Supanova 2023 Convention Report!!!
Last weekend (yes this is late i know, shut up), I went to my second ever convention! It was called Supanova, which is basically ComicCon for here in Australia. Definitely the biggest convention I've been to so far (which is to say I've been to two, so perhaps that's not saying much lol but still!). I also went both days this time, as opposed to AVCon (our previous convention in July) which I only went for one day. So that was fun!
I also took the opportunity to cosplay! I mean my "characters i want to cosplay" list is kinda huge, gotta get through it somehow. This time I went with a casual rendition of Kazuha (one of my favourite characters, i.e. my current tumblr pfp) from Genshin Impact! It's really cool to see how much I've improved with cosplay since my first one earlier this year as 9S. Can only continue to go up from here, too!
I went to the convention with my good friend (and official convention buddy) Miku @remimibanana, who you'll see in this report! She cosplayed as Sucrose, also from Genshin Impact, and with a casual rendition of her outfit too!! It looked amazing, like seriously look at these photos, we both looked SO fucking cool. So glad we could do matching cosplays! We had a lot of people compliment our cosplays which felt so gratifying hehe.
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Day 1
We start the day with what else but my own stupidity. About an hour before we were supposed to meet up to head to the convention, I decided to get my cosplay all on and together, just to make sure everything was in order. And that all went well! I was looking at myself in the mirror, and wanted to just do one more super minor touch-up on one of the tufts of hair on the side of the wig.
I used this really really strong hairspray (it's basically just glue at this point) for styling the rather extreme shapes of the wig hair, and I was going to use it one more time. So I aimed it at the hair I wanted to shape (with the wig still on, mind you), and I sprayed it.
Directly into my open eye. From the side.
(and no my glasses didn't shield shit lol)
I immediately flushed my eye out, but I was perfectly fine I just didn't want to like glue my eye shut or something like that lmao. Probably panicked a bit too much aha...but that was a fun start to my day.
With that aside, it was time to meet up with Miku at the train station. And meet up we did! But first we needed energy, we both skipped breakfast lol.
We went and got some food real quick (nuggets, chips, all that good stuff), and headed for the train! But we were kinda early, so we ended up just wandering around for a bit. You know how sometimes you can have like an awkward amount of time where you can't really commit to anything so you just have to sit around and wait? That. It was fine though!
And then once the train arrived, we took it, and after a short walk once we arrived at our stop, we were at the convention grounds! It felt really cool standing outside of this gigantic venue, that's what made it really feel like a big convention.
(the convention building is the big one on the left!)
We headed to admission (we had already bought our digital weekend passes ahead of time, because we're smart lol) and we got given a paper wristband each. They told us that we had to keep them on for the entire weekend otherwise we wouldn't be able to re-enter. But if it broke we just had to go swap it for a new one.
I accidentally put Miku's wristband on too loose, but that meant she could freely take it on and off which actually sounds kinda convenient. Mine on the other hand wasn't going anywhere lol
With all that out of the way though, it finally was time for the convention!!
The first thing we did was just wander around and take it all in. The Artist Alley. The games. The miscellaneous stands. The food. The guest panels. But most importantly...
The cosplayers. There were so many.
(okay maybe not most importantly everything was equally important y'know let's not jump the gun here)
We got many, many, MANY photos with other cosplayers. And we had a lot of people come up to us asking for photos too! It's such a delightful feeling having somebody tell you that they love your cosplay.
I'm going to go over all the cosplayers we came across first and foremost, so prepare thyself!!
One of the first cosplayers we came across as we were exploring the Artist Alley was a Furina cosplayer!! (there will be a lot of Genshin cosplayer mentions here don't worry about it it's totally a convention thing)
They were with their friend group of a bunch of other cosplayers (there was a Fischl, a Collei, a Lynette, they were all so cool) but they did look kinda busy. But eventually we did get a photo with Furina!!
Another cosplayer we came across was a 9S! I had to get a photo, because I love 9S, but also because I've done the cosplay myself before. They were also super nice, they even had a light-up Black Box from the game which was quite cool.
Miku and I talked at some point earlier about if there was one single Genshin cosplay we were to come across that would make us freak out. I think I chose Neuvillette (love him) and Miku chose Lyney. But honestly we didn't even think we'd see any Fontainian cosplayers since it's still such a new region.
But... we had seen Furina already... so there was a chance.
And lo and behold, we actually spotted a Lyney cosplayer.
(no Neuvillette though ;;)
We immediately wandered over to their general direction, waiting for the opportunity to ask for a photo. But as we had our backs turned looking at some of the merch that was on display at the stand we were at, the Lyney cosplayer actually came up to US and complimented OUR cosplays first!!
This had us pretty elated to say the least (especially Miku haha) and I asked if we could get photos (after complimenting their cosplay as well, of course!!).
We thanked them, and let them on their way. Miku then proceeded to freak out lol
I also had a moment of resonance with this other cosplayer.
I saw a fellow Kazuha.
We locked eyes.
We pointed towards each other. Like that Spider-Man meme.
We approached each other.
We shook hands. Nodded our heads.
We took photos.
It was amazing.
Another pair of cosplayers we came across were some Tokyo Mew Mew cosplayers!! Miku is a big fan, and she had to get a photo with them. I love all their poses in this photo!!
At one point, we came across a Yoimiya (from Genshin again lol) cosplayer!! At first we didn't realise they were talking to us, until they got really close behind us and got our attention. They wanted a photo with us and they liked our cosplays!! Unfortunately we didn't think to get one with them on our phones in the moment, so just take my word for it that they were extremely kind and had such a cool cosplay as well.
There was this absolutely wonderful Nahida cosplayer we came across! Miku wanted to get a photo with them, and so we went up to them and asked for a photo, and they were so sweet about it!!
They were with who I'm guessing was a parent or guardian or someone, and they were super kind as well! They wanted to get a photo with all three of us and so they did! I hope they can both look back on that photo and be reminded of happy convention memories.
They were so sweet, talking about how much they loved our "casual spins" on our characters' outfits, aghhhhhh I smile just thinking about it.
Okay so last week, Miku and I went to this local Japanese culture AnimeGO festival, and we saw plenty of cosplayers there. It was a shame that we didn't cosplay ourselves, because idk we both felt kinda awkward walking up to cosplayers, not in cosplay ourselves, to ask for photos. One of the cosplayers we saw there was a maid Xiao. We saw them so many times, it was like they were taunting us. We joked that we could call their name and they would appear in front of us.
If you didn't guess already where I'm going with this, we found them again at this convention!!! And this time since we were also in cosplay, we felt perfectly comfortable to go up and finally ask for our long-awaited photo. And ask, we did! And photo, we did recieve! Love how we're all Anemo characters lol
(ignore my horrific selfie-taking skills lol)
Okay, last one. Another cosplayer we saw last week! The elusive Il Dottore, Second of The Eleven Fatui Harbingers. They were pretty funny when we went up to them to ask a photo, going on about how exhausting cosplaying for an entire day can be. They were with a friend who was cosplaying Collei, but the Collei from the manga which was super cool to see! Of course we got a photo with them too!
And that sums up all our cosplayer encounters!! Miku and I both told ourselves that this time around we'd take way more photos with other cosplayers since last time at AVCon we didn't take quite as many as we had hoped. And we definitely succeeded at that!
Although... I think we can go even further! For example we never got a photo with the Lynette cosplayer, I also saw this Grell cosplayer from Black Butler who I never got around to getting a photo with, there was an Alhaitham and Kaveh (together of course), a Lumine, a Klee, SEVERAL Ventis, a couple Zhonglis, a Raiden Shogun, a 2B, I could go on!
But the photos we did get with the cosplayers we did go up to were all amazing, and we're both just so happy. This is why cosplaying fucking rules.
But it is as you have guessed! Conventions are actually NOT all just about cosplaying! There's plenty of other stuff we got up to! Of which I will now talk about.
There were a bunch of food stands at the convention. A coffee/crepe stand (which I'm now realising we actually never got around to trying damn it lol), an Indian food stand, a Boost Juice stand, a hot chips stand, and the one we went to, a pretzel stand! Neither Miku nor I had ever had a real pretzel before, just these tiny snack ones you can find here in Australia, so we wanted to give them a try. We each got just a standard salted pretzel, and wowwwwww they were good. We both really liked them!!
One of the most prominent things they had at the convention was a pretty sizeable selection of multiplayer games to play! So every chance we got basically we found a vacant console setup and played some games together. Some of the games we played included:
Melty Blood: Type Lumina (i think that's what it was? never actually saw the title lol) where I started out playing okay until Miku proceeded to subsequently destroy me with her button mashing skills.
very skewed picture lol
Smash Ultimate: A game I had never played before! I'm super unfamiliar with fighting games in general, whereas Miku has definitely had some more experience with them. Regardless, once we both got into it, it was really fun!! We both swapped out characters every round, and for the most part Miku was just destroying me again but I did sneak in a couple winning streaks in there too!
Sonic Origins: We played this for like 2 minutes lol but it's Sonic so of course it's fun!
And finally... Just Dance. I think it was 2023? (Miku can correct me on that one lol)
A day or two before the convention Miku had pointed out to me on the map (because I had missed it myself) that there was going to be a setup for Just Dance at the convention! Now, she's been raving on for a while now about how amazing she is at Just Dance (some of the entries on Wii, to be exact) and I had been wanting to see these skills for myself for some time now. And as someone who has never played it before, I felt like it would be a good opportunity to learn from the best. So we decided in advance that we would definitely be playing Just Dance at the convention when we got the time. And we most certainly did!
We sort of hung around nearby (playing more Smash) waiting for the people who were at the time playing it to be done so we could have a turn. This worked out well, because soon enough we were up there taking our bags off and getting ready to move.
The first song we played was, what else, but Ievan Polkka! Miku knew the entire song already so she nailed it of course, but I don't think I did too badly in the end either! You just kinda gotta get into it all the way, so you at least look like you know what you're doing, even if you really don't.
The next song we played was Livin' La Vida Loca, which Miku also knew in its entirety! I think we did a lower difficulty to accommodate for me but she got 5 stars on this song too.
But somehow, against all odds, I also managed to get 5 stars!! I was very pleased with myself.
At this point there were more people waiting to have a turn, and we were getting ready to let others have a go, until this pair came up to us and asked if they could play with us. We said yes of course, however...had we only known the blight we would soon have to suffer through...
Connecting all four Joy-Cons turned out to be just a completely impossible task, for no reason. We could only ever connect any three of them at once. We tried so many times, that the Switch feed to the screens shut off for some reason to make matters worse??? At this point I had already surrendered one of my controllers to the newcomers as I was happy to leave it there and let them play, I already had my turn. But it took quite a while for them to finally reconnect the Switch feed, and we were back in business at long last.
(In the end they could only connect TWO Joy-Cons without it having a panic attack, but at this stage the three people playing including Miku just gave up and played it anyway lol)
They all played Rasputin! It was very fun to watch them all play and do the very iconic dance.
Artist Alley! It felt big and also not big at the same time somehow, not really sure how else to put that. There were I believe 5 or 6 aisles all lined up next to each other, right in the middle of the convention, with either side of each aisle lined with artists of all sorts and styles!
We spotted one particular artist stall that had these absolutely GORGEOUS prints just completely decking out the back panels, of Star Rail, Genshin, Disney, Mario characters... there were so many and they were all so so pretty.
But we had to steel ourselves, as we told ourselves that Day 2 would be the day that we go all out on spending. We thought it might be a hassle to have to carry around our spoils whilst also in cosplay, you see.
Although that didn't stop Miku from getting a few other prints anyway from another stall! She got a Hu Tao one, a Wanderer one, and a TBHK one! They were all drawn and formatted to look like magazine covers, they looked so cool.
And I may have bought a couple of things, as well. There was a stall ran by a bookstore chain, and they were doing a "Buy-One Get-One-Half Price" promo for the duration of the convention, so I capitalised on this and picked up Assassination Classroom Vol. 14 (what I'm up to currently), and the Ask Iwata book, a compilation of words and ideas from the late Satoru Iwata. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to get it, and Miku did the same (as well as Volume 3 of Spy x Family).
There were two stands selling a bunch of swords!!! So we went up to one and they let us hold one of the swords, a Lion's Roar from Genshin. It was very cool. I like swords hehe. Suffice to say I told them I'd be back tomorrow to get one, and I meant it lol.
That was a pretty unordered summary of everything that happened on the first day!!
Well... almost everything.
I actually wasn't able to go home straight after the convention as I had an inspection at my place that would still be going on by the time the convention was over. So earlier in the day I selfishly asked Miku if she'd mind hanging out for a little bit longer after the convention is done. And she agreed, and we left it at that at the time!
Until towards the latter half of the convention when we kinda asked ourselves... "wait, what are we actually going to do for an hour?"
This was a very good question.
We thought about it for a little while, before I believe it was Miku who suggested that we go and do karaoke in the city! This is something that we had been wanting to do for a little while now, but things just never really lined up, and so we never really had the chance to actually do it.
But we both realised that right now was the perfect opportunity. AND we were in cosplay. It was bound to be fun experience!
And so, as per our trait of spontaneously deciding to do things, we decided that once the convention was over, we would go spend an hour doing karaoke for the first time!! Which was VERY exciting for us both.
Once the convention was wrapping up, we were just kinda waiting around for a while, just on our phones. We ended up playing some of these Instagram pause games, where it'd randomly shuffle through HSR/Genshin characters, and you'd have to pause it and whoever you land on is your best friend, or school bully, or lover, or whatever other category it would be.
We got some pretty...incredible combinations and results with the scenarios they presented. That was a lot of fun.
Once we had finally left the convention grounds (after going the wrong way for a little bit oops) and after taking the train, luckily the karaoke place wasn't too far away, and we headed straight there. We would have enough time for an hour straight of karaoke. It was very exciting!!
The karaoke room itself was pretty small (and the walls were definitely not going to be keeping in much music or singing but whatever, that was part of the fun lol). But there were neon disco lights, and a small screen with huge speakers in the corner of the room. You had to connect your phone to the screen, and then through YouTube you can do virtually any song in existence, provided you can find an off-vocal or karaoke version of it.
And so, we went at it! I'm not going to list off every single song we did, but some highlights for the first day included me doing Writing on The Wall (Will Stetson) and Reach For The Stars from Sonic Colours, and Miku doing アイドル (YOASOBI) and Super Sonic Racing from Sonic R!!! It was LOADS of fun, we were just messing around and dancing and singing our hearts out. We even through a couple improv impressions/commentaries/quips in the middle of songs, which was just hilarious.
By the time the hour was over however (which went by SUPER quickly), all we wanted to do was go for another hour! We were actually in the middle of duetting 光るなら (Goose house) but then the lights and music just shut off instantly in the middle of the song! Our hour was up...apparently. But it was getting late, and dark, and that do be scary, so we had to call it a day. Hopefully we get to go back another time! There were still so many songs we needed to do (and we needed to finish off 光るなら after we were rudely cut off...must redeem ourselves...)
(love the photo on the right lmao)
We headed back to the station, and had to wait a short while for the train to arrive. So in the meantime we talked about our favourite parts of Day 1 (all the cosplayers and the games, and the karaoke too obviously) and what sort of things Day 2 might have in store for us!
We reflected on Day 1, and realised that we might not actually want to spend the entirety of Day 2 at the convention itself. We were pretty done by the end of the first day, and we had pretty much seen everything. Obviously there were going to be more cosplayers to go and see, more games to be played, and of course Day 2 was the day we would spend ALL of our money and then some.
But we accepted that the entire day wouldn't be spent at the convention. Which opened the gates for a bunch of other things we could do! And so we got to thinking.
It didn't take us long at ALL to decide to go to karaoke again. This time we could go for longer!! We decided that we were going to go for 2 hours this time, meaning we could have all the time in the world to sing whatever we wanted! Guess it wasn't going to be very long after all for us to redeem ourselves with 光るなら.
We also decided that we could go and get some ramen from one of the ramen places in the city! Another thing we had been wanting to do for quite some time now. This was the perfect opportunity!
So now we had a rough plan of how our next day would go. It was so exciting, I thought it would be hard to get to sleep that night amidst all the excitement but it really wasn't, I was so exhausted lol.
But with that, Day 1 of Supanova was complete!! On to Day 2!
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Day 2
Today started much more relaxed than the first! Got enough sleep (probably), no cosplay to have to worry about either, and before long Miku and I had met up again and were on our way to the convention once more!
Once we got there, we immediately saw this amazing Dan Heng cosplayer at the platform. I went and complimented their cosplay, and we kept making our way along. We were both kinda curious as to why they were seemingly leaving the convention even though it had only just started for the day? But it kind of is very much like Dan Heng to get his data and leave as soon as possible, so it totally made sense, yep, totally.
It didn't take us long to get to the convention, as we knew where we were going this time! Once we were there, they let us go through these special gates for people who already had wristbands, and it felt kinda special lol.
It was time for Day 2!
We started by heading straight over to the food stands again, and we got more pretzels! This time we got toppings with them too, I got cookies and cream and Miku got nutella. We also got slushies, mine was grape flavoured and purple and Miku said it kinda looked like the grimace shake. I was scared for my life.
With that out of the way, it was time to do some spending! We kinda just wandered around taking it all in, at one point I bought a mystery eeveelution pen. It was in a blind box, so I jokingly shook it and said "yep, sounds like Leafeon!".
Sure enough, it was indeed Leafeon! This will come up again later.
After this, it was time to start buying prints. In the end, we kinda both ended up getting most of our prints from that one artist stall that I mentioned earlier. I got Gojo Satoru, Neuvillette, and Ina prints! And Miku got Navia and Dan Heng IL prints!
Also, we went back to the book stand and we each got some more manga. I got Pokemon Adventures Vol. 1, JJK Vol. 0, and HxH Vol. 11-12. And Miku got Komi Can't Communicate Vol. 2 and Heart Gear Vol. 1. We also got free bookmarks which was pretty cool (that may have been on Day 1 actually lol).
After this, we did our tradition of buying each other exactly one print each. So we went our separate ways and agreed on a spot to meet up afterwards. I had no idea what print I was going to get her, but I eventually found this really cool neon-looking print of Kureiji Ollie! I know Miku likes Ollie a lot, so I decided that this would be the perfect print to get her. And she really liked it!
She ended up getting me this really beautiful Leafeon print (see I told you it'd come up again), and it also had an Oddish and a Wooper in it too, with some purple flowers draped over the top, I love it a lot!! Leafeon is my favourite eeveelution, so it was perfect!
The last thing I wanted to buy was that Lion's Roar sword we saw and got to hold the previous day. So we went back, and I asked for it! They asked if I wanted to hold it first, and I told them that I already did yesterday, and then I think that's when they remembered me haha. Don't know if they were actually expecting me to come back or not lol, but I did! Told you I meant it.
As they were boxing it up for me they were giving me advice about how the Lion's Roar was actually really good for characters like Xingqiu in-game, and that a lot of people just typically settled on using Sacrificial Sword on him instead. I got called out hard, because my Xingqiu literally does have Sacrificial Sword right now.
I got my sword in the end, and thanked them for their advice haha
Here is a picture of my haul in the end!
After this, we were pretty much ready to say goodbye to the convention. We think that we could probably get away with going for just one day next time, but now we know! And it definitely wasn't a waste of time, because now we had the rest of the day ahead of us as well! So we headed back to the train station, and made our way back to the city.
We had some time to kill before the karaoke place opened, so we decided to go and get some ramen! The place we were originally going to head to, however, was closed once we got there. In hindsight we probably could have just checked their open times online, but it was fine in the end, because Miku saw another ramen place on our way to the one we were originally going to go to, and so we decided to head there instead!
Turns out it was a proper izakaya right in the city, which was pretty awesome. It was really pretty on the inside!
Once we were both sat down, we had to decide what we were going to get. We're both pretty indecisive, however, so it took a little while admittedly. But in the end, I got a tori shoyu (chicken ramen) and Miku got a signature tonkotsu, which was basically the same except with pork instead of chicken. We also got some really refreshing drinks, a lemon and lime bitters and a peach ice tea!
The ramen was REALLY filling, like it didn't look like it was quite enough initially, but it most definitely was, for the both of us. It kept us going for the rest of the whole day. And it was every bit as good as we had hoped it'd be!
We also got some takoyaki, and while we didn't get any photos of it, it was also really good!!
After this, we still had some time to kill, so we headed off to the library (beelined to the manga because of course we did), and to a bookstore (same thing here too lol), and after a bit more wandering around, it was finally time to head over to the karaoke place as it would be opening soon!
We hung out near the entrance and basically went in the very second it opened, quickly booked a room for 2 hours, and went back in! It was actually the exact same room we were in for Day 1 lol.
Of course we started by redeeming ourselves immediately with 光るなら, and if I may say so I think we absolutely killed it, as expected! We had successfully redeemed ourselves.
We both prepared lists of songs we wanted to sing the night beforehand (so we were actually a little more prepared this time), and we went and did a whole bunch more songs!
Again, I won't list them all out, but some highlights included me doing Kick Back (Kenshi Yonezu), end of a life (Calliope Mori), and Unravel (TK, which I did the scream and then my voice hurt afterwards because I don't know how to scream properly lol), and then Miku doing Livin' La Vida Loca (Ricky Martin), Dragostea Din Tei (O-Zone, that one was a LOT of fun), Diamond City Lights (LazuLight from Nijisanji EN, she even knew the chant section!!), and Five Nights at Freddy's by The Living Tombstone (because hell yes that's why)!
We managed to fit in so many more songs in the two hours we had this time around, yet by the end we still just wanted to keep going! But that was it, we had to leave, and hopefully we can go again at some point!
After our second bout of karaoke, it was again time to head back to the train station for the last time this weekend. We were both pretty tired by this point, suffice to say, but we parted ways for the weekend, and that was that!
So yeah! That more or less sums up the whole convention weekend!!
At the start of the year, I was excited to be going to AVCon. I wanted it to be a big special event, going to a convention for the first time ever, cosplaying for the first time ever, being a part of a sort of atmosphere around people who love the same things I do. I never thought I'd have the chance to go to TWO conventions in one year though! It just makes me really really happy. I love going to conventions, and I love that that's a thing that I can actually say now!!
And I'm also really grateful that I have Miku to go with me! She loves a lot of the same things I do, and she's willing to do cosplay alongside me, and all these other fun things too! It was a really fun weekend with her ^^
Definitely planning on going to more conventions next year, like I said earlier, I have a huge list of characters I need to cosplay after all (we both do for that matter) and we may already be thinking about what our next cosplays are going to be, so you'll definitely have to keep an eye out for that, because we might have some pretty cool plans in the works!!
Thank you for reading my (extremely lengthy) report, I hope you enjoyed reading through my convention experience!!! <3
