Off To Anime Expo~

Off to Anime Expo~

My Ita backpack and badge lanyard are ready 😊 (decided to give Frieren some love in addition to SxF)

In a few hours I'll be heading to Anime Expo, which is the largest anime convention in North America! Since it's local, I go every year that I can - this will be my fourteenth year attending 😃 But only my second year since becoming hyperfixated on SxF, haha.

Takuya Eguchi, the voice of Loid, made an appearance at the expo last year and I was able to attend his panel. Wrote about it here, but yeah, it was fun! There was quite a lot of SxF appreciation all over the expo last year (photos here and here), so I'm hoping we'll see more of it this year too! No SxF guests have been announced this year, however Toho Animation will be having a SxF panel (together with Kaiju No.8) later today.

There are no specifics yet about what will be discussed in that panel, but I have my fingers crossed for season 3 crumbs 🤞 WIT Studio will also be having a group panel with other studios on Saturday, but from what I'm hearing, they may not be involved with season 3. We'll see.

Last year I made a few posts while I was at the expo. I might do that again this year, or just make one big post when I get back. Depends how much time I have while I'm there. Also, since the last day of the expo is on Sunday, my post about the new SxF chapter will be delayed. I might not get to it until later that day, or the next day depending on how tired I am 😅

For my last Anime Expo '24 post, I wanted to share some of the SxF merch I found around the con!

Firstly is Animate's selection, including some exclusive CODE: White merch that they only sold at the expo.

Below are the lovely ThreeZero figures on display (pardon my reflection in the glass).

New Anya figures~

Some other merch, including T-shirts.

Loved seeing the season 2 illustrations on display ❤️

I got the below pin from the MangaPlus booth for downloading their app. There were different manga featured on the pins and they were giving them out at random, but when I showed the lady all the SxF stuff on my Ita bag, she gave me the Anya one 😄

In the end, the only SxF stuff I bought at the expo were the playmat and acrylic board from the aforementioned CODE: White merch at Animate. Guess that's one advantage of being such a proactive SxF collector...since I'm so familiar with all the SxF merch that exists and I'm always ordering the stuff I want when it releases, I don't need to buy much at physical shops 😅

Now that I have all SxF Weiss Schwarz cards that I want (had to buy a few rare variants as singles since I didn't get them when I bought a case) I decided to make scans of the adorable chibi art on some of them! While the majority of the cards simply feature scenes from the anime or illustrations that have been shown elsewhere, this chibi art is only found on these cards. Of course I had to collect all the Twiyor ones ❤️

For those who are interested in the Weiss Schwarz card game, I wrote a google doc here explaining the basics of how to play 😁

SxF displays at Anime Expo! So excited to see the "season 3 coming soon" on this one 👀

Also loved these displays at the MangaPlus booth!

I would have included this scan with my recent miscellaneous collab scans post, but I decided it deserves its own post, not just because it's one of the loveliest official Twiyor illustrations I've seen, but also because the story of how I got it is...interesting 😅

This image is from the chara fine graph (which is basically a framed picture) that was included as a preorder bonus for buying the complete season 2 blu-ray set from a shop called Rakuten Books (together with badge pins of the same designs). I briefly mentioned it back in October of last year when season 2 was airing, along with preoder bonuses from other shops like Animate and Amazon. I only wanted to get this one though, so as per my usual process of trying to secure rare SxF goods, I made a note to myself to keep an eye out for when it released. Rakuten, which I believe is the main company for Rakuten Books, has their own proxy buying service, and as the season 2 blu-rays were released, I saw them appearing there. But as noted on their main site, the condition for them to send you the chara fine graph is that you must preorder all of the three season 2 blu-ray discs from them. Once you buy the third one, if they know that you've already bought the others, then they'll send you the preorder bonuses along with it.

I was concerned that if I bought the discs via proxy, they wouldn't know that I bought all three and would cancel my order at the end! I would be devastated if that happened after waiting months and spending all that money on the complete set. I knew people would sell the chara fine graph second-hand as soon as it released, so I decided to wait until then and try to find it on Mercari.

So the months went by and eventually I found out that the final blu-ray volume of season 2 would release on April 17th, 2024. I made a mental note to check Mercari for it then, but unfortunately something else released around that same time...CODE: White in the US, which had its first screening on April 18th. Admittingly, I got distracted by the CODE: White release and had seen it twice by the following weekend. I did do some preliminary searching for the chara fine graph, but not with my usual refined search terms. It wasn't until the 21st that I finally sat down and really started searching for it. And while I did find a few listings, they had already been sold.

I was hopeful that more people would sell it, since it had only been less than a week since release. But I guess I underestimated how popular this chara fine graph was because, after the initial five listings I saw that were sold within the span of a few days, none appeared after. I had, like, ten Mercari tabs open on my browser with different search terms that I refreshed many times a day, but nothing was showing up. I would groan whenever I'd see the preorder bonuses for the other shops like Animate and Amazon pop up, but not Rakuten Books. I did finally see one new listing of someone selling just the badge pins, but that was sold within a few minutes, which made me even more nervous. I would also be nervous getting up in the morning since I didn't want to see that a new listing was posted and sold while I was sleeping! Thankfully I work from home so it wasn't too much of an inconvenience for me to refresh the Mercari tabs on my personal computer whenever I had a minute. But as the days went by and I didn't see any new listings, I started getting mad at myself that if I had only started seriously searching for it right on release day, I would have had at least five chances to get it and could have saved myself this hassle. I even sent a message to Rakuten Books via their online form, asking (in Japanese) if they could somehow sell it to me and ship internationally, etc. But their response was pretty much what I expected...a polite "no."

But then, on the evening of May 4th, I found a new listing and immediately bought it! What should have been a red flag though is that the person was selling it for $30 (with the badge pins included), while everyone else had been selling it from around $80-$100. The title they gave to the item was weird too; they simply called it "Spy Family" instead of "Spy Family Chara Fine Graph" or "Spy Family Rakuten Books Bonus" or something descriptive like that. But the seller had a decent rating so I didn't think there was a problem. After I got the email from Buyee (my proxy service) that they successfully bought the item, I thought I was all set. I closed out all my search tabs and went to bed feeling satisfied.

However, when I got up the next morning, my heart sank when I saw that about an hour after I had gone to bed, Buyee sent me another email saying that they refunded and cancelled my order! The reason they gave was "due to the convenience of the seller" 😫

But what was most frustrating about this is that, when I checked the searches again, I saw that the same seller had relisted the item, with a higher price and more descriptive title, and it had been sold already. What probably happened is that the seller realized they made a mistake with the title and price of the listing and wanted to change it, which Mercari apparently allows them to do even after it had already been sold and paid for!

I was furious with Mercari for allowing this. The least they could do in a situation like this is give the original buyer, like, one day to buy the item again with the increased price before the seller is allowed to relist it again. I wanted to write to the seller and/or Mercari, but I wasn't able to make a Mercari account since it's restricted to Japan. I was also internally yelling at myself that if I had just started searching for it within a day or two of release instead of procrastinating, I could have avoided all this. So it was back to square one, but I wasn't going to give up! I opened up more search tabs with even more refined search terms. I also expanded to other proxy-supported shops like Surugaya and Yahoo Japan Auction. I even got my mom to help me, since she's often up in the middle of the night and can check in case anything is listed during that time while I'm asleep. I downloaded the Buyee app too so I could check listings even if I was away from my computer. With all this, I was hopeful I'd be able to buy it again, though it was more of a question of "when" than "if." With second-hand collectibles, you never know when they could pop up...I could find a new listing the next day, or not for a year or two. But I just kept up the searching, and finally, after another month went by, on June 3rd (June 4th in Japan, so technically Twiyor day 😁) I finally found it again...on Yahoo Japan Auction of all places!

I had never bought via auction before so I was a bit nervous I'd get outbid or something. But I immediately clicked the "pay buyout price option" (which was only a few dollars more than the original price) and, thankfully, a short while later Buyee informed me that I successfully won the auction! But after what happened before, I was still paranoid that it could get canceled for whatever reason. But that didn't happen, and after waiting for shipping, it finally came~

I always like to add a "lessons learned" in these situations, so I'd say the lesson here is don't be blasé or procrastinate when it comes to something you really want. And of course, being persistent pays off more than not!

As if the season 3 announcement several hours ago wasn't exciting enough, now we have one hell of a new chapter 😭

It's just one tragic event after another...Martha can't bring herself to confess to Henry (and regrets it later), her letter gets censored so she's left waiting in vain to see him, she's basically forced to join the front lines or be killed, meanwhile Henry is struggling to figure out his own feelings but then has a total breakdown when he thinks Martha's dead, gets beaten up and thrown in jail, then is coerced by his father into marrying someone else. Gosh, these two just can't catch a break 😓

But my favorite part of this chapter is young Donovan Desmond's speech. What he says here so perfectly conveys the overall conflict of Spy x Family and sets him up as the ideal antagonist.

The series has shown us over and over how people are indeed liars, but it's also shown us time and time again how amongst all the lies, mostly through the Forgers, that people can still come to understand each other. Donovan's view is one of hopelessness - that true understanding can never be attained and human beings will always wage war, and while the series doesn't downright portray this as false, it does show that there is hope...that, even though people will never stop committing atrocities, at the very least, a middle ground of peace can be found even amongst those who lie to survive.

Donovan believes that we can never know the true intentions of others because we ourselves are hiding our own true intentions...the Forgers are hiding their true intentions, but in spite of that, they've come to love and understand each other. Like Twilight said when he first met Donovan, he won't ever stop trying to understand others and will always try to meet them "in the middle" if he can. Again, this is why Donovan is shaping up to be a great "final boss" who challenges the hopeful message the series has advocated so far. Another example of how, even though this arc seemingly has nothing to do with the Forgers, Endo still ties it back to them and the story overall.

Now the question for the next chapter is...who saved Martha? Also, judging by Henry's reaction when he first sees Martha in the present time (pictured below, chapter 72 during the bus hijacking arc), it doesn't seem like he had thought she was dead at that point. So he must have found out somehow before this that she had survived.

We'll have to wait until next time to find out! Even as the series hits chapter 100, Endo isn't done with this tragic love story just yet 😅