Went to DDAM 2024 today. Compared to the AFAs that I have been to DDAM, is much better by a lot. Firstly, the general logistics were planned much better.

Firstly, there wasn’t the dreaded 2h queue where you have to stand behind some obese aliexpress crossplayer. And the inside wasn’t an actual stampede of sweaty obese people as well. I don’t know if it was just me but the demographic of people who goes to this and AFA seems to be different as well. When I went to AFA in 2022 and 2023, there were a bunch of weird people such as the guy that brings some gawr gura doll in a back and takes pictures with them and the usual discord mod kind of guy. But I don’t think I saw any of such people today. I don’t think I saw any morbidly obese people as well? I suppose that since there are only artists stalls here, the coomers who go to AFA for tenga and getting slapped by rurusama for \$100 are not here.

The entrance fee was also about \$6 only, which is very little compared to \$28 of AFA, I suppose if you cut down on the concert and the other stuff that I don’t care about (bushiroad, sega, an entire wrestling ring???), you can save alot of space and cash to bring down the entrance fees. Furthermore, without the giant concert with mediocre artists that I don’t really care about, the space was a lot quieter. Out of the performances that I can recall from AFA, I only remember some DJ from AFA 2022 (they literally just played anisongs with extra bass) and ladybaby when he came for AFA creator fest 2023.

So basically, DDAM seems like it took all the good parts of AFA and executed it well. I was planning to go to AFA creator fest later this year, but maybe I will skip it since the stalls in it and DDAM will probably be the same?

However one critique one will have is that consumerism has kind of forced everyone to only make fan art of the popular things, which are broadly:

  • vtubers (read hololive)
  • gacha games (genshit, hsr, arknuts, BA)
  • mainstream animes (frieren, oshi no ko, jjk, csm comes to mind)

At the end of the day, the artist is running a business. It makes no sense to sabotage oneself by drawing a niche anime that no one is interested in. While I guess it makes sense that there are no 惡の華 merch for example, it doesn’t really make sense to me that there is no love live, idolmaster or even madoka merch. I also only found 1 stall selling pjsk merch. It seems that this is really catered towards those mainstream media? Even then, pjsk seems really mainstream to me, especially with the vocaloids? I guess I will never get any cool aqours merch and stuff, guess I got into the love live fandom way too late.

But I guess I won’t really blame them? Even comiket seems to be plauged by the same problem as seen in this reddit post. With OP’s comment adding “in twitter a lot of no name artist claim that they can sold a lot of books because they draw BA this time”. Average BA W.

Anyways’s I spent \$50 on DDAM and another \$32 on the Bocchi figurine with I went to la tendo later to check out their 2nd hand store. The Bocchi figurine seems worth it as people were selling for 3000 yen before shipping, although some claims yahoo sells for 400 yen, but whatever.

Now, myself cannot unsee that in 一日一惡, the traditional Chinese character of 惡 is used instead of the modern Japanese kanji 悪, which is incidentally also different from the simplified Chinese character 恶. The simplifaction of this character honestly baffles me, but whatever. We can note the radical 亞 (in 亞洲) follows this same simplification pattern of being 亜 in modern Japanese and 亚 in simplified Chinese. Anyways, the title of 惡の華 which I mentioned earlier uses both the old kanji for I believe 悪 and 花, which I guess is the author’s way of making the title sound edgier, which is quite apt given the plot.

Here is also the current state of the top of my desktop

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