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Anime fans celebrate 'nerd culture' at Senshi-Con

Jane Lee stayed up all night to finish sewing her costume in time for this weekend's Senshi-Con anime convention.

She didn't succeed. At 8 a.m. Saturday, the 20-year-old had to surrender and make her way to Anchorage's Egan Civic and Convention Center.

But her backup costume, a lacy petticoat, a long curling wig and a cloth headband in the Japanese "Lolita" fashion, still attracted plenty of compliments -- and fit in into the wild assortment of furry headpieces, video game and manga characters, homemade swords, wigs, masks and other costumes that descended on the Egan Center on Saturday.

Organizers estimated that more than 2,500 people converged on downtown for Senshi-Con, Alaska's largest anime convention and a loud-and-proud celebration of geekiness and the culture of costume-playing, often shortened to cosplay. This year's attendance estimate far surpassed earlier records for the convention, now in its 10th year.

The line started early Saturday morning, wrapping around the Egan Center and back to Fourth Avenue. Most convention-goers looked to be high school or college age but there were also families and parents with strollers weaving in and out of the crowds.

Once people got inside, the halls were punctuated by shrieks of excitement and the question, "Can I take your picture?"

"Your wig looks totally ballin'," Lee said to one friend, walking into the area where vendors were selling hats, T-shirts, stuffed animals, posters and artwork.

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A little while later, she gasped, "I love 'Blue's Clues'!" spotting Thomas Peters, who was dressed as Steve from the popular children's TV show.

Peters, 28, whose past costumes have included Where's Waldo and Willy Wonka, said he tries not to dress up as someone other than an anime character.

"I really like nerd culture," Peters said. Of Senshi-Con, he said, "Every year it just gets bigger and bigger."

In 2005, Senshi-Con (a name based on the Japanese word for warrior) emerged as a small-scale affair in the West High School cafeteria. The next year, it graduated to the student union at University of Alaska Anchorage, and last year, it expanded to the Egan Center for the first time.

Staffers and observers credited the long-running convention's success in part on a cohesive, committed organizational team that has largely stuck together since the early days of Senshi-Con. Back in 2005, a crew of anime and video game aficionados at West and Dimond high schools joined forces to launch the first convention, which was intended to be more focused on anime and gaming.

This weekend, members of that original team -- the "forefathers," they call themselves -- were helping run the show.

"(Senshi-Con is) one of the few ties that keeps us together," said Patrick Campaign, who was a senior at Dimond when Senshi-Con started. He now runs his own ophthalmology practice in Anchorage.

Kira Buckland, who came up with the idea in the first place, flew up from Burbank, Calif., to help out in the video game room. Buckland was the president of the West High Anime Club when she decided Alaska needed its own convention to accommodate a growing anime scene. She remembers that first year in the West High cafeteria.

"And 10 years later, it's grown into what it is now," said Buckland, now 27 and a voice actor.

Convention organizers have steadily become more business-savvy over the years, and are now well-versed in legal liabilities, trademarks and credit card services. They've added more special events and vendors, catering to a larger, more diverse audience with interests that go beyond anime and video games.

In one of the main rooms on Saturday, a traditional tea ceremony commenced onstage. Other scheduled activities included panels, tournaments, a costume competition and a chess game where characters engage in staged fights.

On the downstairs level, surrounded by people sitting in front of TVs and playing video games, Paige Cordell sang Breaking Benjamin's "I Will Not Bow" into a microphone as part of a group playing "Rock Band."

The 20-year-old UAA psychology major was dressed as a character from the Japanese manga series "Devils and Realists." She loves the shopping portion of the convention and commissioning work from artists. This year's convention, she said, is better organized than the last.

Senshi-Con, anime and gaming convention in Anchorage from Alaska Dispatch on Vimeo.

While waiting in line, Cordell and her friends played "Senshi-Con bingo" with popular costumes.

"There's always 'Kingdom Hearts,' there's always a schoolgirl, there's always a butler ... doesn't matter whether or not it's Black Butler, there's always one," Cordell said, referencing a popular Japanese manga character.

Nearby, 20-year-old Chloe Holland was sitting at a table, waiting for a Pokemon tournament to start. She dressed up as the vampire queen Marceline from the TV show "Adventure Time."

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Holland said she and her dad spent about 40 hours making a bass guitar out of oak wood and plywood blocks.

"It's what you do," she said.

Cordell called cosplay "a labor of love."

"It's expensive; you get pretty much nothing out of it," Cordell said, "other than the fact that you get to feel awesome about yourself."

Cost is a big reason that Lee started making her own costumes. She learned to sew from her seamstress grandmother and the Internet. She frequents thrift stores and other low-cost retail clothing stores.

Now, Lee sews costumes for other people, at a rate of $10 an hour.

She's attended and worked at Senshi-Con for years, and this is the first year she ran out of time to hand-make a new costume. She was hoping to appear as a character from a Japanese manga series that has become popular in the last year.

But, for that costume, there was still Sunday.

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"I'm going to try to finish it tonight," Lee said, her eyes bright behind blue contacts.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Paige Cordell as Chloe Holland. The story has been updated to correctly identify Cordell and Holland.

Devin Kelly

Devin Kelly was an ADN staff reporter.

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