptu displays. one pair has a light stick in either hand, trying to swing them around to some odd music in their head. i stand around and watch them for a while, occasionally giving them what could seem like pointers, and maybe once or twice showing them how to swing them around like a pair of nunchaku.

(if they'd open the door, we wouldn't need to entertain ourselves this way. . .)

finally, the door opens. we pile into the room and onto the dance floor. imagine, if you will, a plague of locusts descending on defenseless ancient egyptian fields of wheat.

the music starts and people start to move, gyrate, or seizure as best they can, to the rhythm of the music. people tend to think otaku can't dance. . . you can decide from my pictures. some have also claimed there was no DJ, but there was—a tall, gaunt, vampire-like man who played crowd pleasers and teasers in a neverending stream. he played some X-japan, and Hayashibara. to quote the announcer from ddr 3rd mix, 'what a cool guy you are!'

alas, i spent most of my night dancing with one of the girls I was showing how to play with the sticks ( booth babe, as it happened), and so i was useless to the news site. so I entrusted the camera to one of our gophers (a good friend and ecchi specialist. . .) who had come to see what all the commotion was about. he took control of the camera and took some 'interesting' photos, to say the least. (trust me, the less said, the better.) i, on the other hand, was lost to the beat and in the dance dance zone. especially when they played butterfly.

our friendly web designer stopped by for a bit, too, but we were saved from seeing him dance by the guy on stage with the exoskeleton. . . as he danced, an on-screen robot followed his moves precisely, and our designer, geek that he is, got totally distracted from the dance at hand, asking questions and looking envious. ^_^

(come on, you have to admit the robot was neat. -chris)

after about three hours of dancing, my partner and I decided we had had enough and headed to our respective rooms.

and on the way back, i first heard the rumors of Disney running around and generally trying to ruin our con.