ShortCircuited

Saturday May 27th, 2006. Anime North. Doubletree Hotel Ballroom. KOTOKO live <3.

Well, I guess I’ll start from the top… the space in the concert hall was very limited so they required AN con-goers to pick up a special ticket to get into the concert. My god were we lucky… when we arrived in the morning there were only 5 tickets left, and luck just so had it that there were 5 of us in total. Talk about close calls.

Anyways, later that day we got in line around 2:45. The line up for the concert started at the base of the stairs leading to the concert hall and stretched half way down the hotel, and then was redirected to a parking lot… LOL.

It wasn’t until around 3:30 (when the concert was supposed to start) that we finally managed to get back _inside_ the hotel. Around 45 minutes later, we neared the stairs and an airport-like security check point. Was it cheaper for Geneon to fly us all to Japan to see KOTOKO instead of flying her here? Was there a psychotic fan among us? My imagination went wild. But the security check point was very much real, as they had those scanners for detecting metal objects, as well as ‘thorough’ bag checks. I had a jack knife with me, so I stuck it in my backpack and hoped they wouldn’t find it -_-’.

Well, they didn’t find it, but they DID find my pair of scissors which they promptly confiscated (for later retrieval). After the nearly 2-hour-behind-schedule wait, it was an easy walk to get to the concert hall, where I was greeted by a sea of sitting fans. Now this next part really bugged me: whenever anyone tried to stand (come on, it was a fucking concert) a bunch of people started shouting “SIT DOWN!” and this continued even after KOTOKO appeared on stage. Great welcome, eh?

Anyways, before KOTOKO appeared, they gave some previews to the songs she was about to sing accompanied by short clips of her and the anime the song was from. We got to see some of Baldr Force exe, and Shana too <3
The actual song list was something like this (I didn’t recognize all of the songs, and she sang them in a different order from the printed song list):

1. Suppuration -Core- (Kaanazuki no Miko)
2. Re-sublimity (Kannazuki no Miko)
3. Hane (original)
4. Being (Shakugan no Shana <3)
5. Shooting Star (Onegai Teacher)
6. DuDiDuWa lalala (Mahou Shoujou Tai Arisu)
7. Oboetete Iiyo (original)
8. Chi ni Kaeru (Starship Operators - which reminds me I have to blog on this series later)
9. Face of Fact (Baldr Force)
10. Wing my Way
11. Short Circuited

And there were some instrumental only pieces in between which featured KOTOKO’s dancers (who bounced a lot)… I guess KOTOKO got tired and needed a breather as it was a really hot day up here in frozen barrens of Canada. Funny note: for one of the songs, people started to get really hyped, jumping and shit like that only to feel the floor starting to shake.

In the end, the KOTOKO concert was awesome and definitely worth the super long wait. (Was so tired after though T______T) Of course that wasn’t the end of things, as KOTOKO was going to be doing a signing after the concert. While I exited the concert hall I saw a guy selling copies of her North American release CD “Hane” (released by Geneon early for this event). I quickly grabbed one for $18, not even realizing I circumvented the long line up for the CDs by doing that. But I’m kind of happy that I did, as most of my friends did not manage to even get a CD.

Update: FFS, I’ve held this post back as a draft for a whole week. I’ll post images of the CD, etc. later. And yeah, I never did get those scissors back… lol -_-;